Tag: 2020s

Remember (리멤버, Lee Il-hyung, 2022)

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An elderly man suffering with a brain tumour and advanced dementia is determined to expose the abuses of the colonial past all too easily forgotten by the contemporary society in Lee Il-hyung’s remake of the 2015 Atom Egoyan film of the same name, Remember (리멤버). The film’s title works on multiple levels, firstly in the mind of the hero who both wants to remember and doesn’t as he feels his mind slipping away, and then in the minds of the men he seeks asking them both to remember the man who’s come calling with vengeance on his mind and who it is they really are. 

As in many other similarly themed films of recent times, Pli-ju’s (Lee Sung-min) main problem is that those who chose to collaborate with the Japanese during the colonial era and directly contributed to the deaths of all his family members have largely gone on to extremely successful careers at the heart of the establishment. Ironically enough, right-wing Korean nationalist ideology is largely pro-Japan and the legacy of Japanese militarism was a key component in the post-war military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-Hwan. To that extent, Pil-ju is the inspector that calls visiting each of the men who caused the deaths of his father, brother, and sister in turn while exposing a series of colonial abuses. One of the men he visits is a working professor who teaches that Japanese colonial rule was actually beneficial in that it helped “modernise” the society though building infrastructure such as roads and railways without really considering that they were largely built with forced labour. 

This casual disregard for human life has continued into the present day with the general Pil-ju targets, Chi-deok (Park Geun-hyung), also the head of the company, in which the Japanese effectively have a controlling share, responsible for a workplace accident that injured the father of Pil-ju’s getaway driver In-gyu (Nam Joo-hyuk) and refused to compensate him. Chi-deok, a hero of the Korean War, even makes a rousing speech instructing the audience that they must remember those who fell in defence of democracy which is a little rich seeing as his values are anything but democratic. Chi-deok also tries to justify himself to the police officer investigating the murder of the first man Pil-ju knocked off that those days were just about survival and that “Korea” no longer existed so all he could do to save it was to become Japanese. But like many of the other men, such as the professor who tricked Pil-ju’s brother into forced labour in a mine where he eventually died, he did so for personal advancement wilfully selling out his fellow countrymen throwing those who refused to change their names or continued to speak Korean in jail while sending off their sisters to become comfort women for the Japanese army. 

The first man that Pil-ju killed tortured his father to death on a trumped up charge so he could steal his land. It’s not even ideology, it’s just greed and oppression. Everyone keeps telling him that no one cares about this kind of thing anymore, but conservative politicians nevertheless continue to weaponise it suggesting that anything is permissible in the battle against communism while imperialism is therefore a lesser evil. Pil-ju’s dementia is a metaphor for the literal erasure of history and the simple act of forgetting, the process by which many of these men have been able to rewrite their pasts to justify their actions. Yet it’s also true that there are things Pil-ju too does not want to remember and actively denies until finally forced to reckon with himself, with his complicity, guilt, and regret that he was as Chi-deok puts it not all that different as a man who survived those times when so many did not. Shot through with a gentle humour, Lee’s admittedly unsubtle drama (a Japanese soldier named Tojo literally says he’s going end the pacifist constitution so Japan can start wars whenever it feels like it) is also a gentle tale of intergenerational bonding as Pil-ju comes to develop a paternal affection for his workplace buddy In-gyu that suggests the past is only exorcised when spoken and passed down to new generations free of justifications or omissions and most importantly remembered as it was by those who really lived it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Back To That Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Seira Maeda, 2021)

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A young woman facing a life crisis is forced to reevaluate her relationships with art, friends, and family after learning that her estranged younger sister has suddenly passed away in Seira Maeda’s indie drama, Back to that Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Maku ga Oritara Aimasho). Facing a patriarchal society, the young women at the film’s centre wonder if it’s better to chase your dreams even if they won’t come true or contend with the unfair demands of contemporary salaryman culture in the hope of achieving conventional success and a comfortable life. 

At around thirty, Manami (Rena Matsui) is beginning to lose patience with herself feeling that she’s achieved little in her career as a theatre director in the last 10 years while continuing to work part time at her mother’s hair salon. Her younger sister, Nao (Miwako Kakei), left abruptly for the city some time previously and the pair have hardly spoken since partly as we discover because of a high school falling out that continues to play on Masami’s mind in undermining her sense of confidence in her art. 

