Tag: 2020s

Kubi (首, Takeshi Kitano, 2023)

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Apparently in gestation for a couple of decades, it’s unsurprising that Takeshi Kitano gave himself the role of Hideyoshi in a long-awaited historical drama adapted from his own novel, Kubi (首). Played as an irascible but wily old man, Hideyoshi is the second of Japan’s great unifiers and, unlike his predecessor, died as a result of an illness rather than intrigue. He was also a peasant who rose through the ranks and is perhaps witness to the tumultuous class conflict and social divisions of a hierarchal society.

Even so, in this version of events, Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) too speaks in a thick rural dialect that sets him apart from his retainers and seems to hint at his uncouthness. This Nobugana is an unhinged despot who threatens and humiliates his subordinates, not to mention sexually assaulting them. In short, there’s no real mystery why his men have begun to turn against him and there is intrigue in the court. The film opens with Murashige’s (Kenichi Endo) quickly quelled rebellion which floundered when his reinforcements failed to arrive. Murashige is on the run and Nobunaga has heavily suggested whoever brings in his head will be first in line for the succession, but Murashige is also in a relationship with Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima) another courtier vying for favour in more ways than one from the capricious Nobunaga. 

The striking thing about the staging is how like a yakuza drama this intrigue really is with each of the main factions manoeuvring for control, forming temporary or duplicitous alliances forged in the mutual desire of ousting a ruler whose increasing instability presents only the likelihood of a return to chaos. Nobunaga’s flamboyant speech and threatening manner are reminiscent of a yakuza boss on his way out, as is his obvious tactic of setting his rivals against each other while secretly planning to hand the reins to his son anyway. The film takes place in a largely homosocial world, the only women on screen are sex workers and peasants about to be murdered, only this time defined by romantic intrigue in which the various relationships between the men are inescapably linked with power and duplicity.

Mitsuhide’s relationship with Murashige is originally framed as a giri/ninjo conflict, Mitsuhide torn between the exercise of his duty as a samurai and his love for Murashige, only to later be set wondering if Murashige isn’t also playing him in urging him too towards rebellion, while Murashige accuses him of harbouring desires for Nobunaga which would also necessarily be desire for advancement. Advancement is something sought by all and in particular Mosuke (Shido Nakamura), a peasant who is taken on as a foot soldier after looting a battlefield for amour and killing his friend to get his hands on the prize only to realise just at the critical moment how pointless the constant desire for heads really is. The absurdity is rammed home in the closing scene in which Hideyoshi declares himself uninterested in the severed head he asked for, rendering the quest entirely pointless.

This absurdity extends to introducing the character of a comedian who is later killed for talking too much, while Kitano wise cracks his way along as the affable Hideyoshi. Kitano is in his way in dialogue with other samurai epics, using Akira Kurosawa’s horizontal wipes and introducing a pair of bumbling comic relief peasants only to suddenly kill one of them off because at the end of the day this world isn’t very funny. It’s cruel, and mean, and meaningless, so you might as well laugh like Hideyoshi. Residents of a ninja village conduct a festival in which they pray for death and to be released from this earthly torment as soon as possible, while farmers still dream of becoming samurai little knowing the reality of samurai life.

It’s this cycle of futility that is echoed in the opening image of a severed neck into which crabs in a river are crawling. Kitano stages lavish battle scenes, but ones that are often horrifying and absurd, a visceral struggle in mud and blood fought for no real reason. These samurai live their lives on the point of a sword, but they move and behave like yakuza fighting pointless turf wars and games of petty intrigue until someone finally comes for their heads. In the end, the victor is the one who doesn’t play the game at all, but sits and laughs at the absurd cruelty all around them in which the only stable force is ambition accompanied by a nihilistic lust for blood in an already bloody world.

Kubi  screens in New York July 16 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Whale Bones (鯨の骨, Takamasa Oe, 2023)

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The augmented reality scavenger app at the centre of Takamasa Oe’s Whale Bones (鯨の骨, Kujira no hone) is littered with a series of digital ghosts endlessly re-enacting the past. Its selling point is that the content can only be accessed in a specific location, what its users call “holes” into which they “bury” their unpleasant thoughts, the irony being that they don’t so much rid themselves of them as ensure their survival on some other plane.

