Tag: 2017

Pop Aye (Kirsten Tan, 2017)

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pop aye posterLife’s crises can take many forms but when they involve elephants it’s usually with a little more distance than in Kristen Tan’s whimsical debut, Pop Aye. A metaphorical return to source, a man entering late middle age tries to reclaim his childhood innocence by walking backwards (with an elephant) but discovers that you really can’t go home again. Man and elephant set off on a classic buddy movie road trip, enjoying a selection of encounters with fellow travellers each with a few lessons to impart.

A man in late middle age, Thana’s (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) carefully crafted life seems to be imploding all at once. The first building he designed, Gardenia Square, was an elegantly appointed modern shopping centre which seemed to perfectly reflect the growing consumerism of the ‘80s. 30 years later his futuristic design is now dated, and Gardenia Square is set for demolition to make way for the next modernist masterpiece ironically titled “Eternity”. If that weren’t depressing enough, the son of Thana’s former partner has taken over the business but has none of his father’s loyalty and is determined to sideline the office’s silly old man through pointedly underhanded ways such as deliberately telling him the wrong time for meetings and depositing the physical 3D model he spent a night at the office finishing with all the other rubbish in a now disused room.

If his work life is failing, Thana’s home life isn’t doing much better. His shopaholic wife, Bo (Penpak Sirikul), has little time for him and when Thana discovers her hidden vibrator, he finally realises he is entirely obsolete in every area of his life. So when he catches sight of a beautiful elephant dressed in elegant attire ready for posing for photos with foreign tourists, Thana has an immediate reaction which takes him right back to his boyhood days spent in the company of family pet, Popeye (Bong). Tracking the elephant down again and singing the cartoon’s famous theme tune to verify his identity, Thana decides to buy him (much to his wife’s horror). Seeing as you can’t really keep a giant elephant in your back garden, Thana decides his destiny is to take Popeye back to his rural village where he believes his uncle will look after him.

Undoubtedly part metaphor, Popeye represents the innocence and natural beauty of pre-modern Thailand – the very qualities Thana feels himself to have betrayed when he chose to leave home in less than ideal circumstances to pursue a “better” life in the big city. Thana got what he wanted. He became successful, wealthy, in some sense fulfilled, but now just when he should be entering a more contented phase of his life it’s all crumbling away from him and his ambivalence about the sacrifice he made as a young man is beginning to resurface. He thinks he can put something right by “rescuing” Popeye and reclaiming these qualities in the process but, as usual, nothing’s quite that simple.

Thana’s flight is as much from the modern world as it is from himself. Feeling unloved, Thana also feels eclipsed by his times, held in contempt by the younger generation whose sleek suits and obvious insincerity are a poor match for his disheveled befuddlement. This is a world in which monks accept Visa and take photos of elephants (which must surely be ten a penny) on their tablets. The city takes you in as quickly as it’ll spit you out, Thana warns a young truck driver, but his rare moment of direct emotional honesty is shrugged off as the rantings of an old man.

Despite the coldness of city life, Thana mostly meets warmhearted people on his journey through the countryside, beginning with a roadside saint who describes himself as being “like a tree” in the way he stays rooted to the spot observing the people and cars going by. Dee, noticing Thana’s blistered feet offers him his flip-flops which he won’t need anymore because he’s going to see his brother in Heaven. After all, even trees have to die someday. Grateful to the man, Thana takes Dee under his wing and vows to help him achieve his final wishes, but his intervention may have unforeseen consequences.

Thana even generates a strange bond with the policemen who arrest him for cluttering up the scenery in his nice middle-class neighbourhood which eventually leads him to a rural bar where he seems to meet a kindred spirit in Jenny – a melancholy transgender woman with a longstanding resentment of the bar’s resident “hostess”. Despite hitting it off with Jenny who seems to understand his particular pain, Thana disappoints himself by ending up in a humiliating, unsolicited situation with the bar girl but finds the equally disappointed Jenny forgiving and still willing to help a fellow traveller in need even if, as seems to be the case in much of his life, Thana has allowed himself to be bamboozled into doing something he didn’t really want to do.

At the end of his long, strange journey, Thana finds his illusions shattered, his romantic dream of his childhood home exposed as a mix of memory, nostalgia and idealism. Thana ends up where he started, only with a little more clarity and a new trend towards acceptance rather than defiance. He may think of Popeye merely as the manifestation of the innocence he sacrificed in childhood, but Popeye is his own elephant with his own ideas about his future which might or might not include Thana. Ending on a slightly upbeat note in which Thana is perhaps not as unloved as he believed himself to be, Pop Aye is charming odyssey through middle-age malaise set against the beautiful Thai landscape and told with a whimsical, melancholy humour.

Screened at BFI London Film Festival 2017.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Wrath of Silence (暴裂无声, Xin Yukun, 2017)

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wrath of silence posterNature red in tooth and claw – life in the arid Northlands of modern China is surprisingly bloody in Xin Yukun’s The Coffin in the Mountain followup, Wrath of Silence (暴裂无声, Bào Liè Wúshēng). The film’s Chinese release has, apparently, been indefinitely delayed for unclear reasons but it’s easy to see what might have given the censors occasion for pause in this tale of missing children, corrupt businessmen, and the relentless lusty greed of the new middle classes. A voiceless everyman forced away from his family by a series of unfortunate events, returns to look for his missing son but finds only a malevolent darkness invading the corners of his once peaceful rural mountain town.