The two women have in many ways chosen different paths, Nao striking out by heading to the city and getting a regular office job and Manami staying at home trying to make it work in theatre but finding herself treading water. On the night that Nao dies, the sisters mirror each other each black out drunk collapsed in the street but only one of them is alone which in the end perhaps makes all the difference. Out to dinner with members of her theatre troupe celebrating an engagement, Manami has far too much to drink, much more than than anyone else or than is really appropriate becoming embarrassing in her belligerence as she lays into even her closest friends while others wonder why they bother with the troupe at all now that most of them are ageing out of their carefree days, have full-time paying jobs and growing familial responsibilities to take of. 

Nao, meanwhile as we discover, was pressured into drinking more than was wise by her boss at a semi-compulsory work do, an all too common form of power play in the contemporary working culture. Carrying her own share of guilt, Manami is alerted to this hidden source of her sister’s suffering by one of Nao’s colleagues, Mihashi (Manami Enosawa), who alone attended the funeral. Facing the same continued harassment, Mihashi is determined to confront her boss with the help of Niiyama (Kenta Kiguchi), an activist working on behalf of employees experiencing workplace bullying, but is later blamed herself with the implication that Nao drank on her behalf while she perhaps should have stayed to make sure she was alright before leaving for the last train. Her colleagues insist that Nao seemed cheerful and engaged with the party, while Manami and her actress friend Sanae (Nanami Hidaka) wonder if she wasn’t just playing the part, that in feeling disconnected from her family she wanted to feel accepted by those around her. 

In an unexpected turn of events, however, Manami decides to not to take Nao’s employer to task or attempt to change a dangerous and outdated workplace culture but to try and make peace with difficult relationship they had through restaging the high school play that set them apart which as it turns out was actually written by Nao but for which Manami had taken credit. Along the way she’s led towards a more commercial path by the duplicitous Niiyama who turns out to be a bit of a sleaze and not much better than those he claimed to be challenging. What she discovers is that restaging Nao’s play may not be the best way to honour her, gradually working through her grief and guilt by writing an original piece inspired by their relationship while reconsidering herself and her life up to that point. Of course, in one sense, she reduces Nao to a plot device in the mere motivation for her own creative rejuvenation while partially letting herself off the hook in discovering a family secret that explains a lot about her difficult relationship with her mother but does at least allow her come to terms with her sister’s death in letting her burn out bright just as in the alternate ending she’d crafted for Anna Karenina as a woman driven to extremes by the strictures of her society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館, Hiroshi Okuhara, 2021)

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You can check out any time you like, but you can never really leave the titular Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館) at the centre of centre of Hiroshi Okuhara’s Taiwan-set erotic mystery drama adapted from the novel by Yoko Ogawa. At least, so it seems to be for heroine Mari (Lucia), a youngish woman stultified by a dull existence and controlling, possessive mother while haunted by the memory of her late father murdered when she was still a child. The goddess Iris, so we’re told, could fly to any place she wanted on her rainbow wings as perhaps does Mari, in a sense, in her circular, sado-masochistic, and largely epistolary romance with a middle-aged Japanese translator of Russian literature (Masatoshi Nagase). 

On an otherwise dull if stormy night, Mari is alerted by the sound of a woman screaming while manning the front desk. On investigation she finds an older gentleman violently beating a sex worker who manages to escape down the stairs while he calmly walks his way out. Despite this violent, dangerous episode Mari is intrigued rather than frightened, handed a crumpled note and drawn to the malevolent presence. Spotting him in the town she follows him to the beach where he explains he lives on a near by island across a makeshift bridge cut off at high tide which he likens to that of Iris’ rainbow connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. 

Mari may in a sense be chasing death in the figure of the middle-aged man who also obviously recalls the image of her absent father, she taking him on a kind of date to ice cream (which he does not appear to enjoy) by the sea as her father had done when she was a child. Yet the relationship that develops between them is erotic rather than romantic, Mari discovering a sense of empowerment in submission to the older man’s sexualised violence as he strips and binds her, tearing her clothes while watching himself in the mirror.

The presence of mirrors is central to their relationship, or perhaps to Mari’s fantasy as she reflects on the multiplicities of self it offers her along with a sense of endlessness as if she and the middle-aged man had begun to inhabit a world of two behind the glass. When she questions his true identity he replies only “I am You” which she later returns to him, “You are me”, signalling the selflessness which now exists between them if also leading us to question how much of this is happening merely in Mari’s mind bored behind the counter of the Iris and longing for escape. She borrows the name of an absent childhood friend, “Mary”, for her correspondence with the middle-aged man in order to keep her relationship with him secret from her mother while the main character in his book is also co-incidentally named “Mari” giving her at least three mirrored personas in this already complicated relationship one of which actively controlled by the middle-aged man and another by her mother. 

