Tag: 2020

The Asadas! (浅田家！, Ryota Nakano, 2020)

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There’s a kind of irony at the centre of Ryota Nakano’s The Asadas! (浅田家！,Asada-ke!) in that its photographer hero makes a name for himself photographing his family yet at times neglects them or appears curiously insensitive, perhaps even selfish in the pursuit of his dreams. Inspired by the life of photographer Masashi Asada, the film is at once a celebration of the family and an advocation for the tangibility of a photograph as a repository of memory that can bring comfort even in the absence of its subject.

The first part of the film is narrated from the perspective of Masashi’s (Kazunari Ninomiya) much more conventional older brother Yukihiro (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who is generally exasperated by and a little resentful of the family’s indulgence of Masashi, a seeming free spirit who acts on impulse and gives little thought to the consequences of his actions. People frequently describe both Masashi and his father Akira (Mitsuru Hirata) as “not normal,” and there is something unconventional in their family setup with Akira a househusband in a small town in the 1980s while his wife Junko (Jun Fubuki) supports the family with her career as a nurse. It’s Akira who first gives Masashi a camera and his dream of becoming a photographer which he eventually achieves through taking amusing pictures of his family in various scenes casting them as firemen, racing drivers, or even gangsters. 

Masashi attempts to get the photos published as a book, but is quickly dismissed and told that no one wants to buy his personal family photo album. Though the publisher may have a point that in general people value photos of their own family but not those of others, the family photo itself is treated as a triviality as if it had no real worth. The same could be said of Masashi’s work, that some do not take it seriously because the subject is his own family. Yet Masashi finds new value in it in his ability to capture the essence of a moment in family life through a staged photograph such as that he designs for the family of a little boy who is dying of a brain tumour.

In the back of his book, eventually published by an eccentric woman who runs a small press and decides to take a loss because she found the photos so funny, Masashi pledges to travel anywhere to take similar photos for other families which of course means he is often separated from his own whom he then rarely photographs much to his father’s disappointment. After leaving for university, he had barely contacted them for two years while after travelling to the zone of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami he abruptly drops out of contact with his long suffering girlfriend Wakana (Haru Kuroki) after becoming immersed in the task of cleaning up the orphaned photos found among the wreckage. 

Of course, there are those who object to his work thinking that there are more important things to do while so many people are still missing, but as he discovers recovering the photos gives people a sense of comfort and healing as if they were getting back a little bit of the past that had been taken from them and most particularly if the people in the photographs are no longer here. A little girl who’s lost her father is alarmed and resentful that she can find no photos of him, realising that he was rarely in the ones they took as a family and wondering if that meant he didn’t really love them hinting at an ironic sense of parental absence in that parents often take the photos of their children so do not appear themselves but still leave their imprint in a sense of absence in which every photograph also contains the invisible presence of the photographer.

And then sometimes the reverse is true. A grandmother comes looking for pictures of her grandchildren, but ironically finds pictures only of herself. The triviality with which the family photo was regarded seems almost offensive for something that can offer such comfort and warmth in a time of profound grief as a tangible link to a past that will never return. Masashi makes his family’s unrealised dreams come true through his photos, bringing them joy if also a little anxiety in a creating a perfect record of their unconventional family while Nakano does something similar capturing of the essence of a happy family life filled with equal parts laughter and tears.

The Asadas! screens Feb. 24 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Park Hoon-jung, 2020)

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Sometimes being too good at your job can be a definite liability. So it is for the hero of Park Hoon-jung’s melancholy gangster noir, Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Nagwonui bam). Park’s worldview is often nihilistic and sometimes downright unpleasant, though it’s a sense of fatalistic sadness that dominates this otherwise over familiar tale of a noble gangster cruelly misused by those who choose not to obey their shared code and thereafter finding himself on a dark path towards if not exactly redemption then at least an inevitable ending. 

Rising foot soldier Tae-gu (Uhm Tae-goo) has found himself in the middle of an old-fashioned gang war, serving an ambitious boss, Yang (Park Ho-san), who has unwisely decided to press into territory operated by the well established Bukseong gang. Getting some of his guys back after being kidnapped by Bukseong and held in an apartment block where the community is currently protesting the take over and demolition by gangster redevelopers, Tae-gu is told by his opposing number that Yang is a crazy upstart who would be a nobody without him and that he made a mistake turning down a job offer from Bukseong boss Doh. Tae-gu is however an old school mobster loyal to his gang which is why he doesn’t stop to think things through when someone close to him is killed in a car accident in which he assumes he was the intended target, believing Doh is striking a low blow. Encouraged by Yang, he meets with Doh in person and daringly knocks him off at a swimming pool sauna escaping through a window in the nude. Yang arranges to send him to Jeju Island to lay low before moving on possibly to Russia, but Yang has also been engaging in a failed pincer movement which left them all in hot water after failing to take out Doh’s no. 2, Ma. 