In the winter of 2004, a small boy watches his sheep whilst building a small rock tower and drinking from his Ultraman flask. A short while later, his dad, Baomin (Song Yang), is pulled away from a fistfight at the bottom of a coal mine by a phone call from his wife informing him that their son has gone missing. Baomin drops everything and goes home but he’s still persona non grata in the small mountain village after stabbing the local chef in the eye with a lamb bone during a fight over Baomin’s refusal to sign over his land to developers hoping to open a coal mine.

Baomin’s path crosses with that of two other men, gangster-like mining magnate Chang (Jiang Wu) who has recently been “acquitted” of running illegal operations, and Chang’s lawyer, Xu (Yuan Wenkang), a conflicted single parent. Baomin and Xu are at opposite ends of China’s recently born class system – one educated, successful, and inhabiting the new pristine cities, the other literally rendered voiceless by an act of violence, poor, and living an antiquated rural life in a desert wasteland. Chang exists in the no man’s land between them as an example of the new elite – his life is one of Westernised elegance in his smart study and wood panelled drawing room with its deer heads on the walls. Yet it’s not business acumen which underpins his success but thuggery and a thorough disrespect for conventional morality.

There is a double irony in Baomin’s life in that his original objection to the coal mine has sent him straight into one. Owing vast compensation to the chef whose eye he ruined as well as needing money to pay for his sickly wife’s medical treatment, Baomin has little choice but to leave his farm and travel to a distant city where he can earn the money he needs to pay for his various responsibilities. Not only are the coal mines ripping up the landscape, they’re destroying families firstly through forced absences and secondarily through disease born of industrial pollution.

This veniality is all too plain in Chang’s ostentatious display of needless slaughter as he sits at a large dining table entirely covered in plates of raw meat ready to be sizzled in Chang’s favourite hot pots while a finely tuned slicer runs in the background churning out an endless supply of repurposed flesh. Chang’s overwhelming need for consumption is less about hunger than conquest as his hunting hobby proves but the trophies on his walls are as fake as the hairpieces which cover his receding hairline. The force which drives him is not so much need as vanity, fear, and insecurity. Desperate to be hunter and not hunted, he has abandoned all morality and will stop at nothing to ensure his place at the table is secure.

Baomin will stop at nothing until he finds his son. The film’s title, ironically enough, includes a slight pun in its first two characters which are pronounced “Bao” and “Lie” (the name of Baomin’s son) but mean “violence” and “spilt” while the characters of Baomin’s name (保民) mean protect and citizenry. Baomin is a violent man. According to his wife he was always fond of a fight even before rendering himself mute, but it has to be said that violence is, in his voiceless state, his most efficient method of communication. Flashing pictures everywhere he goes, Baomin chases visions of his son, haunted by small boys in Ultraman masks, fighting monsters far more real than the tokusatsu hero’s usual foes.

Fable-like in execution, the final revelations are heavily foreshadowed though dual meanings are plentiful as in a small boy’s innocent assumption of a classic Ultraman pose which looks eerily like something else to those with a guilty conscience, planting the seed of doubt as to whether it really was quite that innocent after all. Xin shoots with Lynchian surrealism as darkness seems to creep idly into the frame and then hover there, threatening something terrible, like the manifestation of willingly unseen truths. The rapid pace of social change has brought with it a loss of morality that endangers the foundation of society itself, sacrificing the young on the altar of greed while the state turns a blind eye to systemic corruption and cowards save their own skins rather than ease the suffering of others. Filled with a quiet rage mediated through melancholy poetry, Wrath of Silence takes a long, hard look into that creeping darkness but finds the darkness looking back with accusing eyes.

Screened at BFI London Film Festival 2017.

Original trailer (dialogue free, no subtitles)

 

Never Say Die (羞羞的铁拳, Song Yang & Zhang Chiyu, 2017)

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Never say die posterBody swapping drama seems to have come back in style of late, though they’ve rarely been as funny as the surprisingly laugh out loud Chinese comedy Never Say Die (羞羞的铁拳, Xiūxiū de Tiěquán). Based on a stage play by the Chinese theatre company Mahua whose last effort Goodbye Mr. Loser did something similar only with time travel, Never Say Die is a story of never giving up, always getting even, and learning to understand yourself through someone else’s eyes.

Edison (Ai Lun) was once an MMA champion, but a scandal three years previously has left him disgraced and reduced to taking dives for his shady boss, Dong (Tian Yu). Edison has a reputation for being good at taking dives because he can make them look so “realistic”, and believes his special talent ought to earn him a few more dollars. Seconds after dramatically hitting the mat, Edison gets a call reminding him he’s late for a weigh-in at a “real” fight. When he gets there he’s confronted by a bulldog reporter, Xiao (Ma Li), who questions him about his history of taking bribes. Reacting angrily, Edison soon realises Xiao’s boyfriend is none other than top MMA fighter and arch-rival Wu Liang (Haowen Xue).

