Tag: 2020s

Octopus with Broken Arms (误杀3, Jacky Gan Jianyu, 2024)

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It’s quite surprising, somehow, that Octopus with Broken Arms (误杀3, wùshā 3) gets away with as much as it does simply being another recent mainstream movie set in an unidentified South East Asian nation where, conveniently enough, almost everyone speaks Mandarin. The third in the Sheep Without a Shepherd series, it quite clearly takes aim at the tendency of authoritarian governments to cover things up and deny the public the truth in any situation. Ordinarily, the censor’s board wouldn’t like that pointed out, nor would it like implications of police violence and corruption though as this is all taking place in “Not Mainland China”, it seems to have passed them by.

Then again, by setting itself overseas the film also deflects the implications of its focus on child trafficking which is a huge and well documented problem on the Mainland though here it becomes something that only happens overseas. The closing title cards in English offer a series of statistics about missing children worldwide, but avoid mentioning the statistics in China where the One Child Policy contributed to a phenomenon of children being kidnapped from the cities to be raised on rural farms while the preference of sons often saw daughters otherwise sold off.

In any case, Bingrui (Xiao Yang) is an ethnic Chinese refugee raised in an orphanage who got a huge capital injection from a gangster after finding his missing child and turned it into an internationally successful cosmetics corporation. When his own daughter Tingting is kidnapped, he seems to know immediately that he’s not been targeted simply because he’s a wealthy man and suspects the involvement of Fu-an (Feng Bing), an old “friend” with whom he’d had “a few issues” who had approached him for money for his son’s heart transplant which he had given him. 

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Bingrui must have been involved in something untoward even if he’s now a devout Buddhist who’s just trying to be a good father having lost his wife in childbirth. Fed a series of clues to find his daughter, it’s clear he’s being led towards a kind of confrontation with his past along with a test of character. He may be able to say that he did the things he did because he had no other choice. If he had not joined the side of those acting against all common notions of humanity, he would simply have become one of their victims. But there is a choice involved all the same, and Bingrui chose survival through the sacrifice of other lives. 

The fact that the kidnapper lives streams much of the chase suggests they’re less interested in the money than truth and ultimately want Bingrui to blow the whistle on a vast conspiracy which otherwise can’t be investigated because it’s burrowed deep into the police force and perhaps beyond. As one of those working against him later says, there are too many secrets destined to remain so that should be brought out into the light. A newsreader, however, remarks on hearing about a possible cover up of the deliberate murder of a number of trafficked children passed off as “refugees”, that what he most fears is that the people have lost faith in their government. Nevertheless, there might be something quite subversive about the lengthy scenes of citizens expressing discontent with blatant lies from the authorities and openly begging for the truth given the famously tightlipped CCP’s usual approach to public information.

In any case, the more we learn about Bingrui the harder it is for us to sympathise with him and the film then becomes more about proper paternity and the willingness of a parent to surrender their own life for that of their child. The film takes its English title from an incredibly elaborate school play little Tingting is involved in at the beginning of the film about how Octopuses are all orphans because their parents abandon them soon after birth and then pass away. Bingrui wasn’t exactly an orphan, like many of the children he was kidnapped from a loving family, but became one and lost his sense of humanity in the process. The question is whether he will be able to abandon his instincts for self-preservation to save his daughter or if, in the end, he will choose to save himself just as he did when chose to join those who kidnapped him rather than become a victim. Like many similarly themed thrillers of recent years, the film is built around a series of outrageous twists many of which are startlingly obvious but in their way serve the shocking quality of those that aren’t. What’s truly shocking is the depth of this conspiracy which hints not just at children being stolen and sold to overseas adopters, but trafficked into sexual exploitation or for illegal organ harvesting. The barbarity knows no bounds, and while the actions of Tingting’s kidnappers are in themselves brutal it’s clear they have no other way to ensure the injustice they face will be addressed. Indignant but avoiding sentimentality, Jacky Gan Jianyu’s slickly designed B-movie thriller nevertheless ends on a note of karmic retribution that the “hero” may not have earned but does at least allow him to make good on his promise and symbolically atone for the all the pain and suffering his callousness self-interest has caused. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Lumberjack the Monster (怪物の木こり, Takashi Miike, 2023)

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Could being a psychopath actually be better? It might be an attractive thought for some, the absolute freedom of living without emotional or moral constraint. Emotion is after all a difficult thing to bear, though life without it might also be lonely and unfulfilling leaving a void often filled by other desires such as a lust for wealth, status, power, or proof of superiority. Based on a novel by Mayusuke Kurai, Takashi Miike’s Lumberjack the Monster (怪物の木こり, Kaibutsu no Mikori) finds its hero at a point of existential crisis no longer certain of his true nature or identity.

