Tag: 2020s

Sunset Sunrise (サンセット・サンライズ, Yoshiyuki Kishi, 2024)

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In a way, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic presented a kind of turning point in which it became possible to envision a different kind of future brokered by technological advance in which society was no longer ruled by the dominance of the cities. If people could work remotely from anywhere, then they could easily improve their standard of living by moving to more rural areas for cheaper rents and healthier environments. Assuming the infrastructure was in place to allow them to do so, they could also support and reinvigorate communities struggling with depopulation in which the young have all left for the cities leaving the elderly behind to fend for themselves.

It’s an elegant solution that solves many of the problems of the contemporary society, but change isn’t always as straightforward as it seems as the hero of Yoshiyuki Kishi’s Sunset Sunrise (サンセット・サンライズ) finds out after he jumps at the chance to move into an abandoned house in Tohoku for a fraction of the rent he’d have to pay for a flat in Tokyo if he didn’t still live with his parents. The catch is, however, that houses have souls too and are more than just places to live for those that own or inherit them. Momoka (Mao Inoue), who decides to put her own empty house on the market, has her reasons for not wanting to live there herself nor for selling it completely but renting it out is also emotionally difficult. In the end, she only really does it after being put in charge of the town’s empty house problem at her job working for the council and thinking she should probably start with her own. Not knowing what to charge, it hadn’t really occurred to her someone would be as interested as Shinsaku (Masaki Suda), a fishing enthusiast longing to escape his salaryman life in the city for something a little more traditional in a peaceful rural area. 

Then again, that’s not to say that Shinsaku is a traditionalist and his decision quickly sparks controversy but also attracts the attention of his boss who senses a promising business opportunity. Momoka’s is a slightly special case, but Japan is filled with these so-called “akiya” which might, amid the work from home revolution of the pandemic, now be attractive to young professionals looking for a better environment to start a family. Houses generally start to deteriorate quite quickly when no one lives in them, and it’s true a lot of them need some work doing but it’s an idea that could work out well for everyone. Younger people who can’t find decent living space in the cities would be able to afford larger homes in the country where they would also then be contributing and integrating into the local community to provide support for its elderly residents.

Shinsaku becomes a part of the local community quite quickly and strikes up a friendship with an elderly woman whose children have all moved to Tokyo and rarely visit now that their own children are getting older. They’ve asked her to move to Tokyo with them, but as she points out, it would be the same as them moving back. There’s nothing for her to do there, and she’d have no friends. She’d only feel in the way and that she was getting under her daughter-in-law’s feet. Nevertheless, they fear for her especially as the area is still dealing with the scars of the 2011 earthquake which have left many clinging to a now bygone past. Once Momoka and Shinsaku start working with his boss on the akiya project, they find it hard to convince the inheritors of the houses to agree. Though they won’t live there, they might want to pop back a few times a year just for the memories and somehow can’t bear to part with their childhood or relative’s homes. But Shinsaku points out, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a case of either or and the renovation projects they undertake modernise the houses in a sympathetic way that brings them up to date with modern living yet honours the past even sometimes incorporating some of the previous resident’s furniture and belongings while issuing a caveat that the owners are welcome to visit should they wish to.

Essentially, the idea is a kind of co-existence with the past but also with unresolved trauma such as that presented by the earthquake and the ongoing pandemic. Momoka too is struggling to move on and while a gradual romance seems to arise between herself and Shinsaku, she isn’t sure she can ever let the past go though he makes it clear it’s okay to bring it with her. For his part, despite the initial fears of the early pandemic period and the suspicion of him as an outsider, Shinsaku’s quickly taken in by the community and adapts to a more rural way of life with relative ease though his boss’ big plan is rather undermined by his later insistence that he come back to Tokyo to run the project from the office like a many a contemporary CEO rolling back promises of flexible working environments that make this kind of utopian ideal much harder to materialise. In any case, there’s something quite refreshening in the eventual resolution just to do their own thing, not particularly paying attention to labels or what other people might think, but just doing what makes them happy right now. As an old fisherman’s song says, the sun sets but then it rises again. Scripted by Kankuro Kudo and adapted from a novel by Shuhei Nire, the film has kind of wholesome optimism that is rooted in a sense of continuity but also the potential to start again and make a new life inside the old that is less bound by outdated social norms than brokered by the gentle solidarity between people and a generosity of spirit that allows all to seek happiness in whatever way they choose.

Sunset Sunrise screens in Chicago 22nd March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Yoyogi Johnny (代々木ジョニーの憂鬱な放課後, Satoshi Kimura, 2025)

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Not much makes a lot of sense in the world of the titular Yoyogi Johnny. Nothing’s quite as it first seems and life is full of contradictions, but that’s alright, for the most part. Johnny just floats on through life going with the flow, but then he meets a series of girls who each for some reason want to practice things with him though for very different reasons while he tries to make sense of it all and gain the courage to push for what he really wants.

