Tag: 2020s

Takano Tofu (高野豆腐店の春, Mitsuhiro Mihara, 2023)

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There’s an untranslated title card at the beginning of Mitushiro Mihara’s poignant dramedy Takano Tofu (高野豆腐店の春, Takano Tofu-ten no Haru) that describes the film as a story about the end of Heisei and it is in many ways about the end of an era, or perhaps of eras, but equally new beginnings and the eternal wellspring of life. With subtle hints of Ozu playing out as a kind of mashup of Late Autumn and Late Spring, it suggests that it’s never really too late to find happiness or to start something new even while preserving the best of the old. 

Harbingers of change are, however, lingering on the horizon as a customer to Takano Tofu remarks agreeing with daughter Haru (Kumiko Aso) that they need to innovate to stay in the game when the big new supermarket opens a few streets away. But change is not something father Tatsuo (Tatsuya Fuji) is keen on and especially when it comes to his tofu which is why he’s cancelled Haru’s popular new product of fried tofu and cheese despite its popularity and is also dead against her idea of expanding their network to sell in Tokyo.

There is something inherently comforting about the peacefulness of this quiet corner of Onomichi as Mihara captures it even if it also seems like a place out of time more Showa even than Heisei with its family businesses and old-fashioned shopping arcade. But equally there’s an underlying loneliness and answered longing along with a sense of lives disrupted by historical circumstance. Ironically enough, Tatsuo receives news from the hospital that one of the arteries to his heart is blocked requiring an operation to get everything working again and then immediately bumps into an old woman about his own age with whom he eventually bonds over the shared traumas of living in post-war Japan along with the lingering social stigma towards those affected by the dropping of the atomic bomb. We later learn that the failure of Haru’s marriage was in part caused by her father-in-law’s prejudice fearing her irradiated genes would contaminate his bloodline.

Then again, perhaps the pity expressed towards Fumie (Kumi Nakamura) as a woman who never married plays into outdated and sexist social attitudes that also lead Tatsuo and his friends to decide to find a mate for Haru given his sudden mortality crisis and fear that like Fumie she will be left alone when he eventually passes away. Of course, what it amounts to is a bunch of old men trying to decide who a middle-aged woman should marry while deliberately avoiding asking her if that’s even something she’s interested in. Having experienced marriage already perhaps she’s no desire to do so again and is perfectly happy the way things are. In any case she’s infinitely capable of finding a husband for herself if she wanted one. The prospective match they come up with for her is perfect on paper, youngish, handsome, wealthy and cultured, yet as it turns out what Haru might prefer is someone more ordinary, down to earth, and straightforward ironically enough just like tofu. 

As she later says, Tatsuo’s tofu has the flavour he gives it. Nicely textured, surprisingly soft on the inside, with a slight hint of astringency. There may be a minor pun involved in the Japanese title in that it can be read either as “Haru of Takano Tofu”, or as the meaning of her name implies “Spring at Takano Tofu” hinting both at a sense of transience and resurgence as Tatsuo takes in the cherry blossoms with Fumie and reflects on all they’ve experienced throughout the long years, the hardship and heartbreak of the post-war era. Yet as he says life is for living and it’s as much as you can hope for to look back and laugh at a life well lived. Maybe some things don’t need to change all that much, like carefully produced artisanal tofu as rich in soul as those who make it, but there’s always room for a little innovation and tiny chances for new happiness that could easily pass you by if you aren’t willing to take a risk or two and place a bet on change.

Takano Tofu screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Exhuma (파묘, Jang Jae-hyun, 2024)

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The vengeful ghost of Japanese imperialism rises to take its revenge on its forgetful children in Jang Jae-hyun’s eerie supernatural horror, Exhuma (파묘, Pamyo). As in The Wailing, the supernatural threat is in this case not of Korean origin which causes a problem for otherwise powerful shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun). As a Korean exorcist, she is apparently not best placed to defeat an alien spirit while insisting that Japanese ghosts are more dangerous because they kill indiscriminately and cannot be reasoned with.