The film takes its title from a fairytale featured in a picture book being read by a small boy who has been abducted and illegally experimented on. A monster begins living as a lumberjack in a small town where he begins killing and eating the residents, only no one notices. Eventually it realises that he spends more time being the lumberjack than the monster and is confused about his identity. With no friends left to talk to (because it ate them all), the monster decides to move to another town to make more friends but ends up sneaking into the house of a lumberjack, stealing a baby, and fashioning after itself to create another monstrous lumberjack.

This is in a sense what’s happened to Akira (Kazuya Kamenashi), now a lawyer who discovers he has a “neuro-chip” in his brain that suppresses his emotions after he’s attacked by a masked figure and it breaks re-introducing him to an unwelcome humanity. This is quite inconvenient for him in that he’s done quite a lot to feel guilty about, firstly participating in a scheme with his “friend” Sugitani (Shota Sometani), a natural-born psychopaths, to facilitate his experimentation on live humans, and secondly that he murdered his boss who is also his fiancée’s father to take over his law firm. Though the fiancée, Emi (Riho Yoshioka), seems to be afraid of him, it’s also true that simple proximity to her warmth and kindness may have begun to reopen his heart.

Of course, it could be true that the mad scientists who abducted the children accidentally picked up a few who were already psychopaths but in this case it seems like the chip did its job on each of the victims of the axe-wielding assassin. Meanwhile, we also see “psychopathic” traits in lead investigator Toshiro (Nanao) who admits that she will do whatever it takes to get to the truth even if it includes throwing out the police rulebook. Akira asks her if her desire to solve the case isn’t also a roundabout means of vengeance for the death of her brother, leaving her not so different from the assassin who is also extracting vicarious revenge on man-made psychopaths, but she replies that that’s exactly how a psychopath might see it while also deflecting a similar question from embittered cop Inui (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) who remarks that if the killer’s only taking out psychopaths then why bother stop them?

In some ways, Akira is like the lumberjack. He was simply being what he was and knew no different, but gradually beginning to rediscover his humanity is burdened with guilt and remorse now acutely aware not just of the feelings of others rather than their consequences but of his own feelings too. The couple who abducted the children claimed they were doing it to save their son, trying to reverse engineer psychopathy so they could cure him though their actions were themselves psychopathic and like the lumberjack they created only more monstrous children like themselves. Akira has it seems rediscovered the person he may have been if he had been raised in the loving family from which he was abducted and is determined to search for the meaning of life, but he is also responsible for the decisions he made as a man who knew no guilt or remorse and may in fact have to pay for the moral transgressions he was not fully aware he was making. Miike conjures a sense of the gothic in the creepy, candlelit mansion where the children were kept and otherwise sticks to standard procedural for the “real” world, but finally lands back in the realms of fairytale as his hero finds himself part of neither one world nor another while faced with a choice that may earn him redemption but also loneliness and futility.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Honey Money Phony (“骗骗”喜欢你, Su Biao, 2024)

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Can you really say a scammer who just takes people’s money without messing with their feelings is any better than one who just robs them? That’s a justification put forward by fraudster Ouyang (Sunny Sun) in Su Biao’s remake of Thai rom-com The Con-Heartist, but it’s a difficult one to swallow. After all, even if you just trick someone out of a small amount of cash,the psychological effects can be devastating though the pain may not be quite the same as getting your heart broken in a love scam.

Qinglang (Jin Chen) has indeed had her heart broken by the lothario Zijun (Wang Hao) whom she met at a tennis class she started going to after moving to the fictional city of Aoo Kang. Later it’s revealed that the cause of her move was getting fired from her company for reporting her boss for sexual harassment while she was also in a bit of debt from breaking a non-compete clause by getting another job, something which Zijun apparently sorted out for her. But not long after she took out a loan to give him money supposedly for his university tuition, Zijun ghosted her and she realised she’d been the victim of a romance scam. Now she’s on the hook for that too, working a series of part-time jobs in fast food restaurants and walking dogs as well as an unsuccessful gig as a vlogger in addition to her regular job in insurance. 