Then again, he breaks up with Asako (Mio Matsuda) because he realises he likes her in the same way he likes “history” which is to say, when someone asks him what his favourite subject is he just says that but doesn’t actually know if he even likes history or not. Having never been in love, he doesn’t know what it’s like and therefore wants to end the relationship. Mostly he just spends his time hanging out in the “squash club” where they don’t actually play any squash but just use the clubroom to hideout from the less satisfying aspects of their lives or otherwise avoid other people. In fact, they’re only in the squash club to make up the numbers and were all looking to start clubs of their own but for various reasons were prevented from doing so. But when a mysterious young woman they christen Deko (Shieru Yoshii) for her prominent forehead arrives at the club looking for the founder, Ondera, whom they call “Button”, it wrecks their peaceful lives because of her insistence that they actually play some squash.

Deko wants to practice squash with him, but his childhood friend Kagura (Runa Ichinose) wants him to role play real world interactions while she has otherwise become a virtual recluse who no longer attends school. Meanwhile, he’s also drawn to a colleague at his part-time job at a bookshop/bar, Izumo (Maya Imamori), who is also the boss’ daughter. Somewhat salaciously, she wants him to practice “physical contact,” as that’s one of the areas she has difficulty in having herself also been a recluse who dropped out of school and has come to Tokyo for a fresh start. Johnny immediately picks up on this irony of Izumo salmoning her way to the capital while, in general, most people are travelling away from the city to a less populated area for a quieter life rather than the other way around though like many of these conversations it’s lost on Izumo to whom it is of course just normal. Johnny has several of these conversations in which he attempts to point out that something doesn’t make sense but just finds himself trapped in an infinite loop of back and fore as the other person struggles to understand his logic or he theirs. He is however a kind person who tries to help everyone who asks him though perhaps without really thinking about it. 

Yet most of the young women eventually oscillate out of his life depriving him of these very important friendships and ironically rebounding to the squash club even though they now actually have to play squash. Nevertheless, through his various relationships Johnny begins to gain a new perspective on himself and even finds out what it’s like to fall in love. A strange young woman who seems to be part of what very much looks like a cult, reminds him that “self-sufficiency” is a lie even though it’s supposedly what their cult is founded on. It is after all an organisation that promotes “independent living” while sending its members who all live in the dorm to farm the fields, though this yet another thing that doesn’t really make sense but Johnny just has to accept. Nevertheless, it seems she’s right when she says people can’t live by themselves alone and by and large need each other to survive. She tells Johnny that he should stop visiting Kagura because it’s “meaningless” and wouldn’t help her, but at the same time seems to appreciate his good-naturedness and the gentle positivity he puts out into the world in his ability to just be nice and be there for that want or need him while never expecting anything in return. As he’s fond of saying, if you regard a person as a friend then it doesn’t really matter whether they agree or not they’re still your friend and Johnny has more than many might awesome he would. Warm-hearted and filled zany humour, the retro aesthetic of its opening titles only adds to film’s charm as a little gem of indie comedy.

Yoyogi Johnny screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Home for Rent (บ้านเช่า..บูชายัญ, Sophon Sakdaphisit, 2023)

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An inability to overcome the traumatic past leaves a family vulnerable to the dark machinations of a black magic cult in Sophon Sakdaphisit’s supernatural thriller, Home for Rent (บ้านเช่า..บูชายัญ). The film’s title is eventually revealed as a grim irony, the home in question a seat of the soul though like the director’s previous films it’s economic anxiety and social aspiration that open the door to damnation even if in this case there’s something more than fate in play.

All of Ning’s (Nittha Jirayungyurn) problems start when the flat she owns to let out is vandalised by a vacating talent. As she explains to the estate agent, Tom (Suphithak Chatsuriyawong), she can’t afford to refurbish it and the rent was covering the mortgage on the house she actually lives in which belongs to her husband, Kwin (Sukollawat Kanarot). Tom floats the idea of the family moving into the flat while they tidy it up and renting the house out instead, but Ning is worried Kwin won’t like the idea. She’s right, he doesn’t and suggests it would be easier to just sell the flat but Ning doesn’t want to do that either. The reasons for her attachment to it aren’t completely clear, but if she were keeping it as a safety net it might hint at a degree of insecurity in her marriage though as we later see she’s also job-hunting and not having much luck. Seeing the candidate next to her write down a much lower salary expectation she hastily changes hers too, fearing she’s pricing herself out of the market. 