This is often true of ghosts in Japanese folklore. Their grudges become all-consuming. Revenge is often taken against society or humanity in general rather than a specific target and can even affect those the ghost once would not have wished to harm. In this case, it appears the supernatural entity in question has retained some of his selfhood while screaming for a hundred years having been sealed away in what one person describes as the worst burial plot in Korea. The ghost’s newborn great grandson won’t stop crying, apparently a family affliction, and so they want to do something about this apparent curse. But that requires digging into the past and unearthing its unpleasantness such as the fact the family’s immense wealth is thanks to the great-grandfather’s questionable politics as a full on militarist committed to the furthering of the Japanese empire. 

Meanwhile, the other ghost that haunts them is that of a giant samurai who was killed at the battle of Sekigahara, which of course means he could also have participated in Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea only eight years previously. The film hints at backstories, never explaining why it is that Hwa-rim speaks fluent Japanese or what it was that happened in Japan except that she apparently found out that Korean shamanism doesn’t work that well on the average Japanese ghost. It all goes back to some kind of mad monk and fox diviner who did some black magic on the peninsula as a whole though it’s not clear exactly what it’s been doing for the last 70 years or so. 

These different kinds of spiritual practice and folklore beliefs jangle together seemingly without border or conflict. The funeral director (Yoo Hae-jin) who works with Hwa-rim and her geomancer friend (Choi Min-sik) is a Christian but apparently has no objection to witnessing shamanic rights nor disbelief in their power as if his twin belief systems simply sat next to each other. Even so, there does seem to be something entirely distinct about Hwa-rim’s practice that is different from Japanese Shintoism despite it its superficial similarities to the extent that her abilities have no effect on a Japanese spirit. 

Then again, this evil is older and deeper than the original ghost apparently wailing for a hundred years about his imprisonment and keen to take down all his descendants in self-destructive revenge. A grave digger spots what seems to be a snake with the head of a person, while no one seems to take the warnings about opening the coffin seriously. Everyone talks about grave robbers, ironically looking for riches among the dead, though the what the team find themselves doing is unearthing the buried past, trying to free themselves from it and perhaps the oppressive yoke of the colonialist legacy.

Jang heightens the sense of anxiety with faced paced, rhythmic editing coupled with scenes of extreme eeriness. He hints at a world beyond our own filled with vengeful spirits and lurking evil while the threats are largely supernatural rather than human even if the ghosts themselves did originate as ordinary people who were also fairly problematic before they died. In some ways, the film might be saying that it doesn’t do any good to go digging up the past but also that if you don’t you may have to live with a slowly festering evil that will visit itself on your children and your children’s children. Still, like the little boy who secretly kept grandma’s false teeth because he wanted something to remember her by, the past can be a difficult thing to let go of and simply re-burying it in a nicer place may not be enough to free yourself from the long buried generational trauma of an almost forgotten past.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Yutaka Tsunemachi, 2023)

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Life goes on as usual, until it doesn’t. The couple at the centre of Yutaka Tsunemachi’s debut feature Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Kono Hibi Ga Naidara), are about to hit the crisis of youth in which they begin to think seriously about their futures and fear that their lives can no longer continue simply as they were but also struggle to find direction while torn between what society views as a successful life and their own desires.

The crunch point comes when Hiroto (Hiroki Sato), a construction worker, and Futaba (Kaho Seto), who works in a florist’s, learn that their rundown apartment block is going to be demolished and they have six months to find somewhere else to live. While Futaba idly looks at wedding rings, she isn’t really sure how Hiroto views their relationship or if he’s even assuming they’ll finding somewhere new together. The financial strain of an unexpected move also has her wondering if she should give up her job in the florist’s, which she enjoys due to her love of flowers, and start looking for a regular company job but an attempt to talk about it with Hiroto only results in petulance born of male pride as he takes it as her complaining he doesn’t earn enough with his job as a casual labourer. 

Another source of friction is that Hiroto seems reluctant to meet Futaba’s family while refusing to introduce her to his hinting at longstanding childhood trauma stemming from a legacy of domestic abuse and a father who lost himself in drink. Even so, he’s drawn to an older man at work, Haruo, who soldiers on despite his decreasing physical capability. When he is unceremoniously fired, the Haruo takes his own life having lost his both his means of supporting himself and his sense of purpose. Haruo might remind him of father though Hiroto feels somewhat guilty that he didn’t do very much to help while he was alive and resentful towards his heartless boss and colleagues who did nothing more than make fun of him. 

