Tag: 2020s

The Colors Within (きみの色, Naoko Yamada, 2024)

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“If I could see my own colour, what kind of colour would it be?” the heroine of Naoko Yamada’s The Colors Within (きみの色, Kimi no Iro) asks herself. Yet there’s a curious pun in the film’s Japanese title in that the word “kimi” simply means “you” but it’s also the name of another girl by whom Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa) is captivated though she doesn’t quite have the ability to articulate her feelings beyond the fact she feels “all sparkly inside”. 

In any case, Totsuko has the ability to see people as colours but largely keeps it to herself in fear that people will think she’s “weird”. Totsuko does indeed appear to be slightly otherworldly, though no one really seems to reject her for her ethereality save perhaps one classmate who describes her as that girl who sits in the chapel on her own all the time. What she’s mostly doing in there is reciting the serenity prayer to find “peace of mind,” and talking to the cool nun at her Catholic boarding school, Sister Hiyoko (Yui Aragaki), who tries probe gently into whatever it is that’s bothering Totsuko but equally avoiding pressuring her reveal anything before she’s ready. Then again, Totsuko may not quite know what it is that’s making her feel uneasy even if she remains upbeat and cheerful with a childlike sense of fun and innocence.

This quality of joyfulness is directly contrasted with the intense melancholy of Kimi (Akari Takaishi) with whom Totsuko becomes fascinated after catching sight of her “beautiful” and “clear” colours. When Kimi disappears from the school it’s rumoured she talked back to a teacher or that they found out she had a boyfriend, but it seems a Catholic education just isn’t a good fit for Kimi so she decided to drop out. Like Totsuko, Kimi has a secret but hers is that she can’t bring herself to tell her grandmother, who attended the same school and is over the moon about her going there, that it isn’t working out for her. What with it being a Catholic school, there’s also the implication that Kimi and also Totsuko may be struggling to define themselves within a repressive environment and reconcile their differences in the intense fear of not only being rejected by their community but damned to hell. 

After Totsuko checks every bookshop in town because someone said they saw Kimi working in one, she accidentally starts a band with her and a boy who just happened to wander in, Rui (Taisei Kido). Rui also has a secret which is his love of music which he fears conflicts with his responsibility of taking over the family medical practice. He isn’t exactly sure he wants this future that’s been forced on him and prevents him from following his dreams. In fact, none of the teens really wants the kind of life their parents wanted for them but they aren’t yet certain of the kinds of lives they do want or really who they are which is why Totsuko is still unable to see her own colour despite clearly discerning everyone else’s.

Through making music together, they discover new ways of expressing themselves and with it growing self-acceptance that allows them to be honest with themselves and others about who they are and what they want. Music in itself becomes an act of holy communion with the universe, a pure communication of one soul to another much like Totsuko’s synaesthetic ability to see people as colours. Even Sister Hiyoko insists that any song that is about goodness, beauty, truth or indeed suffering is itself a hymn and in the end Totsuko’s song is about all those things. Her joy, Kimi’s sadness, and Rui’s confusion coming together in a harmonised symphony as a consequence of “sharing secrets and feelings of love”. This sense of delicacy extends to the animation itself which has a watery, ethereal quality. Produced by Science Saru, this is the first of Yamada’s films not based on existing material and is underpinned by a tremendous empathy for its anxious adolescents as well as their uncertain adults along with a true sense of wonder for a world of colour and light hidden from most but visible to the ever cheerful Totsuko content to dance through life for the pure joy of it even if as she says she wasn’t very good.

The Colors Within screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and is released in UK cinemas on 31st January courtesy of All the Anime.

Trailer (Japanese with English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 “THE COLORS WITHIN” FILM PARTNERS

Born to Fly (长空之王, Liu Xiaoshi, 2023)

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Elite test pilots set out to reclaim Chinese “dignity and security” through the development of a next generation stealth fighter in Liu Xiaoshi’s action drama, Born to Fly (长空之王, Chángkōng zhī Wáng). Clearly a riposte to Top Gun: Maverick (which was not approved for release in Mainland China), the film was originally scheduled as a National Day release and is another in a long line of “main melody” movies paying tribute to particular areas of military and civil service as evidenced by the use of actual voice recordings from downed pilots at the film’s conclusion and a lengthy pause on an aerial shot of the airmen’s cemetery praising those who gave their lives for the country. 

