Tag: 2019

Sending Off (おみおくり〜Sending Off〜, Ian Thomas Ash, 2019)

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Following his 2014 documentary -1287 which followed a woman suffering with terminal cancer, Ian Thomas Ash examines the process of dying, and its aftermath, from a more immediate perspective in Sending Off (おみおくり〜Sending Off〜, Omiokuri: Sending Off) which sees him accompany Dr. Kaoru Konta who provides palliative care for those, mostly very elderly, who are approaching the end of their lives and are otherwise being looked after at home by family members rather than in hospitals. 

While in the past it might have been much more normal to die at home and for ordinary people to be familiar with illness and death, it may now be more usual to be cared for by trained professionals at a medical facility. Most particularly in rural areas, however, that might mean being entirely removed from a local community with friends and relatives perhaps unable to be present as much as they would like and so elderly family members are largely looked after by loved ones. That sense of community is certainly something that the bereaved family at the first home are very grateful for, affirming that while people in the cities can be distant from each other, people will always come to help in the country and true their word, the house is filled with neighbours helping to prepare food at 8.30am the morning after an elderly relative passes peacefully in her sleep shortly after 2. 

At the second house, meanwhile, a son who has been painstakingly taking care of his elderly mother laments that he feels oppressed by the ritualistic elements of a traditional funeral but would be failing in his duty to give her a proper send off if he did not complete them properly. Mr. Endo had remained conflicted about telling his mother that her condition was terminal, helping to video some of her treatment himself, including a mobile bathing session and soothing ice afterwards so other relatives could see his mother enjoying her life even while its quality continued to decline, but admitting that he hopes her suffering will soon be over so that she can finally reunite with his late father. Mrs. Endo receives a typical Japanese Buddhist funeral in a local temple and is then cremated, the family participating in the traditional ritual of picking up the remaining bones with chopsticks and placing them carefully into an urn. Dr. Konta also attends the public memorial service and gives a eulogy, discussing her brief relationship with the late Mrs. Endo and remarking on her admiration for the Endo family. 

As she says, caring for those with no possibility of recovering can be emotionally difficult. Yet we often see her taking time to admire the beauty of nature whether in a well kept garden, field of flowers, or the landscape to and from appointments. She tries to do her best to offer care and advice not only to the patients but to those who are their primary care givers and will often be making difficult decisions on their behalf. One elderly couple she visits appear to be in quite good health and mostly able to look after themselves, but she worries that as they had no children and their other relatives, save a nephew they don’t seem keen to contact, are also elderly there is no one who they can call should one of them become seriously ill and unable to look after the other.  

Mr. Hata, meanwhile, has the opposite problem in that he is worried about leaving his wife behind when he dies especially he claims because she’s not so good at the practical stuff and he’s always taken care of that for her. Those familiar with Ian Thomas Ash’s work may already be acquainted with Mr. Hata as he became the subject of an ongoing social media project as Ash helped him reunite with the son he had lost contact with 30 years previously after separating from the child’s mother. “Regret and regret, sometimes enjoy life” is how Mr. Hata describes the business of living but declares himself satisfied with being happy in the moment, seeing this as a “happy ending” witnessing the cherry blossoms surrounded by people he loves. Capturing the process of dying as unobtrusively as possible and with absolute sensitivity, Ash can also be seen stepping in to help when needed while documenting both the highly ritualised processes of “sending off” a relative and the managing of grief which accompanies them. 

Sending Off is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Life: Untitled (タイトル、拒絶, Kana Yamada, 2019)

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“Killing is easy. Revive me instead!” The heroine of Kana Yamada’s Life Untitled (タイトル、拒絶, Title: Kyozetsu) exclaims during a climactic argument, trying to find meaning in a life of ceaseless transaction. Adapting her own play, Yamada sets her tale of existential disappointment in an apartment used as an HQ for a group of call girls, each with their own problems but trying to live as best they can within the compromising environment of a patriarchal society which offers them little in the way of hope for a less depressing future. 

According to the agency’s top girl Riyu (Tomoko Nozaki) “everyone here is a failure of society”. Asking herself whether her painfully “ordinary” life was worth much of anything, Kano (Sairi Ito) resolved to become the hare rather than the tortoise, put on her recruit suit and submitted her CV to “Crazy Bunny”, a “delivery” company offering services only hinted at on the menu. Discovering that sex work was something she couldn’t handle, she managed to switch sides, becoming part of the management team taking “orders” and dispatching other women to various love hotels in the surrounding area, which means of course that she is privy to most of the interoffice drama even if she has little knowledge of these women’s external lives beyond that which they offer up freely as part of their work. 