Experience is maybe why she suddenly thinks twice after being contacted by someone purporting to be from the vlogging site telling her she’s been suspended and needs to pay a fine. After getting Ouyang’s info from the bank she threatens to expose him but then makes a deal, if he helps her scam Zijun into giving back the money she gave him she won’t take this any further. Of course, there’s no guarantee Ouyang hasn’t just switched to a different con while Qinglang remains quite naive and despite herself trusting him. Then again, he’s the exact opposite of Zijun who took advantage of her despair and offered himself as a source of constant support. His aloofness and apparent honesty about what he is may in their way reassure her. 

There is something that might be comforting in Ouyan’s unflashiness. Though he drives a convertible, it’s not a particularly glamorous sort and has a busted taillight and in any case, he also lives in it. According to him, that’s so he can get away quickly if he needs to, but also suggests that it’s not really all about the money. Zijun, meanwhile, is greedy and materialistic, hopping from one wealthy woman to the next while hoping to join the social elite and live a high life of fast cars and wild parties. A justification for Ouyang’s scamming is given in a tragic backstory which may or may not be true suggesting that he was born out of wedlock and his mother died in childbirth. He was raised by his grandmother and uncle while his birth father entered his life at one point and tried to connect with him but it turned out it was all because his other son from a different relationship needed a bone marrow transplant. As soon as he found out Ouyang wasn’t a match, he disappeared from his life. 

The implication is that Ouyang scams as a kind of revenge because he doesn’t trust people and therefore is unable to live an ordinary, honest, life but through connecting with Qinglan and falling in love he develops the desire to live with more compassion and stability. Qinglang, meanwhile, gains confidence in herself and realises that her low self-esteem left her vulnerable to manipulation. Her friend, Xiaohui (Li Xueqin), who was also in massive debt and ended up posing as a blind person to carry out accident scams, also puts the skills she’s learned to good use to progress her acting career which might all be a very contradictory message even if there’s something satisfying about scamming a scammer and especially one as full of himself as Zijun. Released for Western New Year, the film has a zany wholesomeness despite its bleak subject matter and hints at a sense of despair in contemporary life in China but does indeed suggest that cheaters don’t necessarily need to prosper and you do have a degree of control over your life even if it’s just deciding to choose love and move on rather than wallow in a sense of futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Hey! Our Dear Don-chan (おーい！どんちゃん, Shuichi Okita, 2022)

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A trio of actors undergo a coming-of-age tale of their own when a baby is suddenly abandoned on their doorstep in Shuichi Okita’s charming slice of life dramedy, Our Dear Don-chan (おーい！どんちゃん, Oi! Don-chan). A take on Three Men and a Baby, the film stars the director’s own daughter and follows her over a period of three years as the actors attempt to adjust to fatherhood and the new kind of family that has arisen between them. 

As the film opens, Michio (Tappei Sakaguchi), Ken (Hirota Otsuka), and Gunji (Ryuta Endo) are struggling actors working in slightly different media but having about the same amount of luck and continually dejected about their lack of career success. Ironically while playing the game of life, Ken has a baby girl in the game but is surprised to hear one crying for real on the street below. On reading a note in her pushchair, Ken realises that the baby has been left by a previous girlfriend, Kaori, with the instruction that he raise it. 

Of course, the situation gives rise to a degree of panic, Ken wondering not only if he is the father but if he can be while supported by the other two guys, along with former houseman Sakamoto and his girlfriend Akari, taking care of more practical matter likes getting nappies and baby food. Then again, some of the practical details are already overcome by virtue of their occupations which allow them to be home during the day taking shifts to watch the baby they christen “Don-chan” on account of not knowing her real name. 

As they struggle with the demands of fatherhood, the three men each commit themselves to Don-chan’s well being, mindful of the memories she’ll make in the future and wanting to make her present as happy as possible. At one point they decide to take a camping trip in order to show her that they can be “manly dads”, but otherwise entertain her at home or take her on trips to the aquarium acting as a trio even if Ken is technically the primary dad forming a new kind of family that makes it easier to care for a small child than it might otherwise have been. If Ken had been on his own, he may not have been able to raise her. Michio and Gunji both complain at the precarious state of childcare facilities, lamenting that you can’t get a place unless you work full-time but you can’t work full-time if you can’t get childcare for when you’re at work. 