As the title might hint, even the island “paradise” of Jeju is not free of death and crime as Tae-gu discovers after bonding with their contact, Kuto (Lee Ki-young), a fixer smuggling guns from Russian mobsters hidden inside consignments of fish. Like Tae-gu’s sister, Kuto’s niece Jae-yeon (Jeon Yeo-been) is suffering from an undisclosed terminal illness that seems to have few obvious symptoms but has left her with suicidal tendencies. Kuto’s decision to take Tae-gu in is motivated by his desire for money to take Jae-yeon to America for treatment though she and Tae-gu are also much the same both having lost people close to them because of their proximity to the gangster world while he and Kuto search for ways to make up for the harm their lives of violence has caused. 

Jae-yeon is quick to remind Tae-gu that she will soon be dead and that therefore nothing really matters and her life has no meaning while he perhaps as a gangster feels something similar that his life ended the day he first picked up a gun yet there are also ways in which he must act in satisfaction of his code. His tragedy is that he’s operating under a misapprehension, blindly trusting in the wrong people when the truth is painfully obvious to all but him.

Park inserts a series of ironic pillow shots of the idyllic Jeju night scene with comforting lights swinging from tropical trees and gentle waves rolling on the horizon, before closing with a series of eerie daytime shots of familiar locations now devoid of people as if this were a hell our heroes had recently been haunting, ghosts of a violent landscape. His fight scenes are visceral yet also occasionally cartoonish, several taking place in the confined space of a car expertly framed by Park as the heroes fight desperately for life while constrained by their environment. A high octane chase through an airport with its ubiquitous escalators soon gives way to an impressive motorway-bound set piece with an unexpected resolution, the gangsters later scattering on hearing far off police sirens though as we also realise police collusion is an inescapable factor in the fragile equilibrium of the underworld even if it might not stretch all the way to idyllic Jeju. “Don’t waste your tears” Tae-gu unironically offers in weary resignation to his fate, a noble gangster to the last too good to survive in a world of nihilistic futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, Simon Zhao & Xu Shixing, 2020)

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Monster movie streamer Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, jù è dǎo) became a surprise hit in the early days of the pandemic as people increasingly preferred to entertain themselves at home, though of course in a way it may be somehow comforting to see people battle more obvious threats that they can actually see and physically resist. In any case, the film never promises much more than its nature as fodder for online streaming would suggest while admittedly pinching plot elements from other similarly themed movies such Train to Busan and positioning the central conflict as effective paternity rather than the monster itself.

A brief prologue finds American pilots flying through the Dragon Triangle during the Second World War while ominously carrying cargo labeled as containing dangerous radiation though the reason they later crash on an uncharted island is that they are suddenly attacked by what appear to be pterodactyls. Nevertheless, the radiation is later given as an explanation as to why all the creatures on the island have evolved into huge and terrifying monsters including the titular crocodile.

Flash forward to the present day and grumpy middle-aged man Lin Hao (Gallen Lo Ka-leung) is escorting his estranged 19-year-old daughter Yiyi (Liao Yinyue) home to China following the sudden death of her mother in Australia where the pair had been living. Yiyi has secretly been accompanied by her university student boyfriend Cheng Jie (Wang Bingxiang) of whom Lin clearly does not approve, not yet able to shift his perspective on the daughter he hadn’t seen in five years to realise she is no longer a little girl. Family bonding will however have to wait as the plane they’re travelling on alongside a pregnant lady and her husband, an influencer, and an obnoxious man travelling home for a heart transplant, is pulled into Dragon’s Triangle by magnetic interference and crash lands on the island where several of the survivors are quickly swallowed by the crocodile. 

Those who remain are therefore faced with a series of dilemmas as to whether to help each other or prioritise their own survival with Cao Fang (He Qiwei), the heart transplant candidate, actively pushing several of his fellow passengers towards the crocodile so that he can get away. Lin meanwhile quickly takes charge and is more or less unchallenged as they try to explore the island in search of clues hoping that the radio equipment in the ‘40s plane they read about in a diary one of the pilots left behind will allow them to make contact through the outdated tech of radio waves. 

