Tag: 2020

Midnight in a Perfect World (Dodo Dayao, 2020)

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“It doesn’t matter what’s happening as long as nothing’s happening to me” a middle-aged woman exasperatedly exclaims, irritated by a young man’s naive curiosity. A dark exploration of the legacy of Martial Law, Dodo Dayao’s surrealist horror movie Midnight in a Perfect World asks how much of your freedom you’re prepared to sacrifice for security and if the illusion of a “perfect world” in which everything “just works” is worth the price of your complicity. 

In a near future Manila in which all of the city’s infrastructural problems have been solved, conspiracy theorist Tonichi (Dino Pastrano) is convinced that a mysterious force is disappearing people in random parts of the city after midnight, a theory which is only strengthened after his friend Deana rings him in a panic convinced she’s become a victim of his “blackouts” and insisting that someone’s stolen the moon. Tonichi’s other friends, the sensible Mimi (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), reckless Jinka (Glaiza de Castro), and melancholy hospital worker Glenn (Anthony Falcon), are less convinced but caught in the street after midnight the gang have no option but to look for a “safe house” in order to escape the creeping darkness. For unexplained reasons, Tonichi is unable to enter with his friends and finds himself trapped outside in “God’s Blindspot”, as the mysterious Alma (Bing Pimentel), a middle-aged woman and safe house veteran, describes it. 

Alma might in a sense be seen as the embodiment of the Martial Law generation, holing up in her safe house minding her own business and defyingly not caring what’s going on outside determined only to make it through the night. She offers cryptic words of advice to the youngsters, but does not really try to help them outside of trying to prevent them from interfering with her own survival. The so-called safe house has a hidden upper floor apparently invisible from the outside and hiding its own secrets. When one of the gang manages to break open the door and pays a heavy price for their curiosity, Alma merely creeps forward fearfully and closes it again ensuring she is safe from its myriad horrors even in her wilful ignorance. 

Still, you have to ask yourself why if this world is now so “perfect” the youngsters seem so unhappy. Their drug use appears not to be particularly hedonistic but may offer them a degree of escape from a society which has become oppressive in its efficiency. Sensible Mimi cautions Jinka against associating with smarmy drug kingpin Kendrick (Charles Aaron Salazar) who spins bizarre stories of weird aliens while proffering a new drug which supposedly feels “like dying and going to heaven.” On her way from Kendrick’s Jinka passes a group of intense men and immediately pegs them as a hit squad, realising that Kendrick’s hideout has been exposed and she herself may now be in danger in an echo of the extra-judicial killings which have become a grim hallmark of Duterte’s Philippines. “Beta version Martial Law” is the way Jinka later describes it, drug users now taking the place of “activists” as targets not solely of legitimate authority but vigilante bounty hunters. The rumours of strange disappearances, people “erased” from their society, are yet another means of control inviting complicity with an unofficial curfew for a population ruled by fear.  

As if to ram the allegory home, Dayao ends the credit roll with the Martial Law era slogan “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan” or “For the nation’s progress, discipline is needed” followed by the English phrase “Never Again”. Yet, it is happening again, the extra-judicial killings of the Duterte era no different from the disappearances of “activists” under Marcos. Jinka refers to the old Manila as the world capital of malfunction, its transformation seemingly brought about by a mysterious force but unlike Mimi who seems otherwise prepared to accept complicity in her “everything works” conspiracy theory remains dejected and suspicious. None of these young people is happy with their new utopia or prepared to pay the price demanded to live in it yet there appears to be no real way to resist and their eventual decision to brave the darkness exposes nothing so much as their naivety. Scored with eerie sci-fi synths and often shot in total darkness, Dayao’s surreal horror show offers a bleak prognosis for the contemporary society unable to escape from the permanently haunted house of an authoritarian legacy. 

Midnight in a Perfect World screened as part of this year’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF).

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro (とんかつDJアゲ太郎, Ken Ninomiya, 2020)

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Among the more prolific of young indie talents currently emerging in Japan with five features released since his 2015 debut Slum-Polis, Ken Ninomiya is fast becoming the go to chronicler of Tokyo’s contemporary club scene but unlike The Limit of Sleeping Beauty or Chiwawa, Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro (とんかつDJアゲ太郎) is a surprisingly wholesome take on the same phenomenon as an otherwise clueless young man begins to step into himself after accidentally falling love with the live house vibe. 