Meanwhile, they continue to struggle in their professional lives. A humiliating audition for a TV commercial causes Ken to rethink his career plans, stopping off to buy new toys for Don-chan on the way home lamenting that he “danced like an idiot for no reason.” Michio continues to go full method over researching all his roles for seconds of screen time in TV and movies, while Gunji’s stage career is disrupted when the manager of his troupe decides to admit himself to a psychiatric facility for long term care. Through their interactions with Don-chan, however, they all begin to grow up gaining further life experience which enhances their performance ability and gives them a greater goal to work towards aside from mere career success. 

A heartwarming familial drama, the film doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be to raise a child in contemporary Japan especially as a single-parent but rather embraces a larger idea of the word family which centres platonic friendship and community while simultaneously understanding of Kaori’s position in the knowledge that none of this is easy and she may not have had access to the kind of support that made it possible for Ken to care for Don-chan with so much love and attention. In any case, little Don-chan is certainly lucky to have so many people around her all invested in her happiness and future whose lives she has also enriched just by her existence. A truly happy film, Okita adds small doses of absurdity to the already surreal events along with a nostalgic sense of childhood comfort right down to the childish font of the film’s titles complete with corrections and crossings out that are, much like life, evidence of joyful trial and error. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tales from the Occult: Body and Soul (失衡凶間之罪與殺, Frank Hui, Daniel Chan Yee-Heng, Doris Wong Chin Yan, 2022)

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The second in a series of horror-themed anthologies, Tales From the Occult: Body and Soul (失衡凶間之罪與殺) takes fairytales as its theme but truth be told none of the episodes has very much in common with the most well known version of their respective stories. What they do have in common is a rather grisly view of the nighttime city perhaps inspired by classic Cat III shockers though mediated through a strong sense of irony. “I like it a bit dark” one of the heroes exclaims and it’s certainly a sentiment shared by each of the three directors. 

The first instalment, Frank Hui’s Rapunzel finds former idol star Maggie (Michelle Wai) trying to prop up her flagging career while constantly written off as a has been best known for a cheesy pose in a dated shampoo commercial. Her manager sends her to an obnoxious rich kid’s birthday party where the women are so young they weren’t even born when she was a star and relentlessly mock the weird “aunty” and her “retro” movies. One of the guys sets fire to her hair which is even more of a problem for her because she’s supposed to have an important meeting with a producer in the morning and he’s not going to hire her with a less than perfect appearance. Maggie’s desperation eventually draws her into the orbit of a hair fetishist serial killer from whom she must try to escape while attempting to rescue her hair and save her career. A secondary strain of social community places the killer’s creepy all night salon in a building that’s about to be torn down for urban renewal leading him to be bullied by gangsters to move out but not wanting to for obvious reasons. Maggie meanwhile eventually makes a surprising decision in order to fix herself which is in its own way cannibalistic at least of the female image when it comes to the idea of perfect hair. 

You couldn’t say that Daniel Chan’s Cheshire Cat really has that much to do with the classic Alice in Wonderland character either, though Chan does throw in something like a Mad Hatter’s tea party and leave his heroine trapped in a cage suspended above the air. Nora (Cecilia Choi Si-Wan) works in a cat rescue centre and is particularly upset by the idea of people hurting her feline friends, especially as her own cat Bobo was recently murdered. After agreeing to rescue a kitten trapped under a van she unwittingly passes into a grim haunted house adventure with a death metal vibe. In a series of atmospheric shots, Chan frames Hong Kong in an angry red tint capturing the increasing resentment of Nora as she continues to take out her rage on those who would harm poor defenceless creatures. 

Doris Wong’s The Tooth Fairy perhaps ironically subverts its title while toying with the interplay of sadomasochistic fetishes. Dental nurse Sammi (Karena Lam Ka-Yan) is being relentlessly harassed at work by sleazy dentist Steve (Tommy Chu Pak-Hong) who won’t take no for an answer. On her way to the bank, she comes across a fight between two young men in which one bites off the other’s ear, and invites the biter to her clinic to get his swollen cheek looked at. Steve, however, does not take kindly to this after seeing he and Sammi flirt with each other, extracting a healthy tooth without anaesthetic as if teaching him a lesson, but clearly deriving sexual pleasure from his pain just like the sadistic killer on the news. In any case events soon escalate following some cake-related triggering and not just for its capacity to ruin your teeth. The killer may claim they’re setting people free from their earthly suffering but is clearly in part at least killing for the thrill. 