Meanwhile Mari begins to doubt him, witnessing a display of irrational violence and later hearing that the body of another sex worker has been discovered in the town. He told her he had no family since his wife passed away but turns out to have a mute nephew who later claims to be his stepson said to have lost his tongue to cancer though we later wonder if that is really case. In seducing the nephew/stepson she takes on a more dominant, masculinised role while he is later feminised by the middle-aged man if also becoming an embodiment of the triangular griefs that bind them, the boy for his mother, Mari for her father, and the middle-aged man for the wife is rumoured to have killed. 

Okuhara is not so much interested in solving the literal mystery of the middle-aged man’s potential as a covert serial killer as exposing Mari’s inner psychodrama as she attempts to process the unanswered questions of her father’s death, literally haunted by the image of him wondering whether or not she as loved as a child while straining to break free of her mother’s controlling impulses but otherwise trapped within the oppressive atmosphere of the Hotel Iris. Caught between Taiwan and Japan, Mari occupies a liminal state of constant inertia while spreading her rainbow wings in search of danger and excitement. Shot with a moody ethereality, Okuhara’s poetic psychodrama captures an almost gothic sense of intensity as the heroine investigates the mystery of herself through transgressive relationships with the living and the dead on permanently shifting sands. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Escape (탈주, Lee Jong-pil, 2024)

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Lee Jong-pil’s existential action drama Escape (탈주, Talju) opens with scenes of a man running. He runs his way through the rest of the film, continually on the move and chasing a dream of freedom outside of the oppressive society in which he is otherwise trapped. The man who chases him, meanwhile, is himself running away. His movements are slow, calculated, and cold but also somehow tender and almost it seems an act of self harm. 

The fact that the oppressive regime is North Korea is almost irrelevant and the film is less about Communism than it is lack of autonomy that may be found in any other democratic or developed nation in which people are driven to erase a part of themselves in order to fit in or to prosper amid rigidly defined social codes. Nevertheless, there is a direct criticism of the Democratic People’s Republic in the ironic signage, a car ploughing straight through a sign that reads “for freedom and happiness of people”. But then, even if deserter Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) finds happiness in the South we can’t be sure it’s really any better. The welcome message blasted through loudspeakers over the wall that marks the border doesn’t sound all that different from the propaganda messages on Kyu-nam’s radio, while the deserter’s phone positioned to appeal to men like him appears to be out of order. 

But to Kyu-nam, “the South” is only really an idea and it’s clear he intends to transcend those borders too, venturing on to the wider world and wherever it pleases him to go. What he rails against is fate, that his life is dictated by forces outside of his control or more accurately by Field Officer Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) from State Security who takes him under his wing and tries to make something of him as a loyal soldier of the North. What becomes clear is that Hyun-sang is a man who fears freedom and that the presence of a man like Kyu-nam is a threat to him because he awakens his own deeply buried desire for liberation. 

From the longing looks he directs at a man with whom he studied abroad in Russia we infer that Hyun-sang is gay and the suppression of his authentic self in order to keep himself safe in a repressive culture has made him cruel and vindictive. Unfortunately, this presumably unintentionally plays into a homophobic trope which aligns queerness with sadistic villainy, but does nevertheless lend a kind of poignancy to Hyun-sang’s otherwise vindictive quest to prevent Kyu-nam’s escape precisely because he himself desires to be free but is too afraid to free himself. From a wealthy and prominent family and with an important position within the regime, this system otherwise works out well for Hyun-sang but he is also imprisoned by it and will forever be prevented from becoming his authentic self or gaining what he truly wants so long as he remains within North Korea. 

A homoerotic charge exists between the two men though what Hyun-sang may really be chasing is himself and half-hoping he’ll be caught. Kyu-nam meanwhile has a single-minded desire for autonomy and individuality, to live and die on his own terms rather than live with no right or power to decide his future. There are those who’ve found other ways to reject the system, a group of mostly female nomads seeking a new place to belong after being kicked out of their village but seemingly with no intention of leaving the country, but for Kyu-nam there is no freedom inside the walls and his determination to find it is what makes him so dangerous to Hyun-sang for whom the very idea of freedom is so painful he’s sublimated himself entirely into an oppressive regime.