The hero, Ken, intended to bury something in a more literal sense after hooking up with a high school girl on dating app who apparently takes her own life in his apartment. Ken drives into the mountains and digs a hole, but the girl, Aska, disappears from the boot of his car leaving him wondering what exactly happened while experiencing a kind of breakdown that leads him to the Mimi app and Aska’s buried videos. In a way, he’s chasing a ghost. Trying to find out who Aska was and what might have happened her while trying to absolve himself of guilt and responsibility over her apparent death and his reaction to it. 

In a video he finds she talks about her late father and remarks that believing he’s out there somewhere gives her hope, much as her spectral existence in the Mimi app becomes a kind of beacon for the other users and bears out the way she both exists and doesn’t as a ghostly avatar of a constructed online identity. Rin, one of her followers, explains that Mimi started as a venting app where people threw away all of their unkind thoughts but quickly gave rise to a small, cult-like community of mutually supportive digital archaeologists intent on digging up all Aska’s holes as if attempting to excavate her identity. 

Of course, Ken has a different reason for wanting to dig up Aska and his quest is also an act of self-preservation. Before hooking up with Aska, he’d been jilted by his fiancée and was perhaps wounded and resentful, though his decision to take a high schooler back to his apartment in the first place doesn’t cast him in a very good light nor does his subsequently shady behaviour though it’s true enough that he begins to wonder if Aska was ever really “real” in the first place or some kind of digital ghost. People around him seem to just disappear, there one minute and then not, but then in a later moment of irony he realises the person he’s chasing is merely hiding rather than having blinked out of existence.

Ken’s work friend also fears that he will “disappear” from the office, becoming yet another soulless drone even as his obsession with Aska grows and his metal heath declines. It may be that he too is a ghost, trapped in the past and unable to move forward while feeling sorry for himself about his broken engagement. An attempt to explain his situation only raises the suggestion that perhaps he himself is an author of this mystery rather than its victim, which as his ex Yukari points out is his preferred way of seeing himself. In any case, what he’s confronted with is the dualities of the “real” and “digital” worlds in the way we become different people, burying parts of ourselves in hastily dug holes in an attempt to paper over the cracks in our lives.

These tiny fragments are themselves like the whalebones of the title, feasted over by tiny creatures who scuttle away as the soon the glittering stops and a new day begins. Oe lends his constructed reality a note of noirish eeriness in Ken’s ghostly quest for the “real” aska while hinting at the contradictory nature of social media which can at times be cruel and hateful, a place to spill bile forgetting that there are real people on either side, and also spark genuine connections among lost and lonely people looking for comfort and community otherwise unavailable to them. As Aska had said, thinking that her father was out there somewhere gave her hope, echoing the way that our digital ghosts may survive us but also provide a comforting sense of permanence in a transient and lonely world.

Whale Bones screens in New York July 14 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

The Box Man (箱男, Gakuryu Ishii, 2024)

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Those who obsess over the Box Man, become the Box Man, in Gakuryu Ishii’s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. Yet the unnamed hero’s problem is that he feels himself unable to become “the real thing” and is thereafter trapped inside a labyrinth while forever seeking an exit. It’s never clear to him, or to us, if the cardboard box he wears is really just that or something imbued with a supernatural power that actively masks his identity even from himself.

Tellingly, the only named character is a woman, Yoko (Ayana Shiramoto), who seems to exist outside of the box. She appears to be free, confident, aware of all she is and apparently certain of her identity. The Box Man, or perhaps “a” Box Man, meanwhile, is known only as “myself,” a former photographer (Masatoshi Nagase) who almost pities those who target him in memory of the Box Man who once infected and cursed him to the same fate. Watching the city through the tiny letterbox slit, he remains a step away from our world and later refers to the box as the entrance to some other place suggesting that it’s really we who are trapped on the other side of the cardboard.

He advances something similar when he in effect turns the box inside out, walling himself inside a single room by covering the windows and doors to box out the world but not really finding escape. Still, others seem to covet the title of Box Man, those also without concrete identities but going by names such as Fake Doctor (Tadanobu Asano) and the General (Koichi Sato), both of whom are apparently interested in the Box Man and tracking his every move. It seems they believe there can only be one real, authentic Box Man allowed, but become increasingly uncertain which of them is “real”. The notes the Box Man is keeping become key to his identity, but like a metaphor for the unseen hand of fate, one points out that perhaps someone else has written them out for them, Myself lamenting that the author has written a better version of himself than he ever could. 

