Tag: 2010s

Cyclops (キュクロプス, Norichika Oba, 2018)

June 5, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Though Japanese cinema is no stranger to noir, the genre has perhaps failed to gain the foothold it occupies in overseas. Nevertheless, noir is where Norichika Oba aims to take us in his second feature as an ex-con emerges from prison with only one thing on his mind – revenge. The poetically titled Cyclops (キュクロプス) is heady noir filled with unreliable narratives, not least that coming from our foggy headed protagonist, in which the sands of truth are constantly shifting beneath our feet. Then again, perhaps the truth is better off buried. Clarity delivers its own burdens.

14 years ago Shinohara (Mansaku Ikeuchi) went to prison for the murder of his wife, Akiko (Ako). He was discovered cradling her lifeless body in a hotel room covered in blood next to the body of another man – Tezuka, a politician, thought to be her lover. After his business went under Shinohara started to drink, heavily. At the time of the incident he was an alcoholic and claims to have no memory of anything prior to discovering his wife’s body owing to being in a state of permanent inebriation. He is sure, however, that he would never have hurt her and denies all the charges. Nevertheless, he’s spent the last 14 years in custody keeping his head down and is about to be paroled. Which is where Matsuo (Kouzou Satou) comes in. A sergeant on the original case, Matsuo has long been harbouring feelings of guilt over the way the affair was handled and claims to have discovered the identity of the “real” killer – a petty yakuza called Zaizen (Hikohiko Sugiyama) who was after the politician and offed Akiko to tie up loose ends. The law can no longer help in this case, but Matsuo suggests Shinohara pursue his own justice and put an end to the matter in the old fashioned way.

What ensues is a complicated cat and mouse game as Shinohara, a bruiser with a prison education in street violence, prepares to take on a vicious and vindictive mob boss who he believes took his wife’s life on a whim to further his own career. Matsuo teams him up with one of Zaizen’s guys, Nishi (Yu Saito), who supposedly wants to do “the right thing” in training a rookie to take out his boss. Meanwhile, Shinohara has also gotten himself into trouble by visiting a local bar named Galatea which is run by a mama-san who looks exactly like Akiko and is also under threat from Zaizen and his collection of sleazy henchmen.

Of course, nothing is quite as it seems and Shinohara, perhaps naively trusting almost everyone he comes into contact with, is left with no clear indication of who he should believe and which story is likely to be the most “true”. Lying back on a jetty under the pale white moon, he thinks he sees the image of his wife, ghostly yet dressed in a fiery red which reflects back on him, bathing his face. Shinohara has a series of nightmares or perhaps flashbacks in which he relives the murder, seeing the killer remove his balaclava but imagining a different face every time.

The title of the film comes from a painting in the bar which is inspired by Greek mythology and features a scene of the giant cyclops Polyphemus hovering behind a mountain while his unrequited object of affection, Galatea, hides herself below. Haru (Ako), the bar’s mama-san, aligns herself with Galatea as a woman trapped between conflicting emotions and effectively held prisoner by her own inertia, longing for escape but unwilling to accept it. Shinohara, at this point sporting an eyepatch and likened to the quasi-stalker giant, wonders if the cyclops has in some way forgotten what it was he was looking in the first place and is simply wandering without aim or purpose. Shinohara has indeed forgotten many things, holding the key to his own salvation all along but proving slow to realise the extent to which he is being misused.

Yet for all his talk of vengeance, Shinohara remains a good and kind man who wants to protect the innocent even while punishing the guilty. Adopting a stray dog, perhaps out of identification with its lonely existence, Shinohara’s humanity begins to resurface enabling him to form an oddly genuine friendship with Nishi even whilst suspecting that he is not all he seems. The bad guys get what’s coming them, but it’s forgiveness that eventually saves the day as the two men find a kind of brotherhood born of mutual understanding and respect. Freedom is won and then given away freely as the cyclops regains his sight, learning to look within for the key to all mysteries while walking a dark and dangerous path towards salvation.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Wilderness (あゝ、荒野, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2017)

June 4, 2018July 16, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

When Shuji Terayama published his only novel in 1966, Japan was riding high – the 1964 Olympics had put the nation back on the global map and post-war desperation was beginning shift towards economic prosperity. In adapting Terayama’s jazz-inspired avant-garde prose experiment for the screen, Yoshiyuki Kishi updates the action to 2021 and a slightly futuristic Tokyo once again feeling a mild sense of post-Olympic malaise. Terayama, like the twin heroes of Wilderness (あゝ、荒野, Ah, Koya), got his “education” on the streets of Shinjuku, claiming that more could be learned from boxing and horse races than any course of study. Both damaged young men, these lonely souls begin to find a place for themselves within the ring but discover only emptiness in place of the freedom they so desperately long for.