This idea of people being disposable tools of corporate entities is further born out by the experiences of his hometown friend, Daigo (Masashi Yamada), who is feeling burned out by his dream job in the city largely thanks to a bullying boss and overbearing work culture. A friend who experienced something similar tells him she just quit her job and feels much better so if he doesn’t feel appreciated he should leave, but it’s not really that simple. Not only does he need a steady income to survive but there’s a degree of shame and trepidation in not following the conventional path, the same shame and trepidation that has Futaba worrying she’s being irresponsible in following her dream of opening a florist’s of her own rather than using her degree to get a better paid job and start saving for the next phase of adulthood while still uncertain if Hiroto is going to want to get married and settle down. 

Experiencing another crisis that forces him to confront his childhood trauma, Hiroto sighs that his future is shrouded in darkness and he wishes that it was all set out for him an ironic inversion of the crisis experienced by others his age that they resent being railroaded into a life of conventional success that in fact does not make them happy. In any case, he emerges with a little more clarity about the kind of future he might want no longer so frightened of commitment or suspicious of familial bonds. What the youngsters experience is a perhaps premature end to their youth symbolised by the literal tearing down of their world in the soon to be demolished apartment block that forces them out of their inertia and onto a path towards a more settled adulthood. But equally that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to abandon their dreams or live up to an ideal of conventional success if it’s not what they want but can begin to find other futures for themselves outside of the mainstream that are valid and satisfying. Tsunemachi follows them with a hazy detachment but captures something of the anxieties of contemporary youth still struggling to find accommodation with demands of living in a judgmental and uncertain society. 

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Faraway Family (彼方の家族, Taro Kawasaki & Eisuke Sakauchi, 2023)

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It may be a truism to say that you never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives, but even if a family looks superficially happy and gives the impression everything is going just perfectly for them that might not actually be the case. The title of Taro Kawasaki & Eisuke Sakauchi’s Faraway Family (彼方の家族, Kanata no Kazoku) has a double meaning in that in the Japanese title can be also read as “Kanata’s Family” which is the name of the hero and also a word meaning “somewhere in the distance” which is in fact how both of the boys feel their fathers to exist. 

Kanata may feel it more closely in that he lost his father in the 2011 tsunami and has never really dealt with the grief having moved to Yamagata with his mother. Kanata’s father also had quite a difficult relationship with his fisherman grandfather who was intent on railroading him to take over the boat and seemingly never had a good word for anyone yet his father lost his life after heading to the harbour to look for him explaining only that he was family. Now the only breadwinner in the family, his mother has to work to support them and is therefore often absent, leaving him money to buy dinner from a convenience store which he usually eats alone. 

Having become withdrawn and fearful of making new relationships that may end suddenly, Kanata also has the added stigma of being someone from Fukushima in the wake of the nuclear disaster. His new teacher, Yoshikazu, makes a well-meaning faux pas in telling Kanata to consider him a father figure yet as it turns out Yoshikazu is a fairly compromised one. On being introduced to his classmate Riku who is also Yoshikazu’s son he thinks he’s had his face rubbed in it with this picture of the perfect family.

But what he discovers is that Riku has many of the same problems as himself seeing as he also fears he does not really fit in his family and wonders if they’d be happier and better off if he weren’t in it. Unlike Riku, Kanata doesn’t seem to be overly burdened by parental expectation and despite the problems between his father and grandfather his early childhood seems to have been happy and filled with love and cheerfulness. His problem is more to do with what he’s lost and the resulting sense of absence it’s left behind as he finds himself eternally missing his father. 

For Riku meanwhile, it’s the connection itself which is painfully absent. The more he tries to connect with Yoshikazu the more it seems to backfire while Yoshikazu seems obsessed with the idea of his getting into Japan’s most prestigious university mostly for his own gratification as double proof of what a great teacher and father he is. Or else, to mask his own sense of inadequacy in that he would feel embarrassed professionally if his own son turned out not to be academically inclined. Riku’s family don’t celebrate birthdays and he can’t ever remember getting a present but when he decides to try and buy one for Yoshikazu it’s a reminder of a happier memory when he simply played with him as a loving father rather than a hard taskmaster driving him on to a vicarious goal as evidence of his controlling nature. 