Just to make things more complicated, Xiao is also the daughter of Edison’s manager, Dong, whom she hates and is determined to expose for his corrupt dealings. Edison chases after Xiao when he and Dong discover her recording a very compromising conversation but after ignoring a warning sign the pair end up on a rooftop during a thunderstorm. Edison bumps into Xiao, kissing her by mistake and pushing her into the pool in which they then both get struck by lightning. Waking up in hospital, each of them discovers they’ve come back a little different than they remembered.

This being China with its relatively stringent censorship laws, the body gags are kept to a minimum with Xiao suddenly dropping her reporter’s poise for “manly” roughness and Edison becoming subtly effeminate. Both are horrified by the sudden colonisation of their own bodies and resentful that in order to look after it properly someone they intensely dislike is going to have to be very aware of their most intimate features. This is especially true of Edison who reacts to his new found femininity in the predictable way by fondling his own breasts and then having a fantastic time in a ladies’ only bathhouse (an extended set piece ironically set to YMCA).

The gag is simple enough but actors Ai Lun and Ma Li commit so totally to their new roles that the increasingly absurd situations ring true right up until the trio end up learning Kung Fu from a possibly gay, resentful deputy chief monk (Teng Shen) at a mountain retreat. Veering off from the standard rom-com route, Never Say Die makes a brief sojourn in revenge genre after Xiao finds out some unpleasant facts about Wu Liang (through being Edison) and decides she needs to get her own back by humiliating him in the MMA ring. Edison may have been a champ, but despite his physical training, Xiao is still an elegant female reporter who’s not exactly used to being in the middle of a fight.

Never Say Die does not manage to escape the inherently sexist bias of the gender swap movie, but it does its best to mitigate it. It is problematic, in one sense, that Xiao needs to “man up” to get revenge on her dreadful boyfriend and then is sidelined when it comes time for Edison finish the job for her, but on the other hand she is the more capable and pragmatic of the pair who teaches Edison how to get himself together whilst playing a supporting rather than leading role. Perhaps betraying its comedy stage show routes, the script may appear episodic and meandering but it’s all brought together in grand fashion at the end with nary a gag wasted. The lesson is that eventually you have to get off your high horse and really look at yourself and others whilst resolutely refusing to back down to dishonest bullies if you really want to earn the right to be happy in yourself. Hilarious and emotionally satisfying in equal measure, Never Say Die is an unexpected comic delight which proves surprisingly subversive even in its superficial innocence.

Currently on limited release in UK cinemas courtesy of Chopflix.

Original trailer (Mandarin, no subtitles)

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (夜は短し歩けよ乙女, Masaaki Yuasa, 2017)

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The Night is Short posterHave you ever had one of those incredibly long nights that seemed to pass in an instant? Masaaki Yuasa returns to the absurd world of Tomihiko Morimi with the charming one night odyssey, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (夜は短し歩けよ乙女, Yoru wa Mijikashi Aruke yo Otome), which takes place in the same world as Yuasa’s TV anime adaptation of the author’s Tatami Galaxy. The Girl with Black Hair dreams her way through Kyoto, relentless as a steam train in her pursuit of new experiences, but perhaps the speed at which she travels leaves her horizons perpetually unclear.

Beginning where many stories end, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, opens with a wedding. “Sempai” (Gen Hoshino) longs for the “Girl With Black Hair” (Kana Hanazawa). He doesn’t know her name or really very much about her at all other than she’s in the year below him and they belong to the same club, but this is a love for the ages fated to come true. To this end, Sempai has been engineering “coincidental” meetings with the Girl so that she knows he exists, in a “there’s that guy again!” sort of way, hoping to travel into her heart by means of osmosis. Until then he’ll just stare at her lovingly from three tables away at social events involving mutual friends…

The Girl, however, has her own plans. She’s determined to make her way into the world of adulthood this very night, travelling by the power of alcohol (for which she seems to have a seriously impressive tolerance). For the Girl, the night is filled with possibilities. She’s open to everything and everyone, ready to say yes to whatever strange adventure the gods have in store for her. Which is lucky, because this is going to be a very strange night indeed.

The Night is Short pivots around the idea of connection as its two poles – Sempai and The Girl, are perpetually kept apart, orbiting each other in an endless search for a home. The Girl drinks and claims she feels the interconnectedness of all things, at one with the world and everybody in it. The miserly, miserable local god she’s in the middle of a drinking contest with understands her reasoning but has lived too long to agree with it. After all, at some point you have to stop drinking and the world is cold and lonely. The old man tastes only life’s nothingness, for him life is fruitless and nearing its end but for the girl all the world is flowers and warmth, filled with promise and possibility.

If the old man is right and alcohol provides only a fleeting, essentially fake feeling of contentedness, then perhaps there are other routes to true connection – such as the universal circulation of books. Books carry ideas between people and take feelings with them yet there are those who try to staunch the flow – namely book collectors who try to stem the system by hoarding copies to push up the price. Sempai and the Girl each find themselves caught up in this act of anti-human profiteering as allies or enemies of the strange little creature who presides over the great book fair of life.

Even those, like the old man, who feel themselves to be excluded from human society prove themselves connected by one very special unifying factor – the passage of disease. The Girl is committed to spreading happiness wherever she goes, healing the sick and ministering to the lonely, but even those who feel they have nothing to give have still given away a part of themselves in the form of the common cold as it rips like wild fire through old Kyoto with the desperate force of a lifetime’s painful rejection. It’s kind of beautiful, in a way, as the old man’s life suddenly brightens in not feeling so alone anymore after casting himself as patient zero.