Shinji (Masaki Suda), abandoned to an orphanage by his mother after his father committed suicide, has just been released from juvie after being involved in a street fight which left one of his best friends paralysed. Discovering that his old gang won’t take him back he’s at a loss for what to do. Meanwhile, shy barber Kenji (Yang Ik-june) who stammers so badly that he barely speaks at all, is battling the possessive stranglehold his drunken, violent ex-military father weilds over him. Raised in Korea until his mother died and his father brought him back to Japan, Kenji has always struggled to feel a part of the world he inhabits. The two meet by chance when Shinji decides to confront the man who attacked his gang, Yuji (Yuki Yamada) – now an up and coming prize fighter. Shinji is badly injured by the professional boxer while Kenji comes to his rescue, bringing them to the attention of rival boxing manager Horiguchi (Yusuke Santamaria) who manages to recruit them both for his fledgling studio.

The Tokyo of 2021 is, perhaps like its 1966 counterpart, one of intense confusion and anxiety. Plagued by mysterious terrorist attacks, the nation is also facing an extension of very real social problems exacerbated by a tail off from the temporary Olympic economic bump. As the economy continues to decline with unemployment on the rise, crime and suicides increase while social attitudes harden. In an ageing society, love hotels are being turned into care homes and wedding halls into funeral parlours. The elder care industry is in crisis, necessitating a controversial law which promises certain benefits to those who commit to dedicating themselves either to the caring professions or to the self defence forces.

Yet nothing much of this matters to a man like Shinji who ignores the crowds fleeing in terror from the latest attack in favour of “free” ramen left behind by the man who recently vacated the seat next to him out of a prudent desire to make a speedy escape. Shinji takes up boxing as way of getting public revenge on Yuji but also finds that suits him, not just as an outlet for his youthful frustrations but in the discipline and rigour of the training hall as well as the camaraderie among the small team at the gym. Kenji, by contrast, is kind hearted and so shy he can barely look his opponent in the eye. He comes to boxing as a way of finally learning to stand up for himself against his bullying father, but eventually discovers that it might be a way for him achieve what he has always dreamed of – connection.

Asked why he thinks it is we’re born at all if all we do if suffer and long for death, Kenji replies that must be “to connect” though he has no answer when asked if he ever has. For Kenji boxing is a spiritual as well as physical “contact sport” through which he hopes to finally build the kind of bridges to others that Shinji perhaps builds in a more usual way. Shinji tells himself that the only way to win is to hate, that in boxing the man who hates the hardest becomes the champion but all Kenji wants from the violence of the ring is love and acceptance. Shinji’s friend, Ryuki (Katsuya Kobayashi), has forgiven the man who crippled him and moved on with his life while Shinji is consumed by rage, warped beyond recognition in his need to prove himself superior to the forces which have already defeated him – his father’s suicide, his mother’s abandonment, and his friend’s betrayal.

While Shinji blusters, shows off, and throws it all away, Kenji patiently hones his craft hoping to meet him again in the boxing ring and “connect” in the way they never could before. There’s something essentially sad in Kenji’s deep sense of loneliness, the sketches in his notebook and strange relationship with an equally sad-eyed gangster/promoter (Satoru Kawaguchi) suggesting a hankering for something more than brotherhood. Nevertheless what each of the men responds to is the positive familial environment they have never previously known, anchored by the paternalism of coach Horiguchi and cemented by unconditional brotherly love.

Caught at cross purposes, the two young men battle each other looking for the same thing – a sense of freedom and of being connected to the world, but emerge with little more than scars and broken hearts, finding release only in a final transcendent moment of poetic tragedy. Kishi’s vision of the immediate future is bleak in the extreme, a nihilistic society in which hope has become a poison and death its only antidote. A tragedy of those who want to live but don’t know how, Wilderness is a minor miracle which proves infinitely affecting even in the depths of its despair.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Interview with director Yoshiyuki Kishi conducted at the Busan International Film Festival (Japanese with English subtitles)

Enokida Trading Post (榎田貿易堂, Ken Iizuka, 2018)

June 3, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Japanese cinema is filled with tales of those who become disillusioned with city life and decide to go home to the country to start all over again. Almost always they start with failure and build to success as the hero or heroine gradually figures out what they want out of life and then how to make it happen. Enokida Trading Post (榎田貿易堂, Enokida Boekido), however, does things a little differently. Mr. Enokida (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) has been back in his home town for four years and has already built up a successful, if scrappy, business selling second hand goods. When the right hand side of the first character in Mr. Enokida’s name suddenly falls off the store’s sign one day without warning, Mr. Enokida knows something big, good or bad, is definitely on its way.

Both director Ken Iizuka and star Kiyohiko Shibukawa hail from the small country town, not coincidentally also called Shibukawa, in which the film is set. A tribute to rural life, Enokida Trading Post adopts the calming, laidback feel of many a Japanese tale of life in the village but that’s not to say it’s the sort of place where nothing much happens – quite the reverse in fact. When we first meet Mr. Enokida, he’s wandering into the local hair salon but he’s got more than just a quick trim on his mind. Aside from indulging in a little how’s your father with the middle-aged proprietress (Reiko Kataoka), he’s also picking up a few extra pennies from the curious little boy he’s allowed to watch from outside. The affair with hairdresser will eventually get him into a lot more trouble, but Mr. Enokida is the sort that finds trouble worth the prize so it’s mostly the people around him who will end up paying the price.