With pulsing synth scores, Lee keeps the tension high as Kyu-nam runs and runs through minefields and bullets while pursued by the full force of the North Korean army and the steely Hyun-sang who always seems to be one step ahead. His passage takes on an existential quality, risking death rather than continue to live a “meaningless life” in which he has no power to decide his own fate. His escape is finally self-liberation, taking the decision to free himself because no one else is going to, while Hyun-sang remains a prisoner too afraid of freedom to actively pursue it though perhaps tempted by his encounter with Kyun-nam, a man free in his mind if nowhere else.

Escape screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

US trailer (English subtitles)

High Forces (危机航线, Oxide Pang Chun, 2024)

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It’s always a worrying sign when the guy in front of you at check-in has brought a parachute. Shot back in 2021 and finally hitting screens three years later, Oxide Pang’s airborne hijack thriller High Forces (危机航线, wēijī hángxiàn), pits veteran star Andy Lau against a gang of crooks who’ve taken his plane hostage in order to convince the CEO of the airline to reveal the password to his accounts so his wife can send them a large amount of money.

Perhaps surprisingly given recent Chinese cinema’s attitudes to wealth, the film remains uncritical of the existence of a luxury airliner with a top deck hotel complete with duty free. The CEO in fact later becomes a hero, fighting alongside Lau’s Haojun in order to save the lives of the passengers, while it’s revealed that it’s his wife’s family who founded the airline he took over that may have been conducting some very shady business dealings. Nevertheless, it’s the economy class passengers the amoral Mike (Qu Chuxiao) starts bumping off before planning to vacate the plane via parachute along with the pilots leaving it to plunge to the ground.

Yet, the hijacking is also Haojun’s chance for redemption seeing as his estranged wife (Liu Tao) and daughter are coincidentally on the same plane while travelling to seek medical treatment for daughter Xiaojun’s (Zhang Zifeng) eyes. Haojun was driving recklessly and got into an accident after which Xiaojun lost her sight and gained a deep-seated resentment towards her father. This reckless streak is attributed to anger issues stemming from untreated bipolar disorder which Hao now believes he now has under control. Mike is also taking the same medication and the two men are presented as reflections of each other. Haojun’s flashes of rage are expressed through the colour red flooding the screen, while Mike’s greed and envy seem to be reflected in green. Whether this is a helpful framing of bipolar disorder or not is up for debate, but the implication is that through defeating Mike Haojun can overcome himself, triumph over his anger issues, and regain his rightful place as a husband and a father.

Ironically he first tries to do this by using a toy walkie-talkie dropped by a little boy whose father seems to have a lot of issues of his own to communicate with Xiaojun who is trapped in first class with the kidnappers. Using his special forces and security skills, Haojun crawls all over the plane trying to pick the kidnappers off one by one until being left with the core group led by Mike. A slightly bum note is struck when one of the stewardess’ suddenly overcomes her aversion to a sleazy colleague who was harassing her after he takes a bullet on her behalf, but she too rises to the occasion helping Haojun fight back against the kidnappers as do several of the passengers who set on the last of Mike’s men making sure he can’t leave the plane. 

Of course, the film ends with the usual set of title cards explaining that all the wrongdoers were caught and punished while Haojun was rewarded for his heroic actions in saving the lives of the passengers and crew. Nevertheless, in the grand tradition of overblown action dramas it also has its share of silliness such as the obvious set up of one of the stewardesses showing off her new skydiving certification. This particular airline should also probably have another look at its hiring procedures and employee vetting. The real enemy is perhaps corporate corruption and shadiness in business though these leads are never really followed in much more than a cursory fashion with the action remaining mainly on the plane even as Mike seems content to simply shoot people just to make a point. Like The Captain, the film’s conclusion is basically a celebration of the nation’s emergency services who all come together to help the plane land safely through a rather improbable solution to its myriad problems. Nevertheless, for much of its runtime it’s a very effective, if occasionally absurd, action drama in which a lone vigilante takes on a plane full of crooks with sometimes surprising violence while trying to fight his way back to his family and restore his image of himself as father if only in his daughter’s eyes.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)

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The central thesis of Neo Sora’s mildly dystopian drama Happyend is that the real looming earthquake the powers that be are so afraid of is a youth revolution. But the film seems to ask if that’s something that’s really achievable or if idle teenage fantasies of a better world will soon be snuffed out by its seeming impossibility or the internalised desire for a conventionally successful life lived under a system they know to be corrupt, unfair, prejudiced, and staunchly hierarchal.