There is something undeniably absurd about the way the Box Men scuttle around, occasionally sticking their ams out of the box’ flaps while arguing over the true identify of the Box Man despite having described the mystery as boring. The Fake Doctor seems to want to destroy the box, as if he wanted to obliterate it perhaps in an attempt to destroy the image of a mask to avoid the suggestion that he has one himself, while it remains unclear if this would free the other Box Man or trap him further while Fake Doctor would take his place. When Myself killed the Box Man before him, a mask may have been what he wanted. A photographer sick of seeing the world and longing to be free of it, to shed himself of an identity he no longer wanted only to search for it once again even as others try to crush it from without. 

The Box Man comes to the conclusion that it’s the world that should be boxed away, but of course it’s all the same. When he remarks that Yoko, after leaving their sanctuary, did not really escape but has simply gone to a deeper level, it’s reflective if his own desire to find meaning in a meaningless world. He claims that he dreams of a world yet to begin but is finally confronted perhaps by anonymity in witnessing a row full of Box Men apparently all also devoid of personality which might in an ironic sense tell him who is if only in reflection. 

Strange and surreal, Ishii lends an edge of absurdity to the strange existence of the Box Man while perhaps aligning the letterbox frame of his open window to that of the cinema screen and the artificial reality that surrounds us. In any case, it seems the other world the Box Man longed to enter was that of the self, his interior life expanding inside the box as a small galaxy he has somehow become lost inside, no longer able to see beyond himself but trapped inside an “exitless black hole” looking for a path to authenticity away from this “fantasy” in which everything is “fake” save the potential salvation of a distant guiding light.

The Box Man screens in New York July 13 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Six Singing Women (唄う六人の女, Yoshimasa Ishibashi, 2023)

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“Don’t take any detours,” the hero of Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s Six Singing Women (唄う六人の女, Utau Rokunin no Onna) is warned by his partner though it’s advice he’ll end up not taking if not entirely of his own volition. Even so, it may be that it’s the society that has gone off track, poisoning the environment and losing respect for the land that has always nurtured and protected us. Part eco-drama, Ishibashi’s surreal odyssey into an etherial realm of nature and spirits has its share of eeriness but also a kind of comfort in the embrace of the natural world.

Only that’s not how it first seems to Shin (Yutaka Takenouchi). After receiving a phone call to inform him his estranged father has passed away, he leaves his partner Kasumi (Rena Takeda) at home in Tokyo and travels into the mountains with the intention of selling his father’s house. But when he arrives, he finds himself in a place stranger than your average remote country hamlet and after signing a contract with the slimy Uwajima (Takayuki Yamada) is kidnapped by a band of mysterious, apparently mute women. While he is looked after in the house. Uwajima is tied up in the shed and tortured.

As we later discover Shin and Uwajima are embodiments of light and dark, a protector of nature and its destroyer. When Shin had asked him what Uwajima’s company, which has also bought up all the neighbours’ land, plans to do with his father’s house he tells him they just want to protect nature but his answer is of course ironic. He represents a corporate entity that cares nothing at all for the mountain but is simply looking to make some money by dumping potentially harmful stuff where no one will find it. Realising that his father had been on some kind of quest to stop the corporate take over, Shin begins to investigate his death and the wider fate of the mountain taking him ever deeper into the woods. 

What he finds there is a another realm, a place of spirits that seems somehow sacred if dangerous. Unable to speak, the women appear to have a message a for him but it’s only after reconnecting with his father and accepting his legacy that Shin finally begins to understand. His mother had told him that his father had been “possessed by the mountains,” and there may be something in Shin’s mania as if the spirits had indeed taken him over aside from merely captivating him. Yet despite his newfound desire to protect these women as embodiments of a natural order, he is powerless to do so alone and especially against the destructive corporatism of Uwajima.

Ishibashi strays into folk horror territory in that the strange place Shin finds himself in has the trappings of a cult. He witnesses strange rituals and is prevented from leaving a place he cannot understand by the women who cannot speak to him nor explain themselves. Bees, spiders, frogs and snakes surround him with an air of malice but are perhaps trying to protect, both him and themselves or else realising Shin is no threat to them but a prodigal son returning to accept and claim the legacy he sought to reject from a misunderstood father like him possessed by the mountains. Finally he finds the answer to the question his father asked him, in the woods exactly where he said it would be. 