Enokida Trading Post has two other employees – Chiaki (Sairi Ito), a married woman experiencing some kind of problems at home, and Kiyohiko (Ryu Morioka) who seems to have an extreme aversion to answering the telephone. The gang are also joined by a hippyish older lady, Yoko (Kimiko Yo), who stops by to chat every now and then, and an old friend, Hagiwara (Kenichi Takito), also recently returned from Tokyo but apparently only for a few weeks while he finishes a screenplay.

Sex and gossip become the two main pastimes for the Enokida gang as Kiyohiko catches sight of Yoko in a compromising position with the old man who runs the local laundrette while Mr. Enokida has begun to worry that Chiaki may have become a victim of domestic violence. As it turns out Chiaki’s worries are of a quite different order which might explain why she keeps renting “racy” mainstream movies like Betty Blue and Eyes Wide Shut from the local DVD store and apparently watching them all alone.

In an attempt to solve some of their problems, the gang find themselves making a visit to “Chinpokan” which effectively means “willy museum” and is indeed filled with pieces of erotic art from classic shunga to a room full of wooden penises in various sizes. A visit to Chinpokan can it seems work wonders, but as soon as you solve one problem another arises and a surprising discovery is made regarding another local love story before a third suddenly spirals into violence, revenge, and murder! Even in peaceful Gunma, such things do indeed still happen – something which prompts Mr. Enokida into a another reassessment of his life choices as he ponders his role in events so far and tries to decide what his next move ought to be.

Mr. Enokida’s motto had always been that anything except for actual rubbish he could handle. Sadly, quite a lot of rubbish has just happened to him and he doesn’t know what to do about it. The revelations do however prompt each of his friends into opening up about their individual worries and finally finding the strength to face them head on to make some decisions of their own. Making the best use of the beautiful scenery and filled with the charms of small town life, Enokida Trading Post is another in the long line of relaxed rural adventures, effortlessly finding the strangeness of the everyday in the country while grounding its sense of absurd fun in the unique philosophy of Mr. Enokida and his variously troubled friends.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hanagatami (花筐/HANAGATAMI, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2017)

June 2, 2018July 9, 2020by Hayley Scanlon5 Comments

In time the past becomes a dream. A world in and of itself, conjured from feeling and memory and painted in the imprecise strokes of one attempting to recreate a long forgotten scene. The melancholy heroes of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s long career were each trapped in a sense by nostalgia, a yearning for another time and place, or more precisely another, more innocent, version of themselves only with the benefit of hindsight and the confidence of age. Finally realising a long dreamt of project in dramatising Kazuo Dan’s classic wartime youth novel Hanagatami (花筐/HANAGATAMI), Obayashi reunites with another melancholy young man who as he puts it in the opening text wants to tell his story not out of a sense of nostalgia but out of longing for the things which were lost. Those like him who had the misfortune to be young before the war saw their whole world swept away by a kind of madness far beyond their control, losing not only a past but a future too.

When Toshihiko Sakakiyama (Shunsuke Kubozuka) returns home from Amsterdam where he had been living with his parents, Japan is already at war in China. Though the times are changing, Toshihiko’s life remains relatively untouched by conflict, insulated from the concerns of the day by the pleasant natural surroundings of his old-fashioned country town. Returning to the family estate presided over by his war-widow aunt, Keiko (Takako Tokiwa), Toshihiko strikes up a friendship with her sickly sister-in-law, Mina (Honoka Yahagi), whose proximity to death only seems to enhance her beauty. At school he finds himself caught between two polar opposites – the strong and silent Ukai (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) and the cynical nihilist Kira (Keishi Nagatsuka), while his two sets of social circles finally combine with the addition of Mina’s friends Akine (Hirona Yamazaki) and Chitose (Mugi Kadowaki) who also happens to be Kira’s cousin. The world is on the brink of ruin, but there are dances and picnics and festivals and everywhere everyone is desperate to live even in the midst of such foreboding.

Obayashi opens with a quote from one of Dan’s poems in which he mourns the flowers in full bloom shortly to be cut down in their prime. Hanagatami itself means “flower basket” but is also the title of a noh play about a woman driven mad by love for a man from whom she is separated by the arbitrary rules of her society. Japan itself has become a basket of flowers, offering up its youth on a senseless altar to political hubris while a generation attends its own funeral and becomes obsessed with the idea of permanence in a permanently uncertain world. Chitose carries about her camera, bitterly claiming that she will confer immortality on her subjects while privately longing for an end to her loneliness and suffering.