Thus the school at its centre becomes a microcosm for the society at large. Set slightly in the future, though with a retro sensibility, the film revolves around a close group of friends who are nevertheless pulled in different directions as they approach the end of high school while becoming aware of the destructive effects of an authoritarian educational system on children across the nation. The priggish headmaster (Shiro Sano) is involved in dubious schemes with local government and high tech companies and drives a flashy yellow sports car to work. Somehow the teens manage to prank him by standing it on its end like some kind of monolith to his hypocrisy and corruption. The headmaster quickly brands the obviously harmless prank as a “terrorist” action and uses it to crack down on lapses of discipline in the school. 

His actions are mirrored in those of the Prime Minister who uses the looming fear of “the big one” as a means of forwarding his fascitistic agenda. He alludes to the false narrative that Koreans and other minorities committed crimes and poisoned wells in the wake of the 1923 earthquake as justification for his tough approach to immigration while limiting the ability of those who do not hold Japanese citizenship to participate in democracy. Kou (Yukito Hidaka), the most conflicted of the teens is a zainichi Korean whose family as he points out has been in Japan for four generations. He’s not obliged to carry his permanent residency documentation on him, but is repeatedly asked for it by police who scan his face to pull up his records on their ominous new devices. Drawn to rebellious student Fumi (Kilala Inori), he’s minded to resist social oppression but also mindful of his single-mother’s hopes that he will win a scholarship and attend university. 

Nevertheless, he begins to drift away from childhood friend Yuta (Yuta Hayashi) who resists by immersing himself in the dance music of the past. Kou regards him as childish or unenlightened, irritated that he doesn’t seem to have grown or changed at all and increasingly convinced he’s outgrown their friendship. There may be something naive about Yuta’s simple desire to enjoy his time with his friends and find his freedom in music, but he is the only one of the teens who really does reject the system by choosing to live outside it. 

Tensions come to a head when the school instals a mass surveillance system under the cute name “Panopty,” doubtless inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for the perfect prison. The system awards points for infractions on discipline but ruthlessly and without thought. A delicious moment sees a telltale baseball student fined once for smoking after picking up a discarded butt with the intention of throwing it away and then again for littering when he inevitably drops it. Led by Fumi, the kids resist in distinctly old-fashioned ways with a sit-in at the headmaster’s office but cracks soon start to appear and some aren’t willing to risk their academic futures on something which will only benefit the kids of tomorrow. In the end they win the right to a free vote on the surveillance system, but have perhaps underestimated how many of the young will also vote for “safety” over freedom in the mistaken belief that the system does not infringe on the rights of people like them.

This is a city in which ominous red lights blink in the distance like silent alarms, where the kids are forever hanging out next to signs that read “caution”, where earthquake alerts are so common no one really pays much attention to them but the looming threat of mass destruction hangs over everything and everyone. Even so, these kids are just teens growing up, having fun with their friends, and beginning to decide which path they’ll take in life. A poignant moment takes place at the end of a bridge with steps on either side and the sense that at some point you go one way and your friend another and you may never see each other again. Perhaps this is their earthquake, the silent tremor that sends them into adulthood and a society still in flux that seems somehow beyond repair.

Happyend screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Way We Talk (看我今天怎麼說, Adam Wong Sau-Ping, 2024)

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In the opening scenes of Adam Wong’s The Way We Talk (看我今天怎麼說), deaf children are being taught in a specialist school but are prohibited from using sign language to communicate with each other. The teacher, who does not sign, reprimands them severely insisting that they must speak to her. Her harsh and authoritarian approach is akin to that taken by colonialising authorities insisting that children must speak their language in an attempt to wipe out that which is spoken in their homes and among their families in a concerted attempt to weaken the bonds of their communities. The teacher claims she’s doing this for their own good, as do some of the children’s parents, because they believe that they will not be able to live “normal” lives if they cannot speak and that signing weakens their ability to do so. 

Of course, this is also motivated by internalised ableism and the stigma surrounding disability. Bella lost her hearing following a childhood illness and received a cochlear implant at an early age. Her mother did not want her to learn sign language because she believed doing so would set her back but instead forced her to listen to lines from television dramas multiple times, beating her with a coat hanger when she failed to repeat them with perfect pronunciation. Her prejudice is later exposed when she discovers that Bella has begun learning to sign as an adult, asking her if she wants to be like “one of those deaf people”. 