This is might be something of a plot hole seeing as it obviously didn’t work for the American pilot though perhaps there just weren’t any ships in range given the circumstances, and it seems he too might have come to a sticky end. But thanks to his sudden promotion to father of the group, Lin begins to reassess his role as a father to Yiyi in beginning to cede ground and actually listen to some of her ideas along with accepting support from Cheng Jie to help him protect her not lease because he realises he may not survive. There are also a few other giant and very hungry monsters on the island who in this case turn out to be more of a threat than other people who with the exception of Cao Fang are more community minded than individualistic. 

A mild social message is conveyed through Yiyi’s eventual discarding of the cigarettes she secretly smoked, symbolising the end of her rebellion and the re-acceptance of her father along with his patriarchal authority as if shifting back onto the right path thanks to the experience of fighting a giant crocodile together and realising that he really did stay to protect her instead of just going off on his own. Some undeniably ropey special effects and a general lack of coherence in the film’s internal logic frustrate its ability to maintain momentum though English-speakers aside, the performances are strong even if the plot developments at times feel unoriginal. Even so the film sells its message of family reunion and perhaps less palatably patriarchal social conventions as Lin Hao steps up to protect his daughter and community from the threats that surround them be they giant crocodiles or otherwise.

Crocodile Island is out now in the US on Digital & DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

US release trailer (English trailer)

The Best is Yet to Come (不止不休, Wang Jing, 2020)

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A man denied a fair chance in life because of his impoverished background comes to identify with the plight of those carrying the hepatitis B virus in Wang Jing’s true life drama, The Best is Yet to Come (不止不休, bùzhǐ bùxiū). Inspired by the story of Han Fudong, a journalist who exposed the societal prejudice against those with a previous diagnosis of the disease, the film’s Chinese title “no pause no rest” makes clear how tirelessly he strived to reveal the truth even at the potential cost of destroying his dream of becoming a professional reporter. 

Han Dong (Bai-Ke) came to Beijing in 2003 in the hope of landing a job at a paper, but just like everywhere else journalism is a largely closed profession almost impossible to break into without elite qualifications and connections. At a jobs fair, Han Dong tries to pass off his reluctance to hand over a CV as a recruitment tactic to get people to remember him, circulating copies of his portfolio instead though recruiters quickly lose interest on realising they are all self-published articles posted online. Once he admits that he only finished middle school, it’s game over no matter how talented a writer and investigator he may turn out to be. 

It’s this sense of unfairness, of being turned away on the grounds of a few words on a piece of paper that eventually leads him to sympathise with those carrying the hepatitis B virus after investigating a company that claims it buys blood, discovering that they provide a service helping people to forge health certificates for job and school applications. Vox pop-style interviews recreated in the manner of the time feature several people describing the various ways their lives have been ruined simply because they happen to carry the virus, many of them infected since birth or early childhood. One man has been trying to apply for jobs and graduate schools for several years but finds the offers are always withdrawn after the health screening, while another woman recounts that her fiancé cancelled their engagement because his family could not accept someone with hepatitis B. 

This is also in the immediate aftermath of the SARS epidemic which perhaps caused a preoccupation with infectious disease which may be largely unfounded in the relative difficulty of passing on the hepatitis B virus. After landing a golden opportunity of an unpaid internship compensated only with 50% article fees, Han Dong finds himself conflicted. He knows the forgery operation is illegal and a threat to public health, but also cannot blame the people who make use of it when their lives have been rendered so impossible that is difficult for them simply to live. An early assignment had seen him cover a mine collapse and witness a destraught mother bounced into accepting compensation for her son’s death while shouted at by the foreman (played by film director Jia Zhangke who also produced) for having the temerity to ask to see his body. Han Dong got a front-page byline as co-author with his mentor figure, Huang (Zhang Songwen), but wonders what the point is if nothing ever changes and the truth is not enough on its own. 

For obvious reasons, films about crusading journalists are rare in Chinese cinema given that whistleblowing is not regarded as a virtue and those who try to expose wrongdoing are often shouted down or hounded into silence as seen with the doctor who drew attention to the poor medical practices in rural blood clinics that caused an HIV epidemic in farming communities, and most recently with the physician who tried to raise awareness of the new respiratory illness that later developed into a global pandemic. Journalists who report problematic stories can also find themselves facing prosecution and imprisonment. Han Fudong’s writings did however lead to an eventual change in the law and the destigmatisation of hepatitis B while he himself overcame the educational elitism of the contemporary society to achieve his dreams of becoming a professional reporter. As such, Wang’s dramatisation of his life may be in a way subversive if subtly so in hinting at a greater role for a currently not so free press in the modern China while also embracing a central philosophy that one need not simply accept an unacceptable status quo but actively reject and challenge it and that by doing so something might actually change. 