Like the heroine of the noh play, our protagonists too are driven mad by love as the madness of their times spurs them on and holds them back in equal measure. Mina, in all her etherial beauty, becomes the symbol of an age – innocence about die, drowned in its own blood. All in love with Mina, or perhaps with death itself, the men sink further into petty rivalries and conflicted friendships all the while staving off the inevitabilities of their times – that soon they too will be expected to sacrifice themselves for a cause they don’t believe in or risk being left behind alone.

Toshihiko finds himself torn between his two friends – the light and the dark, the robust Ukai and the gloomy Kira. While Toshihiko’s wide-eyed hero worship of Ukai and his idealised male physique takes on an inescapable homoerotic quality, his relationship with Kira leads him towards a darker path on which everything is “worthless” and all pleasures impossible in a world apparently so close to its end. Kira, having committed a truly heinous act, reminds his friends that they routinely kill and eat animals, and that one day they too will be gobbled up, swallowed whole by the cruelty of their times.

One by one the war takes them, if indirectly, leaving only Toshihiko behind. Describing his youth as like a game of hide and seek in which he suddenly realised it had gotten dark and all his friends had gone home, Toshihiko recasts his tale as a ghost story in which he remains haunted by the visions of his younger self and longs for his long absent friends, robbed of the futures promised to them by right of birth. Free floating through dreams and memory, Obayashi conjures an etherial world overshadowed by tragedy but coloured with wistful melancholy as pale-faced soldiers march off for the land of the dead while youth does its best to live all its tomorrows today in rejecting the senseless cruelty of its age.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Update July 2020: Hanagatami is released on UK blu-ray from Third Window Films on 6th July in a set which also includes a 20-minute making of and 35-minute interview with director Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

We Are (青の帰り道, Michihito Fujii, 2018)

June 1, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The youth movie perhaps hit its peak in the immediate post-war period, but poignant coming of age tales have always held a special place in Japanese cinema. We Are (青の帰り道, Ao no Kaerimichi) has a fairly troubled history of its own – the shoot was disrupted when one of its stars was arrested leading to the role being recast, requiring substantial reshoots which took place over a year later. Yet like its protagonists, We Are was finally able to rediscover itself and create something beautiful from admittedly difficult circumstances. Broken hearts, broken dreams, and broken futures conspire to scatter a once close group of high school friends as they each pursue individual dreams with individual success whilst looking alternately for a path both forward and back.

Spanning from 2008 to 2018, We Are follows seven ordinary small town teens from their high school graduation through to a more settled adulthood ten years later. In 2008, Kana (Erina Mano) and Tatsuo (Yuki Morinaga) have musical dreams which she is going to Tokyo to pursue while he is staying behind to study for medical school entrance exams in an attempt to fulfil his doctor father’s wishes. Kana’s best friend, Kiri (Kurumi Shimizu), is going with her, partly out of a want of anything else to do. She has dreams of becoming a photographer but her family are not supportive of her art and she has always struggled through feeling at odds with them. Loud mouth delinquent Ryo (Ryusei Yokohama) doesn’t really have a plan, save bumming around until something turns up and any plans Ko (Junki Tozuka) might have had would have been derailed seeing as he’s got his girlfriend (Mika Akizuki) pregnant and has decided on a shotgun wedding. Only Yuki (Keisuke Tomita) is following a more conventional path in going to Tokyo for university and then planning on finding a regular salaryman job.

The film opens with a scene of joy and freedom as the kids ride their bikes along an otherwise empty stretch of road between the fields, swearing to make the most of the last summer vacation. The road itself becomes a recurrent motif, stretching out into the distance seemingly full of promise but also strangely empty. The kids do indeed make some memories, but for some of them the hope proves too much to bear, soon turning to despair as their lives begin to spiral out of control, their dreams warped and ruined by the muddiness of the adult world.

Kana’s musical career is quickly derailed by an amoral producer who doesn’t believe in the artistic merit of music, only in its commercial capability. Kiri, dropping out of college, gives up on her dreams of photography to make Kana’s a success through acting as her manager but the two naive country girls are no match for the canny executive and Kiri is soon working for the company learning how to market soulless pap to a public desperate only for empty cuteness. While Kana struggles with accidentally becoming the poster girl for a brand of vegetable juice, Kiri embarks on her first love affair but is ill equipped to recognise the potential warning signs in her new boyfriend owing to a lack of emotional awareness brought about by her dysfunctional upbringing.