The women who work at the agency, if you can call it that, are a varied bunch almost as if Yamashita, the thuggish boss running the operation on behalf of an older man (Denden), has made an effort to cater to all tastes. Three of the ladies gossip about ridiculous clients and their excuses for not wanting to use protection (including a fake medical certificate), while openly taking potshots at an older woman, Shiho (Reiko Kataoka), who has been selected as a substitute for the in demand Mahiru (Yuri Tsunematsu). Older women are cheaper they giggle, though the oldest of them, Atsuko (Aimi Satsukawa), is not so young herself and perhaps aware that she’s reaching a crisis point as she ages of out of the “most desirable” demographic. Kano thinks of Mahiru as the office’s hare in comparison to her patient tortoise, an embodiment of faceless desire wanted by all known by none. 

Mahiru too is well aware of her appeal and an expert in manipulating it. She loves money, she says, because she wants to use it to “buy someone’s life to burn the garbage inside me”, later vowing to “buy a person who can serve me for life”.  Carrying the burden of childhood trauma and sexualised from an early age, Mahiru is distrustful of relationships not based on transaction but perhaps craving something deeper while darkly yearning to burn the city of Tokyo to the ground. As it happens she is not the only one yearning to raze this society for the various ways in which it condemns women like her to a kind of underclass while men continue to live by a double standard that allows them to “buy” female bodies but resents the women who “sell” them. 

Another young woman, Kyoko (Kokoro Morita), finds this out to her cost in her difficult romance with the agency’s driver Ryota (Syunsuke Tanaka) with whom she slept for free while they were both drunk. She claims to understand him, that they are really both alike, soft people trying to look hard in order to survive in a cruel society. But he rejects her, asking who’d want to date a “hooker” like her, echoing Riyu’s words that she is “utterly worthless” by virtue of her life in sex work. Kyoko may be right and he likes her too, but he can’t let go of the idea that there is something “humiliating” about being romantically involved with a woman who has sex with men for money. 

Yamashita, meanwhile, is breaking all the rules of the trade by having sex with the girls he runs sometimes paying but perhaps sometimes not, wielding his position of power for sexual gratification before finally unmasking himself in describing the women as “garbage waiting to be thrown away”, disposable merchandise to be used and discarded once no longer useful to men like him. Kano might have been under no illusions as to Yamashita’s character, but the depths of his callousness surprise her. She’d developed a fondness for his underling, Hagio. (Hagio), who seemed sensitive and kind but turns out to have more than she’d expected in common with the girls while continuing to engage in the double standard, insisting that those who pay for sex are stupid, deluded for falling in love with those who only want money. 

Kano thought her “ordinary” life was “pathetic” and wanted to know if a “tortoise” like her could become the protagonist of her own story only to remain on the sidelines, a patient observer of these women’s lives while not quite as conflicted as you might expect her to be in her complicity with their exploitation. “A woman who ran away wouldn’t understand” Riyu fires back on being pushed for her refusal to entertain an unpleasant client, and perhaps it’s true, she wouldn’t because she works for the other side. She decides that perhaps it’s alright for her life not to have a “title”, meandering aimlessly without clear purpose but continuing all the same while the women take their particular kinds of revenge against a misogynistic and oppressive society ruled by male violence. Fully taking the play off the stage, Yamada depicts the lives of sex workers with a melancholy empathy quietly enraged at the society which forced them into lives they may not have asked for or wanted but discriminates against them simply for doing a job which is in essence like any other. “It’s not my fault” a high school girl instantly answers when questioned by a policeman, and you know, it really isn’t. 

Life: Untitled is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

What Can You Do About It? (だってしょうがないじゃない, Yoshifumi Tsubota, 2019)

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“Datte, shoganai janai?” The subject of Yoshifumi Tsubota’s empathetic documentary asks, stoically accepting disappointment with a resigned, well What Can You Do About It? (だってしょうがないじゃない). Recently diagnosed with ADHD, 41-year-old Tsubota documents his friendship with a relative diagnosed with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder, in his case autism with mild learning difficulties, as he tries to come to terms with the many changes in his life from the death of his mother some years previously to the impending prospect of having to leave his childhood home and enter a residential facility. 

Born in 1957, Makoto had lived alone with his mother for over 40 years before she passed away. Leaving education after middle school, he drifted around in various jobs before joining the SDF with which he served until returning home on his father’s death and is now in his early 60s. Yoshifumi’s aunt, Machiko, has become his legal guardian, helping him get the PDD diagnosis and sorting him out with a pension while managing his money and just generally watching over him. Other than Machiko, whom he refers to as a sister, Makoto is also visited by a series of helpers who assist him with day to day matters such as cleaning and grocery shopping he otherwise finds difficult. 

As his grocery helper points out, sometimes it can take a while for Makoto to fully understand why something is not working out the way he expected. In the case of shopping, he forgets about his budget and puts everything he wants into the basket only for the helper to remind him that he needs to put something back because he’s run out of money. He also gets himself into trouble with Machiko after asking Yoshifumi to go shopping with him and splurging on new trainers just because he liked them, lying that Yoshifumi had bought them for him and remorseful about potentially getting Yoshifumi into trouble. The biggest problem, however, is with a seemingly pernickety neighbour who has been making complaints about Makoto’s sometimes eccentric behaviour, especially his strange habit of going out late at night and throwing plastic carrier bags in the air just because he enjoys seeing them dance in the wind. He knows he needs to change, but finds it impossible to stop. 

