Tag: 2020s

The Story of Southern Islet (南巫, Chong Keat Aun, 2020)

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A wife finds herself thrown into a complicated world of spiritual confusion when her husband is struck down by a mysterious illness he himself attributes either to black magic or divine wrath. Set in 1987 (a year which saw a series of authoritarian crackdowns), Chong Keat Aun’s autobiographically inspired tale A Story of the Southern Islet (南巫) is partly a treatise on the absurdity of national borders but also one of cosmological ambiguity in which the acceptance of that which cannot be explained provides the only hope of cure for those burdened by the sin of transgressing against the gods. 

The gods are a constant source of tension in the marriage between Yan (Jojo Goh), a Westernised educated woman from another village, and her husband Cheong (Season Chee), a superstitious Chinese-Malaysian who makes a living selling seafood at the local market. Yan wants to have the statue of local deity Datuk Gong moved, finding it inconvenient in front of their house while Cheong chastises her for potentially offending the god by disrespectfully hanging her washing out to dry right next next to him. All the trouble starts however when Cheong chases a poisonous snake away from the statue and accidentally damages the fence of the man opposite, Nam (Kuan Kok Hin). Cheong already feels conflicted, worrying that the snake was a manifestation of Datuk Gong and he may have made a grave mistake in being so unwelcoming when a an extremely upset Nam comes over late at night and bangs on their door insisting on compensation. Nam is then killed on his way into town to get repair supplies leaving Cheong feeling extremely guilty and later collapsing with a mysterious illness that among other things causes him to vomit rusty nails. 

To Cheong, that sounds like black magic, a mild degree of suspicion falling on devastated widow Keaw (Pearlly Chua). Yan first takes him to a regular hospital where he’s diagnosed with “food poisoning” and sent home with a few pills, Yan’s attempt to convince a nurse by showing her the nails backfiring as the young woman backs away in horror insisting that she have some respect, they are doctors not shamans. An attempt to ask a local hardware store to help her identify the nails ends in a similar fashion, the salesman offended by the implication that the nails he sells are rusty. Out of her depth, Yan finds herself progressing through each of the spiritual systems in place in the local area, turning then to a shaman who is offended that she hadn’t come to him earlier her local friend Loy (Ling Tang) explaining that she’s from another village and didn’t know shamans did healing only for the shaman to express incredulity not only that there are places where no one worships Datuk Gong but that Yan is a Malaysian woman who cannot speak Malay and needs Loy to interpret for her. 

Yet this village is on the border between Thailand and Malaysia, many of the local people speak Thai while the boys are prone to knock the TV onto a (not really suitable) Thai broadcast in an attempt to avoid the endless speeches about national unity and patriotism. Then again the boys attend a Chinese school where pupils are discouraged from speaking their home dialect and one girl’s mother has even changed her name in the hope of giving her an easier future (as part of Operation Lalang teachers not educated in Chinese were parachuted into Chinese-medium schools giving rise to fears of an attempt to undermine the language). No one at the market seems to want the local seafood, everyone wants the “better” quality, if apparently more expensive, catch from Thailand leaving Cheong with a minor business problem. The shaman tells Yan that Cheong’s condition was caused by accidentally urinating on sacred land but when she ventures into a cave in the hope of praying directly to the mountain deity a disembodied voice tells her that Nenkan Keriang is not so petty, and not only that neither is she Malay meaning the gifts Yan has been told to bring of betel nut and a sarong are also inappropriate. 

Nenkan Keriang’s sad story is in one sense a historical echo of female subjugation, Keriang apparently a Chinese princess who became the victim of an evil shaman after turning down his romantic overtures. If anyone would be motivated to help Yan, it is most likely Nenkan Keriang (and it may well be to her she eventually owes her salvation). Nevertheless, after Malay shamanism fails, Chong courts (further) controversy by sending Yan to ask a Muslim spiritual leader instead who first insists he no longer dabbles in Shamanism before agreeing to help giving Yan instructions and the equipment she needs to rid herself of an unwanted demonic presence squatting on her land. 

It remains unclear if Cheong’s affliction is self-delusion, that in his guilt over Nam and also a series of other minor transgressions including “stealing” fish from a paddy field that belongs to another deity he’s made himself ill and can only be cured psychologically through the reassurance of ritual, or if Yan, who may or may not believe herself, actively cures him by exorcising their demons with the assistance of a transplanted animist deity. Beautifully shot with a lingering ethereality, Chong’s mystical tale places gods and demons amid the everyday while demonstrating the ebb and flow of deeply held cultural beliefs in a border community where harmonious coexistence has long been the norm. 

The Story of Southern Islet streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Finding Angel (천사는 바이러스, Kim Seong-joon, 2021)

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Every Christmas, a box full of money is left in a small village in Jeonju by a well-wishing philanthropist the villagers have taken to calling the “faceless angel”. The phenomenon is in someways a double-edged sword seeing as the anticipation often attracts the attention of the press with various reporters descending on the village hoping to unmask the unknown benefactor’s identity while the villagers have their own ideas who it might be though in practice perhaps it doesn’t really matter. 