As his slightly amusing name implies, Agetaro (Takumi Kitamura) is the third generation heir to a tonkatsu (deep fried pork cutlet) restaurant. It’s not that he doesn’t want to take over the family business, but admits that he’d largely be doing it because he doesn’t know what else to do. His rather nerdy friends, all sons of small business owners in an area of Shibuya with a distinctly small-town vibe, are in much the same position. Ironically remarking that Agetaro always loses at The Game of Life as they hang out playing boardgames, the guys eventually find him with a pair of binoculars staring at a girl in an apartment opposite they are convinced inhabits a different word where people eat prosciutto and cheese and drink fancy wine. Agetaro gets an unexpected chance to meet his unobtainable crush, Sonoko (Maika Yamamoto), when he’s summoned to deliver a bento to a dance club after hours for a moody DJ, Oily (Yusuke Iseya), who describes tonkatsu as the area’s “soul food” and rates Agetaro’s dad’s as the very best. Allowed to step onto the dance floor, he finds himself blown away by Oily’s set and determines to become the very first tonkatsu chef/DJ partly in the hope of impressing Sonoko. 

Though set very much in the present day, there’s a pleasingly retro quality to Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro that recalls old school Showa-era musical youth movies in which young guys from humble backgrounds make something of themselves by working hard and staying true to their roots. Agetaro’s problem is that he’s caught in a moment of adolescent anxiety, resentful of his father (Brother Tom) whom he feels looks down on him, refusing to let his son anywhere near the fryer while making him chop cabbage all day and reminding him he doesn’t have to take over the shop if he doesn’t want to. Agetaro’s dad won’t teach him to fry because he thinks he doesn’t take anything seriously, and he might be right, but as his sister (Natsumi Ikema) says he’s worried about him too secretly trying to be supportive by standing at the back of the room when Agetaro gets his big break at the local club. 

Despite being mentored by Oily, however, Agetaro blows his first opportunity failing to get the crowd moving with a rather naff set designed to entertain his equally nerdy friends. But failure, crucially, only endears him to Sonoko who had previously been put off by his cheesy attempts to become a viral YouTube star with a series of gimmicky videos featuring himself and his friends wearing novelty “tonkatsu” outfits. Where he thought of giving up, Sonoko’s reminder that everyone makes a mess of things once in a while and no one should expect success right out of the gate helps Agetaro realise that what he needs to do is bring all of himself to his set which in this case means understanding that the thing is learning do something well and in that there’s no difference between frying the perfect cutlet and finding the perfect beat. Simply put, he needs to become the Tonkatsu DJ for real. 

Attracted to DJing because of the freedom it offers, Agetaro eventually finds his “heaven” on the dance floor marrying both sides of himself as he accepts his tonkatsu legacy and claims his space within the club scene which here is unproblematically joyful, a warm and welcoming space in which young people come together to enjoy good music, dance, and have wholesome fun. Simply put, it’s hard not to fall in love with a film which makes space for an unironic and unapologetically joyful moment of catharsis featuring Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is Place on Earth. Shifting away from the slick music video aesthetic of his earlier work, Ninomiya hits lowkey charm in his tale of minor slacker success as his feckless hero finally figures himself out and learns how to cook up a storm in the store and on the floor. 

Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro screens on July 4/6/9 as part of this year’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF)

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Like Father and Son (拨浪鼓咚咚响, Bai Zhiqiang, 2020)

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A grieving father and orphaned little boy eventually find mutual solidarity in an increasingly duplicitous society in Bai Zhiqiang’s warmhearted road movie, Like Father and Son (拨浪鼓咚咚响, Bōlànggǔ Dōngdōng Xiǎng). Travelling the modern China in search of the boy’s missing father, the pair encounter only greed and selfishness but discover perhaps something in each other that repairs their sense of despair as they bond in their shared sense of loneliness, each in their own way “left behind” and looking for someone who’ll look for them. 

Pedlar Guoren (Hui Wangjun) makes a living transporting goods from the cities and selling everyday items to customers in remote villages, even running a digital portrait service for those without access to photographic equipment most of which seem to get used for funerals. It’s in one such village that he first encounters little Madou (Bai Zeze), a “left behind child” raised by his grandmother but rejected by the other kids and longing for his absent father to return. Having overheard Guoren mention that he’s headed to the town where he believes his father is working, Madou tries to catch up to him in the hope of giving him his school report to show his dad so he’ll come back but is unsuccessful. When his grandmother suddenly passes away leaving him all alone, the other villagers seemingly rejecting him, Madou decides to take drastic action stowing away in the back of Guoren’s van only to be discovered after accidentally setting off a box of firecrackers and setting fire to half of Guoren’s stock. Though reluctant, Guoren ends up agreeing to take the boy to find his father in the hope of gaining compensation for his lost merchandise while half suspecting that Madou’s dad may have already moved on. 