His solution runs contrary to that of the estate agent who encouraged him to sell his father’s home, that the world is what it is as if it could not be changed and resisting destructive capitalism is merely foolish when it would be better to take the money and run. Ishibashi rams him message home with his haunting capture of the woods as a dreamlike idyll though not without its sense of darkness while lending an air of surreality to Shin’s ethereal quest with all its owl women and inscrutable ritual that somehow hint at a natural order of things that is deeper and older than our society and with which we tussle at our peril for nature is never quite as passive as we thought for all the compassion it may otherwise hold for its prodigal sons and daughters yet to return to the fold.

Six Singing Women screens in New York July 12 as part of of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Homunculus (ホムンクルス, Takashi Shimizu, 2021)

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Is the world we see merely a self-created illusion, or do we each share a concrete, objective “reality”? It’s a question which seems to obsess the antagonist of Takashi Shimizu’s manga adaptation Homunculus (ホムンクルス), though in the end he’ll perhaps find the answer is less clear cut than he’d been willing to believe. “When you look at the other person you can create the world” is the lesson he’s eventually given by his test subject, echoing the film’s somewhat trite message that it’s connection which gives life meaning, a willingness to see and be seen having moved past unresolved trauma in pursuit of the true self. 

This is something the hero, Susumu Nokoshi (Go Ayano), has apparently been unwilling to do. Formerly a high flying actuary peddling life insurance, literally putting a price on the lives of others, Susumu now claims to have lost his memory and is living in his car next to a park which is home to the local homeless population. One night, a weird young man with strange, staring, goldfish-like eyes knocks on his window and makes him a bizarre job offer. For whatever reason, Susumu allows himself to be convinced by this decidedly odd young man he’s only just met to let him drill a hole in his head which he claims will unlock untold abilities and perhaps even return some of his missing memories. 

Manabu Ito (Ryo Narita), a medical student and the wealthy son of a successful doctor, claims he wants to use the trepanation experiment in order to prove that the world does not exist but is merely a self-created illusion of the human brain. As a result of the operation, Susumu does indeed develop special powers in that he suddenly starts seeing strange things in the middle of Kabukicho. According to Manabu, he’s developed the ability to see the “homunculus” of others, seeing their inner self-image as a reflection of their deeply buried trauma. 

Despite himself, Susumu begins attempting heal the various traumas of the troubled souls he sees but at the same time perhaps oversteps his right to intervene, acting in instinct and compulsion never considering whether not not they actually want their traumas resolved. His first case is that of a violent yakuza whose inner self is a wounded child encased in robot armour, the implication being that he has buried himself in a life of merciless violence in an attempt to mask unresolved childhood guilt. Yet his eventual “freedom” in having faced his younger self entirely ignores the weight of his later years of violent cruelty, as if all of his subsequent “stress” were wiped out in an instant. Susumu’s second case, however, is still more worrying in that is sees him apparently “fix” a young woman’s control and self-esteem issues effectively by raping her while in some kind of trance. 

His own issues meanwhile lead back into his refusal to deal with the painful past, implying his unusual lifestyle is in fact a fugue state born of trauma response. We learn that he was once wealthy and successful but also deeply empty inside, apparently saved from the soul destroying delusion of consumerist fulfilment by a young woman who saw him for what he really was. He resents his new abilities because he is still unwilling to extend the same courtesy to others, trapped in self obsession desperately wanting to be seen but all the while refusing look even as the hole in his head takes the lid off his emotional repression. 

Nevertheless, there’s a curiously homoerotic subtext between the patient and his mad scientist friend whose eventual descent into machiavellian levels of manipulation is never quite convincing even if it perhaps comes from a place of spurned hurt. Manabu’s unresolved traumas are indeed given short shrift and perhaps in themselves fairly banal, failing to live up to his air of strangeness or prove equal to the darkness inherent in his odd obsession with the art of trepanation coupled with his doubts as to the nature of reality. Neither outlandish enough in its surreality nor, ironically enough, willing to engage with its own unpleasantness in its latent misogyny, Homunculus’ central messages of the essentiality of mutual recognition ring somewhat hollow while its heroes remain mired in their own quests for true selfhood in looking for themselves reflected in the eyes of others. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Every Trick In The Book (鳩の撃退法, Hideta Takahata, 2021)

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A down on his luck writer finds himself at the centre of a mystery only how much is truth and how much “fiction”? Based on the novel by Shogo Sato, Hideta Takahata’s Every Trick in the Book (鳩の撃退法, Hato no gekitai-ho) ponders the possibilities of literature as the hero seems to create a fictional world around him in which it is largely unclear whether he is solving a real world mystery or simply imagining one based on his impressions of the strange characters he encounters through the course of his everyday life.