Kanata seems to have had more than his share of tragedy in life and is painfully aware of the things just our of reach but also increasingly that not all of them are and if you’re not careful you can in fact be the one to push them away. Shooting in the icy snow of a Yamagata winter, Kawasaki and Sakauchi capture the frostiness of the boys’ emotional isolation but also the quickening warmth of their friendship as they bond over their shared loneliness in pining for an absent father. What Kanata learns is to embrace the things that seem somewhere far away for they do at least exist there, even if no longer present in a physical sense, and that the memory of them can be warm and comforting rather than painful or lonely. 

Faraway Family screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Polar Rescue (搜救, Lo Chi-leung, 2022)

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One of the more surprising things about Polar Rescue (搜救, sōujiù, AKA Come Back Home), a rare vehicle for Donnie Yen outside of the martial arts and action genres, is just how unheroic its panicked hero is. Though he may start off as a frantic parent who has our sympathies, we later begin to realise that he is at least severely flawed while there are also a few perhaps subversive hints towards the pressures of the modern China which have frustrated his attempts to be what he would assume a good father to be.

Despite later hints that the family is in a spot of financial bother, they’ve all gone on what looks like a fairly expensive skiing holiday in a European-style resort. The problem begins towards the end of their stay when eight-year-old Lele starts acting up in part because his father, De (Donnie Yen), promised to take him to Lake Tian to see the monster but has broken his word because of road closures due to the adverse weather. Wanting to make it up to his son, De decides to try going anyway via the backroads which are still open but soon enough gets stuck in a ditch. Events from this point on are deliberately obscured, but somehow Lele gets separated from his parents and sister and goes missing in the freezing wilderness. 

Rather than a father’s one man race against time to find his missing son, the film soon shifts into familiar China has your back territory as the full force of artic rescue complete with helicopters and specialist equipment is deployed to find this one missing boy. De is still not satisfied and at several points frustrates the rescue effort by getting into trouble himself without really reflecting that it’s his own irresponsibility and paternal failure that have caused the rescuers to risk their own lives trying to find his son. 

Though we might originally have sympathised with him, particularly as it seems clear Lele is behaving very badly and will not listen to either of his parents, we later come to doubt De on learning that Lele’s disappearance is at least in part related to an incredibly ill-advised though perhaps understandable parenting decision. As the film would have it, De is both too old fashioned in his authoritarian approach in which he’s often been violent towards his son, and too slack as evidenced by the boy’s bad behaviour. He’s failing in most metrics as a father given that he’s run into career difficulty as an engineer after challenging some of the nation’s famously lax safety regulations on a site he was working on he believed to be unsafe and then getting swindled on another construction project by a client who ran off with all the money. He also seems reluctant to allow his wife (Han Xue) to work to ease the family’s financial burden out of a mistaken sense of male pride. 

This ties in somewhat to the propagandist themes as we see him totting up how much it would cost to send his kids to school overseas only for his wife to tut that Chinese education is good too, while the fact the family have two children also hints at a new ideal in the wake of the loosening of the One Child Policy to encourage correction to the rapidly ageing population. The rescuers, meanwhile, are portrayed in a perhaps slightly ambiguous light given than many of them quickly become sick of De and think they should stop looking given the unlikeliness of a child surviving alone for several days in such freezing conditions. Some even suspect De may be responsible for his son’s disappearance and is using them to cover up the crime. Even so, they get to sing a rousing song to the tune of Bella Ciao and re-echo their commitment not to give up until they’ve found Lele even if it turns out to be too late to save him.

A subplot about the two-sided nature of social media in cases like these is dealt with only superficially, while many other things do not quite make sense including the inclusion of a bear and his cub whose appearance, though obviously serving a symbolic purpose, seems like overkill. Nevertheless, there’s a good degree of ambiguity in the central disappearance that helps to head off the otherwise predictable nature of its trajectory. 

Polar Rescue is out now in the US on Digital and Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go Usa.

US trailer (English subtitles)

WE 12 (12怪盜, Berry Ho Kwok-man, 2023)

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Phenomenally popular Cantopop boyband Mirror have been dominating the Hong Kong box office lately with several of the guys playing regular roles in movies not particularly designed as vehicles for their star persona such as Anson Lo’s turn in arty horror It Remains, or Lokman Yeung in Mad Fate. We 12 (12怪盜) is however the first time the band have made a movie altogether as an ensemble star vehicle and is clearly intended for their many devoted fans filled as it is with what seem to be in jokes and references to the guys’ “real” personas or at least those of the “character” they play in terms of their membership of Mirror.