Embittered and cynical, Guoren is consumed by grief for his young son who passed away of an illness, displacing his hurt by channeling his pain into anger towards an old friend who he believes cheated him out of money he could have used to pay for additional medical treatment. Perhaps for these reasons he has ambivalent feelings for Madou, at times despite himself sorry for him but also fed up, irritated to have been saddled with his boy when so cruelly robbed of his own. He doesn’t really mean it, but Guoren often cynically suggests selling Madou into China’s child trafficking network if he can’t get someone to accept responsibility for him by paying compensation for all stock that he destroyed.

The frequent, if sarcastic, references to child trafficking are only one example of the ills that plague the modern society. During their journey, the pair find themselves stuck in the mud and despite working together are unable to free the truck only for a passing motorist to stop and offer to help but only for a small fee. Stopping off in a small town, Guoren allows another shop owner to “borrow” Madou for a short period only to discover him being forced to beg in the street with all the money going straight into the shopkeeper’s pocket. Migrant workers they question looking for Madou’s father soon descend into a mass argument about unpaid debts and who owes who, while other labourers hold up cardboard signs featuring their skills in the hope of being hired by passing vans.  

Madou is himself a “left behind child” one of many in modern China raised by grandparents in the country while the parents work in the cities to provide for them. Lonely, Madou longs for his father and blames himself for his continual absence. Guoren meanwhile also blames himself for the death of his son but vows revenge on his friend in order to avoid facing the pain of his grief. They are each in a sense left behind, little Madou breaking down in despair in the realisation that he is entirely alone, that he has no more family and nobody wants him while Guoren clings fiercely to the memory of his son. Awkwardly bonding as they travel, Madou picking up a talent for market selling, the pair eventually develop a sense of connection that begins to heal their familial wounds, Gouren discovering a surrogate son while Madou finds the father figure he’d been looking for. A warmhearted yet also melancholy tale of intergenerational bonding Bai Zhiqiang’s gentle familial drama may find itself in an increasingly greedy and self-interested society but eventually allows a ray of hope in the genuine connection between the orphaned boy and grieving father.  

Like Father and Son streamed as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

OK! Madam (오케이 마담, Lee Cheol-ha, 2020)

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“If I have to die I’ll die in business class” a passenger insists, refusing her hijacker’s instructions to move to the more egalitarian section of the plane. Partly a social comedy in which a cast of disparate individuals respond in their idiosyncratic ways to an airborne hostage crisis, Lee Cheol-ha’s Ok! Madam (오케이 마담) is also an unconventional family drama in which an impoverished family go to great lengths to save their very first family holiday. 

Mum Mi-young (Uhm Jung-hwa) runs a successful twisted doughnut stand at the market, while her husband Seok-hwan (Park Sung-woong) is an in-demand IT expert. Yet financially the family is strained with Mi-young apparently exasperated that Seok-hwan keeps wasting money buying vitamin drinks in the hope of winning giveaway prizes. When they finally get lucky and win a dream trip to Hawaii, the couple are originally over the moon only for the penny pinching Mi-young to reconsider. Perhaps it’s irresponsible to take time off from their businesses and selling the prize online would be the more sensible option. When their daughter, Nari, complains that the other kids make fun of her because of her parents’ professions and the fact she’s never been abroad, however, Mi-young reconsiders. She may later regret that, as their dream family getaway is quite literally hijacked by North Korean spies who believe a fugitive former agent may be aboard their plane. 

Lee keeps up a sense of suspense as to the identity of the former North Korean agent even if the twist is a fairly obvious one. The other passengers on the plane are a minor microcosm of the contemporary society, one of the most vocal a feisty mother-in-law who’s forced her son’s wife on a long haul flight in the final trimester of her pregnancy so she can give birth on American soil and guarantee her child US citizenship. Other passengers meanwhile gossip about a famous actress while an arrogant politician constantly throws his weight about and an old man travelling to meet family bitterly regrets starting a conversation with Seok-hwan. 

Much of the comedy rests, ironically, on class disparity as the penny pinching Mi-young resolves to make the most of her unexpected upgrade to business class on learning everything’s free while the snooty mother-in-law quips about trying to engineer her grandchild’s access to American citizenship only to wonder if they might end up being born North Korean. Seok-hwan even jokingly brands his wife a “communist” for her financial austerity as she contemplates passing up personal pleasure for financial gain, while North Korean agents targeting the plane are eventually torn apart by infighting with some determining to sell off the rogue agent rather than simply capture them alive as instructed. 

Nevertheless, the main draw is the awesome fighting skills of Mi-young who finds herself donning a stewardess outfit and taking out the bad guys aboard the unexpectedly cavernous aircraft. Simultaneously enforcing and undercutting conventional gender norms, Mi-young had forced her daughter to learn ballet against her will even though Nari would rather learn taekwondo and is always watching action movies on TV. In a meta touch, an actress confesses that it’s just her face someone else does the actual fighting while Mi-young effortlessly takes out rows of bad guys who, it is has to be said, are not much of an advert for North Korean special forces. 