That everyday life is however eventful just in itself. Tsuda (Tatsuya Fujiwara) once won a prestigious literary prize and was destined to become a popular author but hasn’t written anything of note for some time and in fact now largely works as a driver ferrying sex workers around on behalf of his shady boss. The mystery begins when he approaches a man, a rare solo reader in an overnight cafe, and promises to lend him a copy of Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie only to later discover that the man went missing along with his wife and the daughter he had explained was fathered by another man. 

Like many of his subsequent encounters it isn’t entirely clear if this meeting really took place or at least as Tsuda said it did or is only part of the novel he is beginning to write. The man, Hideyoshi (Shunsuke Kazama), asks him if it’s a novelist’s habit to begin imagining backstories for everyone he sets eyes on and there may well be some of that even as Tsuda is fond of claiming that amazing things happen around us every day to which we are mostly oblivious. Still, Tsuda probably didn’t expect to be pulled into the orbit of local gangster Kurata (Etsushi Toyokawa) after accidentally passing on counterfeit currency he found by chance. It’s true that most of what’s happening to him is the result of a series of bizarre coincidences or cosmic confluence which has accidentally united this collection of people in an unintended mystery which Tsuda intends to solve in either literal or literary terms. 

“It’s all a novelist can do” he later claims in trying to write a better ending for “characters” he has come to like than the one he assumes they “actually” met. But then his editor Nahomi (Tao Tsuchiya) chief worry is that, like his previous novel, Tsuda’s story will contain too much of the “literal” truth which could cause his publishers some legal problems. Part of the reason Tsuda left the industry is apparently because his last book was inspired by a real life affair which was then considered somewhat hurtful and defamatory. For that reason it comes as quite a blow to Nahomi as she begins to investigate and discovers that much of Tsuda’s story lines up with “real” places and events, but then again as he says if you can draw connections between known facts then you begin to see a “hidden” truth which may in its own way be merely his invention. 

The film’s Japanese title translates more literally as something like “how to fend off a dove” which does indeed have its share of irony especially considering the meaning the dove symbolism turns out to have in the film but perhaps also hints at the essential absurdity of trying to fight back against something that is otherwise harmless and in fact represents peace. Tsuda may be onto something and nothing, embracing the bizarre serendipity of a writer’s life while trying to recover his creative mojo but embellishing it with more danger and strangeness than it actually has to offer. Then again as his editor discovers, there really is an incinerator it seems anyone can just walk up and use to burn whatever they want including dead bodies, while people in general are full of duplicities all of which keeps the “fake” money circulating as people use it to try to buy things that can’t really be bought. Hideyoshi calls them “miracles”, embracing the strange serendipity of his life as an orphan longing for a family to call his own and unexpectedly finding one which is “real” in someways and “fiction” and in others. Then again, if you believe in something does it really matter if it’s “real” or not? Hideyoshi and Tsuda might say it doesn’t, the publishing company’s lawyers might feel differently, but it seems there really are amazing things going on around us every day if only you stop to look. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Na Hyeon, 2022)

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“Justice is preserved by being just” according to the idealistic hero at the centre of Na Hyeon’s Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Yacha) , though he’ll eventually come round to his sometime mentor’s belief that “Justice must be preserved by any means necessary”. Any means necessary is indeed the motto of the titular hero named for the unpredictable Buddhist deity and regarded by his superiors as a dangerous maverick though as it turns out he does indeed have justice in mind even if his idea of justice might not fully align with those whom he is intended to serve. 