While Kana and Kiri struggle in the city, Ko has married, settled down and begun building a home for himself back in the country. An ordinary dream, but an achievable one if you’re willing to make it work and Ko takes to fatherhood with natural ease. Sadly, his friends are not so lucky. As their dreams fade, alcoholism, domestic abuse, crime, and finally suicide conspire to ruin their hopes, leaving each with a profound sense of guilt and defeat in finally finding themselves on the road home with not much to show for their travels besides a few fresh scars. Yet somehow, despite the myriad unforgivable things and a shared sadness in a collective failure to save each other, friendship endures, forgiveness is possible and though the days of youth will never return, there is a “way back” for those who’ve learned that there’s nothing wrong in wanting to start over. You can never go “home” again, but some things don’t change even when you do and if you’re very lucky the most important of them will still be there waiting for you no matter how long you’ve stayed away.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Bamy (バーミー, Jun Tanaka, 2017)

May 31, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Can you be so haunted that you eventually become a ghost? The protagonist of Jun Tanaka’s Bamy (バーミー) sees lonely spirits everywhere but they don’t frighten him, in the expected sense at least, so much as act as supernatural jailers lurking just out of sight ready to remind you that there is no escape from their all seeing eyes. Which is to say, he begins to find them irritating especially as he feels himself pulled along by the unstoppable forces of “the expected” without being entirely sure “the expected” is what he really wants. Perhaps Ryota (Hironobu Yukinaga) is just another commitment-phobe getting cold feet before a wedding and looking for an excuse to find out if the grass is greener with someone else, but then again perhaps there are forces operating beyond our understanding, be they good or ill.

Our pair of lovers are brought together by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a bright red umbrella falling impossibly from on high. As their eyes meet across the incongruous sight, Fumiko (Hiromi Nakazato) recognises the man on the opposite side as Ryota – an old friend from her university days. Fast forward one year from this atypical meet cute and Fumiko and Ryota are moving in together with a wedding date already in place. The red umbrella hangs proudly on their balcony as a romantic tribute to their love but at odd times it seems to glow ominously, as if emanating a sense of inescapable unease. The couple’s happiness is ruptured when Ryota spots the first of his ghosts lurking in the bedroom. Before long he’s seeing them at work, in the streets, everywhere. He’s seen them all his life and though they do not frighten him, he is sick of their constant presence. Gradually the ghosts place a wedge between himself and Fumiko as he begins to neglect the wedding preparations before running into another woman, Sae (Misaki Tsuge), experiencing the same problem who might be better placed to understand what he’s going through.

The ability to see ghosts, it has to be said, is not an especially good excuse for neglecting one’s fiancée. Ryota, who seems to have forgotten there are many other words in the Japanese language besides the one which means “sorry”, does not appear to be a very good communicator and never thinks of confiding in Fumiko about what it is that is bothering him, nor does he ever try to communicate with the ghosts who perhaps are just looking for attention. In fact, Ryota never seems to take much of an active role in anything and almost “haunts” his own life, remaining isolated on the fringes, drifting along aimlessly like a man without a soul.

Existing to one side of the world around him, Ryota eventually makes ghosts of both his women. Sitting alone before a table on which lies a lovingly prepared meal, Ryota cannot see Fumiko as she lurks behind him, her form distorted and indistinct as filtered through the frosted glass which acts as divider to their living area. Later her face appears again through a frosted door as she grows ever more distant towards him, no longer “Fumiko” but a strange, unknowable being. Her hand on his face once grounded him, brought him back to the real but since the umbrella disappeared all that has changed. Meanwhile, Ryota wonders if the ghost seeing Sae is his real soulmate only to see her pale before him, her fingers dark and cold as she too becomes little more than something that will bind him to a fate he isn’t sure he wants.

The umbrellas at least seem to want Ryota to be with Fumiko, whatever he (or she) may think about it. An echo of the “red strings of fate”, the umbrellas bind the lovers on a cosmic level which can never be severed – Ryota’s “rebellion” is perhaps towards fate itself, towards having his life dictated to him (by an umbrella) with his personal agency all but removed. Then again, maybe “the umbrellas” know best and what they’ve given Ryota is a gift, only the pleasure of a gift begins to dissipate when it is made clear that it cannot be declined. The cosmos seems determined on railroading him and perhaps the only way to “escape” its harbingers is to accept its judgement and submit, turning a given fate into a chosen one through a conscious act of will. Echoing Kiyoshi Kurosawa in his conflicted romanticism and David Lynch in his eerie sense of the everyday surreal, Tanaka conjures an atmosphere of inescapable supernatural dread as his hero begins to realise his only source of salvation may lie in willing submission.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

TFF trailer (English subtitles)

Love and Wolbachia (恋とボルバキア, Sayaka Ono, 2017)

May 30, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Documentarian Sayaka Ono turned the camera on herself and her family seven years ago with her graduation project/debut feature The Duckling. Returning with her second feature after spending the intervening years in TV documentary, Ono tackles a subject perhaps more distant from her personal experience in exploring the lives of sexual minorities and particularly of transgender women in generally conformist Japan. Love and Wolbachia (恋とボルバキア, Koi to Wolbachia) takes its name from that of a parasitic bacteria which can cause its host to change sex. Love may very well be a kind of virus, but Ono seems more interested in answering the question of why someone might decide to live as a woman in a society so often hostile to them.

The first two protagonists Ono introduces us two were born intersex. Despite their personal feelings, each was encouraged to take hormones to conform more closely to their external appearance. Forced to make a perhaps false binary choice, or in essence being deprived of the right to make it for themselves, each has attempted to live in the way which bests suits their authentic selves though they often encounter discrimination and/or hostility from those around them.