Makoto’s compulsions worry Machiko who recalls a previous occasion on which he almost started a fire idly playing with matches. She is also alarmed on discovering a pornographic magazine he’d hidden in his figurine cabinet, paranoid that he might harm someone, unable to control himself or understand what might be considered inappropriate. Machiko’s rather prurient reaction appears to cause Makoto a great deal of anxiety despite Yoshifumi’s reassurance that most men have similar magazines and looking at them, so long as that’s all it is, is perfectly healthy whatever Machiko might say to the contrary. 

Meanwhile, he’s acutely worried about the prospect of being forced out of his family home and realising that if something happens to Machiko there will be no one left to look after him. After his mother’s death, Makoto had announced a sudden intention to marry a beautiful woman, but, as it turns out, only to get himself another mother. Two older women who come to chat with him as part of a community outreach programme try to talk him out of it, persuading him that wives and mothers are different, something which apparently took a little time for him to fully understand. When a cherry tree in the garden has to be cut down, he finds it very distressing as if he no longer recognises his home as his own with only two trees when there had always been three.

Yoshifumi too is looking for acceptance and understanding, explaining to Makoto and the visiting ladies that his wife is struggling to accept his ADHD diagnosis while telling us in voiceover that he’s been hiding his medication in his office and taking it in secret because she doesn’t approve. His quest to understand Makoto is also one to understand himself while trying to capture the way he sees the world. As Makoto says, however, Yoshifumi’s wife can never fully understand because she does not experience things the way they do. Nevertheless, the two men though a generation apart generate a genuine friendship, going to theme parks, baseball games, summer festivals, and eventually karaoke as they bond over their shared sense of difference. Lending a whimsical touch with frequent transitions into surrealist animation, Tsubota’s warm and empathetic approach explores not only his cousin’s usual life but also the problems of ageing and of disability in contemporary society along with a persistent stigma towards the acknowledgement of development disorders but finds solace in community support as friends and relatives rally round to help Makoto live his life to the fullest for as long as he can. 

What Can You Do About It? is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Reiwa Uprising (れいわ一揆, Kazuo Hara, 2019)

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With a career spanning more than 40 years, veteran documentarian Kazuo Hara cannot exactly be described as prolific. His films can often take years to produce, his upcoming documentary on the Minamata disease apparently having been in development for the last decade and a half. Perhaps appropriately enough Reiwa Uprising (れいわ一揆, Reiwa Ikki) is then something of a revolution even within the director’s own career in that it saw him spring into action at a moment’s notice after being invited to document the imminent House of Councillors election by the documentary’s subject, Ayumi Yasutomi, making good on a joke made during an online interview. 

A transgender woman and professor at the University of Tokyo, Ayumi Yasutomi had received some previous press attention during an eccentric but unsuccessful campaign to become a local mayor. She was now one of 10 candidates selected to stand for brand new political party Reiwa Shinsengumi founded by former actor Taro Yamamoto. Yamamoto himself was already known for his unconventional political style, and Reiwa Shinsengumi was set up expressly to oppose the scandal-beset Abe administration with a series of broadly left-wing policies prioritising human rights and the environment in addition to pushing for an end to the consumption tax, nuclear power, and the controversial Henoko US military base in Okinawa. 

As a new political party, however, there was no firm organisation in place and Yamamoto chose his various candidates for their individual platforms, giving them in the main a fairly free rein to run their own campaign as they saw fit prioritising their own policy ideals. Yasutomi’s central policies revolve around the protection of children with a focus on preventing abuse and reform of the educational system, but she is also keen to encourage a return to nature and as in her mayoral campaign is regularly accompanied by a rented horse temporarily stabled in the city. Like Yamamoto she stages a series of publicity stunts including a Thriller flashmob, describing the video’s zombies as adults who have died inside after being robbed of their childhoods and have subsequently become mere machines perpetuating the systems of oppression which have made them what they are, while continuing with the musical processions which had originally caught Hara’s eye during her mayoral campaign. 

Though Yasutomi remains his main focus, Hara expands the canvas to capture the nascent revolution that Reiwa Shinsengumi is attempting to foster. As a new political party, they are not so much focussed on winning power as gaining a foothold, hoping for the 2% vote share that would grant them status as an official political party. The other candidates stand on a variety of social issue policy platforms from disability to workplace exploitation and the anti-nuclear movement with a keen focus on social equality insisting that no-one should be judged according to their “productivity” or “usefulness” to society. A sign language interpreter appears onstage next to the candidates at the central rallies, and in an impressive hustings gimmick the floor literally rises to allow his two wheelchair-using candidates access to the stage on the same level as their able-bodied colleagues. It is perhaps an unexpected candidate who makes the most impact, however, in the impassioned speeches of part-time worker and single mother Teruko Watanabe who advocates fiercely for the rights and dignities of Japan’s impoverished working class as a woman who found herself at the mercy of an inherently exploitative employment system which offers little protection to those outside of the full-time salaried employee. Her concerns are echoed in those of another candidate who once ran a 7-Eleven and has a deeply held grudge against Japan’s famous combini culture having taken the unusual position of being a boss who regularly advocated on behalf of workers. 