The guys’ solo projects and movie work are perhaps hinted at in the film’s central thesis, if you can call it that, in that the boys have been doing too many solo missions and have lost their team spirit. In the universe of the film, they’re a kind of crime fighting zodiac who do things like save princesses and conduct jewel heists. Each of the band members, who use similar character names, is introduced with a special power which ranges from the ability to converse telepathically with animals to the nebulous “strategic planning” and the downright plain “abseiling” which seems particularly unfair given that any of the other guys could obviously learn to abseil too and then he wouldn’t have a power anymore.

In any case, their group mission is to stop a mad scientist from activating a device which can send mosquitos to other universes because it would destroy our ecosystem. Meanwhile other scientists are working on creating a “right-wing chicken” which turns out to be less political than it sounds and in fact much more absurd, along with a series of other cancer causing foods just in case you weren’t sure if they were really “evil” or not. Even so, the plot isn’t really important more a means of tying the silliness together given that focus is split between the 12 guys who each have their particular moment to shine and personalised gags. When the big job goes wrong because they decided to all do their own thing rather than work as a team, they have to come back together again and rediscover the equilibrium of Kaito (i.e. Mirror). 

Which is all to say, it’s a little impenetrable to the uninitiated but fans of the band will doubtless be in heaven. It’s all in the grand tradition of boyband popstar movies in which the silliness is sort of the point in generating a sense of conspiracy with fans that they’re the ones who get the jokes because of their intimate relationships with the stars. The film also features extended cameos from fellow Cantopop group Error who play their back up team and have a few gags of their own, while Malaysian actress and star of Table for Six Lin Min Chen also has a small cameo as the kidnapped princess. 

The best performance comes however from The Sparring Partner’s Yeung Wai-lun as the slimy security manager Johnny who is obsessed with order and dresses in fascist uniform so obviously out of keeping with the silliness and absurdity the boys represent in a mild kind of rebellion towards anything serious or grown up society in general. There is something quite childish about the way the gags suddenly pop up out of nowhere along with the otherwise nonsensical nature of the film which isn’t so much a nonsense comedy like those of the 80s and 90s as much something totally random perhaps intended to express the essence of Mirror or at least that which its fans believe it to be. For all of these reasons, the film makes very little literal sense and does not hang together very well for anyone not already well versed in the world of the band but presumably plays out just fine for anyone with a 21st-century equivalent of a decoder ring and a silly sense of humour willing to join the boys for whatever crazy adventure they may be embarking on next.

WE 12 is on UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

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Whatever happens upstream affects those further down according to the headman of a small village faced with incursion from city dwellers hoping to turn their peaceful idyll into a tourist hotspot in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s eco drama Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Aku wa Sonzai Shinai). He reminds them that those at the top have a responsibility to those below, and it’s only because of this sense of mutual consideration that life is possible here. It’s an obvious metaphor for the contemporary society in which those with money and power have largely forgotten about those without, but then the film’s title also asks us a question. What is “evil”, does it exist or not, or is it merely in inextricable part of nature human and otherwise that balances out the good?

After a long tracking shot along the trees shot from below, Hamaguchi focuses on the figure of Takumi, a man at home in nature patiently sawing and cutting logs. He teams up with another man, Kazuo, to harvest water from a local stream we later realise is being used by an udon restaurant for a superior taste. Takumi shows him wild wasabi and explains how the locals use it, suggesting that Kazuo consider adding some to his dishes. Like him, Takumi’s daughter also seems to be at home in the forest, wandering off to walk home alone when Takumi inevitably forgets to pick her up from school.

Takumi describes himself as a “jack of all trades” or more to the point a local odd job man, but seems in many ways he’s one who keeps the balance. The problem they have now, is that a company from Tokyo has bought some land and is intent on stetting up a “glamping” resort in the village. A pair of agents turn up from the city to give a kind of question and answer session, but as one of the attendees later suggests it’s mainly to make themselves look good. Unable to answer most of the villagers’ quite reasonable questions all they can do is state they’ll take their opinions into account while offering flawed promises of financial gain and insistence that people from Tokyo will visit as if that were some kind of honour. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the villagers maybe happy as they are and aren’t interested in further material gain while understandably wary of the effects of the resort on the local area from increased traffic and pollution. The agents encounter unexpected resistance centring on the septic tank which has been penciled in for an area which would lead to the contamination of wells and groundwater while it’s also clear that the company are determined to cost cut with the agents blithely telling them that a little bit of sewage in your drinking water never harmed anyone and in any case it’s within the permitted amount. 