The failure of the regular justice system is signalled in the film’s opening as idealistic prosecutor Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo) finds his case against a corrupt CEO falling apart because of procedural mistakes by his own rookie team. Humiliated on the courthouse steps, Ji-hoon is given a punitive transfer to the NIS where he is kept out of trouble, told to draw a salary but given very little work. He and his jaded colleague who was once known as the “bulldozer of justice” but has been ruined by this bizarre form of punishment and no longer has the will do to anything much at all mostly spend their time doing jigsaw puzzles stave off boredom. When his colleague admits there’s no more hope for him and turns down an offer of reinstatement, Ji-hoon agrees to travel to Shengyang, a hotbed of international spies in China, to find out what’s going on with a series of false reports from their agents on the ground led by maverick black ops officer Yakska. 

What he soon discovers is that he’s been dragged into some murky geopolitical shenanigans between North Korean spies, his target’s possibly corrupt team, and the Japanese who are once again up to no good trying to prevent a possible alliance between North and South believing such a union would present too much of a threat to their economic position in North East Asia. His problem is that Yaksha’s field craft does not measure up to what he regards as appropriate conduct. He engages in firefights and commits what seem to be summary executions while later threatening to torture a hostage to force her to reveal the location of their missing asset, a North Korean financial kingpin, Moon (Nam Kyung-eup), who had been acting as a double agent for the Japanese but had become disillusioned with their imperialist outlook and decided to defect to the South bringing valuable information with him. 

It has to be said that however uncountable it may be to see a Japanese spy who behaves like a gangster committing acts of torture in a well appointed lab on a Chinese woman in China, Yaksha cannot exactly claim the moral high ground having attempted to do something similar only in his filthy hideout in an abandoned mine. Ji-hoon’s dilemma is that he doesn’t know whose side, if any, Yaksha is on or if he’s after the North Korean trillions Moon had been managing rather than a hugely beneficial national asset. Exposed to this morally grey world, however, Ji-hoon’s idealist edges begin to soften as shifts towards Yaksa’s “by any means possible” philosophy while trying to stop evil Japanese spy turned lobbyist from recovering the valuable data Moon had to sell and going on to do even more nefarious deeds undermining the possibilities for reunification along with the Koreas’ economic potential. 

Somewhat uncomfortably, the film does then more or less condone torture, betrayal, and summary execution if conducted in the pursuit of “justice” even while simultaneously approving of Ji-hoon’s idealistic pursuit of the rich and powerful who continue to misuse their position and cause pain to ordinary people. It comes to something when the safest ally is a gang of human organ traffickers with whom Yaksha seems to be suspiciously familiar. Nevertheless, what Yaksha eventually asks Ji-hoon to do is to “clean things up” hinting at the duo’s complementary qualities as they pursue “justice” in both the legal and more immediate senses. Filled with some quite literally explosive action sequences along with some admittedly broad comic book antics as the guys face off against Hideki Ikeuchi’s Japanese arch villain Yaksha is certainly a good looking film if one with a dark heart beating at its centre. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Techno Brothers (テクノブラザーズ, Hirobumi Watanabe, 2023)

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Hirobumi Watanabe has sometimes cast himself in his films as a misunderstood, struggling filmmaker at the mercy of his own thwarted ambitions and the vagaries of the Japanese indie movie scene. With Techno Brothers (テクノブラザーズ) he shifts his perspective a little in delivering an absurdist satire on the relationship between an artist and the oppressive managerial forces by which they are exploited but are otherwise largely unable to escape.

In his previous films, the characters that Watanabe plays have often stood out for their motormouth quality often going on lengthy rants to a largely silent straight man but the total powerlessness of the titular Techno Brothers is signalled by the fact that they are never permitted to speak except through their music. The film contains several scenes of them standing in identical red shirts with black ties and sun glasses, each with an identical impassive expression as they play their 80s style synth techno music inspired alternately by that of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk. They’ve been picked by manager Hiromu who also dresses in a red shirt and sunshades but wears a leopard-print jacket over the top as if to make clear that she is the one in control. 

Hiromu repeatedly makes clear that she believes Techno Brothers are musical geniuses destined to echo through time like Bach and Mozart but in the end she is only really interested in exploiting them financially rather than supporting the art she claims to have so much faith in. In a running gag, she takes them to several restaurants and orders enough food for four people but seemingly doesn’t let them eat any of it and tells the wait staff just to bring them tap water. Why the Techno Brothers allow themselves to be treated this way is a mystery with only the implication that they must really believe that Hiromu can get them career success and are too afraid of ruining their chances to stand up to her. 