In any case, danger seems to lurk behind every corner with potential serial killers apparently all around us as the heroes find out during their various quests. Their stories may not have much in common with their inspiration but each have a strangely ironic quality curiously mimicking B-movie cinema in terms of colour palette and production design, Frank Hui eventually opting for a neon-coloured nightmare lair while Nora and the gang chase through a haunted Hong Kong and Sammi does her best to extricate herself from the unwanted attentions of her sleazy boss who is perhaps the real monster in the shadows. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Parades (パレード, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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Living a life without regrets is easier said than done. The protagonists of Michihito Fujii’s The Parades (パレード, Parade) each have unfinished business that prevents them moving on from this world, but what they discover is an unexpected sense of solidarity among similarly lost souls as they try to lay themselves to rest. After all, all they can do now is observe and reflect while helping others like them with their own lingering doubts and regrets.

Drawing inspiration from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Fujii first introduces us to Minako (Masami Nagasawa). A 35-year-old single mother, she wakes up on a beach and frantically looks for her seven-year-old son Ryo (Haru Iwakawa) little realising that the reason no one seems to be able to hear or react to her is because she’s already dead. Picked up by fellow ghost Akira (Kentaro Sakaguchi), she’s taken to a disused fairground that doubles as a hub for wandering souls. Though it takes her a while to accept her new situation, she gradually bonds with others at the camp each of whom have their own unfinished business which isn’t all that different from her own in that they mostly want to be sure the people they left behind will be alright.

The film takes its name from the monthly processions in which wandering souls meet by lantern light to look for their missing people together. This sense of solidarity and empathy seems to echo the best of humanity along with a melancholy longing. There appears to be little rancour in this afterlife, a yakuza who was killed in a gang war simply feels sorry for his father and so guilty about the girlfriend he left behind that he’s been afraid to face her for the last seven years, and a high school girl who took her own life because of bullying first thinks her unfinished business is vengeance on the bullies but later accepts is actually a desire to apologise to her best friend who then had to take the brunt of the bullies’ cruelty on her own.

What the film seems to say is that we should have more of this fellow feeling in life. Former film producer Michael (Lily Franky) constantly references his days as a student protestor remarking that they might not have amounted to very much but at least they had unity. His regret is less his failed revolution than a moment of emotional cowardice that saw the woman he loved marry someone else instead. Constant references to the end of Casablanca echo their plight as if Maiko (Yuina Kuroshima / Hana Kino) married Sasaki (Ayumu Nakajima / Hiroshi Tachi) for the good of the revolution though she really loved Michael who unlike Rick just walked out on it because in the end he wasn’t brave enough to risk the consequences of its success or failure. 

The world building may not always be consistent and the rules of this universe appear unclear. It seems that in general the ghosts don’t linger long. Even the heavenly liaison Tanaka (Tetsushi Tanaka) appears to have been dead not longer than 40 years with Michael seemingly the only other long-stayer with the others’ deaths fairly recent. In general they are only really waiting for themselves or others, wanting to make sure that their loved ones will be alright in their absence even though there’s nothing more they can do for them now other than observe. Though they can walk through this world and interact with physical objects, their presence is otherwise invisible unless the person they wish to contact happens to be in an altered state. To this extent, the resolution may seem like a bit of a cop-out but does lend an additional poignancy and imply that these lessons learned in limbo can still be taken into the mortal realm creating additional empathy and solidarity among the living so that they may be able to live their lives freely and fully perhaps not entirely without regrets but at least with fewer of those that would prevent them from moving on when their time comes. But even if they find themselves trapped in limbo, they’ll hopefully find others like themselves and a gentle sense of hopefulness about what’s to come even as they prepare to leave this world.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Little Girl’s Dream (夢は牛のお医者さん, Yoshiaki Tokita, 2014)

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The Japanese title of Yoshiaki Tokita’s observational documentary A Little Girl’s Dream (夢は牛のお医者さん, Yume wa Ushi no Oisha-san) is “I Want to be a Cow Doctor”. Following his heroine over a period of 25 years, Tokita attempts to tackle such varied themes as rural depopulation, the difficulties faced by those working in the agricultural industry in the late 20th century, and the changing ways of life in the countryside while essentially telling an inspirational story about a little girl who managed to achieve her childhood dream through hard work and perseverance and is now living a happy and successful life. 