As for Kwin’s reluctance to move, it may be a degree of snobbishness in not wanting to leave his large suburban house in a wealthy area for a small flat where he ends up sleeping on the sofa because the couple’s daughter Ing (Thanyaphat Mayuraleela) can’t seem to settle. As it turns out, Kwin has other reasons for remaining attached to the house and not wanting anyone else to live there but even as it stands it seems far too big for their small family and an obvious financial burden. Yet Kwin’s outward anxiety is to do with finding “high quality” tenants given what’s just happened with the flat. Ning is reassured by Tom’s confirmation that the prospective tenants are a retired doctor and her daughter though as Kwin points out, it’s mere snobbishness to assume a doctor will be a better tenant than anyone else. 

Nevertheless on meeting them, Kwin unexpectedly agrees only for Ning’s aunt and neighbour Phorn (Natniphaporm Ingamornrat) to report strange goings on at 4am such as ominous chanting and the sudden arrival of large numbers of crows. Strange things begin happening around Ning too, while Kwin’s behaviour has also become weird and irrational. Ning is however facing an uphill battle trying to get people to believe her that the couple renting her house are actually crazed cultists who may be targeting her daughter while others assume she’s going out of her mind because of the stress of maintaining it. 

The space that’s for rent in fact seems to be the human body as it becomes clear what kind of home is being sought. Aside from financial worries, the curse essentially stems from the inability to accept loss, or perhaps also the attempt to escape it by assuming new identities rather than deal with a painful past. Only Ning remains in the dark in this triangular series of relationships with pyramids an often repeated motif mimicking the dark symbol of the cult. Sophon Sakdaphisit conjures a genuine sense of eeriness within the genial suburban environment that hints at a largely invisible but pervasive evil that has Ning and her family firmly in its sights. But in other and perhaps slightly uncomfortable ways, it may be the family that eventually repairs itself in what amounts to the complete integration of the once buried traumatic past which may have destroyed what once was but has birthed something new in its place that at last seems to be free of the gloominess that once overhung the family home having relocated to a much warmer and down to earth environment in the absence of both financial and aspirational anxiety but simply content to have found a place to call home.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Tales of Kurashiki (蔵のある街, Emiko Hiramatsu, 2025)

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Beniko’s high school art project involves recreating a picture her mother left behind that immortalised a memory of a happy family moment during the rare sight of fireworks. But Beniko can’t seem to make progress with her artwork and she’s thinking of giving up art altogether along with her ambition of attending an art school because for her painting is intrinsically linked with her familial trauma and fears for the future. It is also, however, the force that keeps her family together though not perhaps in the way she intended.

The attempt to recreate her mother’s drawing is that to reclaim her family as it was though as she later realises attempting to recreate the past exactly is a futile effort. Resentful towards her mother for leaving and perhaps also towards her father for his emotional abandonment and the absurd jealousy that left her mother with no choice but to leave, she reinvents herself as a caretaker as a way of rooting herself in the domestic space by taking care of her autistic older brother Kyosuke, affectionately known around the neighbourhood as Kyon-kun. Looking after Kyon-kun is one reason she gives for not going to art school, but as her friend points out much to Beniko’s shame, perhaps that’s not really fair to him either if she’s exploiting his need as an excuse for her cowardice while denying him the right to his own life too. He is after all a little more capable than she might give him credit for, travelling to the correct station on his own and waiting for her patiently at the other end when she misses her regular train. 

Beniko’s childhood friend Aoi later realises that he did something similar. When Kyon-kun wandered off while Beniko was distracted and climbed a tree at the shrine to watch imaginary fireworks, Aoi and his friend Kiichi, who is the son of the shrine owner, promised to set off some real fireworks for him without really thinking it through or having much intention to actually do it. But as Beniko points out, Kyon-kun never forgets a promise so now he’s asking every day when the fireworks are and is continually disappointed. Chastened by Beniko, Aoi’s half-hearted attempt to keep his promise backfires and he realises that he too thought that it didn’t really matter because it was Kyon-kun and he wouldn’t know the difference. 

Aoi’s desire to make good on his word is partly a sense of guilt and shame in his realisation of the way he’d thought of Kyon-kun, partly due to his feelings for Beniko, and partly adolescent insecurity in the acceptance that his unnecessarily harsh father has a point when he says he never follows anything through. Kiichi too is experiencing similar anxieties as his father threatens to leave the shrine to his more studious younger brother and is exasperated by his goodhearted goofiness. The trio are all really looking for new paths towards adulthood by trying to make peace with their younger selves and gain the confidence to follow their dreams even if it takes them away from the picturesque settings of provincial Kurashiki.