The question of gender in and of itself appears more important to some than others. Another of our protagonists, Miya, refers to herself as a “makeup man” and runs a bar which acts as a kind of community space and refuge for other transgender and non-binary people who often have nowhere else to turn. Nevertheless, Miya struggles with her partner’s decision to undergo gender confirmation surgery and finds it difficult to understand why someone would be willing to put themselves through so much pain and suffering for something she sees as an external concern. For Miya the question of “gender” seems moot, not quite something requires only an individual identification but which scarcely requires one at all. It is she feels, in essence, something culturally defined which an individual is free to accept or reject in claiming their own personal identity as distinct from from social codes dictated by society.

Yet Miya also finds herself a victim of these social codes in a desire to provide protection to those who need it only to find herself ill equipped to cope with the intense responsibility of accidentally becoming a community leader if one without a particular political agenda save wanting to make other people’s lives easier. The question of gender roles becomes a more obvious problem in the relationship between lesbian Julian and her transgender partner Hazumi. Criticised by some of her friends for dating a transwoman, Julian also struggles with a perceived expectation to adopt a “masculine” role within the relationship, that Hazumi expects her to provide protection while also becoming the dominant partner which she seems to feel does not fit her personality. Conversely, Julian also longs for a conventional home and family as a married couple with children yet Hazumi wants to transition fully and, having left a marriage and a child to live a more authentic life, worries that starting another family with Julian may prevent her from achieving her dream.

A conventional family life also seems to have prevented 50-year-old Ichiko from pursuing her desire to live as a woman, having lived in a time when few knew such things were possible. A father with three children, most of her resources are given over to their care but she still finds time to enjoy a more authentic life and participate in the community. Like Ichiko, Mihiro began wearing women’s clothing after admiring her wife’s outfits only she later decided to leave her marriage and retains a male personality only for work. Having fallen in love with a man who himself feels uncomfortable with the culturally defined notions of “masculinity”, Mihiro is heartbroken to realise he already has a live-in girlfriend and worries his impression of their relationship may not match her own. This rings eerily true given a solo interview in which he jokingly laments Mihiro’s purehearted approach to romance which he believes leaves her open to male manipulation.

Ono does not particularly explore the lives of transmen, perhaps an anomaly seeing as Japan is one of few nations to have elected a transman to office (Japan also elected its first transgender female politician back in 2003), preferring to explore the place of trans and gay women in a society which can be deeply misogynistic and relentlessly conformist. Mihiro’s supportive mother, watching her carefully applying her makeup, remarks on how much time men must save in not needing to bother. Mihiro partially corrects her – wearing makeup is a choice which is open to women but not perhaps to men and choice, it seems, is the main thing or not so much “choice” but freedom to live in the way you choose rather than the way which is chosen for you by your society.

Screened at Nippon Connection 2018.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

All Because of Love (痴情男子漢, Lien Yi-Chi, 2017)

May 26, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Growing up is hard is to do – that is, unless you’re the hero of a teen movie, in which case growing up is merely “difficult” and everything is sure to be alright once the bullies have been vanquished and the last dance danced. Designed to appeal to its target audience, the world of the teen movie is usually black and white, free from the chaos and confusion which most experience during adolescence. All Because of Love (痴情男子漢, Chīqíng Nánzǐhàn) is, however, refreshingly honest in its fierce love of a messy situation, forcing its hero into a series of “difficult” circumstances while he plays the noble fool holding fast to an obviously unrequited love in the hope that his niceness will somehow capture his true love’s heart.

When we first meet Erkan (Kent Tsai), he’s a nerd and the member of an oppressed minority at his school, constantly targeted by the tough guys. He is hopelessly in love with popular girl Mandy (Gingle Wang), who is actually dating one of the bullies and doesn’t even really know who Erkan is. Despite his declaration to love her for a thousand years, Erkan’s attempts to woo Mandy end in spectacular and humiliating failure but still he does not give up. Shortly after graduating high school, Mandy abruptly rings him for “a date”. Erkan, still smitten, is excited but Mandy has an ulterior motive – she is pregnant with her jock boyfriend’s child and, abandoned by her own one true love, reckons Erkan might like to try out life as a baby daddy. She is correct in her assumption and Erkan would be buying a ring if he had any money but as it is they’ll have to make do with the gentle guidance of Erkan’s elopement expert grandad (Hsu Hsiao-shun) who takes them back to his seaside home town where they can hide out from Mandy’s overbearing (and very wealthy) family.

As the title implies, the rest of the film becomes a treatise on love – requited or not, familial and romantic, permitted or illicit. Erkan is thrilled, on one level, to have got it together with Mandy but on the other hand Mandy won’t let him near her and it’s clear she is only using him and taking advantage of his noble character to get her out of a fix. Meanwhile, staying at inn, Erkan gets to know another girl, Sing (Dara Hanfman), who is in a permanently gloomy mood thanks to her devastating ability to read minds, and hasn’t left her room in years. Sing, thanks to her ability, has fallen half in love with Erkan’s goofy goodheartedness but also knows he’s still hung up on Mandy, and that Mandy is still hung up on her ex-boyfriend. She is then in a difficult position but manages to strike up enough of a friendship with the lovelorn young man to spur her on to exploring the outside world once again.