Yuasa’s drunken night in Kyoto is strange and surreal. Time runs inconsistently, revealing the uncomfortable truth that it speeds up as you grow older and night approaches dawn to the still young Girl, too full of life and possibility to think of looking at a clock. Sempai remains a cypher, his only clear personality trait being his certain love for the strange girl who’s always too busy chasing dreams to see him. His friends are also facing their own strange nights from the one who’s decided not to change his undies until he’s reunited with his one true love with whom he shared but one fateful encounter, and the other whose taste for female attire receives a slightly muddled reception, but they each find themselves caught up with three level pagoda trains, guerrilla theatre practitioners (or “school festival terrorists”) whose protest turns out to be romantic rather than political, not to mention the persistent threat of underwear thieves. Is this fate, or mere “coincidence”? In the end perhaps it doesn’t matter, but the night is short. Walk on Girl, just slow down a little, you have all the time you need.

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl is released in selected UK cinemas on Oct. 4 courtesy of Anime Ltd. Check the official website to see where it’s screening near you.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ghostroads – a Japanese Rock’n’Roll Ghost Story (ゴーストロード, Enrico Ciccu, 2017)

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ghost roads posterWhat price would you pay for fame? A down on his luck rockabilly guitarist asks himself just this question when faced with the offer of fantastic success beyond all his wildest dreams at the small cost of sacrificing some friends to the musical gods. Rest assured, Ghostroads: A Japanese Rock’n’Roll Ghost Story (ゴーストロード) isn’t waxing metaphorical on the price of success or the pitfalls of the music business so much as it is riffing on B-movie rock and roll horror. Everything about Ghostroads is retro from the rockabilly scene setting to the shooting style and musical cues but it’s all done with such charm and good humour that it’s near impossible to resist the film’s old fashioned appeal.

The Screaming Telstars are, as the narrator tells us, a bit “crap” and their lead singer, Tony (Mr. Pan), is perhaps not as committed to the band as he once was. Fellow band members remain exasperated by Tony’s often hilariously late arrival at rehearsal sessions while the producer and tech guy cringe at his terrible, lazy playing. Nevertheless, Tony vows to pull it together in time for the gig and, to be fair, he usually does. This time, however, things take a turn for the worse when Tony’s absent minded guitar frenzy proves too much for his ancient amp. The venue they’re supposed to play the next day doesn’t have house amps so Tony will need to sort himself out with a new one or risk cancelling.

Tony also has no money so makes the decision to stop into a tiny old fashioned second hand musical equipment store in a back alley to look for a vintage amp to add to his collection. Despite the warnings of the shop assistant (Taka Shin-Okubo) who acts more like the wise monk in a kung fu film than a serious businessman, Tony is strangely drawn to one amp in particular. Seeing Tony won’t be dissuaded, the man behind the counter lets him have it for free on the condition that it’s his responsibility now and whatever happens with it, he can’t bring it back.

This is largely because the amp comes with a lodger or as he calls himself, an “amperition”. Peanut Butter (Darrell Harris) is a smooth American blues singer who has been imprisoned in his amp so long he’s quite desperate to impart some musical wisdom to a struggling rock star like Tony, but his advice comes at a price.

Tony’s playing improves under the tutelage of Peanut Butter, but Tony has another problem in the return of a longterm nemesis from his student days, Shinzo (Tatsuji Nobuhara) – lead singer of The Mad Reader, and the man who possibly stole Tony’s girl, Shinobu (Tomomi Hiraiwa). Thus Tony’s journey begins from useless loserdom to big time star, besting his rival and finally having a shot with the beautiful Shinobu, but all the while everyone is worrying about him. Peanut Butter is not a positive influence in Tony’s life, and the fact that he keeps talking to someone no one else can see is a definite cause for concern, but then again Peanut Butter says he can make Tony a star, if only he’ll ditch all his friends…

In short, Ghostroads is a vehicle for The Neatbeats – the kind of band movie they just don’t make anymore. Set firmly within the world of rockabilly subculture, the film also features a number of other underground bands including 50 Kaitenz and The Privates whose lead singer, Tatsuji Nobuhara, plays the part of Tony’s arch rival Shinzo. Peanut Butter assures Tony that all he needs is to find the one perfect song (something he can help him with, for a price), but every song featured is a hit with the soundtrack proving the film’s most essential asset.

Ghostroads commits absolutely to its retro aims, aping the classically kooky effects of the down and dirty silly rock horror movies of ages past. The effects are spot on with Peanut Butter permanently surrounded by a blueish haze which seems to intensify whenever he’s doing something not quite right. Peanut Butter also has a strange little hologram device featuring a tiny burlesque dancer (played by The Tassels’ Miwa Rock) which is never explained but adds to the increasingly surreal atmosphere. Surreal and quirky it most definitely is but Ghostroads has real love both for its subculture setting and for the long forgotten classics it’s trying to resurrect. Good, clean, unpretentious fun, Ghostroads is proof enough that the rock and roll spirit is alive and well and living in Japan.