Beniko’s mother was fond of saying that there was a deity of waiting in the town, and there is a white-clad figure perhaps visible only to Kyon-kun who follows the youngsters around and looks on cheerfully as if embodying the sense of fun and warmth that lingers in the city. Kurashiki does indeed look like a nice place to live with its continual sunniness and traditional architecture though as someone points out that’s largely because the bombers flew past here and hit somewhere else instead. Fireworks are as apparent disruptor but eventual healer Kojo says a way of bringing people together, a source of joy happiness even amid difficult times just as they were during the pandemic. There’s something quite wholesome and comforting about the way the whole community comes together to make Kyon-kun’s dream come true, overcoming the obvious objections of the powers that be that it’s not a good idea to have a fireworks festival in a town that’s almost entirely constructed in wood to create a small marvel of human kindness and solidarity. It’s this that finally allows Beniko to remake her family, giving it her own light and colour while keeping a place for her mother having come to an acceptance of why she couldn’t stay and a conviction that she will one day return when she too has begun to heal her heart.

The Tales of Kurashiki screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Devils Stay (사흘, Hyun Moon-seop, 2024)

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Unable to accept his daughter’s death, a father refuses to let her soul rest in Hyun Moon-seop’s possession thriller, Devil’s Stay (사흘, Saheul). The film’s Korean title “the Third Day” hints at its inverted religious overtones as a priest explains that she will indeed rise again like the Lord himself three days after her death, but as a destroyer of worlds in the incarnation of powerful demon. Heart surgeon Seung-do (Park Shin-Yang) isn’t sure that’s such a bad thing if only his daughter survives.

Then again, there’s a sense that Seung-do himself may share that So-mi’s (Lee Re) plight was partly down to his hubristic conviction in his skills as a surgeon that he alone could save her. So-mi evidently had some kind of serious medical condition that could only be cured by a heart transplant, but the obvious implication of that is if So-mi is to survive then another child must die. There is a kind of equivalent exchange in play and a wager that Seung-do is making with the universe. He may not think of it that way, but he is in fact making a deal with the Devil in his willingness to commit a human sacrifice to save his own child at the expense of someone else’s that in turn would colour the rest of So-mi’s life even if she had not become possessed by a demon.

Father Ban (Lee Min-Ki), a young and intense priest very committed to exorcisms and demon hunting, presses Seung-do as to how he came by this heart that he gave to his daughter, already sensing that this is how the demon crept in. Seung-do must in effect wrestle with the decision he made that has both damned and saved his daughter in equal measure along with the reality that whatever has survived is not So-mi, or at least, not So-mi alone. Father Ban tells him that when the demon rises on the third day, it will immediately turn on those closest to its host. He must then place another wager, deciding whether saving So-mi is worth risking the lives of his wife and son in addition to his own rather than letting her go gracefully and attempting to go on with his life while carrying the burden of paternal failure. 

But to all around him, it appears as if Seung-do has lost his mind. He rants and raves, insisting that his daughter isn’t really dead and even at times interfering with the funeral process to take charge of her body. Like him, Father Ban is also considered an outsider by other members of his church who think he’s too invested in demonology and possibly also blame him for the death of another exorcist priest who saved him when he was demonically possessed himself while serving in the army. Perhaps subversively, the film heavily implies that there was more than friendship to Father Ban’s relationship with the other priest and that his desire to vanquish the demon is also one of vengeance. In this, he may be Seung-do’s enemy as he is gradually seduced by the demon and considers appeasing it to save So-mi, encouraged to make another equivalent exchange and in a sense enact his own funeral to take her place.

In this way, the religiosity is undercut by the implication that the “light” that guided So-mi belonged to father rather than to God as he fulfilled his role as a her polestar and his promise that he’d come find her if she made sure to stay where she was. Even so, it amounts to an awkward advocation that father knows best in that So-mi’s salvation lies in her obedience to Seung-do, rejecting her autonomy to place her faith in her earthly father to save her as he promised he would. In many ways, it’s a story of paternal redemption in which Seung-do must reckon with the transgressive choice he made, no longer able to run or hide from it to but forced to accept his weakness and failure along with the morality of what he did. Essentially a character study, Hyun Moon-seop’s conjures a palpable sense of evil and eeriness but also hope as Father Ban’s mentor had reminded him, that demons too can be beaten though the worst of all dwells in the human heart. 

Devils Stay is released in the US on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital March 18 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Park Hee-kon, 2023)

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“Why do you always overreact?” a petulant craftsman eventually asks Soo-hyun, though Soo-hyun hasn’t overreacted so much as dared to assert herself in a world that often doesn’t listen to women. The irony at the centre of Park Hee-kon’s cybercrime thriller Don’t Buy the Seller (타겟, Target) is that it seemingly all unfolds because of a faulty washing machine, but like similarly themed films such as Door Lock, it soon becomes clear that Soo-hyun (Shin Hye-sun) isn’t really safe anywhere and there’s nothing this world objects to more than a woman who answers back.