Hiromu tries to get them a gig with a local fixer who for some reason is a little girl (played once again by Watanabe’s niece Riko Hisatsugu) who only speaks through her assistant, played by Watanabe in one of several sides roles he assumed throughout the film. She tells Hiromu that Techno Brothers stink and they aren’t marketable locally because their music is out of touch with the times and people won’t understand it (echoing a description of his filmmaking Watanabe has given in his previous films). Boss Riko advises them to seek their fortunes in Tokyo, but though they may briefly leave Otawara they never get out of Tochigi and stuck playing a series of low rent gigs like busking in parks or entering what turns out to be a competition mainly for local children and other unsuccessful adult musicians as in the wonderful folksinger parody once again performed by Watanabe. On one occasion they’re hired by an eccentric orchid grower who wants to see if the kind of music he plays has an effect on the way his flowers grow.

For all its absurdity the film skews surprisingly dark in Hiromu’s indifference the safety of the band, wilfully starving them which apart from anything else would seem to be counterproductive in preventing them from being able to perform not that their performances require much in the way of animation anyway. She books herself fancy hotel rooms and sends them out on the street, keeping the money for herself, while denying them any form of individuality or autonomy. Even if at one point they begin to rebel or make a run for it, they are unable to escape her grasp entirely and are once again rendered mute tools of her own success. 

Then again, it seems Hiromu has bosses of her own to placate and is also on the search for a missing sister though if she treated her like she treated the Techno Brothers maybe she requires no rescue. A brief post-credits coda hints at a wider world of dark corporate finagling the Techno Brothers may have no clue they’re a part of though a title screen assures us that they will return even if currently they seem to have landed right back where they started with little to show for their pains. In this perhaps Watanabe signals his position as an independent filmmaker locked onto a circular path of frustration and appeasement but also a determination to continue making art that people might not understand no matter what the cost.

Three Old Boys (三叉戟, Gao Qunshu, 2024)

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In a surprising development of Chinese propaganda cinema, the once untouchable subject of police corruption has become a prominent feature albeit often in tales of righteous cops who stand up for real justice against the few bad apples who’ve allowed themselves to be corrupted by contemporary capitalism. Then again, its subject matter might explain why TV police procedural veteran Gao Qunshu’s Three Old Boys (三叉戟, sānchājǐ) has been languishing on the shelf since at least 2020 if it were not also for the inevitable effects of the pandemic. 

In any case, Gao’s film has a distinctly retro vibe with use of classic Chinese pop and very ‘70s soundtrack while its maverick cop heroes all dress in the fashions of 40 years previously. All born in the late 1960s, they are products of an even more authoritarian era and began their careers in the late 1980s. Like any other old cop movie, they bemoan the restrictions of the contemporary society and suggest modern notions of appropriate police behaviour prevent them from doing their jobs which has its degree of awkwardness on the one hand implying the modern police force is now not so hardline but also that it should be because that’s what gets the job done. 

As they contemplate retirement, the trio are offered positions as part of a new squad set up to tackle economic crimes and specifically international money laundering, the chief problem with being that the criminals had the effrontery to move the money out of China which is stealing from honest, hardworking, Chinese citizens aside from having already ripped them off with fraudulent investment schemes and good old-fashioned blackmail operations. Of course, as it turns out, the case has a connection to something that happened 20 years earlier and police officer Cui’s (Huang Zhizhong) desire for revenge on the gangster king pin, Huang Youfa (Jin Shijie), who caused the death of his younger brother murdered by gangster Donzgi who was then shot dead by fellow officer Big G (Jiang Wu). 

The convoluted narrative is heralded by a homeless man who takes the police chief hostage and mutters something about a sword of justice that sounds like something right out of a wuxia serial before being updated to the present day. The sword does actually make a reappearance and is wielded by Big G against a young whippersnapper out for revenge and to take care of what he sees as corruption in the earlier generation. When the trio are first put on the case, they are given a young rookie to help them because he’ll be able to do the tech stuff which the old guys probably can’t because their idea of policing was largely rooted in their fists and a capacity for intimidation. But this doesn’t really work with the youth of today who are for some reason fond of reminding them they aren’t their fathers so they don’t have to do what they say. This is particularly true of young thug Blondie who is caught between Ghost, the old gangster king, and Qing an upstart who is actually working for Huang but in pursuit of his own particular goals. 

