Tag: 2020s

For Alice (給愛麗絲, Chow Kam Wing, 2024)

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“I don’t know if I’m really lucky or really unlucky,” a young woman wonders after a series of narrow escapes amid the otherwise dismal circumstances of her life in Chow Kam Wing’s debut feature, For Alice (給愛麗絲). A lament for failed fatherhood, Chow plays with noir tropes and the legacy of classic Hong Kong cinema in his neon vistas of despair but eventually discovers a kind of catharsis even as the absent patriarch can redeem himself only in his absence.

Shuang has spent his life in and out of prison and evidently chose to not to maintain contact with his wife and daughter during his latest stretch. The titular Alice is like her namesake lost in the wonderland of contemporary Hong Kong though she named herself for the song and is doing her best to overcome the many problems in her life many of which stem from her relationship with her often absent mother and her string of problematic boyfriends including the latest one, a tailor, who is sexually abusing her. When her mother disappears yet again on a gambling trip to Macau she decides to run away, intending to stay with a friend and sleeping rough when it doesn’t pan out. She meets Shuang, she thinks, by chance sensibly wary but also grateful for the kindness of a stranger. 

As it turns out, her mother may have had a reason for all those gambling trips and it isn’t all that different from Shuang’s for his life of crime in that they are both doing it for Alice while constantly frustrated by the socio-economic realities of contemporary Hong Kong. Now in his 60s, Shuang wants to make amends and live a more law-abiding kind of life while redeeming himself as a father but struggles to find a foothold while slowly but anonymously building a paternal relationship with Alice who is facing similar problems to those he faced as a young man. Longing to escape her circumstances she sets her sights on independence and is tempted by criminality, ironically suggesting she will become a smuggler or deal drugs to support herself even as Shuang counsels her against it, encouraging her to pursue her education so she doesn’t end up like him. He didn’t have a choice, he explains, but she does and could make a better life for herself. 

But she’s still constrained by an overly patriarchal social system as she finds herself scrambling when her teacher wants to talk to her parents to discuss her smoking on school premises. Who could she possibly ask with her mother absent and the man in the position of a step-father actively harmful and in no position to help? Unbeknownst to her, Shuang accepts his paternal role and offers a genuine apology for his failed fatherhood, his irresponsible absence and its effects on the life of his daughter who was then left unprotected, vulnerable to life’s vagaries and the impossibilities of a stratified society. Yet in the end the only way he can help her is to damn himself, accept his choices and his absence and do what he can for Alice from afar. 

Chow’s Hong Kong is place of constant danger and ever present futility filled with dank corridors, rundown buildings, and neon-lit streets. Yet there is something resonant about Alice’s resilience and desire for freedom while accepting the friendship, help and support of a friendly neighbour adopting a less oppressive paternal role that aims, like the bird in bottle, to set his daughter free both of his own destructive legacy and the constraints of the situation she finds herself in. A parallel is seen in the life of Shuang’s friend, Jiu, again fixing his sights on one last job to provide a better future for his family but at the same time risking it knowing that it may mean forfeiting it entirely. Nevertheless, Shuang redeems his paternity in its denial, an act both of self-sacrifice and revelation in which he restores to Alice a more positive paternal legacy along with a sense of love and support otherwise absent from her life as a young woman largely alone in an often hostile environment.

For Alice screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Blue Period (ブルーピリオド, Kentaro Hagiwara, 2024)

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An ennui-ridden teen finds the world opening up to him after he discovers the power of art yet fears he can’t live up to his new epiphany in Kentaro Hagiwara’s adaptation of the manga by Tsubasa Yamaguchi, Blue Period (ブルーピリオド). Less about art itself, the film presents its hero with the cowardice of conformity, challenging him above all to know himself and wield his selfhood like a weapon in a world that can at times be unforgiving.

Even so, Yatora (Gordon Maeda) is a model student who gets good grades and is known for being well-mannered but secretly he’s filled with emptiness and has largely been just going through the motions. In his opening voice over, he relates that he does what he has to do, but declares himself unfulfilled and directionless. Unexpectedly captivated by a fellow student’s painting, he’s confronted by the power of art and the freedom it offers vowing to get into prestigious art school Tokyo University of the Arts.

The constraints he feels are partly economic in that his parents can’t afford a private university so he has to do his best to get into a public arts school while his mother seems dead against the idea of him going into the arts because it doesn’t put food on the table. Yatora parrots back similar lines describing art school as a pointless waste of time but is quickly taken to task by fellow student Yuka (Fumiya Takahashi) who challenges his tendency towards conformity and needles him into independent thoughts and action.

Yuka is also contrained by conservative social codes in that she dresses in a female uniform though many still call her by her male name, Ryuji. Though the pair have a rather spiky relationship, it’s Yuka’s attempts to challenge him that bounce Yatora towards discovering his true self which as it happens is done through embracing his least palatable elements. As Yuki correctly observes, his good boy persona and tendency towards hard work are just masks for his inner insecurity.