In any case, it’s clear that Soo-hyun is not safe at work as her relentlessly creepy boss (Im Chul-soo) continues to sexually harass her while telling her off for taking things too personally when she finally complains. All he ever seems to do is yell at her for failing to enact his ludicrous demands while the guys at the construction site obviously don’t pay attention to her even though she’s the one managing this project. “Think he wants to work after being yelled at by a young lady?” one of the guys asks when one of the others doesn’t show up for his shift though Soo-hyun hadn’t actually yelled at him so much as asked him to please do his job and follow her instructions rather than ignore her in favour of his own judgement. 

She encounters a similar dismissiveness at the police station where she’s initially fobbed off as just another silly woman despite the younger policeman’s more sympathetic attempts to address her complaints even as his colleague leans over and explains there’s a four month backlog of fraud cases and they won’t even start to look for the guy who scammed her until then. Maybe he has a point, there are lots of victims of crime, but that only means they have lost the ability to enforce the law because the scammers know the police won’t catch them until they’re among the small number of unlucky criminals they do manage to get a lock on. Realising the police won’t help her, Soo-hyun vents her anger by tracking down the scammer on the reselling platform she tried to buy a washing machine from and leaving warnings not to buy on all his listings. Of course, this earns the stalker’s wrath because he too is another man who doesn’t like it when a woman answers back. 

But Soo-hyun has bitten off more than she can chew. This guy is seriously dangerous and into way more than just scamming people online by selling them broken appliances. We can see he has some kind of cyber lair and offers similar services to other men in which he agrees to provide a woman’s phone number, passwords, social media accounts and social security details to any man that wants them, for the right price. If he wants porn or videos posted, that’s extra. But it’s clear that a man with money can ruin a woman who says no with relative ease. Deep into his campaign, the stalker offers Soo-hyun the opportunity to end all this by paying him a large amount of money though as Soo-hyun knows there’s no guarantee he’ll keep his promise. Still after months of terror and constant harassment, she’s on the brink of giving in.

In this way, the stalker becomes an avatar of patriarchal male violence that slaps Soo-hyun right down in her place. She begins to feel insecure in the domestic environment as the stalker sends her nuisance deliveries of fast food at all hours of the day and night along with strange men who’ve been told to visit her for a good time and have evidently been given the code for the door lock. She’d only moved in here a week ago and moving out will incur a financial penalty she’s not well equipped to pay having been scammed in the first place. But the police seemingly can’t do anything while Soo-hyun is plagued by a sense of threat and unease that this person has so much control over her life and could turn up to cause her harm at any moment. Suddenly, she’s not a woman who answers back anymore but a timid and nervous zombie who can barely speak at all. 

Of course, this is exactly what the stalker wanted and what many of the men around Soo-hyun want too. They tell her to stop overreacting or that she brought this on herself by goading the scammer. They imply that she’s made herself an easy target by living alone and that buying goods second hand through apps which involve any kind of personal handover is inherently dangerous, but really they mean that like her friend Dal-ja (Lee Joo-young) she should have got married, chalked up getting scammed to experience, and above all kept quiet about it. Which is to say let her sleazy boss get away with making her feel uncomfortable as a kind of appeasement rather than challenge his behaviour or remind him that he does not have the right to make her feel this way, to abuse his position to interfere with her career, or otherwise oppress her. The message is, you don’t have to buy what they’re selling, faulty goods are after all not worth all this hassle.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Papa (爸爸, Philip Yung Chi-kwong, 2024)

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A man struggles with conflicted emotions after learning that his teenage son has killed his mother and sister in a bloody attack in Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s empathic character drama, Papa (爸爸). As much as he’s responsible for the deaths of those dearest to him, Ming (Dylan So) is still Nin’s (Sean Lau Ching-wan) son and he has a real desire to love and care for him while at the same time wondering why and continuing to blame himself as if this tragedy were really provoked by his failures as a father. 

Weaving back and forth through the last 30 years, Yung meditates on a theme of loss while linking Nin’s life with key moments in history. In 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China and also the beginning of the Asian financial crisis, Nin buys a newfangled digital camera hoping to record the birth of his daughter, Grace. Nin isn’t convinced by this technological advance and wonders if it will just lead to people wasting their time taking endless photos now they don’t have to worry about running out of film, but it’s also the means by which he is eventually able to preserve his family by making use of the temporary pause provided by its timer function so that they can all occupy the same space for a moment but also for eternity.