Meanwhile, Erkan is also confronted by the eerie similarities between his present predicament and the circumstances of his birth. Having always lived with his granddad, Erkan assumed his parents had passed on but discovers there may be more to the story only he’ll have to go to Japan to find out. Erkan’s granddad kicked off the cycle by eloping with Erkan’s grandmother, leaving their hometown far behind to live a life of love far away, though his son and grandson do not seem to have had so much luck when it comes to romance and Erkan’s romantic answers perhaps lie in exploring his family history rather than re-examining his high school days and refusing to let go of his idealised teenage crush.

A heart to heart with Sing provokes a more grown up meditation of unrequited love even if Erkan is entirely oblivious to Sing’s delicately concealed feelings. Purehearted, Erkan insists that love does not need to be requited, merely loving without being loved is good enough for him (so he says, or perhaps he just doesn’t expect anything more). Sing tells him he’s wrong, that it takes two to love and that a one sided affection is nothing more than intense loneliness. Erkan agrees, missing Sing’s hidden meaning, but maturely admitting that it would be wrong to hold someone’s hand just because you’re lonely when your heart is elsewhere.

Erkan’s idealised love for Mandy is gradually revealed as an adolescent affectation while she is left battling various kinds of familial expectation and manipulation before discovering her former boyfriend is not perhaps the heel that everyone had assumed him to be. Meanwhile, Sing is doing something similar in trying to lay to rest the ghost of a friend who left long ago and Erkan is left trying to reclaim his identity though figuring out who he really is before learning to look at what’s right in front of him rather than indulging in a romantic fantasy. Lien Yi-chi sends Erkan on some very bizarre adventures, swapping genres at a moment’s notice from westerns to classic melodrama and musicals and then settling on something in the middle which feels oddly authentic and lived in despite its strangeness. Often absurd if not quite surreal, Lien’s warmhearted silliness is almost impossible to resist as is the cheerful innocence of the effortlessly romantic conclusion.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Chase (반드시 잡는다, Kim Hong-sun, 2017)

May 25, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Korea may not quite be facing such an ageing population crisis as neighbouring nations, but old age has become a persistent cinematic preoccupation. We’ve seen old women still engaging in acts of prostitution to support themselves in the absence of family (and indeed the state), serial killers becoming dangerously confused, and ageing grandmother’s attempt to see the beauty in a world that seems to be descending into chaos. What The Chase (반드시 잡는다 Bandeusi Jabneunda) shows us is that the elderly do at least have time on their hands that could well be used for fighting crime and protecting the vulnerable.

If you were appointing elderly street guardians, you probably wouldn’t pick Deok-soo (Baek Yoon-sik). A curmudgeonly landlord with a conviction that everyone is out to diddle him on their rent, Deok-soo complains loudly when a body is found in a nearby area because it’s going to damage property prices. People who are supposed to die should just die, he exclaims, that’s patriotism! You can bet your bottom dollar Deok-soo voted for Park Geun-hye, but despite his grumpy exterior he has a soft heart as one of his young charges reveals when she reminds him that he’s never thrown anyone out just because they didn’t pay up. Deok-soo has taken quite a (paternal) liking to Ji-eun (Kim Hye-in), a young woman living alone away from family in one of his horrible little apartments. Aside from her rent arrears and tendency to let her mixed up friend stay over so often that she virtually lives there, Ji-eun is one of Deok-soo’s favourite tenants.

Which is perhaps why he gets himself so involved when she suddenly goes missing after a shock discovery is made in her flat. Other than the first body which got Deok-soo so worked up, a few other elderly people have been passing away in lonely deaths which, sadly, isn’t particularly suspicious save that the pattern matches that from an unsolved serial murder case from 30 years ago which began with the killing of old people and then progressed to sexually aggravated murder of young women with long dark hair – just like Ji-eun.

Aside from the ongoing serial killer plot, director Kim Hong-sun makes space for depicting the various problems faced by the elderly in contemporary Korea. The first problems are loneliness and dislocation caused by separation from family members – many of the older people Deok-soo is familiar with have children overseas whom they have all but lost touch with. The second problem is economic – Deok-soo’s flats are dirt cheap for a reason and mostly inhabited by the very young and the very old, i.e. people without a lot of “disposable” income. Being elderly, they often can’t find jobs and don’t have access to a proper pension leading many to take to the streets protesting for rights for the aged including that to work or to be given state support. Deok-soo is lucky with income from renting the apartments, but he also works as a locksmith which brings in a few extra pennies. Being Deok-soo he isn’t particularly worried about other people less lucky than himself, so he rolls his eyes at the protests but is worried enough by the lonely deaths to ask one of his tenants to look in on him every now and then to avoid becoming one.