The hostage crisis in its own way brings the family closer together as they fight not only to save the plane, and everybody’s lives, but their dream Hawaiian holiday. Discovering mutual secrets and past lives, even encountering an old flame, the couple enter a deeper level of intimacy while remaining true to themselves and solidifying their family bond, little Nari’s taekwondo dreams apparently coming true after witnessing her mum showing off her action star credentials. At heart a slapstick comedy with a touch of ironic farce, OK! Madam rejoices in sending up national stereotypes from the clueless penny pinching housewife to the feckless competition-obsessed husband, celebrity obsessives, and self-absorbed politicians but also insists the most ordinary of people have hidden talents they’ll have no hesitation exposing when their loved ones are in danger. 

OK! Madam screens on July 5/7/9 as part of this year’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF)

International trailer (English subtitles)

One Second Champion (一秒拳王, Chiu Sin-Hang, 2020)

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“All things in their being are good for something” little Yan is told by a sympathetic TV presenter slightly unconvinced by his short-lived celebrity as the “One Second Wonder”. It may not sound like the most complimentary nickname, but in this case it’s intended in the kindest sense referring to the kid’s uncanny ability to see into the future if only for one second. As a child he’d told the TV audience that he wanted to grow up and find a way to use his superpower to contribute to society, but now a dejected middle-aged man the hero of Chiu Sin-Hang’s One Second Champion (一秒拳王) is something of a loser, imbued with a sense of defeat and not quite so much trading on past glory as using his “superpower” as a party trick to earn extra cash. 

As he tells us, Yan (Endy Chow Kwok-yin) was born during a storm, a power cut threatening his new life and leaving him apparently dead for one second to which he attributes the cause of his strange ability. All things considered, however, being able to see one second ahead is almost useless. What good is it to predict the winning lottery numbers or the winner of a horse race if you’ve no time to buy a ticket or place a bet? A nerdy sort of child unfairly thrust into the spotlight as the “One Second Wonder”, Yan has become a defeated middle-aged man working in the bar of an old friend while trying to pay off gambling debts accrued trying to raise the money for an operation for his son, Chi-leung (Hung Cheuk Lok), who is deaf. His total lack of self-esteem is rammed home when Chi-leung points out a classmate who’s been bullying him, often ripping out and damaging his hearing aid. Though Yan vows to talk to the school and the boy’s parents to sort it out, he quickly backs own even trying to force Chi-leung to apologise to the bully in front of his equally intimidating mum. 

The one arena where seeing one second ahead may in fact be valuable is in the middle of a fight which is what brings him to the attention of aspiring boxer Shun (Chiu Sin-hang). Faced with esteem issues of his own, Shun struggles in the ring partly due to his asthma and partly ongoing anxiety as a result of trauma having seen his dad behaving strangely after a fight. Aside from personal success, his desire is to resurrect his dad’s old gym, eventually teaming up with Yan after hearing of his strange ability and hoping his success might help attract more members. In this positive environment, Yan starts to regain a sense of confidence, getting a smart new haircut and paying more attention to personal grooming, while impressing his young son with his unexpected success not to mention reflecting that his “useless” ability might not be so useless after all. 

But then, after a traumatic incident he fears his special powers may be gone and is faced with another choice in whether to continue boxing as a “real” boxer or go back to the defeated life he used to live. Boxing shouldn’t be about gimmicks, according to a young pretty boy star (Chanon Santinatornkul) with an ironic, if sometimes cruel, devotion to the craft marketed like an idol by his ambitious manager, but Yan has to wonder if there’s more to him than the “One Second Wonder”. The conclusion that he comes to is that, as the TV presenter had said, everything’s good for something, one second can make a huge difference, and every choice you make counts. Win or lose, what matters is making the most of your time so why wait when you could start right away. A soulful tale of self-acceptance, the power of mutual solidarity, and the restorative qualities of physical discipline, Chiu Sin-Hang’s warmhearted drama is an ode to forging your own destiny, one second at a time, while remaining true to yourself. “Our superpower is never giving up” Yan tells his young son, no longer so afraid of the sound of his own heart beating, as they walk off into the sunset One Second Champions win or lose. 

One Second Champion streams worldwide (excl. China/Spain/Canada) until 2nd July as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙, Chan Kin-long, 2020)

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A former serviceman turned triad middleman bonds with a similarly oppressed South Asian petty criminal in Chan Kin-long’s noirish crime drama Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙). An unexpected awards contender, the first directorial effort from actor Chan aligns its disparate heroes as two men in a sense betrayed by the world in which they live, one longing for a way out and the other too convinced he no longer deserves one to continue looking. 