Bella had internalised a degree of this stigma herself, receiving financial aid as a kind of poster girl for an organisation promoting cochlear implants for whom she gives what is an incredibly insensitive speech in which she remarks that she believes that thanks to technology like this there will one day be no more deaf people in the world. Later she tries to use the sign language she’s learned in one of their videos but is quickly told off. The way the videos are framed presents the use of cochlear implants as a path towards a “normal” life, the point being that wearers could communicate in a way they describe as “normal”. If they were also signing it would imply that implants didn’t work and people wouldn’t buy them. In a later and even more insensitive ad, Bella is pictured with a caption that says the implants restore “joy and colour” to the wearer’s world as if the lives of deaf people were somehow colourless or devoid of joy.

It’s being called out for these unexamined views that gives Bella pause for thought on encountering Wolf, a tempestuous young man who refused a cochlear implant and is determined to preserve the existence of sign language which is after all his mother tongue. Wolf is frustrated by the march of technology. At Bella’s conference, he’s annoyed by the organisers who tell him they’ve cancelled the sign language interpreter because the captioning machine is good enough while appearing indifferent to his objection that they’ve removed the ability for a deaf person to ask a question. He isn’t against the use of cochlear implants for those who want them, like his friend Alan, but is also determined to preserve deaf culture through the preservation of sign language. 

Alan, meanwhile, has swung in the opposite direction and agrees that speech is essential for integration into mainstream society without really considering that it’s the society that should change to become more inclusive rather than forcing everyone to conform with it. Having been repeatedly turned down for employment, ironically in one case at least because she didn’t know sign language, Bella begins to feel that her dream of becoming an actuary is eternally out of reach. Though she’s secured a job at a high profile company, she feels as if she’s a diversity hire, essentially exploited while the company uses her to improve their image as a caring employer but only ever has her doing busy work as if they don’t trust her with anything important. Her mother had always pushed her to be “normal”, as if her deafness were something shameful to be concealed but it becomes clear that living this way places her under a lot of pressure while she may be more comfortable with communicating through sign language which affords her the freedom to express herself without constraint.

Crucially, the point is that Bella should have the choice to use whichever communication style she likes or all of them together rather than being pushed towards that which best suits a hearing society. Those in charge of decision making often claim they’re acting in the interests of inclusivity, but more often than not their decisions are influenced by a desire to cut costs such as relying on AI captions rather than paying an interpreter. Wolf’s dream of becoming a diving instructor is dealt a blow when the Hong Kong diving agency refuses to allow him to take the exam without a qualified deaf diver to interpret, only there obviously aren’t any because they’d all have been in the same position. With a gentle empathy, Wong exposes the petty prejudices of the hearing society but equally reveals the path towards the claiming of an identity among a strong and vibrant community.

The Way We Talk screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Don’t Cry, Butterfly (Mưa trên cánh bướm, Linh Duong, 2024)

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There’s an odd moment of calm in the opening stretches of Linh Duong’s debut feature, Don’t Cry Butterfly (Mưa trên cánh bướm), as the heroine, Tam, dances alone as if enraptured by the music flooding in from the open air aerobics going on in the square downstairs. The Vietnamese cover of ‘90s dance hit Smile by a band also called Butterfly maintains its distinctive “find my samurai” chorus in English though its vision of idealised masculinity couldn’t be further from the reality of Tam’s laconic and apparently unfaithful husband Thanh who utters precisely one line and only at the film’s conclusion which seems to take place in a possibly imaginary past. 

The irony is that Tam works as a wedding planner. We see her shepherd a couple through rehearsal with business-like efficiency, as they were on some kind of conveyor belt to be rushed in and out as quickly as possible. But for all that the wedding is display of untold extravagance that stands in stark contrast to the reality of Tam’s marriage. Even so, many of the attendees apparently to do not show up because the couple have scheduled their nuptials on an auspicious day which also happens to be that of the cup final. Auspicious it is not for Tam who is passed a phone by her 20-something-daughter Ha revealing Thanh at the football with another woman. In a meta touch, the commentator seems to narrate her discovery while photos soon go viral among her friendship group adding to the sense of displacement and humiliation that eventually send her to a soothsayer for a black magic cure to bring her husband’s affections back to her. 

Ha doesn’t understand her mother’s calmness, why she hasn’t thrown Thanh out or raised hell, but also perhaps does not feel the same sense of failure and despair resulting from the end of a marriage as a woman of her mother’s generation might. Though the other women joke about cutting Thanh’s bits off, they too put up with cheating husbands and the onus is on the woman to change and recapture her husband’s love as if she were somehow at fault for losing it. One of the videos Tam watches online features a middle-aged woman who claims to have reformed herself after her husband’s infidelity insisting that it was her fault for letting herself go but now she’s lost weight and dresses more youthfully so her marriage is repaired. Tam goes the black magic route instead but is tempted by memories of a fantasy romance from the past with her college crush though he ultimately turns out to be a loyal husband to a woman none of them liked. 