Otherwise, he worries that the family’s business concerns put too much strain on their relationships. He and his wife Yin (Jo Koo Cho-lam) worked opposing shifts at a 24hr eatery meaning they rarely got to spend time together and the children grew up with each of their parents never fully there. Though Nin had wanted to stop opening overnight so they could have a more conventional family life, Yin, from Guangdong on the Mainland, was against it and wanted to keep going until the children were a bit older. There’s an implication that this 24hr culture is also something of an older Hong Kong that’s gradually being erased in the post-Handover society and that Nin and his family are living in an age of decline.

Though Ming won’t give a reason for what he did, in his court testimony he claims to have heard voices telling him that there were too many people and it was making everyone angry so he needed to kill a few and bring the population down. Nin again blames himself, reflecting that the family live in a typically cramped flat where the children have to share a room and everyone is piled on top of each other even if he and his wife are rarely there at the same time. In flashbacks to happier times when Ming was small, there’s a suggestion that Ming resented his sister and that he always had to share not only his possessions, his mother suggesting that they buy a smaller bike for his birthday so Grace can use it too, but his parents’ attention. In a particularly cruel moment, Ming tells Grace that none of her favourite characters from Doraemon are actually “real” but merely imaginary friends Nobita made up in his head because he is autistic. 

But along with his aloofness, poor social skills and lack of empathy, Nin remembers Ming caring for the stray kitten Grace adopted but then grew tired of though he had not originally been in favour of taking it in. He seems to have been living with undiagnosed schizophrenia, something else Nin blames himself for wondering if there was something he could have done. “If I’d been there it wouldn’t have happened,” he tells the press in the incident’s aftermath, but even if he was ill it’s hard to believe the little boy he taught to ride a bike and took on trips to the beach could have done something so violent and hateful and then show such little remorse. Even so, he’s still his son and the only thing he can still rescue from the wreckage of his life while meditating on all he’s lost. As such, it’s another recent film from Hong Kong about how to live on in a ruined world. Yung’s camera has an elegiac quality aided by a retro synth score and the neon lighting of an older Hong Kong drenched in melancholy, but also weary resignation and a determination to keep going if only in memory of a long absent past that were it not for a photograph “to prove that we were here” would go unremembered.  

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Paradise of Solitude (孤独な楽園, Ikki Katashima, 2024)

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A blocked writer and a introverted young woman discover unexpected connection through accidental epistolary communication in Ikki Katashima’s poetic drama, Paradise of Solitude (孤独な楽園, Kodokuna Rakuen). Each wondering what exactly “paradise” means, the pair of them eventually find new ways to face the past and move on with their lives all while undergoing a vicarious romance with yearning at its centre that may or may not develop into something more “real” or else achieve its power solely through its lack of resolution. 

Yu Tsushima (Sho Aoyagi) is a writer struggling to meet his deadlines on a new serialised novel. Suffering with an illness, he’s retreated to his hometown and is now unable to leave because he experiences seizures on boats which understandably leaves him preferring not to get on them. One day, he receives an incredibly poetic love letter from an anonymous address only to notice a link to a porn site at the end of the email like a cruel punch line. Meanwhile, Ayame (Akiho Otsubo) is a nervous and introverted young woman working at a factory on the next island over. To begin with, it seems like she has suffered under the authoritarian rule of her aunt Tsukiko (Narimi Arimori), though as we later discover she may have meant well. 

Showing a talent for writing which sees her exploited by the factory boss, Ayame is tasked with writing a love letter on behalf of her friend Elena to a man she’s apparently only seen once yet has fallen hopelessly in love with. There’s something a little strange about this proposition, and not least because it seems like Elena may actually want this letter for herself and has unspoken (in Japanese, at least) feelings for Ayame. Elena is not the only non-Japanese person working at the factory at which it seems there may be some racist attitudes and behaviour among the employees, though there may be other reasons she feels isolated and otherwise drawn to Ayame.

But somehow, the letters find their way to Yu who is then “inspired” to write a new serial basically ripping off the anonymous correspondence but rewriting it in his own way while Ayame, having read his stories in a literary magazine, is not exactly angry yet confused and continues writing in order to complete this literary back and fore in crafting a new story together. Though the letters spin a tale of a lovelorn soul, it’s really the past that Ayame longs to revisit in the resultant trauma of her mother’s unexplained abandonment.

On top of the weird island drama, Katashima builds on the sense of uncanniness with a subplot about a cult-like local church and its own desire to reclaim Ayame thereby preventing her from fully confronting her past. Just as Yu is suffering from a medical condition, Ayame too experiences panic attacks when in contact with the church. Though it’s not always clear what is objectively true and what part of the story Yu is constructing from Ayame’s prose, parallel stories develop in which Ayame’s father hoped to liberate her mother’s soul though she eventually decided to chase paradise somewhere else. 