“Let’s start over” Chiu (Gordon Lam Ka-tung) philosophically muses over a cigarette contemplating the coming handover. As a brief title card explains, when the British Army pulled out of Hong Kong, it hung its local recruits out to dry, disbanding their units and leaving them entirely without support. 25 years later, Chiu has become a dejected triad middleman, as we first meet him setting up a dubious deal for smuggled turtles between Taiwanese mobster Pickle (To Yin-gor) and local top dog Boss Tai (Ben Yuen). On his way back to his flat in Chungking Mansions, Chiu literally runs into a South Asian man apparently in the middle of a drug deal. Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan) dreams of bigger prizes, listening to the stock market report on the morning news and musing about robbing a bank. His cousin Mani (Bipin Karma), more conflicted in their criminal activities, cautions him against it reminding him that they already face discrimination and don’t need to add to their precarious position by giving their ethnicity a bad name. “If we have money people can’t look down on us” Kapil counters, seemingly desperate to escape his difficult circumstances by any means possible which eventually leads him to make the incredibly bad decision to cheat local triads out of their drug supply. Leaving Mani and his schoolboy brother Mansu (Anees) alone to carry the can (literally), Kapil takes off while Mani finds himself crawling into Chiu’s flat for refuge when chased by Boss Tai’s chief goon Chook (Michael Ning). Unwilling at first, Chiu agrees to let Mani stay, for a price, only to find himself falling ever deeper into a grim nexus of underworld drama. 

Chiu’s plight as a former British serviceman makes him in a sense an exile in his own land, a displaced soul free floating without clear direction unable to move on from the colonial past. We later learn that he is in a sense attempting to atone for a karmic debt relating to the death of a friend during the Asian financial crisis, also beginning in 1997, of which he was a double victim. Most of his old army buddies have moved on and found new ways of living, some of them rejecting him for his role in their friend’s death and tendency to get himself into trouble while Chiu can only descend further into nihilistic self-loathing in his self-destructive triad-adjacent lifestyle. 

Mani, by contrast, did not approve of his cousin’s criminality, particularly resenting him for using Mansu’s schoolbag as a means of shifting drugs. He dreams of a better life but sees few other options for himself, hoping at least to send Mansu to university and ensure he doesn’t share the same fate. Chiu continues to refer to him solely by a racial slur, but simultaneously intervenes in the marketplace when Chook and his guys hassle another South Asian guy insisting that they’re all locals and therefore all his “homies”, despite himself warming to the young man and even going so far as to sort out child care for Mansu otherwise left on his own. “Harmony brings wealth” Boss Tai ironically exclaims, but harmony is it seems hard to come by, Chiu’s sometime Mainland girlfriend expressing a desire to return because the city is not as she assumed it would be while little Mansu is constantly getting in fights because the other kids won’t play with him. 

“There’s always a way out. I’ll start over” Chiu again tells Mani, though he seems unconvinced. Clearing his debts karmic and otherwise, Chiu discovers only more emptiness and futility while perhaps redeeming himself in rebelling against the world of infinite corruption that proved so difficult to escape. A moody social drama with noir flourishes, Chan’s fatalistic crime story is one of national betrayals culminating in a highly stylised, unusually brutal action finale partially set in the green-tinted hellscape of a gangster’s illegal operating theatre. Men like Chiu, it seems, may not be able to survive in the new Hong Kong but then perhaps few can. 

Hand Rolled Cigarette streams in Europe until 2nd July as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Minamata Mandala (水俣曼荼羅, Kazuo Hara, 2020)

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“An Individual can never win against the government” according to a man seeking justice, “Challenging the government means risking your life”, yet he continues to fight. In his 2017 documentary Sennan Asbestos Disaster, Kazuo Hara had charted the protracted efforts of workers from the factories in Sennan to get justice from the government that failed to protect them. 15 years in the making, Minamata Mandala (水俣曼荼羅) addresses another of post-war Japan’s great industrial scandals as victims of the “Minamata disease” struggle for recognition in the face of continued governmental intransigence. 

Opened in 1908, the Chisso chemical plant was among the most technologically advanced in Japan yet it routinely expelled wastewater directly into Minamata bay. The factory had already paid compensation in 1926 and 1943 for damage done to local fisheries before a change in its production process led to the release of methylmercury into the local water system from 1951 onwards. Though some had noticed unusual behaviour in animals, it wasn’t until 1956 when a little girl fell ill with strange symptoms including difficulty walking and speaking that a widespread “”epidemic of an unknown disease of the central nervous system” was discovered in the local community and subsequently came to be known as the “Minamata Disease”. In order to cover their tracks, Chisso began discharging wastewater directly into Minamata River spreading the pollution further along the coast with additional cases arising in other villages on the Shiranui Sea. 