The slow drip of poison into her life is manifested by a leak in the ceiling and its surrounding mould which only women can see. Another woman knocks on her door with some irritation and asks if she has a leak too, dragging the landlord who declares himself oblivious unable to see the obvious problems of their society because of course he’s a man so everything seems just fine to him. Eventually he sends some anti-mould paint to placate them, leaving Tam and Ha to apply it though it does little to cover up their mounting unhappiness and despair. Ha, fearing that her parents always wanted a boy, wants to go abroad and is intent on taking her best friend from across the way with her but as in her parents marriage never really thought to ask him if actually wanted to go. Trong seems to have a number of abandonment issues seeing as his mother left choosing to pursue her desires to become a dancer rather be trapped by conventional domesticity. 

In the final and increasingly surreal stretches of the film it becomes clear that the women are drowning amid the floods of a patriarchal culture, no different from the fish in Thanh’s tank that he randomly buries in their houseplants and then simply replaces when they die. As the soothsayer had told her, Tam does indeed live a thankless life in which all her efforts are on the behalf of others leaving nothing for herself while slow poisoned by the mould in her ceiling that eventually threatens to consume her whole or else suck her back to time that at least seemed happier but in retrospect may not have been even at its most idealised.

Don’t Cry, Butterfly screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Living in Two Worlds (ぼくが生きてる、ふたつの世界, Mipo O, 2024)

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Mipo O had been quietly building a reputation as one of Japan’s most promising young indie directors with such lauded films as The Light Shines Only There but has been on an extended hiatus since 2015’s Being Good. Living in Two Worlds (ぼくが生きてる、ふたつの世界, Boku ga Ikiteru, Futatsu no Sekai) marks her return to filmmaking after taking a break to raise a family and, adapted from from an autobiographical book by Daisuke Igarashi, not only explores the realities faced by the deaf community but the complicated relationship between a son and his mother.

Indeed, at times the issue is less that both of Daisuke’s (Ryo Yoshizawa) parents are deaf as it is that he does not listen. When he becomes a teenager, his mother Akiko (Akiko Oshidari) spends a huge amount of money on a high tech hearing aid because she wants to hear his voice, though most of what he says to her is hurtful and unpleasant. His older self is probably regretful, ashamed of the way he treated his mother in particular but also in regards to his rejection of his family because he felt embarrassed by their difference in what is a fiercely conformist culture. He doesn’t give his mother a letter about parents’ day because he doesn’t want her to come and also thinks it would be pointless because she wouldn’t be able to hear anything anyway. Later he tries to get his grandmother to come with him to a parent teacher meeting about his plans for high school and beyond, telling his mother she’d only be in the way. In fact, the meeting is quite awkward because the teacher talks directly to him without trying to include Akiko while Daisuke makes infrequent signs under the table as if embarrassed to have the teacher see them.

As a young child, Daisuke had interpreted for his mother using sign language publicly despite the awkward attitude towards it at home. His grandmother writes things down on paper instead, telling him that it’s too difficult for her to learn. That doesn’t make sense to his young brain as after all he’s picked it up since birth. But this early tension perhaps contributes to his increasingly conflicted feelings. When he brings a friend home, he asks him why his mother speaks in such a funny way but of course it’s normal to Daisuke and this perhaps innocent question begins to cement for him that his family isn’t “normal” and he isn’t like the other children. Resentment towards his mother only grows to the point he begins to blame all of his problems on her including his failure to get into the better high school though she has done nothing but support and encourage him. As she points out, she never had any choice about her schooling and received little education because her parents thought she’d recover her hearing and refused to send her to a specialist school until she was 14 meaning she was just sat there all day twiddling her thumbs while unable to make friends with hearing children who mostly ignored her.

The parents were also against the idea of her marrying her husband Yosuke (Akito Imai) because he was also deaf, nor did they support their decision to have a child believing two deaf parents would not be able to raise one safely or effectively. Such attitudes lay bare the lingering stigma towards disability which remains even within the family unit. Unable to separate himself from being the child of working class deaf parents, the teenage Daisuke abruptly moves to Tokyo with a vague idea of becoming an actor signalling his internal search for an independent identity. The film hints that his liminal status existing between the worlds of the hearing and the deaf has left him with subpar communication skills as seen in his repeated faux pas at job interviews until he finally tells the truth and is offered a job on the spot. There’s an intimacy involved in his interactions with his parents which often can’t be understood by others, but also a less pleasant undercurrent in the way these interplay with speech and his own decisions of when to switch between dialogue and sign. 