As might be imagined, these competing themes produce a tension in Tokita’s filmmaking, not least among them the paradox in that by becoming a “cow doctor” Tomomi will necessarily become complicit with an industrial system in which it can never be forgotten that these are “economic animals”. Tokita opens the film with scenes from 1987 when he first began the documentary while filming a piece for NHK about a rural school which took on three calves as “new students” because there were no pupils admitted that year and therefore no graduation ceremony. These are all rural children and perhaps they are under fewer illusions about where their meat comes from, but it can’t be denied that raising an animal that will later be sold is emotionally difficult even for adults let alone nine-year-old children. 

Consequently many of them cry during the “graduation ceremony” they hold shortly before the cows are to go to auction (we later find out they were all bought by the same local dairy farmer who agreed to the children’s request they be kept together like siblings). Having become quite attached to them, Tomomi determined to become a vet after noticing many of the cows suffered from health problems. She adopts a “pet” cow at home, along with various other animals including a rabbit, though her family also raises cattle and it isn’t clear what actually happened to the calf in the long term. 

The documentary only briefly touches on the difficulties of rural living on remarking that the family, who were primarily rice farmers, began raising cows as a means of supporting themselves through the winter so that Tomomi’s father would not have to leave the village to look for other work as many of the other farmers are forced to do leaving their wives and children behind. It also only briefly touches on the problems of rural depopulation in referencing the small number of pupils in the school which eventually closed a short time after Tomomi graduated while she had to leave home at 15 and live in a dorm to attend high school because there was no local access to continuing education. By the time the documentary concludes, there are only 20 houses still occupied in her home village, her parents’ among them. 

Meanwhile, Tomomi’s father remarks on the change in his business circumstances following international trade deals which have made it more difficult for local farmers to compete. Despite the compassion that gave birth to Tomomi’s dream, it is impossible to escape the reality that these are “economic animals” and that there is a monetary value placed on their lives. She has to make life or death decisions based on cost effectiveness rather than what is kindest and inform the farmer when the treatment costs would exceed the amount they could expect to earn from the animal in the future whether in terms of meat, births, or milk. Tomomi’s father had originally objected to her desire to become a vet in part because of the physical demands of dealing with large animals but also the emotional in an uncertainty that a woman will be able to set compassion aside in the course of her work. 

There is then a minor irony, in that Tomomi achieves her dream of becoming a cow doctor but does so by switching focus in deriving the pride she feels in her work from her ability to assist farmers and their continuing faith in her. The passage of time is evident in Tokita’s changing media from the home video-style VHS of 1987 to a more commercial widescreen in the closing stretches, yet his scattershot capture of the key moments in Tomomi’s path towards fulfilling her childhood dream occasionally robs them of their power while he remains otherwise torn between his inspirational tale and the grimness that sometimes lies behind it.

Ballerina (발레리나, Lee Chung-hyun, 2023)

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“You’ve blown things way out of proportion,” according to a man who still doesn’t think he’s done anything to deserve dying for. But as his boss told him, though they may exploit women, sell drugs, and kill people, they have rules. Lee Chung-hyun’s pulpy action thriller Ballerina (발레리나) sees a former bodyguard go after the gangster who drugged and raped her friend with the consequence that she later took her own life.

In recent years there have been a series of real life scandals involving women being drugged in nightclubs and sexually assaulted with videos either uploaded to the internet or used as leverage for blackmail often to force women to participate in sex work. Ballerina Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), seemingly the only friend of bodyguard Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), was raped by drug dealer Choi (Kim Ji-hoon) and thereafter quite literally robbed of the ability to dance. Preoccupied with her trauma, she missteps and injures herself ruining her dance career and leaving her with nothing. There is something quite poignant in the fact Choi sells the drugs in the small, fish-shaped bottles that usually house soy sauce in pre-packed sushi given that Min-hee later says that she wants to come back as a fish in her next life and live in the ultimate freedom of the sea. Dance to her seemed to be a means of finding a similar kind of free-floating freedom, but the trauma of Choi’s assault has taken that from her.