The Best is Yet to Come screens in Chicago Sept. 30 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese (窮鼠はチーズの夢を見る, Isao Yukisada, 2020)

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It’s quite a potent image somehow, a mouse caught in a trap unable to reach out and touch the cheese they’ve risked their life for yet continuing to dream of it as if nothing else really existed. Perhaps love is much the same, at least according to a young woman who warns against falling in love too deeply worrying that in the end you won’t be able to keep it together and so will fall apart. Adapted from a popular Boys Love manga by Setona Mizushiro, Isao Yukisada’s The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese (窮鼠はチーズの夢を見る, Kyuso Wa Chizu No Yume Wo Miru) is in someways in dialogue with his earlier tale of triangulated love between two women Luxurious Bone, if sharing some of that film’s perhaps outdated attitudes towards sexuality. 

The titular mouse is office worker Kyoichi (Tadayoshi Ohkura) who is halfheartedly having an affair with a colleague seemingly just because he can. Unbeknownst to him, his wife has hired a private detective who just happens to be an old friend from university, Wataru (Ryo Narita). Wataru warns him that he’s got pictures of him and his mistress but agrees not to tell his wife, if Kyoichi agrees to accompany him to a hotel for some low level intimacy. The abruptness of the overture seems to hint that the two men had some kind of history in university but this appears not to be the case and Kyoichi continues to struggle with his sexuality partly it seems out of a degree of self-loathing that convinces him he’s not the sort of person anyone should love.

In Luxurious Bone, the problem had been that the two women could not quite accept the validity of their desire for each other and instead ended up having vicarious sex with the same guy. Something similar occurs between Kyoichi and Wataru each in their own way unable to accept the way they feel. Kyoichi repeatedly states that he doesn’t want to cause someone else pain but in fact hurts everyone around him because of his own inability to reckon with his feelings. He continues to womanise, but eventually asks Wataru to move into the grey industrial bachelor pad he gets when his marriage breaks down while keeping him at arm’s length. Wataru is jealous in a direct sense, resenting Kyoichi’s various girlfriends, but also on deeper level lacking faith in his homosexuality or at least ability to accept it fearing he will always in the end choose to be with a woman. 

Both men are imprisoned by an internalised homophobia, Kyoichi most obviously in rejecting his desire for Wataru. “A straight guy can’t handle it” he tells him in an ironic choice of words, earlier having told him that guys like him belonged “in another world”. The film seems to present Kyoichi’s sexuality as a binary choice, men or women, precluding the idea that he might simply be bisexual while inviting the inference that his womanising is an attempt to mask his latent homosexuality and that he is in fact living a lie in betrayal of himself in denying his desire for Wataru. But then Wataru is consumed by insecurity, as if on some level believing he is inherently inferior to a woman and that Kyoichi will always “choose” to be straight while simultaneously certain that he does in fact return his feelings. He tells him that his problem is that he passively accepts love from others but in the end doesn’t trust it and continues to look for it in the next person who shows any interest in him, but it seems Wataru doesn’t have much faith in love either pulling away just as Kyoichi draws closer and unable to accept the validity of his love for him. 

The film maintains some of the more frustrating aspects of BL literature in that it never really considers why Kyoichi rejects his same sex desire nor does it address what the potential complications of his life maybe if he were fully to accept his sexuality and attempt to live openly with Wataru. On the other hand, it perhaps lessons the impact of the darker elements of the interplay between the two men in which Wataru effectively stalks Kyoichi and then blackmails and bullies him into sex which the film justifies on the basis that Kyoichi must on some level want to be liberated from his repressed desire while Kyoichi in turn manipulates and tortures Wataru through his womanising and reluctance to enter a full sexual relationship even while living together. The film’s ambiguous closing scene in which Kyoichi sits on Wataru’s stool and places his yellow ashtray, looking oddly like a wedge of cheese, on his grey coffee table the only splash of colour in his exquisitely decorated yet desolate grey room may also uncomfortably hint that their love is always impossible because it is a love between two men rather than accepting that the only barriers to it lie in internalised homophobia and emotional vulnerability. Even so it is a fairly touching love story of a man learning to accept his sexuality even if in the end it leads to a re-imprisonment rather than a liberation. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

#Alive (#살아있다, Cho Il-hyung, 2020)

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Is solidarity really the answer to alienation? The latest in a short line of zombie-related crisis movies, Cho Il-hyung’s oddly prescient #Alive (#살아있다, #Saraitda) presses directly into what it means to live in a time of isolation as its already introverted hero discovers the existential dread of true aloneness, orphaned by his society and quite literally surrounded by cannibalistic threat only to rediscover the desire for life in the company of others vowing to survive not out of obligation but individual will. 