Meanwhile, Deok-soo has become “friends” with a retired police detective who’s convinced the serial killer he failed to catch 30 years ago is back. Worried that Ji-eun may end up among his victims, Deok-soo begins investigating, unwittingly getting himself mixed up in a dark and confusing world of old school hardboiled only Pyeong-dal (Sung Dong-il) is not quite as worthy a guide as he seemed. Walking around like a maverick cop from a violent ‘70s action movie, Pyeong-dal is convinced he knows who the killer is but he is old and unsteady and his mind is not perhaps reliable.

Then again a persistent subplot seems to argue that the young have no respect for age, are selfish and corrupt, thinking only of short term pleasures and forgetting that they too will one day be old with no one around to look after them. No one takes Deok-soo and Pyeong-dal seriously, they are after all just grumpy old men that everyone wants to get rid of as quickly as possible. They do, however, (paradoxically) have time to indulge in “silly” ideas that the young do not have and are, therefore, perfectly positioned to take down a serial killer who preys on the weak and vulnerable including old men like them and pretty young girls like Ji-eun. Old guys have still got it, at least according to The Chase, though they might have got there faster if only they’d cut the young whippersnappers some slack.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Also available to stream on Netflix.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Take Me to the Moon (帶我去月球, Hsieh Chun-Yi, 2017)

May 24, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Should you continue pursuing your dreams even after you know they won’t come true or just give in and live a dull but comfortable life of conformity? These are questions most young people face at one time or another, but for the hero of Hsieh Chun-Yi’s Take me to the Moon (帶我去月球, Dài Wǒ Qù Yuèqiú), they take on an extra dimension when he is suddenly thrown back into the past with an opportunity to “save” the life of a friend if only he can convince her to abandon her dreams of stardom and stay home instead. A melancholy nostalgia fest for late ‘90s Taiwan (and the late ‘90s in general), Take me to the Moon is an ode to lost opportunities, words unsaid, and the immutability of the past which nevertheless makes room for the odd miracle or two as its hero realises perhaps he’s not grown up as much as he thought.

Three years prior to the main action, 30-something Wang (Jasper Liu) takes a business trip to Tokyo where he reconnects with high school friend Emma (Vivian Sung) who won a prestigious competition to go to Japan and train with a big idol producer. Sadly, Emma’s dreams have not panned out and she’s embarrassed to let her old friend see just how badly things have been going for her. Fast-forward three years to the present and Emma has unfortunately passed away at only 38 after years of hard drinking in hostess bars, poor nutrition, and overwork finally caught up with her. The once tight group of high school bandmates, two of whom have become a married couple, argue over their collective failure to save their friend at which point Wang walks out, meets a weird old woman who gives him some strange flowers, and is knocked over by a car only to wake up back in 1997. Desperate to save Emma, Wang thinks his best bet lies in ruining her chance to go to Japan so that she will never experience the failure of her hopes and dreams and will stay home to live a simpler, safer life.

Filled with a youthful nostalgia and feeling of authenticity, Take me to the Moon makes the most of its ‘90s setting, recreating the late 20th century city through impressive CGI. Wang reacquaints himself with his teenage self, retrieving his well hidden box of tame pornography and enjoying another few bowls of his mother’s delicious fish soup, but his main goal is essentially to ruin the dreams of his friend – an act of betrayal which might be in her interest, but then again it isn’t Wang’s choice to make and perhaps Emma would rather follow her heart even if it means it’s going to get broken.

What Wang eventually realises, as one of the Tom Chang tracks which pepper the narrative points out, is that what he should have been treasuring was the extra time spent with friends rather than worrying about the future. Back in his teenage years Wang was too shy to confess his lifelong crush on Emma and then went on to be plagued by classic bad timing in adulthood until finally it was too late. His attempts to “save” Emma by ruining her life are in part selfish but also cowardly in taking the place of simply saying the things he needed to say at the right time. Finally figuring this out, Wang realises that he can’t “save” Emma like the hero of a time travel movie by manipulating the past, but he has been given a second chance to let her know how he felt. This, in the end, is what may finally, really “save” his friend – simply letting her know that he is there supporting her, that she’s fine as she is and doesn’t need to be “perfect” to be loved as her overbearing parents have led her to believe.

Though Wang awakens to a more positive change than he might have expected, the general idea is that you can’t rehash the past and should make sure that you’re happy with your present to avoid the desire to try. Having given up on his youthful dreams for a lonely corporate existence, middle-aged Wang regains a little of his essential self and decides to fight for a more authentic way of life even if it doesn’t really go anywhere. Warm and fuzzy yet also strangely melancholy, Take me to the Moon is another in a long line of Taiwanese high school nostalgia movies but proves a fitting tribute both to its era and the singer songwriter featured throughout who himself died young in a tragic car accident in 1997 aged just 31.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Original 1997 music video for Tom Chang’s Take Me to the Moon