While passively documenting their struggle, Hara nevertheless uncovers a possible schism at the heart of the movement in that, as unconventional as he otherwise is, Yamamoto is determined to work within the system if only to change it while Yasutomi would rather destroy it completely, repeatedly insisting that the entire country is “crazy” and has never fully managed to escape from its militarist past. She resents the ruling LDP, who have been in power for almost the entirety of the period since Japan’s new post-war constitution came into effect, for perpetuating a kind of “positionism” in which all they care about is a conservative desire to maintain their own status granting only the concession that they will in turn recognise the status of others. It’s this “positionism” she seeks to counter in what she sees as the best expression of liberalism through rejecting labels, something which has apparently brought her into conflict with the wider LGBTQ+ community. Reiwa Shinsengumi managed to win two Diet seats, awarded to the two disabled candidates in a first for Japan, though Yamamoto himself did not make it back to parliament and Shinzo Abe’s administration remained comfortably in power. Nevertheless, Hara captures a political moment in which real change seems possible for the perhaps the first time since the decline of the post-war leftwing student movement in the early 1970s. As Watanabe puts it, this is just the start the starting line. The revolution starts now. 

Reiwa Uprising is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

It Feels So Good (火口のふたり, Haruhiko Arai, 2019)

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“It’s kind of erotic” a young man remarks watching the local bon odori, “Like dancing on the border between this world and the next”, the woman adds, “people who have died and are stuck in limbo”, “kind of like us”. In limbo is indeed where the lovers of It Feels So Good (火口のふたり, Kako No Futari) seem to be, perpetually awaiting the end of the world while wilfully retreating into the romantic past as they reheat their adolescent love affair from a perspective of experience.

Now approaching middle age, Kenji (Tasuku Emoto) is a dejected divorcee living an aimless life in Tokyo when he gets a call from his father (Akira Emoto) to let him know that his cousin, Naoko (Kumi Takiuchi), is getting married and would like to invite him to the wedding. He spins a yarn about needing to ask for time off from a job he doesn’t have, but packs up and leaves right away, staying in the old family home vacant since his mother died and his father remarried. Naoko visits him almost immediately, enlisting his help transporting a large TV set to the house she will be sharing with her fiancé, a major in the SDF currently engaged in disaster relief. Apparently still not over their aborted romance of more than a decade earlier, she determines to seduce her former lover for a one night stand, but the night of passion reawakens Kenji’s desire and eventually leads to a five-day holiday in which the couple cocoon themselves in intimacy awaiting the return of the absent major. 

Adapted from the novel by Kazufumi Shiraishi which was published in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, It Feels So Good finds itself in a moment of acute anxiety and existential threat. The lovers feel themselves in various ways already dead, in part because of the poetic affectation of a lovers’ suicide in which they imagined themselves swallowed by the crater of a dormant mount Fuji. The inactive volcano motif perhaps hints at the untapped potential of their still simmering passion, but also at their mutual emptiness as they attempt to find meaning in the aftermath of disaster. Naoko confides that she decided to get married, in part, because she wanted to become a mother after witnessing so much death, but later adds that she is also suffering from a kind of survivor’s guilt as a resident of Akita, in the disaster area but itself relatively untouched by death or destruction. Kenji, meanwhile, struggles to emerge from the ashes of his failed marriage which seems to have sent him into a self-destructive, alcoholic spiral, that cost him his career and left him living aimlessly in the city. 

Naoko spins their “temporary” affair as a return to the past, not really cheating just temporally displaced, as they hole up together in her marital home making the most of their time alternating between the bed and the dinner table engaging in two kinds of dialogue, that of the body and the other of the mind. Returning to a previous intimacy they marvel at the ease of their connection while edging their way towards a frank discussion of how and why their original affair came to an end, reflecting on shame and fear as they meditate on past choices and their future implications always aware that their present connection has an expiry date. That sense of an ending takes on existential connotations not only for the couple but for the wider world as they contemplate a coming disaster, refocussing their minds and desires on the here and now. “I should have listened to my body” Kenji laments, refusing to think of the future in favour of the present moment, “it’s now or never”.