A young man in his 20s, Jun-u (Yoo Ah-in) lives at home with his parents and seems to be a virtual shut-in not quite supporting himself as a pro-gamer/vlogger. He ought to be in his element when he turns on his television one day to discover that a violent riot has apparently erupted all over the city, apparently spreading like a virus which causes aggressive behaviour and cannibalistic frenzy. Unfortunately, Jun-u’s parents left early that morning and didn’t have time to prepare food, leaving him money to go out for groceries but obviously it’s too late for that now and it looks like they won’t be coming home. Jun-u is entirely alone, and all the more so when his usual lines of communication are cut. 

Like the thematically similar EXIT, with which #Alive shares its faith in mountaineering, #Alive concerns itself less with the zombie threat than with youthful alienation and a sense of hopeless despair. Jun-u ought to be in his element, but finds himself ill-equipped for surviving the apocalypse given that he lacks basic adult life skills and those he does possess are now ironically unhelpful. Resourceful as he is, he remembers a smartphone app that would help him communicate via FM radio and all he’d need would be a standard earphone jack only all his earphones are wireless. Making the most of his unstable connection he uploads a single photo of himself holding his address written on the side of a cardboard box with the hashtag #I_MUST_SURVIVE to his Instagram in the hope that someone will see him but becomes increasingly despondent as his food and resources dwindle and he receives a disturbing voicemail which suggests his family may not have escaped the disaster. 

Hitting rock bottom he considers taking his own life but is saved by a literal light in the darkness, a laser shone from an opposing apartment signalling another presence he had previously missed. Believing he was alone in the world, Jun-u lost the will to live and faced with the prospect of waiting to starve to death or venturing out among the zombie hoards chose the only agency available to him in deciding the time and manner of his death. Realising he is not alone restores his desire for life, yet Yu-bin (Park Shin-hye), though much more well prepared, is also dealing with her own trauma in the face of crisis in the memory of a climbing fall that leaves her additionally anxious and fearful of physical risk. Where Jun-u flounders, lamenting as so many of us has in recent years, that no one seems to know what’s going on, the news continually flashing the same info screen while telling viewers only to stay home, Yu-bin has constructed a mini fort complete with a series of booby traps perhaps content in her independence having resolved to live and glad to have discovered she is not entirely alone. 

In contrast to disaster movie tropes, the pair instantly bond in their shared bounce back from despair, developing unconventional means of communication while Yu-bin willingly shares her food stash which in turn gives Jun-u the courage to venture outside for supplies. Eventually reuniting they do their best to withstand the zombie hoards, standing in as they are for the various anxieties which otherwise surround and oppress them, only to find themselves betrayed, worried that perhaps they have after all been abandoned and that no one is there looking out for them. Their salvation lies in their connection, the derided social media proving a lifeline that both affirms their existence and restores a sense of community that returns their safety, airlifting them from the locus of despair finally #Alive and returned to the world secure in the knowledge that they are not alone.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Young Ip Man (少年叶问之危机时刻, Li Liming, 2020)

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In another branch of the sprawling Ip Man tree, Li Liming’s Young Ip Man (少年叶问之危机时刻, shàonián Yè Wèn zhī wēijī shíkè) aims to kickstart a new strand of streaming action drama in following the titular hero in his days as a student in Hong Kong. Li never misses an opportunity to remind us that this is all taking place in the colonial past, a large British flag flying over the prison in which the film opens. Yet perhaps surprisingly, the betrayals that Ip Man (Zhao Wenhao) faces are local and personal in which the corruption of British rule is felt only distantly and in the priggish figure of a bullying police commissioner who as it turns out is really just an unimportant middleman. 

The most literal villain is, however, arch criminal Ma Long (Mu Fengbin) who is sprung from prison by his gang in the film’s high impact opening sequence. Determined to get revenge on corrupt police chief Stewart (Jonathan Kos-Read), Ma somewhat bizarrely decides to kidnap a bunch of rich kids at school for an English speech competition hoping to get his hands on Stewart’s son Jack. The funny thing is he has a connection to Ip Man’s past and later suggests he may have known that he would be involved all of which seems to be quite a flaw in his plan. In the company of his friend Ya Yun, the daughter of the head of the Axe gang, Ip Man defiantly decides to use his martial arts skills to save his fellow students while squaring off against the corrupt figure of Ma.  