Screened at Raindance 2017.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

 

Noise (Yusaku Matsumoto, 2017)

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noise posterWhat makes someone take off on a homicidal rampage? First time director Yusaku Matsumoto attempts to find out by examining the down and dirty backstreets of Akihabara eight years after a mass killing shook the nation. Dealing with trauma, the death of the family, the precarious position of vulnerable young women pulled into an industry they don’t quite understand, economic insecurity, underground idols, and general nihilistic hopelessness Matsumoto has certainly conjured enough noise to drive even the most level of heads to distraction but once again, it is the city itself which eats its young in the indifferent frenzy of modern life.

Eight years ago, Misa’s mother was one of several people murdered by a lone assailant who drove a truck into a busy pedestrian intersection in Akihabara before getting out and stabbing random passersby. Misa is now making a go of it as an “underground idol” – young girls who sing and dance in clubs in Akihabara but don’t have recording contracts or big studios behind them. When not performing on stage she makes ends meet by working in the “massage parlour’ attached to the studio where she provides sexualised services but not actual sex to met who pay a flat rate on the door and then pick their particular activities off the menu inside.

Meanwhile, delivery driver Ken lives a lonely and miserable existence with his hedonistic mother who rolls in drunk early in the morning and constantly badgers her son for money. Ken would like to better himself and escape his dreadful living conditions, but his mother disagrees and disapproves of him spending his money on online courses rather than giving it all to her. Ken’s mother is also in trouble with the same loanshark gangsters which (secretly) run Misa’s club.

The third plot strand follows high school girl Rie and her lonely father who looks after grandpa at home and tries to reconnect with his daughter but can’t seem to get through to her. Rie chases a delinquent boyfriend she fantasises about trapping through pregnancy before getting herself mixed up with gangsters and embroiled in the same world as Misa but with no one looking out for her.

The strongest theme which runs through the film is that of familial breakdown. All of the protagonists come from one parent families in which the remaining parent has largely failed in their responsibilities. Though this seemingly deliberate approach is unfortunate in playing into the stigma surrounding atypical families, it is certainly true that none of the young people has any access to support from the older generation. Misa’s father had long been abusive even before her mother died, gambling the family money away betting on the horses and spending his life at home drinking. Now seemingly reformed (though not perhaps free of gambling), he wants to try again but it may already be too late.

Similarly, Rie’s father does his best – coming home from work on time, cooking proper meals, and trying to take an interest but he can’t get through to his angry teenage daughter and is also preoccupied by the need to care for his aged, bedridden father. In a strange coincidence he ends up visiting Misa’s underground idol bar where he takes a liking to Misa precisely because she looks a little bit like Rie. Nicknamed Yama-chan by the girls, Rie’s father’s attempts to forge a connection with a look-a-like of his own daughter take on a painfully tender quality of muddled, misdirected affection but a quick look around the rest of the club makes plain it’s not so far removed from the massage parlour as one might think. One of the other regular patrons is a colleague of Ken’s who seems to have little else in his life apart from underground idols, spending his life in the club buying false connection through Polaroid photos and handshakes. What the girls are selling isn’t sex but (false) kindness, providing a facsimile of the love each of these disconnected men is seeking but either thinks themselves unworthy of or is unable to find out in the “real” world.

Ken looks down on these men, he doesn’t understand why they waste their lives in vacuous pursuits of empty pleasure, but his own life, which has been more or less ruined by his irresponsible mother, holds little pleasure of its own. Reading books about mass killings and inspired by the 2008 mass murder, Ken repeatedly makes nuisance phone calls to the police station which arrested the killer threatening to commit a similar crime himself. Flat broke, abandoned, evicted, and with no future possibilities it’s little wonder he feels as backed into a corner as he does but Ken’s final, raw phone call in which the policeman on the other end tries to reassure him that hope does exist proves the last straw in his ever fracturing mental state.

In trying to answer the question why someone might want to kill others, Matsumoto does indeed blame noise. Misa, in giving a painful to camera interview looking back on the massacre reveals that she took all of her anger and internalised it, hurting herself rather than others. Ken, by contrast, seems to burn with rage permanently on the brink of explosion. Rie tries to find the peace she couldn’t find in her own family by starting a new one but is extremely deluded by her choice of mate and then deluded once again by a man faking kindness but thinking only of commerce. All of this desperation – the exploitation, the gangsters, the dire economic prospects of neglected children, conspire to push the already strained closer to the edge, believing that harming others will make them feel better through a strange kind of social revenge. Matsumoto’s Akihabara pulses to beat of synth strings and idol pop, though its soundscape is not one of freedom and joy but anxiety and depression as the city’s disenfranchised youth marches towards its dead end future with no hope in sight.

Screened at Raindance 2017

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Perfect Revolution (パーフェクト・レボリューション, Junpei Matsumoto, 2017)

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Perfect Revolution posterIf there is one group consistently underrepresented in cinema, it surely those living with disability. Even the few films which feature disabled protagonists often focus solely on the nature of their conditions, emphasising their suffering or medical treatment at the expense of telling the story of their lives. Junpei Matsumoto’s Perfect Revolution (パーフェクト・レボリューション) which draws inspiration from the real life experiences of Yoshihiko Kumashino – a Japanese man born with cerebral palsy who operates a not for profit organisation promoting awareness of sexual needs among the disabled community, makes a criticism of the aforementioned approach a central pillar of its narrative. Unlike many on-screen depictions of disabled people, Perfect Revolution attempts to reflect the normality of life with a disability whilst never shying away from some of the difficulties and the often hostile attitude from an undereducated society.