Others ask questions about fire risk and understaffing with the agents later asking Takumi to become the resort’s caretaker, insulting him with the implication that he’s some kind of layabout easily bought with a fat paycheque. He corrects them that he has a job and doesn’t need the money, though they persist with asking him to be a kind of advisor. Takahashi, a jaded manager, is soon captivated by the area and in particular Takumi’s manliness in his log splitting and mysterious demeanour but there’s something inevitably harsh and unforgiving about nature even if it’s man that has corrupted it. Gunshots are heard over the horizon, men hunting deer. Takumi and Hana walk past the carcass of one who bled out from a bullet wound and was presumably just left there dying for no real reason. Takumi tells the agents that their site is on a deer path, so they’d need high fences which might put the customers off but reflecting that wild deer aren’t usually “dangerous” unless they’re sick or have been shot. Takumi asks where the deer are supposed to go but gets only a shrug of the shoulders and “somewhere else” from Takahashi, but there are only so many other places, what if this is the last one? If you continue to displace things, there won’t be anywhere left for anyone.

Still, as Takumi says it’s not that villagers have already decided to resist the glamping project, only that they want their fair complaints to be addressed and are willing to engage with the process if only the agents would treat them with a little more respect. But that’s something thin on the ground from the execs in Tokyo who think they’re all a load of bumpkins easily bought off with promises of a better economic future. To Takumi it is really a matter of balance, something that should be maintained for one’s protection as much as anything else. The ominous score which frequently cuts out abruptly adds to an edge of unease and supernatural dread in the ancientness of the natural world even if as Takumi points out this isn’t their ancestral land. It’s a new village that originated in the immediate post-war era when returning soldiers were given land to farm. They are all to some degree outsiders, as perhaps are humans in this inhuman place, but also ones who’ve found a way to live in it that’s as much about respect for the land and others as it is about survival.

Evil Does Not Exist opens in UK cinemas of 5th April courtesy of Modern Films.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Heavy Snow (폭설, Yun Su-ik, 2023)

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“It’s obvious it was a romance, why did you pretend it wasn’t?” one wounded woman asks another while their connection seems to be frustrated by internalised shame and conflicting desires. Yun Su-ik’s frosty drama Heavy Snow (폭설, pokseol) does indeed seem to suggest that their love for each other can only exist in a kind of otherworld, eventually segueing into a metaphysical realm which simultaneously implies that this isn’t actually a romance but self-reflection and interrogation as a tomboyish actress searches for herself inside her various roles.

Indeed, Su-an (Han Hae-in) views Seol (Han So-hee) with a kind of awe which might be understandable given that Seol is a TV drama superstar improbably transferring to her rural arts school for a break from the world of showbiz. Or as Seol would later imply, because she’s become too difficult to manage and is rebelling against the emptiness of her ostensibly glamorous life through increasing acts of reckless self-harm. Su-an might wonder if that’s all her flirtation is, an attempt to flaunt a taboo while otherwise puzzled and jealous as to why someone like Seol would actually be interested in her. 

Yet Su-an’s interest is also in part idolisation, attracted to Seol because she fears she is everything she wants to be but isn’t, beautiful and talented. But Seol seems to doubt she’s either of those things while otherwise superficially confident in her sexuality and drawn to Su-an because of her ordinariness. Experiencing a moment of identity crisis, she’s looking for herself outside the frame yet also perhaps like Su-an caught in moment of self-idolisation. Noticing one of the giant billboards of her face that the litter the city she briefly touches it before walking away as if attracted to an image of herself she recognises and doesn’t. 