Meanwhile, the loss of Min-hee has robbed Ok-ju of something similar. On first re-connecting with her former high school friend, Ok-ju says she worked as some kind of corporate bodyguard but the organisation is clearly larger than that and involved with some additionally shady stuff that suggests her job may actually have involved some sort of spy and assassin work. In any case, it had left her feeling empty as if she were slowly dying inside. Only on meeting Min-hee does she finally start to feel alive again and has apparently left the organisation she was working for in order to live a more fulfilling life though she may not actually have achieved that just yet. There is nothing really to suggest there is anything more between the two women than friendship, though the intensity of Ok-ju’s feelings suggests there might have been.

Even so, there’s more to Ok-ju’s mission than simple revenge as she finds herself taking down the entire organisation in order to make her way towards Choi. She’s aided by another young woman dressed as a high school student (Shin Se-hwi) who looks to her for salvation, explaining that she has a plan, she’s just been waiting for someone like Ok-ju to show up and help her while the former handler Ok-ju turns to in search of support is also a woman making her mission one of female solidarity against ingrained societal misogyny. “You thought we were easy prey,” Ok-ju challenges Choi making it clear that he made a huge mistake though he continues to taunt her about Min-hee and deflect his responsibility insisting that he hasn’t done anything to warrant this kind of treatment because the abuse and trafficking of women is not something he regards as a big deal.

Ok-ju and the girl obviously feel differently. There’s something very satisfying about the way Ok-ju methodically cuts through a host of bad guys without granting them any kind of authority over her. The action sequences are often urgent and frenetic while showcasing Ok-ju’s skills and the lack of them in the male henchmen, but there’s also a fair bit of humour such as her using tins of pineapple to block knife attacks in the convenience store opener. The film indeed has its share of quirkiness such as the geriatric couple who arrive to supply Ok-ju with weapons but mainly have buckets full of revolvers that look like something out of the wild west before grabbing a flamethrower from the back, while the aesthetic also has a stylish retro feel with its purple and yellow colour palette. Pulpy in the extreme, the film’s stripped-back quality provides little background information and keeps dialogue to a minimum but more than makes up for it in its visual language and often beautiful cinematography.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Muse Never Drowns (ミューズは溺れない, Nozomi Asao, 2022)

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A teenage girl flounders amid a series of changes in her life while questioning her future and identity in Nozomi Asao’s empathetic coming-of-age film, A Muse Never Drowns (ミューズは溺れない, Muse wa Oborenai). Saku (Miku Uehara) is however drowning, a fact brought home to her by the relentlessly aloof Saibara (Mimori Wakasugi) who captures a sense of her panic and despair in a painting of her falling into the local harbour. Yet through their rather tumultuous friendship the pair eventually discover that they aren’t so different after all.

Saibara’s perfectly executed painting destabilises Saku on more than only level, firstly in her discomfort in having been seen and secondly in the insecurity it causes her in her own talent as an artist. Saku had wanted to go to art college, but a teacher harshly corrects her drawing style as if trying to push her towards a more authentic form of expression that’s less worried about getting it right than capturing a sense of what she sees and feels. Lacking confidence that she’ll get in, Saku is thinking about quitting the club in embarrassment but is persuaded to try making something else for the cultural festival while simultaneously receiving an unexpected entreaty from Saibara who wants her to pose for her next painting.

Most of the other students seem to resent Saibara for what they see as her superiority complex, believing she is aloof because she thinks she’s better than them. Because of her blunt manner, Saku too had thought her to be ultra confident and is surprised to realise that Saibara too is filled with doubts and anxieties even if she makes a point of pushing through them. Echoing her teacher’s words, Saibara admits that the lines don’t always come out the way she wants them either but all she can do is try to connect the dots. The reason for her aloofness is a vicious circle of deep-seated loneliness that convinces her she will ultimately be rejected, mirroring Saku’s conviction that she is a “boring” person, and therefore it is easier to remain alone from the start. 

Part of Saibara’s self-rejection is borne of internalised homophobia uncertain if others will accept her sexuality while harbouring a crush on Saku she doesn’t know how to articulate other than through her art while Saku too struggles with her feelings and is confused by the attention she receives from Saibara. Saku’s feelings of insecurity are informed by a sense of embarrassment that she has never experienced a romantic crush like her friend Emi (Kokoro Morita) who likes baseball player Endo despite knowing that likes he Saku, though Emi has also picked up on the way she looks at Saibara and is drawing conclusions about her lack interest in boys. Emi tells her that she accepts her whatever her sexuality is, but is hurt and confused when Saku remains silent and declines the opportunity to open up to her though perhaps partly because she does not really know the answer herself. 