Then again, as we discover Ma only became the arch villain he is because of judicial corruption. When someone close to him was killed, he sought justice but was denied because the perpetrators were influential people, the implication being that they were members of the colonial elite which Stewart was propping up. Filled with grief and rage, he’s hellbent on ruining Stewart’s life and doesn’t really care all that much about what he might have to do to do it. As Ip Man points out, he once tried to teach him about the importance of knowing right from wrong, but Ma now believes that the distinction is one made only by the weak for the strong care only about winning. 

The secondary part of Ip Man’s mission is dedicated to saving his old friend Xuehu from becoming another Ma after becoming frustrated that he was prevented from marrying the woman he loved because of his poverty and the class difference between them. He too vacillates, uncertain if he will actually betray his friend to get the money to get married while remaining complicit in kidnap and murder. As usual, the situation gives Ip Man a lot of opportunities to remind others of the martial arts philosophy and the importance of humanity even if others try to convince him that “feelings are worth nothing in this world”.

Still, the battle plays out like a chess game as Ip Man tries to outsmart Ma and win the students’ freedom while inexplicably still believing in his good sportsmanship certain that Ma will honour his word and let the hostages go if only he manages to beat his arbitrary challenges. Ip Man fights off the bad guys, dashing over balconies and leaping from windows to save his friends, while experiencing an internal conflict as he finds himself at odds with men he previously respected hoping he can still redeem them even as they seem intent on his death. In any case, the most surprising element of the film maybe that in the end the corruption goes largely unpunished with the true winner the duplicitous policeman with a habit of selectively enforcing the law. 

Even Ma seems to recognise the hollowness of his revenge in coming to an understanding of his role and position in otherwise corrupt society while Ip Man appears to win the esteem of Ya Yun’s gangster father who despite his overprotective parenting does nothing at all to try to save her other than raising money and waiting patiently outside the school. Despite its low budget, the film packs in a fair few impressive action sequences beginning with daring prison break and culminating in the schoolhouse siege as the young Ip Man gets the chance to show off his skills while fighting for justice in old Hong Kong.

Young Ip Man is available to stream in the US via Hi-YAH! and released on DVD & Blu-ray May 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wedding High (ウェディング・ハイ, Akiko Ohku, 2022)

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“Today is the best day of our lives” a couple exclaim seconds before taking their marital vows, but if you think about it, isn’t that just a way of saying that it’s all downhill from here? Even the determined wedding planner at the centre of Akiko Ohku’s ensemble comedy Wedding High (ウェディング・ハイ) admits that a good wedding day doesn’t amount to a good marriage and it’s certainly true that almost everyone in attendance has rather overhyped the occasion insisting that it’s a grand turning point in their lives even if they aren’t the ones swearing eternal devotion at the altar. 

Groom Akihito (Tomoya Nakamura) didn’t even really want a wedding, they are after all expensive and time consuming, but is paranoid that not having one, or having one that’s not quite right, will eventually poison his relationship with his soon-to-be wife Haruka (Nagisa Sekimizu). For him the day has to go well, or at least Haruka has to feel as if she’s had the best day of her life, or their marriage will get off to a bad start. Meanwhile they’re under pressure from friends and family members trying to decide on a guest list especially considering that key guests are expected to handle entertainment with both sets of fathers and an eccentric uncle keen to get in on the action while it’s also customary to invite one’s boss to give a brief speech at the reception. 

Akihito’s boss Zaitsu (Katsumi Takahashi) doesn’t exactly try to steal the day but does invest it with a surprising degree of personal significance, oddly touched that Akihito has asked him despite his having been disgraced at work because of a sleazy scandal in his personal life. Zaitsu sees the wedding speech as a chance for a comeback, obsessively studying standup comedy determined to deliver a genuinely funny routine that will make everyone laugh and perhaps conclude that he’s not such a bad guy after all. For Akihito’s schoolmate Shinji (Akiyoshi Nakao) the wedding becomes something similar, allowing him to regain his creative mojo after hating himself for being trapped in variety television having dreamed of becoming an arthouse movie director when Akihito tasks him with directing a wedding video to be shown at the reception. Even one of Haruka’s friends from high school dance club launches into a story about how this is their big chance to make up for their final performance being cancelled due to injury by performing it again at Haruka’s wedding.

A subplot sees Haruka’s uni ex (Takanori Iwata) decide this is his big day too, planning to storm the ceremony and win her back. He’s convinced himself they only broke up because he reacted in the wrong way when she mentioned her parents’ wanted to introduce her to a guy for an arranged marriage and thinks she’s sent him a coded message that she’s being pressured into an unwanted union and needs rescuing before it’s too late. Somehow Maho (Ryoko Shinohara) manages to keep everything running smoothly, springing into action when the couple’s big day gets derailed by competitive speech making and pretty much everyone else trying to have their moment, yet as her colleagues remind her it’s the next couple’s big day too and the last thing they want to do is spoil that by trying to save Akihito and Haruka’s wedding from falling into complete chaos. 