Yet it seems it’s less the awkwardness of too much intimacy that causes Su-an to pull away when Seol kisses her than shame. She tells Seol that she thinks it isn’t right, and perhaps goes on to regret that decision while continually pining for an idealised teenage love. The two women in a sense trade places. Years later Su-an is a famous TV actress, having in a way taken over the image of Seol, while Seol is evidently no longer acting but a depressed and defeated figure still resentful of Su-an’s rejection. The effects of their shifting fame deepen the gap between them with the teenage Su-an further nervous in her relationship with Seol knowing the danger that her celebrity presents. There is a suggestion that their creative desires conflict with the romantic, that they feel they cannot embrace their sexuality freely and remain in the entertainment industry because of the intense pressures a conservative society places on prominent people to be shining examples of moral purity. Each of them appear to become worn out by the demands of their fame, Su-an turning to drugs in attempt to mask her depression while the teenage Seol ponders quitting acting to become more her authentic self.

In the dreamlike third act which commences at the sea, a touchstone for each of the women connected to the innocence of their teenage romance, may suggest that in looking for Seol Su-an is really looking for herself or perhaps simply to recapture the person she was at the beginning of everything. At odds with each other, the two women become marooned in a snowbound land with no one else around. Finally repairing their relationship, it seems that they can only embrace their love in this barren place where no one else exists to judge them. The implication maybe that as Seol says the things Su-an wants to say to Seol she really wants to say to herself in a desire for self-acceptance, but equally that we can’t be sure that any of this “real” rather than dream or wishfulment.  In any case all that remains is a painful longing either for an unrealised love or the elusive self. 

Hinting at the pressures of the contemporary society, the unrealistic expectations placed on those in entertainment industry and outward social conservatism the film never less presents its central romance with an evenhanded poignancy even in its continuing impossibility as the two women continue to look for the self in each other but seemingly struggling to see past the hollow images of their own self-projections.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Heavy Snow screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Noriko Yuasa, 2024)

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According to an undertaker in Noriko Yuasa’s darkly comic drama Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Kaoru no Ososhiki) death is a kind of natural disaster. Despite the sometimes farcical going ons at this particular funeral, he does indeed have point in the sense of inevitable tragedy that the colours events as a dejected middle-aged man attempts to clarify his memories while overseeing the funeral of a woman he was once married to but evidently had not seen in many years.

To this extent, as the title says, Jun is “performing” Kaoru’s funeral though perhaps it’s true enough that there’s always an degree of performance in involved. As Kaoru’s young daughter, also named Kaoru, says, no one here believes in god or Buddha and this ritualised mourning process doesn’t seem to be helping her process her grief. From time to time, Yuasa cuts back to a Bruegel-esque image of a painting of hell complete with demons staring pots with people in boiling water suggesting that this too is a kind of purgatorial hellscape.

Suddenly tasked with MCing his former wife’s funeral Jun takes it with good grace if also a little confusion. Guests mainly seem to be using it as an opportunity to vent their dissatisfaction or settle old grievances. The atmosphere is strange, somehow fraught and otherworldly while the other guests seem to treat Jun as an interloper never really considering that he may be grieving too. The ritualised act of performing the funeral causes him to remember his married life along with the woman who seems to have remained an enigma to him and may have done so to everyone. 

Once an aspiring actor, Jun is now a defeated figure employed as a driver for girls working at a Soapland. Before receiving the call about the funeral he’s beaten up by a pair of gangsters after intervening when one of them tried to assault the girl he was driving. Presented in a boxy square, Jun’s flashback memories have an unreal quality as if his marriage was a kind of fairytale or a dream he was woken from too soon. Kaoru’s decision to make him the chief mourner at her funeral may in a sense have been ironic, a final acknowledgement of the role he played in her life but also grants him a valuable opportunity to set the past to rest and perhaps begin to move on. 

For some of the other guests, however, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Some lie about their relationship with Kaoru or else cause unexpected trouble in venting a petty grievance. A rival screenwriter turns up to get drunk and make catty remarks, while a middle-aged man also uses the occasion to lay into his daughter-in-law with a lengthy misogynistic rant about his unmanly son’s inability to manage his wife. Little Kaoru seems largely left on her own, expected to carry out these rituals while grieving for her mother with no real support. A small subplot revolves around the potential candidates for her father, but none of them, bar perhaps Indonesian restaurant owner Wayan and Jun himself who claims she cannot be his pays much attention to her.