It Feels So Good topped the Kinema Junpo Best 10 list for 2019, a feat doubly notable because it is directed by Haruhiko Arai who is, among other things, editor of rival publication Eiga Geijutsu (ethical concerns aside it took the top spot in their poll too). Arai began his career in pink film writing scripts for Koji Wakamatsu and there is something distinctly ‘70s in It Feels So Good’s nostalgic sensibility besides its plaintive retro folk score and theatrical dialogue. Nevertheless what he charts is two people learning how to live in a world of constant anxiety, sitting atop a volcano but choosing heat over ash, retreating into private passion as a protective bubble against existential uncertainty.

It Feels So Good is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Special Actors (スペシャル アクターズ, Shinichiro Ueda, 2019)

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When your made on a shoestring indie debut becomes an accidental international phenomenon, no one could really blame you for succumbing to imposter syndrome. Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, a meta comedy with high concept conceit, delighted fans around the world but rather than slide into summer tentpole territory Ueda remains true to his roots with follow up feature Special Actors (スペシャル アクターズ) once again developed through actors’ workshops and owing a significant debt to contemporary stage comedy.

Our dejected hero, Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa), is an anxious young man burdened with PTSD from childhood trauma that causes him to faint when he becomes overly stressed or is confronted by an overbearing, if not actually violent, male authority figure. He dreams of becoming a hero who can protect people like Rescue Man, the star of an American tokusatsu-style show he’s obsessively watched dubbed into Japanese since childhood, and is determined to become an actor only his habit of fainting mid-audition constantly frustrates his ambitions. Already behind on his rent and about to be fired from his part-time job as a security guard on the grounds that he didn’t disclose his “illness” when he applied, Kazuto is reunited with his estranged younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), also an actor, who offers to introduce him to his agency, “Special Actors”. In addition to the usual TV and advertising work, Special Actors speciality is renting out talent for “real” as in providing professional mourners, bulking out theatre audiences with laughing stooges, and engineering long queues outside previously empty restaurants. 

Kazuto isn’t quite convinced, not only because it seems like anxiety central, but because it’s more than a little bit shady. The lead “scenario” writer was once a conman, and you can’t get away from the fact this is all quite manipulative and essentially unethical. Forced to take the job because of his financial predicament, he finds himself involved in various plots to change problematic behaviour at the request of well-meaning relatives such as a mother desperate to rescue her daughter from frittering all her money away at host bars. But are the Special Actors really any different than a host at a host bar who is after all only playing a role, as the young woman must know even if she has for some reason been taken in by it? Perhaps they’d be better to find out what is fuelling her obsession rather than coming up with some hokum involving a fake shaman to convince her that her behaviour is dangerous on a cosmic level. 

The moral ambiguity only deepens when the team take on their biggest challenge yet, taking down a shady cult at the request of an orphaned teenage girl whose sister seems primed to give away the family inn. Abruptly shifting into the realms of the espionage thriller reimagined as theatre, Ueda concocts an elaborate heist as the Special Actors infiltrate with the intention to expose. The central irony is of course that in practical terms there isn’t so much difference between them. They are both “lying”, manipulating vulnerable people and doing it for financial gain. “Acting is a big lie” the irate director had screamed in Kazuto’s face, “you have to mean it”. Is the shady cult merely “theatre” taken to an extreme, and if so who if anyone should be held responsible?

Ueda isn’t so much interested in these themes as the ironic potential of their latent comedy, stitching together a series of theatre skit set pieces working towards the epic finale in which the hero, Kazuto, learns to put on his cape and save the day by overcoming his internal “villain” in the shape of his abusive father. Like the cult, the Special Actors are also promising salvation or at least liberation from behaviours which others find problematic regardless of the target’s own wishes or desires even if in the case of some it may be for their own good, a more elaborate form of role play than that enacted in a therapy session. We are indeed all “acting” to one extent or another and you can never be sure that anyone is who they say they are because life itself is theatre. Shot with a perhaps thematically appropriate TV drama aesthetic, Kazuto’s zero to hero journey is pure wish fulfilment fantasy, but even if never reaching the perfectly constructed heights of One Cut of the Dead is undeniably entertaining. 

Special Actors is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts. Tune in for the live Q&A (available worldwide) after the movie on July 17 (also available afterwards on demand)!

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sunod (Carlo Ledesma, 2019)

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A mother goes to great lengths to be with her daughter in twisty Philippine horror Sunod. In a tense tale of supernatural dread, Sunod’s heroine contends not only with mysterious curse and psychological disturbance but with social inequalities, conservative social codes, and a health crisis while trying to protect her young daughter but soon finds herself dragged into a web of black magic intrigue, her calm, rational and compassionate response to becoming the target of a demonic scam only used against her by her unscrupulous aggressors. 

Never married single-mother Olivia (Carmina Villaroel) is wearing herself to the bone with worry over her teenage daughter Annelle (Krystal Brimner), a long-term hospital patient with a dangerous congenital heart defect that apparently requires expensive medical treatments Oliver can ill afford. Reluctant to be away from her daughter, she knows she needs to find another job but draws a blank in the currently difficult employment environment. At her wits’ end, she steps into a recruitment fair intended for students in search of part-time work but manages to impress the recruiter with her top English skills and spiky attitude. Her new job sees her working nights at a call centre where she struggles to adjust to the intense office atmosphere while bonding with “professional trainee” Mimi (Kate Alejandrino) and sympathetic boss Lance (JC Santos). 