Kumashiro (Lily Franky), a man in his mid-40s, was born with cerebral palsy and has been using a wheelchair for most of his life. An activist for disabled rights, he’s written a book about his experiences and is keen to address the often taboo subject of sexuality among disabled people. Kumashiro has long since given up on the idea of romance or of forming a “normal” relationship leading to marriage and children but his life changes when a strange pink-haired woman barges into his book signing and demands to know why he’s always talking about sex but never about love. Kumashiro thinks about her question and answers fairly (if not quite honestly as he later reveals) that he doesn’t yet know what love is but is just one of many hoping to find out. This impresses the woman who approaches him afterwards and then refuses to leave him alone. Ryoko (Nana Seino), asking to be known as “Mitsu” (which means “honey” in Japanese – a nice paring with “Kuma” which means “bear”), suddenly declares she’s fallen in love with Kumashiro, whom she nicknames Kumapi.

The elephant in the room is that there is clearly something a little different about Mitsu whose brash, loud manner runs from childishly endearing to worryingly reckless. Mitsu is a sex worker at a “soapland” (a brothel disguised as a bathhouse in which the customer is “washed” by an employee) and sees nothing particularly wrong in her choice of occupation though recognises that other people look down on her because of it – something which she doesn’t quite understand and is constantly exasperated by. Perhaps offensively, she sees her own position as a woman (and a sex worker) as akin to being “disabled” in the kind of social stigma she faces but does not identify as being disabled in terms of her undefined mental health problems beyond accepting that she is “different” and has not been able to integrate into “regular” society. Nevertheless, she believes herself to be at one with Kumashiro in his struggle and is determined to foster the “perfect revolution” with him to bring about true happiness for everyone everywhere.

Thankfully Kumashiro is surrounded by supportive friends and family who are keen to help him manage on his own rather than trying to run his life for him but he does regularly encounter less sympathetic people from a drunken couple who decide to lay into him in a restaurant to a well meaning religious woman who runs after Kumashiro to tell him how “inspired” she feels just looking at him before trying to thrust money into his purse. Mitsu’s problems are less immediately obvious but her loud, volatile behaviour is also a problem for many in conformist Japan as is her straightforwardness and inability to understand the rules of her society. Mitsu has no one to look after her save a fortune teller (Kimiko Yo) who has become a surrogate mother figure, but it is a problem that no one has thought to talk to her about seeing a doctor even when her behaviour turns violent or veers towards self-harm.

Despite their struggles to be seen as distinct individuals, both Kumashiro and Mitsu are often reduced simply to their respective “differences”. Kumashiro does a lot of publicity for his book but is exasperated by well-meaning photographers who ask, tentatively, if they can photograph just his hands – literally reducing him to his disability. An “inspirational” TV documentary strand is also interested in interviewing Kumashiro and Mitsu, but only because of the “unusual” quality of their relationship. It quickly becomes apparent to Kumashiro that the documentarians aren’t interested in documenting his life so much as constructing a narrative around “damaged” outsiders that viewers can feel sorry for. Fearing that Kumashiro looks too cheerful, the producers ask him to remove his makeup and colourful clothing whilst explaining to Mitsu that they don’t want her to talk about sex work in a positive manner and would prefer it if she used a more acceptable euphemism rather than calling it what it is. Mitsu doesn’t realise she’s been had, but Kumashiro leaves the shoot feeling humiliated and annoyed.

Matsumoto does his best to present the issues sensitively, never patronising either Kumashiro or Mitsu but depicting them as real people with real faults just living their lives like everybody else. Neatly avoiding the classic Hollywood, happy ever after ending he emphases that there is still a long way to go but it is unfortunate that Mitsu’s situation is treated more lightly than it deserves and that her eventual desire to get treatment is undermined by the film’s liberated ending which is, nevertheless, inspirational as Kumashiro and Mitsu both commit themselves to the “perfect revolution” of a better, happier future both for themselves and for all mankind.

Screened at Raindance 2017.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Mukoku (武曲 MUKOKU, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, 2017)

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mukoku posterThe way of the sword is fraught with contradictions. Like many martial arts, kendo is not primarily intended for practical usage but for self improvement, emotional centring, and fostering a big hearted love of country designed to ensure lasting peace between men. Nevertheless, it tends to attract people who struggle with just those issues, hoping to find the peace within themselves though mastery of the sword. Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s long and varied career has often focussed on outsiders dealing with extreme emotions and Mukoku (武曲 MUKOKU) is no different in this regard as the two men at its centre lock swords at cross purposes, each fighting something or someone else within themselves rather than the flesh and blood opponent standing before them.

Kengo Yatabe’s (Go Ayano) life has been defined by the sword. As a young boy his father, Shozo (Kaoru Kobayashi), began training Kengo intensively but his standards were high, too high for a small boy who only wanted to please his dad but found himself beaten with the weapon he was failing to master. Twenty years later Kengo is a broken man after a long deferred violent confrontation between father and son has left Shozo in a vegetative state, neither dead nor alive, no longer a figure of fear and hate but of guilt and ambivalence. Kengo has given up kendo partly out of guilt but also as a kind of rebellion mixed with self harm and is currently working as a security guard. He spends his days lost in an alcoholic fog, trailing an equally drunken casual girlfriend (Atsuko Maeda) behind him.