Hara’s justice seekers, however, take aim not directly at Chisso which still exists and is a dominant economic force in the area, but local and national governments whose continued failure to protect them has greatly exacerbated their suffering. The greatest source of their discomfort is the unfairness of criteria set down in 1977 for legal certification of Minamata Disease in order to gain access to compensation. According to contemporary researchers, the criteria, inspired by Hunter-Russell syndrome discovered after an industrial accident in the UK in the 1940s, were simply wrong leading to the vast majority of applicants being rejected. Hara shifts between the stories of various victims and a pair of scientists determined to prove that the root of the disease lies not in peripheral nerve but brain damage and that the criteria is therefore useless in certifying cases of Minamata Disease. The applicants, meanwhile, intensely resent the implication that they are not genuine, that they are undergoing a collective delusion, faking their symptoms, or suffering from an unrelated illness not the responsibility of Chisso or the government. 

One campaigner whose hair was found to contain high levels of mercury at two years old recounts his ill treatment at the hands of the legal system which implied application of the criteria could be affected by “personality” factors while passive aggressively listing his occupation as “time waster”. Though his case may at first seem mild, it’s also true that as he’s suffered from Minamata Disease his entire life it’s difficult for him to assess how severely it affects him as evidenced by the accidental severing of the top of his thumb which he barely noticed because of his reduced sensitivity to pain. Like other sufferers, he is often privy to the usual hollow apologies from politicians (including one from then Minister of the Environment Yuriko Koike), though another source of frustration is that those in power often refuse to attend meetings with Minamata patients sending underprepared underlings in their stead. One particularly heated meeting quickly goes south when a rookie civil servant allows his handwritten memo reading “no apologies” to be seen by a woman recording the proceedings from the front row while his embarrassed colleagues are able to offer little other than the standard platitudes insisting the Minamata issue has already been dealt with through the previous settlements. 

Rather than focus on the court cases and medical investigations, however, Hara is keen to remind us of the costs to the victims of industrial poisoning, one of the scientists later breaking down as he explains that the main effect of the disease is sensory deprivation leaving even those mildly affected unable to enjoy their lives fully. A rather poignant song written by a congenital sufferer reflects on her tendency to fall in love too easily and be forever disappointed while longing for a freedom and independence denied her because of her disability. For the campaigners, meanwhile, Minamata Disease has robbed them of their right to a personal life as they devote all of themselves to fighting for justice while acknowledging that even when they win it brings little improvement into the lives of those forever affected by industrial pollution. Just as Hara had expressed frustration with the Sennen campaigners he felt were overly feudal in their deference to authority, some find it difficult to support those who ultimately opted to accept a paltry settlement while simultaneously understanding the desire not to have to fight anymore especially as even those born with the disease are now approaching late middle-age. Ending on a poignant freeze-frame, however, Hara reminds us that the damage can never be undone nor can there be adequate compensation for the tremendous loss of potential even as the government continues to vacillate in the abdication of its responsibility. 

Minamata Mandala streams in the US until July 2 as part of Japan Society New York’s Cinema as Struggle: The Films of Kazuo Hara & Sachiko Kobayashi

Clip (English subtitles)

Red Post on Escher Street (エッシャー通りの赤いポスト, Sion Sono, 2020)

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“Freedom is disappearing from our world. Everyone rise up!” screams an accidental revolutionary having achieved a kind of self-actualisation in wresting the leading role not only in the film within the film but in the film itself in an act of characteristically meta Sion Sono playfulness. Harking back to the earlier days of his more recently prolific career, Red Post on Escher Street (エッシャー通りの赤いポスト, Escher dori no akai post) is perhaps a thinly veiled though affectionate attack on the mainstream Japanese cinema industry, a defence not only of “jishu eiga” but a “jishu” life in the meditation that a crowd is composed of many faces in which we are all simultanteously extra and protagonist.

In a sense perhaps Sono’s stand-in, the director at the film’s centre, Tadashi Kobayashi (Tatsuhiro Yamaoka), is a festival darling who made his name with a series of critically acclaimed independent films but has since been dragged towards the mainstream while forced into a moment of reconsideration following the sudden death of his muse and lover. Kobayashi’s ambition is to produce another DIY film of the kind that first sparked his creative awakening, but it’s clear from the get go that his desires and those of his backers to not exactly match. Middle man producer Muto (Taro Suwa), sporting a sling and broken leg after being beaten up by the jealous boyfriend of a starlet he’d been “seeing”, is under strict instructions to ensure Kobayashi casts names and most particularly the series of names the studio want. To convince him, they go so far as to have the established “stars” (seemingly more personalities than actresses) join the open auditions at which the director hoped to find fresh faces, hoping he can be persuaded to cast them instead. The irony is that the studio want Kobayashi’s festival kudos, but at the same time deny him the freedom to make the kind of films that will appeal to the international circuit, the director frequently complaining the producers keep mangling his script with their unhelpful notes. 