Even on her first day, however, Olivia begins to notice something strange about the building where her new job is located which apparently once housed a hospital and is kitted out in gothic style complete with statues of angels and sweeping staircases. During a power cut one day after work, Olivia is approached by a strange little girl, Nerisa (Rhed Bustamante), and unwisely takes her by the hand, guiding her out of the building. Ominous events intensify, she begins hearing things and getting strange calls while Annelle’s heart condition appears to have been miraculously healed only she’s also had a complete transplant of personality. 

Of course, much of this could be down to Olivia’s fraying nerves. We’re told she’s not slept well in months and is already on various kinds of medication while obviously under extreme stress working overtime to try and pay for her daughter’s medical care. Trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, she also faces a degree of social stigma as an unmarried mother, as she reveals nervously confessing to Mimi that she’s raised her daughter alone and so might not be the best person to ask for dating advice. Mimi, meanwhile, is an ultra modern freeter, flitting between a series of temporary jobs uncertain whether to get married for convenience’s sake or make a go of independence by committing to a career. After listening to Olivia’s story, she decides to give things a go at the call centre and the two women generate an easy friendship despite the difference in age and experience. 

Olivia meanwhile finds herself in a difficult position, propositioned by the previously “nice” Lance who hands her a fat check to help cover Annelle’s medical bills but then tries to get his money’s worth by trying it on in the employees’ rest room. She manages to fend him off, but is conflicted in her decision to keep the money out of a sense of desperation. Plagued by strange nightmares in which she sees herself bury her daughter alive, she begins to lose her sense of reality, half convinced that Annelle has been possessed by the spirit of Nerisa who, she has discovered, may have some connection with the building’s dark history as a World War II hospital. 

“When you have a child, there’s always a constant feeling of fear because her life is in your hands” Olivia tries to explain to Mimi, illuminating a more general kind of maternal anxiety than her acute worry over her daughter’s health. A compassionate soul, she tries to help Nerisa settle her unfinished business by helping her find her mum in the hope that she can then “move on” leaving her and Annelle in peace, but finds herself entangled by dark maternity and under threat from a motherly entity that quite literally cannot let go. Driven half out of her mind by an unforgiving, patriarchal society, Olivia tries to do the best for her daughter but struggles to escape her sense of futility in being unable to protect her either from her illness or the society in which they live. Rich and gothic in atmosphere with its creepy disused hospital setting replete with empty corridors and malfunctioning lifts, Sunod’s quietly mounting sense of dread leaves its heroine at the mercy of forces beyond her control, bound by inescapable anxiety. 

Sunod streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Chasing Dream (我的拳王男友, Johnnie To, 2019)

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“You gotta give everything to get everything” according to an intense rocker in Johnnie To’s musical boxing romance, Chasing Dream (我的拳王男友). What turns out to be most important however is not physical endurance but emotional authenticity, if you want to be taken seriously then you have to take yourself seriously first and that means learning to find the courage to embrace your authentic self. A tale of two crazy kids chasing the Chinese Dream, To’s colourful fantasy world is not without its bite as he leans in hard to what it costs to succeed and not in what is often a merciless society.

Our hero Tiger (Jacky Heung Cho), “The Gluttonous Boxer”, is a young man who broke with his boxing master to step into the MMA ring but is also an enforcer for a shady local loansharking gang run by his manager. Aware he is approaching the end of his career – a doctor later tells him he’s in danger of going blind, rupturing his liver, and getting Parkinson’s – Tiger’s life changes one day when he recognises one of the ring girls, Cuckoo (Wang Keru), as the granddaughter of an old woman who used to sell noodles back when he studied boxing in his rural hometown. Unfortunately, Tiger’s boss has also recognised her because she is in deep debt with the mob. Some of the guys want to cut their losses and sell her on to the sex trade but Tiger, seemingly indifferent, claims he can find her a way to work off her debt and thereby kickstarts his rescue not only of her but of himself from the increasingly empty life of an ageing prize fighter. 

What he discovers is that Cuckoo is harbouring intense resentment over being seduced and betrayed by one of China’s biggest pop stars who made himself a name as the “king of originality” after stealing all of her songs and leaving her in the lurch. Qu Fengfeng (Ma Xiaohui) is now a judge on China’s biggest TV singing competition Perfect Diva and Cuckoo has a plan to confront him by getting on the show, the only snag being that she is extremely unpolished as a performer. Tiger, meanwhile, wants to get out of the ring and has a plan to start his own hotpot empire essentially by copying all the best bits of the major chains and bringing them together. He vows to help Cuckoo train by having her mimic the performance styles of major stars, but what she quickly discovers is that there is no substitute for emotional authenticity. A fellow constant decides to switch her routine at the last minute after catching sight of Cuckoo rehearsing, but is unceremoniously voted off by judges who’d rather she “performed a tacky fan dance” (as she was originally planning to do) than simply copycatting famous artists. Challenged that her songs are too similar to Qu Fengfeng’s Cuckoo snaps back that it’s his style that’s close to hers, earning the admiration of astute female judge Zhao Ying (Wu Yitong) who can perhaps detect the artist inside her beginning to free itself from her sense of insecurity. 