Having gone to Tokyo to escape being the child of deaf parents, he discovers that being “ordinary” doesn’t really suit him either and only begins to accept his identity after meeting a deaf woman at a pachinko parlour who invites him to her class for learning sign language in a more a formal way while another of her pupils gently explains to him that though he means well he sometimes does them a disservice by taking over as a hearing person when he should let them do the things they can do for themselves. The absence of musical score and variation in the sound mix emphasise Daisuke’s transition between worlds and his own attempts to locate himself within them eventually discovering the equilibrium that allows him to realise he was the one who couldn’t hear along though his mother had always been talking to him. Touching but resisting sentimentality, O’s poignant drama never shies away from the failings of its protagonist but equally from those of the society within which he lives that can itself be unwelcoming of difference.

Living in Two Worlds screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival

International trailer (English subtitles)

Stranger Eyes (默視錄, Yeo Siew Hua, 2024)

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In some ways consciously and others not, we behave differently if we have an expectation of being observed than if we are confident we are alone. But the line between actions we think of as private and others public is often thinner than we assume and sometimes broken in moments of heightened emotion. A man sits and cries on a park bench, but he does so because he does not think anyone’s looking and feels himself alone though actually someone is watching. They often are, silently and at a distance that can itself be painful.

But then Yeo Siew Hua’s elliptical drama eventually suggests we are watched most by no stranger eyes than our own. Its “stalker”, Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), remarks that sometimes he feels as if he only watches himself an idea reinforced by the film’s continual doubling that suggests that we are in some ways caught between a series of overlapping timezones or entering a space of interactive memory. With echoes of Rear Window, the police accompany Shuping (Vera Chen), grandmother of a missing child, as she runs a pair of binoculars over the windows of her apartment block as seen from the balcony opposite while putting herself in the shoes of her observer. She stops on a young girl staring sadly from her window before beginning a strange dance that makes us wonder if Shuping is actually observing her younger self or if her own interiority simply colours what she is seeing. 

Shuping, along with her son Juyang (Wu Chien-ho) and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna), is scanning the horizon for traces of their missing child, Little Bo, while closely examining old videos looking for signs of anything untoward. The ubiquitous presence of these cameras reminds us that we are often being observed if accidentally and the use of these images could put us at risk. Shuping wants to put a video of the family at the park online but Peiying objects, insisting Bo should have the right to decide when she’s older though the implication is that someone could have seen Bo there and been minded to take her. In any case, the irony is there’s nothing useful either in the videos or, the family initially thinks, in the vast networks of CCTV cameras that exchange our privacy for supposed safety. 

Wu relies firstly on his naked eyes, but then starts sending the family DVDs of videos he’s taken of them for unclear reasons but confronting Juyang and Peiying with the cracks in the foundations of their marriage along with the implication they are unfit parents. Juyang at one point simply walks off and leaves Bo sitting in a supermarket trolley while she cries her head off as if he were half hoping to be free of her. He in turn stalks another woman with a baby in a pushchair who turns to the side for a moment to help a man whose baby is crying, taking her eyes off her daughter long enough for Juyang to pick her up without her noticing. He could have easily have walked off with her, though you could hardly criticise this woman for simply having a chat with her daughter sitting just off to the side technically but perhaps not emotionally out of sight. Peiying meanwhile frets that Bo has been taken from her by some cosmic force because she didn’t love her enough and had considered an abortion before she was born again hinting at the fragility of the relationship between the parents who rarely occupy the same space and seem to live very parallel lives. 

Ironically Peiying feels as if it is only Wu who has truly seen her for everything she is rather than solely as a mother or the persona she adopts as a live-streaming DJ. She says she feels as if Juyang only sees her as air, as if he looks right through her while he looks at other women and seems to feel trapped by domesticity or perhaps by Shuping whose obsessive love for Bo and occasionally overbearing grandmothering seems to annoy both parents in overstepping their boundaries. We observe them just as Wu does, making our judgements in our silence though in this case confident they do not see us and that we are not ourselves currently being observed. But this confidence may also be painful to an observer such as Wu who wants to penetrate the screen while also interacting with his own sense of regret and is unable to make himself visible or express what he feels outside outside of the ghostly act of observation. The watchful soul observes itself as reflected in others who exist only in a world lost to them.

Stranger Eyes screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)