A handsome young man, Kobayashi has also inspired cult-like devotion among fans including a decidedly strange group of devotees branding themselves the “Kobayashi True Love Club” who each wear Edwardian-style white lace dresses and straw hats while singing a folksong everywhere they go. Nevertheless, most of the hopefuls are ordinary young women with an interest in performing or merely for becoming famous. Their stories are the story, a series of universes spinning off from the central spine from a troupe kimono’d actresses performing a play about female gamblers, to a young widow taking on the mission of making her late husband’s acting dreams come true, and a very intense woman with an extremely traumatic past. The audition speech finds each of the hopefuls vowing to drag their true love back from “the crowd” into which he fears he is dissolving, only for them later to save themselves by removing their “masks” to reclaim their individual identity and agency as protagonists in their own lives rather than passively accept their relegation to the role of extra.

Then again, there are those who wilfully embrace the label such as a faintly ridiculous old man who commands near cult-like adoration from his disciples of professional supernumeraries for his ability to hog the screen even if his less than naturalistic acting is at best a distraction from the main action. Without extras, he points out, the screen would become a lonely place, lacking in life and energy though he at least seems to be content to occupy a liminal space never desiring the leading role but seizing his 15 seconds of fame as a prominent bystander. Others however are not, determined to elbow aside the vacuous leading players and reclaim their space. Subtly critiquing the seamier ends of the industry from the lecherous producers who always seem to be draped with a young woman eager for fame and fortune, to the machinations of star makers and manipulations of talentless celebrities, the film makes an argument for sidestepping an infinitely corrupt system in suggesting the jishu way is inherently purer but nevertheless ends on a note of irony as its defiant act of guerrilla filmmaking is abruptly shutdown by the gloved hand of state authority. 

Red Post on Escher Street streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Wonderful Paradise (脳天パラダイス, Masashi Yamamoto, 2020)

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A moribund Tokyo mansion becomes the scene for an orgy of life, death, love, and rebirth in Masashi Yamamoto’s surrealist party movie Wonderful Paradise (脳天パラダイス, Noten Paradise). Sometimes you have to learn to say goodbye and move on, other times you have to learn to forgive and let go of past resentment. Of course, sometimes you have to do both of those things at the same time, which is perhaps appropriate for the former home of the Sasayas which seems to exist between the realms of life and death, a perpetual Bon festival where departed spirits and lost souls congregate for one almighty party. 

Dad Shuji (Seiko Ito) has had a run of bad luck and unfortunately lost the family home he inherited from his parents meaning he and his two adult children, son Yuta (Soran Tamoto) and daughter Akane (Mayu Ozawa), are having to move on though who knows where to. Resentful that she’s having her life uprooted by her father’s fecklessness, Akane takes to social media and Tweets that there’s a party at hers and everyone’s invited as kind of goodbye to the house. Meanwhile, a series of strange events occur from a weird old monk (Akira Emoto) who keeps trying to pray to the various neoclassical statues on the property going nuts at a belligerent removal man and then apparently dropping dead, to the resurfacing of mother Akiko (Kaho Minami) who apparently left the family some years previously for a man who ran a coffee shop but has since passed away. 

The first people to arrive for the party are a gay couple looking for somewhere to celebrate their marriage, a minor irony in that the event will later descend into an elaborate funeral for two people who may or may not be dead. As more and more guests arrive, along with a series of opportunistic commercial food stands and other businesses, the party begins to get out of hand becoming ever stranger as the night wears on. 

At the heart of it all are the tensions in the family, an unresolved resentment directed at son Yuta who is, according to his brash aunt Yuka (Sonomi Hoshino), overly preoccupied with his family circumstances to the extent that it prevents him from getting a regular job and moving on with his life. Shuji has quite clearly failed both as a son and as a father, eventually betting one of his dad’s precious antiques in a card game run by yakuza loansharks setting up shop in the house. Akane appears exasperated, but is also harbouring an intense resentment towards Akiko for her abandonment that prevents her being able to “move on” from her former family home. 

Moving on is also a problem for a few of the ghosts, the line between the living and the dead becoming increasingly blurred. One random surreal moment to the next, Yamamoto careers between absurdist episodes culminating in a fight between a murderous sentient coffee bean and a statue come to life. What began as a lowkey wedding eventually becomes a bizarre funeral enacted through the medium of Bollywood song and dance transitioning into a traditional enka festival number all of which happens before a couple of hapless crooks who’ve been operating a drug factory on the family’s property for the last two years without them ever knowing turn up with their “super mandala drug of paradise” to send the evening in a psychedelic direction. 