Meanwhile, high school boy Toru (Nijiro Murakami) is a classic angry young man working out his frustrations through a hip-hop infused punk band for which he writes the angst ridden poetry that serves as their lyrics. Toru has no interest in something as stuffy as Kendo but when he’s set upon by a bunch of Kendo jocks he decides he’s not going down without a fight. Winning through underhanded street punk moves would normally be frowned upon but the ageing monk who runs the high school kendo club, Mitsumura (Akira Emoto), is struck by his nifty footwork and decides to convince the troubled young man that the path to spiritual enlightenment lies in mastery over the self through mastery of the sword.

The wise old monk pits the self-destructive older man against the scrappy young one, hoping to bring them both to some kind of peaceful equilibrium, with near tragic results. Kengo’s ongoing troubles are born of a terrible sense of guilt, but also from intense self-loathing in refusing to accept that he’s become the man he hated, as broken and embittered as the father who made him that way. Shozo was a kendo master, but as the monk points out, in technique only – his heart was forever unquiet and he never achieved the the true peace necessary to master his art. Knowing this to be the truth only made it worse yet Shozo also knew the burden he’d placed on his son. They say every man must kill his father, but Kengo can’t let the ghost of his go – clinging on to a mix of filial piety and resentful loathing which is slowly turning him into everything he hates.

Toru’s problem’s are pushed into the background but seeing as his enemy is not the flesh and blood threat of an overbearing father but the elements and more particularly water, it will be much harder to overcome. Water becomes a constant symbol for each man – for Toru it’s an inescapable symbol of death and powerlessness, but for Kengo it represents happiness and harmony in rediscovering the good memories he has of his father from joyful family outings to less abusive summer training sessions. Mukoku is the story of three ages of man – the scrappy rebellious teen, the struggling middle-aged man, and the elderly veteran whose own heart is settled enough to see the battles others are waging. The “warrior’s song” as “mukoku” seems to mean changes with each passing season, nudged into tune by the graceful art of kendo.

Kumakiri embraces his expressionist impulses as a young boy finds himself suddenly underwater, vomiting mud and fish while Kengo has constant visions of his father, mother, and younger self ensuring the past is forever present. The ominous score and strange occurrences including ghostly graveyard old women who appear from nowhere in order to offer a lecture on the five buddhist sins lend a more urgent quality to Kengo’s disintegration, though interesting subplots involving a possibly alcoholic girlfriend and a mamasan (Jun Fubuki) at a local bar who might have been Shozo’s mistress are left underdeveloped. Two men face each other to face themselves, trying to beat their demons into submission with wooden swords, but even if the battle is far from over the tide has turned and something at least has begun to shift.

Screened at Raindance 2017.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

 

Junk Head (Takahide Hori, 2017)

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junhead still 2“God is Dead! We Killed Him!” exclaim some funny little mole/penguin people in Takahide Hori’s Junk Head, only to follow it up seconds later when a giant worm spits out the divine visitor from above with “He Hath Risen”.  An extreme feat of technical prowess, Junk Head is a marvel of cyberpunk production design tempered with wry humour and a weary exasperation as regards “humanity” and its children. A man loses his head, literally and figuratively, and finds himself on a journey into the deepest darkest underground filled with mutant clones and terrifying monsters, searching for salvation while groping for identity.

Far in the future, humanity thought it had it made – abnegating their responsibilities to a crowd of lowly clones and living a life of ease, but the clones rebelled and took themselves underground leaving humanity to fend for itself on the surface. Immortal through gene replacement therapy, humanity has also lost the ability to reproduce naturally and now that a disease has wiped out around 20% of the remaining population with no sign of stopping, there is urgent need to rebuild the species.

Hoping to find an answer in the world below, humanity sends one cyborg researcher on a desperate mission. Sadly, the capsule carrying the robot is shot down by wary humanoids living on the higher levels. His head continues to fall until it’s found by a scavenger party who take it to a doctor who “recognises” the head inside the helmet as “human”. Seeing as humanity is, in a sense, their creator, the clones stand back in awe of their new “God”. Now placed into an adorable little white stormtrooper-meets-I-Robot body, God can remember nothing of his past life and spends most of his new one trying to get to grips with his tiny hands and unwittingly walking into certain death only to be saved when the various evil creatures remember they don’t like the taste of metal.

As time moves on God takes on many forms as he falls further through the underground universe, swapping his cute round body for a blocky makeshift one without a voice but with a bigger heart. Having regained some of his memories immediately before his first transformation, the second God is not such a nice guy but “Junkers” is the type to whip up chairs for old ladies and walk miles to gather “Mashrooms” for his new masters, not to mention leaving some food behind for a hungry mutant girl. Once his memories are fully restored (through repeated blows to the head), God thinks back on his soulless life on the surface and realises he’s never felt so alive as he does 600 feet under. The sky might be pretty, but it’s cold up top.