Achieving your dreams can however come at a heavy cost. Pearl “the kick ass rocker” (Kelly Yu Wenwen) has an intense, aggressive performance style but in a running gag turns up at each consecutive audition with a new incapacity, eventually using a wheelchair and wearing a back brace only able to move her arms. “Totally worth it in the name of music!” she cheerfully explains, literally destroying herself to get to the top. Tiger does something much the same exploited as he is by his unscrupulous gangster manager, shouting out “it doesn’t hurt” as he trains by having people jump on his belly, but the battering he takes is not so much for himself as for others, stepping back into the ring in defence first of Cuckoo and then of his dejected master, Ma Qing (Shao Bing), whose attempt to defend the dignity of the noble art of boxing against the modern upstart MMA goes horribly wrong. But Tiger cannot fight others’ battles for them, and the only way he can win is by being himself while honouring their legacy. 

Finally finding how to bare their souls for all to see and “have someone share the fatigue of loneliness”, the pair learn to recalibrate their dreams while falling in love discovering that mutual support is their guiding light as they give each other the strength to be all they can be. Ostensibly somewhere in Mainland China, To’s make believe, retro future city has a colourful comic book intensity that adds a mythic quality to the saga of Tiger and Cuckoo that is perfectly in tune with his dreamy romanticism in which sudden flights of fancy including a full-blown Bollywood-style dance sequence seem entirely natural. A surprisingly moving, wilfully absurd musical love story between wildly grinning pugilist and a young woman learning to sing from the the heart, Chasing Dream is a delightful sugar pop confection in which two crazy kids find love in the ring and with it the power to believe in themselves and a better future.

Chasing Dream streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (Cantonese, no subtitles)

Vertigo (버티고, Jeon Gye-soo, 2019)

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To many, the word “vertigo” is synonymous with a fear of heights, but in essence it refers more to a sense of unbalance, a giddiness born of having lost sight of the ground, temporarily unable to orient yourself within an environment which no longer seems to make sense. The heroine of Jeon Gye-soo’s artfully composed Vertigo (버티고) fears she is suffering with the medical variety caused by an ongoing problem with her inner ear which leaves her with recurrent tinnitus and a permanent sense of wooziness. She is also, however, suffering with a kind of existential dizziness, trapped in a constant state of anxiety in feeling entirely untethered to the world. 

30-something Seo-young (Chun Woo-hee), is a contract worker at an ad company with an office on the upper floors of a high-rise building. Unbeknownst to her colleagues, she’s been having an affair with her handsome, once divorced boss, Jin-soo (Yoo Teo), but he seems to be holding something back from her, insisting on keeping their relationship secret and reluctant to introduce her to his grown-up son. Meanwhile, she’s subject to most of the minor micro-aggressions plaguing women in the work place which run from being expected to come in early to do menial tasks like refilling the photocopier and tidying the shelves, to casual sexual harassment. Somewhat out of it, Seo-young has managed to avoid most of that and thinks she’s moved past the stage of having to play the office lady game by keeping the men entertained at the not-technically-compulsory-but-you-still-have-to-go afterwork get-togethers. Her friend Yedam (Park Ye-young), however, has her getting worried, at once complaining about their sleazy team leader asking for massages and reminding her that they need to turn on the charm at least until their contracts are renewed. 

Being a “contract worker” and not a salaried employee is certainly a major cause of Seo-young’s anxiety, leaving her feeling unanchored in her professional life in the knowledge that she could soon be unceremoniously cut loose for reasons largely unconnected to her performance. As a woman in her 30s it will be increasingly difficult to find a new job while a still patriarchal society will most likely write her off for daring to reject marriage in favour of work but failing to make a success of it. Her male bosses and colleagues, regular employees all, use her precarious status against her, expecting that she “play nice” to get a recommendation for further employment and threatening to tank her career if she doesn’t toe the line. She muses on going “far away” with Jin-soo, perhaps to Argentina, a land of passion where people dance the tango and drink wine late into the evening, but on some level knows it’s a just a comforting fantasy. 

Regularly visiting an ear doctor, Seo-young tries to overcome her sense of unease through medical means, unwittingly returning to the source of her trauma buried in a painful childhood which regularly resurrects itself in her toxic relationship with her mother who only rings to belittle her success while complaining about her string of relationships with terrible men and unsatisfying life with Seo-young’s step-father. Seo-young can’t find firm ground because she is essentially unanchored, left dangling by a failure of the traditional family and seemingly with no “real” friends. She begins experiencing panic attacks at work, retreating to unoccupied rooms to calm herself by looking out at the horizon. 