The main thrust is however that China is ready to defend itself. The film ends with a show of force much like that at the end of Operation Red Sea, though curiously for a propaganda film the implication is very much that China is lagging behind in terms of military technology and as the film begins lacks the necessary capability to hold its own against foreign aggression. The planes that stray into its airspace buzzing an oil rig and causing havoc with a sonic boom are never directly named as American but their pilots speak US-accented English while sticking one finger up and declaring “we can come and go wherever we want”.

To that extent, the central battle is as much between Western individualism and the collective spirit as it is a race for hegemony over the skies. Hot shot pilot Lei Yu (Wang Yibo) originally turns down the opportunity to join the elite test pilot squad because he wants to fight on the frontline and get personal revenge against the enemy planes. He also has a grudge against arch rival Deng Fang (Yu Shi) because he did not salute him after he beat him to a coveted Golden Helmet award and then accused him of cheating. What they have to set aside is, in contrast to the American Top Gun, the notion of “being the best” or engaging in an egoistic individual struggle to be named a winner. Instead, they must learn to work together for the common good so that China may be declared the winner as the planes they’ve risked their lives to perfect are in the best shape to protect frontline pilots and allow them to safeguard the Chinese people. 

Meanwhile, like other recent similarly themed main melody movies, the film is keen to sell the message that China stands alone and has been unfairly shunned by the international community. The leaders of the test pilot programme constantly complain that Western powers have refused to share technology with them or have attempted to limit their ability to innovate through embargoes and blackouts. They insist that China will have to create its own discoveries, but hint at an under-confidence in their ability to do so which is in some ways at odds with the usual propaganda messaging even if it spurs a sense of collective urgency that all hands are needed on deck to solve this particular problem before it’s too late. 

Lei’s unsupportive father even tells him point blank that he does not believe China can develop a stealth fighter and he is risking his life for nothing. Tellingly, Lei’s father had wanted to send him abroad and resents his decision to join the military. In order to serve his country, Lei must break a taboo by defying his father, while it’s later revealed that Deng’s father was a fighter pilot who was killed on the frontlines after winning an award while training in Russia. In another moment of surprising messaging, Deng wonders if his father might have survived if he’d been given a better plane to fly which is why he’s committed to the test pilot programme and the reason he’s eventually able to give up his ego and agree to assist Lei in testing his bright new idea for the stealth fighter rather than chasing glory for himself as the lead pilot. 

All of that aside, Lei is allowed the mild distraction of an extremely subtle romance with an airforce doctor played by Zhou Dongyu in a “special appearance” who decides to give up her transfer back to the south to commit herself to the test pilot programme after being touched by Lei’s grumpy heroism. In any case, the message is very much about pushing the limits as far as they will go while striving together for the common good. Jingoistic it may be but Liu manages to sell the aerial spectacle and sense of danger as his elite pilots risk all in the name of patriotism.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Sister Sister 2 (Chị Chị Em Em 2, Vũ Ngọc Đãng, 2023)

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An ambitious young woman determined to escape the world of sex work resorts to a series of schemes to get close to the number one beauty in 1930s Saigon in Vũ Ngọc Đãng’s lighthearted melodrama Sister Sister 2 (Chị Chị Em Em 2). A thematic sequel to 2019’s Sister Sister, the film once again sees two women face off against each other knowing that only one can be the greatest beauty in the city while otherwise evoking a subtle message of female empowerment. 

Indeed as great beauty Ba Tra (Minh Hằng) points out, ordinary women can only be chosen by men while the extraordinary choose men for themselves. This is something in which Ba Tra has excelled, weaponising her beauty and sex appeal to capture the hearts of well to do bachelors who spontaneously offer her expensive gifts for which she need do nothing in return save continue to exist. Nhi (Ngọc Trinh), the top sex worker at a nearby brothel, wonders if Ba Tra is so different from herself only to be told by a gaggle of local women in thrall to her star image that Ba Tra’s situation is entirely different because of the power she wields over men by, essentially, refusing to give them what they want while Nhi crudely exchanges it for money and is largely at the mercy of those who will pay. 