Because of her experiences, Ayame comes to believe that love within her has died, but perhaps begins to regain something of it thanks to her correspondence with Yu who becomes remorseful in learning that his actions may have been additionally unethical in encouraging Ayame to engage with her past trauma and risk dragging it all up again. He, meanwhile, begins to discover his creativity and overcomes the psychological dimensions of his condition by leaving his island and breaking out of his self-imposed isolation. The correspondence is like the message in a bottle discovered by Ayame’s mother which claimed to be from “paradise”, a hand across the ocean promising a better world over the horizon. Whether or not they find each other eventually in a more direct sense may not really matter, for simply having this invisible presence has enabled each of them to move past their internalised inertia and restart their lives. They may be trapped in a paradise of solitude, but on the other hand not quite alone and now a little more open to life’s possibilities rather than bound by its hurts and disappointments too frightened to leave the safety of their isolation in search of a more perfect paradise.

Paradise of Solitude screened as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Okinawa Blue Note (오키나와 블루노트, Cho Sung-kyu, 2024)

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If you run into someone who has the same name, same birthday, and was on the same flight as you to a random destination wouldn’t you call that fate? The protagonists of Cho Sung-kyu’s Okinawa Blue Note (오키나와 블루노트) prefer to think of it as mere coincidence, at least to begin with. They each have different reasons for coming to Okinawa, but then again perhaps fate sent them here to get a new lease on their lives if not to fall in love.

Love does however seem a little unlikely for the mismatched pair each named Kim Jungmin who are about as different from each other as it’s possible to be. Yet the male Jungmin’s (Kim Dong-wan) animosity is somewhat understandable given that his arrival in Okinawa has become chaotic thanks to the female Jungmin’s (Hwang Seung-eon) presence given that she mistakenly ended up with both his pre-booked car and room reservation because the staff members only checked the name and not the booking number. Jungmin isn’t the sort of person who copes well with complications, nor does he cope well with noisy, more extroverted people like the female Jungmin who is also annoyed by the whole thing but on the other hand doesn’t think it’s really her problem having merely assumed she’d been lucky enough to receive a free upgrade rather than actively nabbing someone’s more expensive package. Nevertheless, he’s forced to get along with her because he needs to borrow her rental car to get around which also means accompanying her on her touristic adventures and getting swept up in her enthusiastic exploration of the island.

The female Jungmin has a tendency to drink too much, say things she shouldn’t, and forget about them by the next morning. The male Jungmin, by contrast doesn’t drink because he is living with rheumatoid arthritis though he says he intends to drink again if his condition improves. He writes romance novels and doesn’t use the internet all that much. She writes webtoons and posts stories to instagram. They really have very little in common aside with a sense of dissatisfaction about their lives, their names, birthdays, and travel itinerary but you can’t deny that their meeting is like one of the male Jungmin’s novels as even he finds himself musing on a new story about someone who comes to Okinawa to patch things up with an old lover only to fall in love with a whale shark they met along the way.

Gradually it becomes apparent that the female Jung-min is here to confess her feelings to a boy from Korea who, it turns out, may have come to Okinawa in search of greater freedom rather than needing to be liberated from his tank which ironically may be more the case for the male Jungmin. Though it’s obvious from their second meeting with Taemin’s colleague Hiro that the two men are a couple, the female Jungmin can’t seem to see or accept it nor does he actually tell her outright that he’s gay only that all he wants from her is friendship as he’s explained several times before only she was too drunk at the time to remember she’s already declared her feelings and been rejected. What the female Jungmin saw as “fate” really was just coincidence and personal myth making as Taemin too had his own fate to follow that led him to Okinawa where he was freer to pursue his romantic desires, if only slightly, than in the still conservative Korea. When the male Jungmin floats an idea for a book inspired by his time in Okinawa the two men give their consent to be included but also ask their relationship remain a same sex one rather than the heterosexual casting Jungmin had given it possibly out of an attempt to disguise their identity but also an underlying squeamishness towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues.

Nevertheless, the male Jungmin is able to re-envision the situation by turning his life into fiction and exploring a relationship between himself and the female Jungmin with the roles somewhat reversed in which he is a stereotypically hard drinking, chain-smoking writer and the female Jungmin a put upon woman with rheumatoid arthritis helping someone else achieve their romantic desires. Is this life imitating art, or art imitating life? Whatever it is, it seems the trip to Okinawa with its tranquil streets, picturesque environment, friendly and laid-back people has offered each of them opportunities both romantic and creative in a moment of unexpected serendipity, or perhaps this time it really was fate after all.