Meanwhile, her growing despair has been spotted by window cleaner and bookshop clown Gwan-woo (Jeong Jae-kwang) who is carrying a sadness of his own. He pities and protects her, supporting from the other side of the glass in a way which is not, strictly speaking, OK but is filled with such innocence and unspoken connection that it largely overcomes the otherwise unpalatable quality of his stalkerish devotion. Gwan-woo is, in a sense, a man who’s unafraid to fall, secure in his ties to the world and literally anchored by his position in society. Seo-young yearns to overcome her sense of anxiety, find firm footing and a sense of support, at once reassured by the presence of Gwan-woo and perhaps disturbed by it. She is, however, feeling her way back to solid ground, gaining the desire to climb safe in the knowledge that someone will be there to catch her even when she feels like falling. 

Vertigo streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival. It was also due to screen as part of the 10th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

colorless (猿楽町で会いましょう, Takashi Koyama, 2019)

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“I think I could capture the real you” a photographer pleads of a subject he has become obsessed with, little knowing the deeply problematic implications of his statement. Shot with a photographer’s eye, Takashi Koyama’s colorless (猿楽町で会いましょう, Sarugakucho de Aimasho), paints its heroes as just that, wandering zombies of modern day Tokyo as estranged from themselves as they are from others, but even as it attempts to draw similarities between their mutual lifelessness cannot help but reflect a misogynistic world view in which the conflicted heroine remains little more than an empty shell, a blank canvas onto which various men project their inner desires leaving her essentially robbed of an identity by an exploitative society. 

When we first meet aspiring freelance photographer Shu (Daichi Kaneko), he is in much the same position, kept waiting by an arrogant magazine editor who has stepped out of the office despite having arranged an appointment to look over his portfolio. When he eventually arrives, Kasamura (Kenta Maeno) rudely dismisses his work, claiming that the selection of photos he’s assembled doesn’t make sense in that it gives no clear indication of his style or intent and aside from that his shots are cold and lifeless. He attributes this lack of passion to the likelihood that Shu has never truly been in love, something which turns out to be true though as we later discover Kasamura is also a cold and cynical man who proudly proclaims the same of himself. Nevertheless, he hooks Shu up with a side job shooting publicity shots for an acquaintance, Yuka (Ruka Ishikawa), hoping to become a “reader’s model” as a path to fame. 

For whatever reason, Yuka seems to incite in him the passion which Kasamura claimed was missing in his work, becoming both muse and object of desire. She describes herself as colourless and wonders if there is a “her” that can be captured, while Shu assures her that he feels much the same but fails to appreciate the various ways in which he is attempting to colour her with his camera, filled with nothing but jealous anxiety when confronted by the possibility that she exists outside of the image he has created of her. The incongruities between what she tells him of herself, his own self created vision, and the evidence presented to him by others bring out an unpleasantly chauvinistic side of him which he perhaps does not even like in himself, abruptly attempting to stop her leaving his apartment without consenting to sex by threatening to withhold the data for the pictures he took, breaking into her phone to check her messages, and later feeling humiliated in realising that she may have hidden from him a prior (or current) life in sex work.

Yuka, meanwhile, remains a cipher. Unexpectedly interviewed as part of an audition she is asked to describe herself but can only reply in terms of the way others see her, answering only that she is often said to have a sunny disposition. We see her parrot back lines she’s heard from one man to another in an attempt to please him, as if wilfully erasing her essential identity to better conform to male desires in an attempt to keep herself safe but also perhaps betraying that she has few words of her own to offer. Yet in private we see a much less complimentary side of her in which she is petty and jealous, resentful of a friend’s success while she seems to get nowhere and, the film uncomfortably insists, willing to use men by exploiting their desire for her which is in essence a desire for a colourlessness they can dye with their own self projected ideals. 

Yuka claims that she does not want to know who she really is, perhaps afraid to know or realising that there really is no value in knowing because her existence is defined by male desire. Her tragedy may be that she isn’t cynical enough, unable to manipulate men to the same extent as her more successful friend, still longing to be known and loved for who she is even while insisting that she does not exist and wilfully misrepresenting herself to those around her out of embarrassment and dissatisfaction with her life. The story she tells in her interview implies a lasting trauma of male abuse which has caused a rupture in her sense of self, unable to grasp an identity other than that granted by others, but still we’re largely left with Shu’s resentment in his inability to “capture” that which cannot be captured in his desire to possess not only Yuka’s body but her image by replacing it with that of his own creation. A dark and cynical take on modern romance, colorless leaves its heroes much where it found them, floundering in an inherently patriarchal society itself devoid of the colour they each desire. 

colorless streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)