Yet as he’s also told, art isn’t just about talent but requires passion and tenacity which in its way makes it a perfect fit for Yatora’s hard-working nature as he buckles down to become a promising artist in the run up to his high school exams. As he later reflects, others may be more talented than him but they can’t make the things that he makes because the point is they come from himself. His early pieces are criticied for their superficiality, that he only sees what’s directly in front him rather than learning to see the world in other, more unique ways and engage with it on an individual level but through his artistic journey he discovers new ways of seeing along with his true self in all its complexity. 

His newfound desire to follow his heart places him at odds with prevailing social codes which favour the sensible though it also spurs others on to do the same, one of his best friends deciding to become a pastry chef rather than get a regular salaryman job hinting at a greater desire for personal fulfilment among the young. Often poetic in his imagery such the sparks that fly from Yatora’s nascent artwork or the comforting blue of the Shibuya twilight that becomes his safe space, Hagiwara sometimes paints Yatora’s quest like a shonen manga with a series of bosses to beat in Yatora’s various rivals and challenges most which teach him something about himself that spurs him on to continue chasing his artistic dreams while the exams themselves are also mental exercises of strategy and thinking outside the box to unlock a particular kind of self-expression. There is something quite refreshing, however, in the fact that Yatora’s only real rival is himself in his ongoing quest for skills and self-knowledge, earnestly applying himself to master his craft eager only for the places his artistry will take him both mentally and physically and no longer so dissatisfied with the world around him but filled with a new curiosity and the confidence in himself to continue exploring it.

Blue Period screened in New York as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Customs Frontline (海關戰線, Herman Yau, 2024)

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Who knew life as a customs official could be so dangerous? Those at the centre of Herman Yau’s high octane drama certainly do put themselves on the front line, facing constant threats of violence as they attempt to protect Hong Kong from nefarious goods and shady businessmen. The crisis in this case is, however, more international in nature as a Hong Kong corporation appears to be supplying an African warlord with seriously high tech equipment in exchange for diamonds. 

A mild political point is made that the world largely ignores conflicts in Africa, the warlord explaining that he needs all these weapons to defend himself because no one else is going to and those that do come to him largely do so for reasons of exploitation, including Dr Raw who acts as their supplier. The customs guys get dragged into it when a boat sails into their waters illegally and thereafter become determined to recover the MacGuffin of a high tech navigation device apparently stolen from the Thai army who would quite like it back. The gang are aided in their quest by a couple of Thai Interpol officers including Ying (Cya Liu) who helpfully speaks fluent Mandarin. 

Meanwhile, Customs is divided by internal polices as two divisions vie for control over the project while plotting their ascension to the soon to be vacated post of deputy commissioner. Veteran officer Cheung (Jacky Cheung) is raked over the coals by brash supervisor Kwok (Francis Ng) and, unbenkownst to him in a romantic relationship with his rival, Athena (Karena Lam). His parter Lai (Nicholas Tse) is meanwhile nursing a degree of heartbreak having broken up with team member Katie (Michelle Yim) a year previously only to hear that she is now engaged to marry someone else. 

Perhaps surprisingly, these interpersonal dynamics largely fall by the wayside and are never dealt with again. However, the film does get into some depth with Cheung’s mental illness which it suggests is largely due to the stress of the job and has turned him into two quite different people. Somewhat insensitively, the film further stigmatises metal illness in its implications regarding Cheung’s career and emotional wellbeing with constant shots of his medication and the suggestion that he is not really up to the job. 

For the most part, however, the Customs division end up in a series of firefights and car chases eventually trying to protect the son of an industrialist (Carlos Chan) who died in suspicious circumstances after trying to sever ties with smugglers. They’re strafed in an African compound, and engage in daredevil stunts trying to outrun the bad guys with combat skills that seem incongruous with their role as customs officials. The earnest Lai runs around punching bad guys in the name of justice to heal his broken heart while otherwise failing to bond with plucky Interpol agent Ying who still ends up as a damsel in distress despite her obvious skills though her chief manoeuvre is a honeytrap, using poisoned lipstick to knock out the chief arms dealer.

The film may hint at a dissatisfaction with inequality and consumeristm along with a healthy mistrust for large, family-owned corporations but otherwise fails to follow through. Cheng dreams of a place in the sun, a house by the sea for Athena where they could leave the stressful world of customs and intelligence behind but also seems resentful of her ambition asking her if she’d choose a quiet life with him over a shot at becoming deputy commissioner and annoyed when she replies that she hopes she can do both, achieving her career goals and then enjoying the rest of her life in a peaceful retirement at Cheung’s side. It may be this sense of hopelessness that drives him, realising he can’t attain what he really wants in the elusive career success denied him because of his reluctance to play the game along with the lack of financial power it affords him leaving him unable to buy that house by the sea or give Athena what he thinks she wants (but probably doesn’t, at least in the way he wants to give it to her). Though falling flat in terms of its interpersonal drama, the action scenes are at least exciting and well-designed even if the whole is somewhat hollow in its continual lack of bite.

Customs Frontline screens in New York July 17 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

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)