Yet for all the surreality of death, violence, sex, and rebirth when dawn arrives it brings with it a kind of calm brokering a new peace between friends and family members as they learn to accept each other and the past in an unburdened sense of openness. Possibly deceased monks, talking cats, kids who can’t figure out how to stop swinging and mysteriously turn themselves into sticks or dissolve in bath water, scorned lovers, unrepentant thieves, ghosts and family secrets descend on this weird gothic mansion in the middle of a city, creating a “wonderful paradise” for one night only filled with surrealist magic and unforgettable strangeness that nevertheless pushes the family back together through dream logic and a taste of the absurd. A weird, sometimes incomprehensible, journey into an etherial, psychedelic twilight psychodrama rave, Yamamoto’s charmingly bizarre nighttime odyssey is a law unto itself but one filled with wonder for the uncanniness of the everyday. 

Wonderful Paradise streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sasaki in My Mind (佐々木、イン、マイマイン, Takuya Uchiyama, 2020)

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A young man is forced to confront his quarter life malaise when presented with unexpected tragedy in Takuya Uchiyama’s heartfelt youth movie, Sasaki in My Mind (佐々木、イン、マイマイン). A study in inertia, Uchiyama’s moody drama finds its melancholy hero defeated by life, looking back to more hopeful high school days and the larger than life friend he has, by his own admission, failed convinced by his own rather solipsistic sense of personal inadequacy that he lacked the capacity to save him. 

An aspiring actor, Yuji (Kisetsu Fujiwara) lives in a small apartment with his ex-girlfriend (Minori Hagiwara) and makes ends meet with a factory job he seems to be embarrassed by. Approached by an actor friend (Nijiro Murakami) apparently doing a little a better with a series of bit parts in TV shows and commercials, Yuji is reluctant to take him up on his offer of a part in a play, while an accidental meeting with an old high school friend, Tada (Yuya Shintaro), pushes him into a defensive mindset after he’s rightly called on his passivity. “Watching life go by in terror” as his character in the play eventually puts it, Yuji is so defeated by life that it has rendered him entirely listless. Ironically taking up boxing, he gets into a random fight with a customer from the the next table at an izakaya, insisting that he doesn’t want to lose but otherwise refusing to fight for anything even the girlfriend he apparently still loves whose refusal to move on perhaps hints at the desire to be given a reason not to. 

His meeting with Tada, now a moderately successful, married salaryman, reminds him of his high school friend, Sasaki (Gaku Hosokawa), a larger than life character who used to strip impromptu and dance in the nude when greeted by chants of his name. It was Sasaki who first convinced him to become an actor as they watched Kirk Douglas in Champion on TV, though after graduation and a move to Tokyo Yuji made no real effort to keep in touch with his friend seeing him only once and discovering he had become a lonely pachinko player equally consumed by a sense of personal hopelessness. As Sasaki once put it, elephants communicate with each other through low frequency sound imperceptible to humans, his own quiet distress call apparently missed by his old friends who perhaps tired of his outlandishness as they outgrew their teenage selves and became bogged down in their own lives leaving him behind as they strove forward alone. 

Left behind is something which Yuji cannot help but feel, further deepening his sense of personal failure in having achieved not much of anything in his Tokyo life. Sasaki aside, his high school friends, Tada and Kimura (Yusaku Mori), have each shifted into a conventional adulthood with regular salaryman jobs, homes, wives, and even children. He didn’t go to his last high school reunion, probably as Tada seems to have realised out of a sense of shame, for the same reason avoiding contact with his old friends while living in an awkward limbo with the ex who apparently grew bored with his lack of drive and continuing air of defeated ennui. Despite his own insecurity, Sasaki had encouraged him to live his life, assuring him that he’s got this, but when it came to it Yuji failed to do the same abandoning him in their old home town as a relic of the past he can’t quite accept. 

Admitting as much to his theatre director, Yuji is once again told to shine in his own spotlight and that lonely people aren’t necessarily lonely because they’re alone. Everyone keeps telling him to grow up, act like an adult, but Yuji doesn’t seem to know how hung up on high school immaturity and reflecting only too late that perhaps they never really understood their friend and in the end they simply left him behind. Only a confrontation with finality pushes him towards a break with his sense of inertia, acknowledging that what he feared was letting go and the eventual forgetting that comes with loss but the “world is rushing forward. We have to keep up”. Sasaki remains for him at least in his mind as he always was, the first of many goodbyes in an “empty elegy” that eventually becomes one’s own. A touching tale of quarter life crisis, Uchiyama’s moving drama eventually pushes its static hero towards an acceptance of his moral cowardice but finally gives him the courage to move forward taking his memories with him into a freer future. 

Sasaki in My Mind streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (no subtitles)