The issue is in one sense control, Ba Tra seemingly possessing it fully and Nhi not at all. She is still indentured to the brothel having sold herself into sex work to pay for her mother’s medical treatment only for her mother to drop dead of shock as soon as she found out. But Ba Tra also has maternal troubles of her own in her “crazy gambler” mother who is forever emotionally blackmailing her for more money while caring nothing for her feelings. To be the first beauty is to make friends with loneliness, Ba Tra warns and there is a kind of sadness in her solitude as a towering image of beauty not quite allowed to be a whole person or display much of an interior life lest the spell be broken. There is then something quite poignant in the genuine connection that arises between the two sisters who after all have similar goals and outlooks even if it’s destined to end in heartbreak when Ba Tra inevitably realises she’s been schemed by the manipulative Nhi. 

Director Vũ Ngọc Đãng flirts with homoeroticism in the closeness of the two women as they dance together perfecting their art but does so mainly for titillation rather than romance, also resorting to family gratuitous nudity even if it does otherwise hint at Nhi’s “naked” ambition to raise herself from the lowest layer of the society to the highest or at least the highest that may be claimed by a woman in this period. The film at once hints at the oppressive nature of the 1930s society in which the only power a woman can achieve is that exercised through her body and then undercuts any sense of a feminist message with its contradictory conclusion that implies it is impossible for Nhi to escape her past and that she will always be a sex worker no matter what else she becomes. 

Nevertheless, Nhi does demonstrate her right to the top spot through her ability to outsmart Ba Tra who otherwise has savvily figured out how to use the society to her advantage through careful media management to make herself a star. As she says, Ba Tra only thinks about the next move, but Nhi has already plotted her trajectory towards the top and thought of every eventuality. Even so, Nhi is expected to pay for her “mad ambition”, putting her back in her place again and slapping down her rebellion against the social order. With mild comic undertones in all Nhi’s crazy plans which include faking her own death and almost killing Ba Tra so she can dramatically save her, Sister Sister 2 isn’t really setting out to explore the lives of women in the 1930s so much as set two against each other in a battle of the beauties but is surprisingly entertaining even in its wilful silliness. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Takahiro Miki, 2024)

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Takahiro Miki has made a name for himself as a purveyor of sad romances. Often his protagonists are divided by conflicting timelines, social taboos, or some other fantastical circumstance, though Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Yomei Ichinen no Boku ga, Yomei Hantoshi no Kimi to Deatta Hanashi) quite clearly harks back to the jun-ai or “pure love” boom in its focus on young love and terminal illness. Based on the novel by Ao Morita, the film nevertheless succumbs to some of genres most problematic tendencies as the heroine essentially becomes little more than a means for the hero’s path towards finding purpose in life.

17-year-old Akito (Ren Nagase) is told that he has a tumour on his heart and only a year at most to live. Though he begins to feel as if his life is pointless, he finds new strength after running into Haruna (Natsuki Deguchi) who has only six months yet to him seems full of life. Later, Haruna says he was actually wrong and she felt completely hopeless too so actually she really wanted to die right away rather than pointlessly hang round for another six months with nothing to do and no one to talk to. But in any case, Akito decides that he’s going to make his remaining life’s purpose making Haruna happy which admittedly he does actually do by visiting her every day and bringing flowers once a week.

But outside of that, we never really hear that much from Haruna other than when she’s telling Akito something inspirational and he seems to more or less fill in the blanks on his own. Thus he makes what could have been a fairly rash and disastrous decision to bring a former friend, Ayaka (Mayuu Yokota), with whom Haruna had fallen out after the middle-school graduation ceremony that she was unable to go to because of her illness. Luckily he had correctly deduced that Haruna pushed her friend away because she thought their friendship was holding her back and Ayaka should be free to embrace her high school life making new friends who can do all the regular teenage things like going to karaoke or hanging out at the mall. Akito is doing something similar by not telling his other friends that he’s ill while also keeping it from Haruna in the hope that they can just be normal teens without the baggage of their illnesses. 

The film never shies away from the isolating qualities of what it’s like to live with a serious health condition. Both teens just want to be treated normally while others often pull away from them or are overly solicitous after finding out that they’re ill but at the same time, it’s all life lessons for Akito rather a genuine expression of Haruna’s feelings. We only experience them as he experiences them and so really she’s denied any opportunity to express herself authentically. Rather tritely, it’s she who teaches Akito how to live again in urging him that he should hang in there and continue to pursue his artistic dreams on behalf of them both. Meanwhile, she encourages him to pursue a romantic relationship with Ayaka, in that way ensuring that neither of them will be lonely when she’s gone and pushing them towards enjoying life to its fullest.