As cute as God is (in all his incarnations), Junk Head’s world of basement horrors is surreal and terrifying. Some monsters are more harmful than others, but the major peril of the middle layers is persistent wormholes from which giant, toothy creatures emerge to devour unsuspecting travellers. Fleshy spiders hang from the ceiling and “Mashrooms” appear to be fleshy protuberances grown on humanoid backs imprisoned within walls. The post-apocalyptic underground city is a perfectly designed mix of makeshift and industrial architecture, covered in dust, grime, and scratches. God’s first body is appropriately worn before he even gets it, a true tribute to the depth of Hori’s conceptual design.

Drawing inspiration from Giger and Kubrik, the world which most comes to mind is, perhaps unexpectedly, David Lynch’s Dune. From the strange mole/penguin people and their rubbery suits to the torpedo shaped, bright red big busted women the underground is an industrial fantasy zone where tiny dinosaur-like snake worms waddle around adorably before being picked off for dinner. Hori brings scope to the claustrophobic world of tunnels and ducts by shooting at a distance with painterly compositions echoing German expressionism. He echoes Lynch again in the constant, dream-like use of dissolves and montage while the punk soundtrack and quick fire swapping from one empty corridor to another is reminiscent of Shinya Tsukamoto or Sogo Ishii. Despite its rather abrupt ending (which does at least tease further adventures for God in the wilderness), Junk Head is a charming, surreal odyssey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with zany humour and rich in character detail. Hopefully the second coming of God will not be too far off.

Screened at Raindance 2017.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Swaying Mariko (たまゆらのマリ子, Koji Segawa, 2017)

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Swaying mariko posterJapanese indie has moved on of late, no longer content with deconstructing the modern family it now wants to take a good look at the modern marriage though Koji Segawa’s Swaying Mariko (たまゆらのマリ子, Tamayura no Mariko), for all of its copious darkness, may be a much more positive vision than might at first be thought. A tale of one woman’s gradual downward spiral into a world of violence, paranoia, and perversion Swaying Mariko’s Tokyo is one of icy silences and magnified spaces between people which seem to defy the otherwise cramped city streets. Loneliness and isolation are the twin forces which drive this spiral of resentment and anger but self-inflicted wounds quickly look for vengeance, usually in all the wrong places.

Mariko (Chise Ushio) is an ordinary middle-aged housewife with a young son, Riku, and an increasingly distant husband, Tomoharu (Keita Yamashina). By day, she works at a batting centre which is less a place for aspiring baseball players to practice their swings than for angry young men who want to hit things very hard. Consequently, her workplace is often unpleasant but aside from the aggressive conduct of the customers, her creepy boss has been making a point of sexually harassing her when not peeping on the girls’ changing rooms or actively having casual sex with one of Mariko’s colleagues in the rec-room. Convinced Tomoharu is having an affair, she takes to stalking him – on foot and online, even deciding to set up CCTV so she can spy on him when he invites an old uni friend to the house when he knows she’ll be out.

Mariko is not the only one, everybody (save perhaps her “babbling” workmate) seems to be gently seething with repressed rage. The batting cages are full of strung out salarymen in suits who are keen to raise their voices and gesture threateningly at timid employees who are very definitely not employed to be substitute softballs for their verbal bats. Mariko’s coping mechanism is her ascerbic interior monologue in which she passes judgement on everyone and everything, making the fair point that her image conscious colleague who won’t date short guys even if they’re rich probably isn’t going to bag a wealthy husband by providing sexual favours to the seedy boss at a rundown batting centre.

Rebuffing the timid colleague’s attempts to connect, Mariko repeatedly telephones a friend from a previous job who refuses all her calls. It seems Mariko has no other friends or family to turn to and is entirely alone with her marital worries which have placed a wedge between herself and her husband. The woman who never answers her calls along with another former colleague becomes a kind of inner chorus voicing Mariko’s own constant thoughts of inadequacy – that her friends don’t like her, that her husband no longer finds her attractive, and that she is a woman with no possible future to look forward to.

Mariko’s fantasy revenge is violent, bloody, and grotesque but possibly not so much as the fact that she actively gets off on savouring its taste. Tellingly, her temporary madness seems to be a common phenomenon as the salesman seems to know when Mariko attempts to buy the sharpest knife he has available and he wonders if he should sell it to her. A violent encounter sends Mariko reeling into a kind of maddening dance in which she decides to throw off all semblance of civility and behaves without restraint – hindering rather than helping an ungrateful woman, joining in with a dance in the street, throwing a bucket over the head of a stranger. When she sees violence being done on a seemingly innocent boy by a pack of thugs she doesn’t intervene but watches, catching up to one of the perpetrators to make him a surprising offer.

Mariko’s madness may be real or imagined but it’s far from an isolated case. Tomoharu’s secrets weren’t the ones she expected and were, in part, caused by her own suspicions and determined silence. Mariko may hate her part-time job (at least this current one) but her husband’s suggestion she give it up to be a full time wife and mother has her inwardly seething, her husband apparently reduced to a shivering coward by the temerity of a woman seeking fulfilment outside as well as inside the home. Ultimately their problems amount to a series of misunderstandings which can only be cleared up by a full and frank discussion the like of which is culturally taboo. Mariko may look like she’s exorcised a demon after dancing through her mad fever dream, but if she did then it perhaps migrated rather than disappeared, eagerly waiting to pounce on the next lonely soul being squeezed in the urban wringer.

Screened at Raindance 2017.