Like most Japanese ensemble comedies, the resolution turns on the team pulling together to make everything work out. In this case, Maho’s speed wedding strategy leads to something genuinely beautiful and better than the original plan in allowing the couple’s friends and family who may not have known each other before to present a united front of support that neatly symbolises their union as a couple and makes their special day a little more special than it might have been if everything had gone smoothly. Almost everyone does indeed get something from the big day even if it wasn’t what they originally thought they wanted, seizing the chance for a new beginning or to put the past behind them. Asked to boil her speech down to the bare minimum a high school teacher (Hairi Katagiri) offers the simple advice “be happy” while Maho reflects on her role in the proceedings admitting that a good wedding day doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have a good marriage but at least you’ll have a few good memories if it all goes wrong somewhere down the line. 

Wedding High screens at Japan Society New York on Nov. 11 as part of The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from JAPAN CUTS and Beyond. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Images: © 2022 Wedding High Film Partners

Mr. Suzuki: A Man In God’s Country (鈴木さん, Omoi Sasaki, 2020)

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God is dead, or maybe not in Omoi Sasaki’s deadpan satire of the ills of contemporary Japan, Mr. Suzuki : A Man in God’s Country (鈴木さん, Suzuki-san). Set in a seemingly isolated fascist state, the film lays bear the intergenerational conflict of the ageing society along with the lonely resentment of those in middle-age caught between two stools in a society which seems only to cater for the young and the old while the powers that be, determined to build a “wholly beautiful city”, go to great lengths to cure the falling birthrate. 

It’s this that 44-year-old unmarried care home attendant Yoshiko (Asako Ito) fears especially when randomly informed one day that if she remains without a husband her citizenship will be cancelled and she’ll have to leave the city unless she elects to become a member of the military which is currently exempt. Her friend Ayako chooses to do just this, no longer able to bear the pressure of being unattached, but Yoshiko is unwilling to surrender her way of life on the whim of some government official. She is constantly bombarded with invitations to the “Beautiful Matchmaking” event but is later rejected because it is only for the “young” only to be reprieved by the mayor who tells her to come back in more suitable attire while declaring that God will not abandon those who make the effort. 

This almost forced insistence on national service as mediated through childbirth and the creation of “beautiful families” as an expression of one’s loyalty to “God”, the nation’s mysterious leader who has not been seen in 20 years, is of course disturbing even as other voices echo the words of real life politicians suggesting that those who have not born children are “defective adults” who must serve their country in other ways such as in the military. With God apparently in poor health the government reads out all his statements on his behalf, issuing commands in his name while distributing his image throughout the land as the locals continue to believe blindly in his existence. 

A crunch point comes for Yoshiko when she discovers a dishevelled middle-aged man taking shelter in the “Utopia” care home where she works. Rather than turn him in she decides to let him stay and later abruptly proposes a paper marriage so that she’ll avoid losing her citizenship. Though “Suzuki-sensei” (Norihiko Tsukuda) proves a hit with the ladies once they discover his musical talents, his outsider status later becomes a problem when the government use the pretext of a soldier’s death to claim they’ve started a war and are on the look out for “enemy spies” though they are also as it turns out looking for the absent God whose identity we can guess. Sights of the old ladies running defence drills with broom handles uncomfortably recall those of peasants training with bamboo spears during the war as does one old lady’s reluctance to take part having been led to blame herself for her brother’s wartime death while gossip that spies loot and poison wells is reminiscent of the pogrom against Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. A gang of thuggish youths with a penchant for happy slapping the homeless insisting that they “do not deserve to live in God’s beautiful country” instantly become spy hunting vigilantes, while rewards are offered for informants reporting anyone whose face they do not recognise. 

The offer presents Yoshiko with a dilemma. Rather than marry him, she could decide to turn Suzuki in and get guaranteed citizenship along with a pension but would it really be worth the price of living with his betrayal? Mr. Suzuki’s true identity will come as no surprise, though his sojourn among the believers exposes the shakiness of the regime when he is mobbed by a militia of angry townspeople out for blood hellbent on rooting out a “spy”, ironically arranged in the form of a cross as they occupy a T-section surrounded by fields. Shuffling between the disturbing and the merely strange, Omoi Sasaki’s deadpan, absurdist drama has its share of poignancy in the frustrated connection between outcasts Yoshiko and Suzuki while satirising the surreal authoritarianism of the world all around them with its mandated hair cuts and bizarre portrait of its absent leader which must be bowed to on all occasions but perhaps does not stray so far from the contemporary realities in all of its discomforting talk of beautifying the nation through the sacred act of childbirth. 