Other than Saibara, Saku is the only one who hasn’t yet returned her careers survey still uncertain of the future direction of her life. Her father has recently remarried and he and her step mother Satomi (So Hirosawa) are expecting a baby all of which has Saku feeling somewhat adrift, displaced within her family and soon to lose her home which has been bought out for a new development project meaning they’ll soon be moving to a new house shorn of the memories of her birth mother and primed for her father’s new start. 

Yet through all her experiences, slowly bonding with Saibara and repairing her friendship with Emi, Saku begins to discover a path towards a more authentic art born of the desire to take things apart and put them back together again while quite literally feeling her way forward with her hands. Coming to terms with her new family circumstances, she builds herself a boat and is no longer drowning but drawing strength from her new found friendships with a renowned sense of possibility for the future while her friends do much the same in the knowledge that they are all scared and uncertain but doing their best to join the dots towards a happier future. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wonderwall: The Movie (ワンダーウォール 劇場版, Yuki Maeda, 2020)

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It’s funny, in a way, that young people are often the ones fighting to preserve the old while those in middle-age and beyond are largely keen to bulldoze the past for future gain. Yuki Maeda’s campus drama Wonderwall (ワンダーウォール 劇場版, Wonderwall: Gekijoban) sees a collection of students take a stand against the bureaucratic capitalism of their university in their attempt to save a much loved dorm but largely finding their efforts frustrated by an implacable hierarchy. 

The Konoe Dorm at Kyoto University was built in 1913, which is to say the beginning of the Taisho era in which arts and culture flourished in a rapidly modernising and international nation. As one of the students tells us, Konoe is run not by the faculty but the students themselves and operates like a commune in which there is no hierarchy, all are equal and equally responsible. They have regular “meetings” about various domestic problems such as refuse collection which can go on for hours because all decisions must be unanimous while they also operate gender neutral bathrooms so that everyone really can be equal and free to be themselves. It’s impossible not to see the university’s attempts to destroy it as an attempt on the students’ autonomy and an attempt to impose order on their bohemian existence. 

At more than one point, a student remembers walking past the alley that leads to the dorm in the dark and seeing the light glowing from its doors as if beckoning them in. In this space, the students inherit what has been passed down to them while teaching each other and the next generation what they know including the negotiation skills they’ve been using to argue their case in their ongoing battle with the faculty. The film’s title refers to a plastic screen that was placed in the student affairs office separating the students from the staff so that they could no longer meet them on their own terms. The narrator likens the wall to the one that fell in Berlin in 1989 and laments that back then we knocked walls down but now we only throw them up. The students argue that the dorm is well built and of architectural interest while it would otherwise be possible to renovate and bring it up to current earthquake codes if only the university would agree. Tragically, a sympathetic teacher who is forced to agree with them is then compelled to reverse his decision and shockingly dies not long after presumably from the stress of the situation along with his own inner conflict regarding the treatment of the students. 

Mifune (Satoshi Nakazaki), the leader of the protests, eventually becomes disheartened. They managed to oust the old battleaxe from the front desk and assumed they could take a step forward to the next boss, but she was merely replaced and by a pretty young woman to boot leaving the guys feeling like they’ll never win. It transpires that the university wants the land the dorm sits on to build a high rise along with additional medical and engineering labs as these are the subjects that bring in funding which is otherwise thin on the ground from the current government. Yet as a visitor says, if prosperity made you happy there wouldn’t be so many young people who feel they have no option other than to take their own lives. If so many people are fighting for its survival, the dorm must have something essential for human happiness. Mifune comes to describe his feeling for the building as something like love in the warmth with which it inspires him.

Quite poignantly, Maeda ends on a series of title cards revealing that the university now refuses to speak to the student body at all and has in fact silenced them, even going so far as to sue 15 tenants who refused the order to move out. Another of the students wonders if the dorm was a victim of its own success, that their “utopian” thinking left them unable to unite for a common goal and perhaps it would have been better if they’d turned to the dark side and gone in all guns blazing in a show of violent defiance. The action shifts to a pair of musical set pieces in which the students and well-wishers play the “Wonderwall” song as a makeshift orchestra breathing life into the rapidly dilapidating building’s walls while continuing to fight for the survival not only of the Konoe Dorm but everything it represents in the freedom and community the students fear will soon disappear from the their lives. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)