Nevertheless, due to its unbalanced quality and general earnestness the film never really achieves the kind of emotional impact that it’s aiming for nor the sense of poignancy familiar from Miki’s other work. Perhaps taking its cues from similarly themed television drama, the production values are on the lower side and Miki’s visual flair is largely absent though this perhaps helps to express a sense of hopelessness only broken by beautiful colours of Haruna’s artwork. Haruna had used drawing as means of escaping from the reality of her condition, but in the end even this becomes about Akito with her mother declaring that in the end she drew for him rather than for herself. Even so, there is something uplifting in Akito’s rediscovery of art as a purpose for life that convinces him that his remaining time isn’t meaningless while also allowing him to discover the desire to live even if his time is running out.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Legend (传说, Stanley Tong, 2024)

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The funny thing about the strangely generic title of Stanley Tong’s latest Jackie Chan vehicle A Legend (传说, chuánshuō) is that it’s at least partly in reference to its now ageing star rather than the tragic love story at the film’s centre which at least tries to echo the epic romances of historical fiction. That might in part explain the rather dubious decision to use AI de-aging technology to cast Chan as the tragic lover in addition to his role as a veteran archeologist researching the gravesite of a Han general’s horse. 

While de-aging Chan robs an age-appropriate actor of the opportunity, it’s equally true that it adds another note of uncanniness to the historical scenes contributing to their rather lifeless quality and otherwise becoming a frustrating distraction given that more often than not the actor’s face simply appears odd and doesn’t particularly look like a young Chan anyway any more than casting a younger actor with a physical resemblance might have done. In any case, despite the frequent discussions of history among Chan’s team, the historical scenes have a fantastical quality that’s much more like contemporary video games than classic wuxia. This may be deliberate given that a new addition to Professor Fang’s team is a video game developer who wants to create a game set in this era and is keen to get Fang on board as a consultant, though the aesthetic mostly detracts from the setting in the jarring use of CGI. Heroine Mengyun (Gülnezer Bextiyar) performs what is intended to be an impressive Hun sword dance, but as the sword is CGI it has no sense of skill or danger. It aligns clumsily with her physical movements like that in a video game cutscene and has a disturbingly weightless quality. The same phenomenon also mars the film’s action scenes which sometimes have an odd quality as if CGI has also been used to impose an actor’s face on that of a stunt double or somehow alter their movements. 

Aside from that, there is some nice cinematography that captures the majesty of the Chinese landscape though even this is sometimes drowned out by the syrupy score which is again quite reminiscent of a video game. Supposedly a spiritual sequel to The Myth and Kung Fu Yoga, the central conceit of the film is that through a jade pendant found in the grave, Fang and his assistants become part of a collective dream which is a flashback to the distant past while it later transpires that they’re being manipulated by a malevolent force in the present who wants to rob China of its historical treasures by finding a secret sanctuary built by the Huns to store the gold statues they stole from the Hans to use as objects of worship. Accordingly, there’s some pointed commentary about how it’s illegal to steal or traffic historical artefacts which should be protected as symbols of China’s essential culture. It’s no coincidence that the villains have Western accents and begin speaking to each other in English as they wilfully blow up a newly discovered historical site.

The modern scenes do, however, have an awkward kind of comedy going on in the form of in jokes between Fang’s team such as the non-love story between assistants Xinran (Xiao Ran Peng) and the clueless Wang Jing (Lay Zhang Yixing) who completely misses all of her hints and seems to be unaware of the subtext of phrases such as “come in for coffee” or that “incredibly expensive bracelet would really suit me.” Chan also gets rescued from drowning by a family inexplicably ice fishing in this really remote place who take quite a long time to realise he’s not some kind of weird talking fish. Though Chan does get his own action sequence at the film’s conclusion, it’s fairly incongruous for a professor of archeology to possess these kinds of skills which are otherwise out of keeping with the fatherly, professorial character Chan plays up to that point even if there is a distinct hint of Indiana Jones in the instance that all of this should be a museum. The little boy who found the pendant even gets a pat on the head for reporting it to the authorities rather than trying to sell it or keep it for himself. Nevertheless, it speaks of something that the digressions into historical legend are often more interesting than the retelling of the legend itself which never really takes flight despite the flying arrows and charging horses of world in which the heroes can only dream of the supposedly peaceful and harmonious society that exists far in the future.

A Legend is released in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD 21st January courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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)