Mr. Suzuki: A Man In God’s Country streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Great Happiness (极乐点, Wang Yiao, 2020)

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Three young men find their paths to prosperity in the modern China abruptly severed in Wang Yiao’s ironically titled Great Happiness (极乐点, jílè diǎn). Great happiness is to them an ever elusive concept overburdened as they are as children of the One Child Policy caught in the midst of the rapid changes which transformed the nation into the capitalist powerhouse it is today. Each of them is in one way or another failed by that transformation, denied the sense of possibility they are continually promised while repeatedly exploited by a society in which everything really is about money. 

Childhood friends Wang, Sui, and Li are each trying to achieve independent success as “entrepreneurs” in the new society, but are also divided by their contradictory goals. For Li, a spoilt rich kid and ambitious fantasist, it’s not so much money that matters as the appearance of it. He buys BMWs on a whim, but has to run across town to ask his mother for money to invest in his “businesses” while it later transpires that his fiancée Xin with whose family he is in dispute over the financial arrangements of the marriage is actually paying their household bills. Unbeknownst to him his mother’s business is struggling, they’ve already sold the assets he was counting on to fund further business ventures, and while they’ll always support him his parents do not have the capability to bankroll his frequent failures. Needing everyone to see him as a big shot, he books a fancy hotel for the wedding despite Xin’s concerns, slapping down his credit card for the 50% deposit only to have it later declined when trying to pay for the ring. Hooked on another sure thing by dodgy friend Ma, he gets himself in trouble by making an unwise arrangement with a loanshark mortgaging something which might not strictly speaking be his. 

Architect Sui’s fiancée Lisa is wary of Li fearing he’s a bad influence and while she might be right Sui makes a few bad decisions of his own including taking a mistress when she travels to the UK to study abroad. Li is investing in his business which given the construction boom in the modern society ought to be a sure thing though Sui also has an artistic temperament and objects to the essential uniformity of the modern Chinese city. Li doesn’t get why he can’t just pull generic designs off the internet rather than coming up with his own while Sui isn’t convinced by his desire to invest in Wang’s burgeoning media business fearful that it will be just another boom and bust industry soon to be oversaturated by the similarly ambitious. 

Wang has been married four years but is yet to conceive a child much to his parents’ consternation. His burden is all the greater as a son of the One Child Policy meaning the responsibility for continuing the family name lies only with him as his grandfather continually points out. His parents who were once wealthy but lost everything in the late ‘90s industrial reforms are so concerned that they pledge all their savings to an IVF programme while granddad objects convinced that paternity cannot be guaranteed and like the factory boss Wang lies to in order curry favour believes they’d be better off with a shaman. Even in the modern society in which “superstition” is frowned upon such beliefs remain common, the factory boss obsessed with “wealth gods” and seeking to surround himself with men who have recently fathered children in order to increase his luck. 

As might be expected, the IVF programme is not entirely on the level, explaining to the family that they need to sign a confidentiality agreement because the treatment they offer is technically unlicensed. They don’t like to describe it as “illegal” because it’s more like the law just hasn’t been updated yet. Sui encounters something similar when his mother comes down with a mysterious illness that seems to be some kind of rare cancer potentially caused by the pesticides used to grow the apples which she had been fond of eating for the benefit of her health, poisoned by the modern industrial machine just like the polluted fish stocks Wang’s mother had been forcing her daughter-in-law to eat believing they’d help her conceive but may actually have been causing her infertility. The medicine Mrs Sui needs exists, but it’s prohibitively expensive and not covered by insurance leaving the family with little choice than to consider selling everything they own including the apartment purchased for Sui’s upcoming marriage. 

In the contemporary society a man’s worth is measured in square meters according to a jaded youngster but there is something of an economic hubris in the visions of these myriad, identical apartment blocks that no one can really afford to buy. While Li, the naive capitalist, and Sui the flawed intellectual whose disappointed father runs a moribund ping pong school in an old temple almost an embodiment of the ghosts of China’s past, Wang (who shares his first name with the city in which he lives) may actually come out on top flashing his hidden capitalistic fangs in his unexpected ruthlessness while simultaneously under increasing family pressure to have a second child now that the One Child Policy has become a Two Child Policy. “Everything he had was borrowed” the friends lament of Li having learned something of the truth he tried so hard to hide. “Who was he trying to impress?” perhaps missing the point in this ordinary tragedy of the modern China. 

Great Happiness streamed as part of Odyssey: a Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)