After opening with a grim scene of Kaoru on the slab, much the action is accompained by the urgent sound of something ticking as if marking out the passage of time while lending a sense of urgency to something that is no longer really urgent. Brought together by her deaths, the guests each have their own relationship with the deceased and like Jun and little Kaoru perhaps begin to process their grief and move step forward though in other ways also the opposite in one’s near literal inability to let go. The girl Jun had been escorting found an abandoned urn on the train and took it home with a kind of perverse delight musing on the reasons someone might leave their urn behind. In a way, that’s what Jun is trying to do, let his past drift away, Kaoru somehow setting him free to start living his life again after he sees her off. As the screenwriter said every script has to have a moment of catharsis and Yuasa’s tragicomic tale does indeed have its share of melancholy poignancy but ends on a bittersweet note of thank you and farewell as Jun and little Kaoru sail off into a new future having laid the past to rest.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Soul (緝魂, Cheng Wei-Hao, 2021)

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“Affection is the greatest obstacle on the path to success” according to the villain at the centre of Cheng Wei-Hao’s philosophical mystery, The Soul (緝魂, Jī Hún). Adapted from a science-fiction novel by Jiang Bo, Cheng’s near future tale has a series of questions to ask about legacy, family, love, and repression as its earnest investigator tries to come to terms with his oncoming end while living with treatment resistant cancer and trying to decide what is the best way to support his wife and unborn child in his impending absence. 

In 2032, police are called to the palatial estate of a local tycoon only to find him brutally murdered. Perhaps there’s nothing so shocking about that, powerful men have enemies, yet the strange thing is that Wang (Samuel Ku) was already dying of brain cancer and had a very short time left to live so there would seem to be little advantage in bumping him off early. The prime suspect is his disgruntled son Tien-yu (Erek Lin) who was seen leaving the mansion in a hurry and is known to bear a grudge against his father over his mother’s death while Wang’s much younger second wife Li Yen (Sun Anke) also identifies him as the killer. But there are definitely a few things which don’t add up here. Why is Wang’s business partner Wan named as his second choice as heir after Li Yen despite the rumours he had been having an affair with first wife Su-chen (Baijia Zhang), why are there security cameras in Li Yen’s bedroom, and why would a man with so little time left to live opt for an arranged marriage to an orphaned 20-year-old woman from one of the orphanages his philanthropic organisation supports?

Those are all questions which immediately present themselves to veteran investigator Liang (Chang Chen) whose own wife Pau (Janine Chang Chun-ning), also a policewoman, is pregnant with their child while he has just learnt that his cancer has resisted all treatment and may in fact be incurable. Deciding his remaining time may be best spent providing what he can for his family he asks his boss for his job back and specifically to be put on the Wang case, immediately homing in on the company’s radical new treatment for cancer through transplanting rejuvenated neurons directly into the brain. He begins to wonder what comes with it if you begin implanting neurons that belong to someone else but gets no reply from Wan in the middle of his sales pitch. 

Hinted at in the Chinese title the question that arises is that of the connection between soul and flesh and whether it becomes possible to achieve a kind of immortality through colonising brains in healthy bodies, an idea which might of course prove appealing to Liang if he were not so innately incorruptible. Then again as his wife says, perhaps it’s easier to die. It’s the ones left behind who have it hardest, suddenly left to deal with everything on their own. That might be why she finds herself tempted by their rather obvious conflict of interest in compromising her integrity to buy her husband a few more days while he wonders what the point of such a sacrifice might be.

Yet what we discover in the unhappy saga of the Wangs is both a megalomaniacal obsession with control that extends beyond one’s own lifetime and a tragic love story born of internalised shame that led to a lifetime of repression and unhappiness in the inability to be one’s authentic self. Liang describes the RNA treatment as an expression of the living’s obsession with the dead, while others describe it as “modern necromancy” oddly echoing the black magic which Su-chen, herself a neuroscientist, and her son had apparently been practicing in their intense resentment of Wang. Pau insists she’d rather believe a soul exists no matter in what form, but if you make division of yourself you may also face an unexpected existential threat born of your own internal conflicts and mutual desire for survival. A slow burn mystery, Cheng’s eerie drama has its share of hokum but nevertheless asks some pertinent questions about the nature of humanity in an increasingly technological age, what it is we leave behind and how it is we move forward (or not) with the process of letting go even as its ironic final moments provide a kind of justice emotional and literal in restoration of a family.