Okinawa Blue Note had its World Premiere as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Rules of Living (ルール・オブ・リビング, Greg Dale, 2023)

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A lost tourist finds a begrudging sanctuary in the home of a reluctant middle-aged woman in Greg Dale’s cross-cultural comedy, Rules of Living (ルール・オブ・リビング). Well intentioned as it may be, the film has some outdated humour and suffers from an unbalanced perspective that prioritises that of the American hero and at times uncomfortably pushes a message of Western individualism as he somehow “liberates” there heroine, Mikako (Kaho Minami), from her sense of obligation to her family and wider community. 

In a case in point, Mikako doesn’t want a roommate because her well-appointed home is a private sanctuary from the outside world and its constant judgement but is more or less forced to let Vincent (Greg Dale) in out of guilt and politeness. For his part fleeing a messy divorce and his own dissatisfaction with life under capitalism, Vincent arrives in Japan only to be somehow surprised that everything’s in Japanese and he can’t communicate with anyone because they are all too embarrassed about their English ability to respond to his questions. This results in a little well-worn humour in which his asking a portly middle-aged lady about a cheap place to stay is misunderstood and leads to an awkward situation as the apparently sexually insatiable older woman drags the naive and wholesome Vincent to a love hotel. Yet Vincent, an aficionado of Lafcadio Hearn, continues to wander round with wide-eyed wonder before rocking up Mikako’s office for more language-barrier banter and subsequently at her house despite not having made any attempt to contact her to make arrangements having befriended her daughter Chieko in Bali.

The film seems to directly contrast Mikako with her daughter who has given up a prestigious job and corporate career to go travelling leaving Mikako overstretched trying to care for her own mother alone as her health declines. Chieko’s decision is to a degree selfish in that she doesn’t answer her mother’s calls and does not even return home for her grandmother’s funeral while ironically looking down on Mikako for being a doormat who always puts the needs of others above her own as, the films argues, is expected by Japanese society. That’s not entirely wrong, though there must be a middle ground between total abandonment and selfless sacrifice in which not everything would simply be left for Mikako alone to deal with and she would have more freedom to fulfil herself outside of the expectations of others including those of Vincent. It’s notable that Mikako also seems to be dissatisfied in her career because of persistent sexism and office mores in which, at 49, she’s been more or less demoted to the ranks of office ladies after spending the rest of her working life in accounts and likely won’t be offered any further promotions, therefore justifying Chieko’s decision to quit. At the office, Mikako is treated as a maternal figure unfairly over relied upon by the boss because of her advanced skills while the younger women make too many mistakes and are slapdash in their work because they aren’t planning to stay in these jobs long term.

Meanwhile, Mikako is also under pressure to remarry especially as many seem to remark on the fact her family home is too large for her as a single woman. She’s been in a semi-serious relationship with a divorced childhood friend for some time but neither of them seem keen to give marriage another go until he too is pressured by his father to find another wife in order to take over the family business. Koichi (Kippei Shiina) is apparently the perfect man, nice, polite, well turned out and professionally successful yet there’s no real spark and Mikako feels guilty that she can’t learn to love Koichi in the way everyone else seems to love him for her. If she marries him, it will be for convenience and companionship along with the expectations of others much more than for herself. 

Her romance with Vincent is not all that convincing but born of frustration with these same social expectations and desire to put herself and her feelings first as manifested in her sudden desire to learn English. Vincent teaches English around the neighbourhood and spreads these individualist ideas around while enlivening the community through the simple act of communication as if no one had ever thought to speak to anyone else before. Yet he meets a more cynical force in the head of the language school he eventually gets a job at who is from India and offers yoga classes on the side despite never having practiced it before coming to Japan in another example of the pernicious qualities of these “expectations”. Vincent partially falls victim to them too in assuming a young woman in the staffroom is a lost student rather than a teacher simply because she looks Japanese. Nana complains no one takes her seriously because of her appearance despite her native level English and American accent. Before arriving at Mikako’s Vincent had tried to rent an apartment only to be told they don’t rent to foreigners and those that do either offer inappropriate accommodation or ask for a series of spurious additional fees. A man in the street also yells at him to go out with his own kind when seeing him with Mikako.

Essentially, Mikako’s choice is between two men, Vincent who apparently represents “freedom”, and Koichi who represents conventionality. This rather undermines the central thesis of Mikako rediscovering herself and taking agency over her life rather than as her daughter had said devoting herself entirely to the service of others. The film’s title is taken from a series of rules Mikako pastes up as condition for Vincent staying with her which included not using the bathroom or disturbing her while she’s in the living room, symbolising her desire for privacy and reluctance to let the relentlessly friendly Vincent into her life (even though being reluctant to let a total stranger and especially a man you’ve never met before stay in your house with you is completely understandable), but also hints at the “rules” that govern her own life in a conformist and patriarchal society. Some of these at least she may escape in deciding to follow her heart even if the place it leads her to has rules of its own that may not in the end be all that better.

Rules of Living screened as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (English subtitles)