Huang has his claws well and truly embedded in the modern society and has it seems manoeuvred favourable people into the police force ensuring that Cui and his team are neutered before they get the chance to do anything. Then again, Big G seems to have a very co-dependent relationship with Ghost who tells Blondie off for getting into a fight with him because cops are off limits. Nevertheless, the point is to dismantle Huang’s networks of influence to restore the integrity of the police force so they can enforce the law which exists for the protection of the people. It’s all rather confusing, but generally lightened by the intense action sequences designed by Yoo Sang-Seob which are also suitably retro but make good use of sword play along with a motorcycle chase. Perhaps ironically inspired by Hollywood hero cop dramas, the film ends with a regime change and a new photo being taken of the guys in their more modern uniforms receiving a commendation with the clear indication that something has been put to rest and the rebellion suggested by Qing’s attempt to steal power from the old quelled while the old boys seemingly decide that justice requires they put off their retirement just a little longer.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, Chen Zhuo, 2024)

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The funny thing about Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, pánghuáng zhī rèn) is that it gets away with suggesting that the police won’t investigate properly and is quite unexpectedly sympathetic towards the hero’s desire for first hand retribution, albeit with the caveat that the police are seen to be investigating but possibly hamstrung by otherwise sensible legislation about the age of criminal responsibility. The Keigo Higashino novel on which the film is based had also been rooted in a moral panic that children were deliberately committing heinous crimes in the knowledge they couldn’t legally be punished for them.

The perpetrators in this case are a little older, though the argument is that if they had been properly charged for an offence committed in childhood they wouldn’t have gone on to commit further crimes in the belief that they are above the law. One of the men feels that in fact he is because it’s clear his wealthy and influential father often clears up his messes for him. A secondary issue hints at an anxiety about the nature of justice given that minors who commit serious crimes such as rape or murder receive much lighter sentences meaning they could be free to live a relatively normal life in just a few short years when their victims will obviously have no such opportunity.

Of course, that’s the point. The implication is that these young people were not fully capable of understanding their actions and could still be rehabilitated to become upstanding members of society. But that might not seem right to the families of their victims such as Li Chanfeng (Wang Qianyuan), a doting single father whose only daughter was raped an murdered by a pair of young hooligans with the assistance of their bullied friend. With judicial progress slow, he receives a tip off from the instigators’ underling and pays a visit to one of the other men who assumes he’s a burglar and attacks him leading Chengfeng to beat him to death with a baseball bat while a video of his daughter’s rape plays on the computer screen. 

The film presumably gets away with its hints towards vigilanteism by the fact the police are right behind him despite having received no tip off. The lead officer is however himself conflicted in beginning to doubt he can provide real justice because of the way the law responds to children who commit crimes and appears to sympathise with Changfeng to the extend he appears reluctant to catch him. The TV news and the people watching it also seem to understand and approve of his quest and desire for vengeance with a woman even helping him hide from the police if also urging him to turn himself in.

But the kind of justice Changfeng wants is incredibly direct. He doesn’t want these men off the streets because he fears for other people’s daughters, but wants to ensure they can’t live the share of life his daughter has been denied. The fact that, if legal justice is served, they’d get out and still be young men pains him without end and only death will answer it. Chased by the police, he begs them to kill him too to release him from his torment. 

Chen Zhuo keeps the tension high with a series of exciting action sequences including one though a disused water park near a moribund hotel the bad guys have been using as hideout. The reasons for their crimes are never explained aside from the ringleader’s dependence on his father, though they are assumed to be mere devilment and rebellion, an attempt to circumvent the system knowing they can’t be held legally responsible for their actions.

The familiar series of title cards at the film’s conclusion explain that the police caught all the wrongdoers while they have also lowered the age of responsibility though it wouldn’t have made any difference in this case. A flashback to another trio of teens suggests that they are emboldened by the fact the law can’t touch them, but the bigger issue is likely to be the way the system is corrupted by money and unequal access to justice. Changfeng is after all a lowly construction worker and is largely left on his own with nothing left to live for but vengeance. His quest to kill the killer is also a quest to kill himself and end his suffering. Zhuo follows him through the grimness of this everyday life, the squalid rooms and his general sense of emptiness but finally returns to the world of state justice and apparently compassionate police only sorry that they couldn’t do more to protect their fellow citizens from the “bad kids” of a changing society.

Original trailer (English subtitles)