As Kim Seong-joon’s warmhearted seasonal comedy Finding Angel (천사는 바이러스, Cheonjaneun Baileosu) makes plain, however, motives are not always pure when there’s money involved and so to some the Angel’s identify matters a great deal. Jihoon (Park Sung-Il) arrives claiming to be a reporter charged with unmasking the mysterious benefactor but on discovering no one is keen to help him, makes up another cover story that he’s a writer researching a novel about small town life while drawing inspiration from the fascinating local legend. As junkyard owner Cheon-ji (Lee Young-ah) instantly realises, there is something a little suspicious about Jihoon that suggests neither of his cover stories is genuine while his true motives remain obscure as he sets about investigating the townspeople trying to figure out if one of them may be the mystery donor. 

As might be expected, the majority of the local residents are elderly though most of them are still working earning a mere pittance at the junkyard despite as Jihoon discovers being fairly well off. Though severe and aloof, many regard Cheonji, who shares the first syllable of her name with the word, as a kind of angel herself having adopted a little boy she’s raising as a single mother while generally being around to settle minor neighbourhood disputes and providing a place for the community to gather which they don’t currently have because the local council leader still hasn’t got round to building the promised old persons’ community centre though he apparently has time to show up for unarranged photo-ops delivering charcoal briquettes to the needy. A running gag sees Jihoon, having got a job at the junkyard to better investigate, struggle with the physical nature of the work while the elderly villagers just seem to get on with it if engaging in the occasional spat along the way. 

Shifting from one “suspect” to another, Jihoon begins to uncover the small secrets of village life learning something new about each of his new friends from bitter regrets to frustrated hopes for the future but his past soon catches up with him threatening to blow his cover as the timer counts down to the Angel’s arrival. What remains is a sad story of perpetual orphanhood and the healing power of the community, the villagers somehow believing that the Angel must be a boy they took in for a brief period 25 years previously who has since made good and wants to give something back though as they later discover the boy was largely betrayed by the world he returned to, encountering only indifference and exploitation away from the kind and watchful eyes of the villagers. 

The identity of the Angel may be beside the point, but what Jihoon discovers is a path back towards redemption through bonding with the villagers if feeling increasingly guilty in not having been entirely honest about his intentions. He is sometimes tempted to betray his new friends, but in the end also helps them to sort out various community problems such as the long held grudge between two elderly former lovers or the inner conflict of Cheonji’s young son who has been secretly siphoning off the best bits of junk while saving money to become “independent” because the junkyard is not an altogether cheerful environment. A warmhearted seasonal mystery, Finding Angel is full of the Christmas spirit as the community come together to protect their local legend aided by Jihoon who becomes ironically enough the fiercest believer in Faceless Angels as he too begins to deal with his childhood traumas, experiencing a Christmas miracle of his own as he learns to let go of his cynicism thanks to the gentle support of the Jeonju villagers. 

Finding Angel is released in UK cinemas on 26th November courtesy of The Media Pioneers.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Clytaemnestra (Ougie Pak, 2021)

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Art and life begin to blur for an indie theatre troupe rehearsing a Greek tragedy in Ougie Pak’s meta take on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon tellingly retitled Clytaemnestra. Filmed at speed during an acting workshop in Greece, Pak’s indie drama is part exploration of a hothouse backstage environment and part meditation on power dynamics which are, the film seems to suggest, more or less unchanged in the intervening 2500 years since the play was first performed. 

Successful actress Hye Bin (Kim Haru) has taken time out from her busy schedule to work with a famous director on the production of an ancient Greek play to be staged at the Theatre of Dionysus itself. The mostly female cast, the only male actor on hand to play the part of Agamemnon, will all stay together in a large rental house throughout the rehearsal process which aside from anything else is an extremely claustrophobic environment. The director (Kim Jongman), meanwhile, seems to be of the break them down school but isn’t so fussed on building them back up. Behaving more like an authoritarian school teacher than a creative collaborator, he operates through shame and humiliation. Showing the cast a video of traditional production, he attempts to workshop through asking each of them for their immediate takeaways on having just seen the play performed but treats each of the answers with condescension instantly shutting down one young actress’ assertion that she saw “Han” in Aeschylus’ script as if directly preventing her from finding common ground between her own culture and a Greek play from thousands of years ago. 

For one reason or another, Hye Bin becomes a particular target for his disdain. When he brings in another actress fresh from Seoul, Ian (Kim Taehee) who arrives with her own assistant, the tensions only rise. Perhaps spotting her rival, Ian encourages the low level bullying of Hye Bin while she becomes irritated and confused on noticing the inappropriate intimacy between the actress and her director. The other members of cast meanwhile find themselves conflicted, often bullied themselves into going along with Ian and the director seemingly too panicked to resist as male actor Jung Hwan (Kim Junghwan) later claims not quite apologising for not having stood up for Hye Bin but apparently embarrassed to have been bamboozled into saying something he didn’t really think was true. 

In the ongoing meta drama, the director is an Agamemnon behaving like a tyrannical king bullying his actors in order, he claims, to get the performances he wants. Attacked by Ian, both verbally and physically, Hye Bin accuses her of using her sexuality to improve her career prospects and thereby indirectly the director of abusing his position to take advantage of potentially vulnerable actresses, provoking a hugely inappropriate confrontation which leads only to threats, violence, and eventual exile. We already know how this play ends, though the director is perhaps so secure in his status, his patriarchal authority, and the “respect” he inspires as a renowned practitioner that it doesn’t occur to him he will have to answer for his behaviour even as he threatens to have Hye Bin blacklisted ensuring she’ll never work in this town or any other ever again and all for the crime of some harsh but true words along with an insistence on maintaining her self-respect through gaining a mutual apology. 

“As soon as we see ego we stop seeing the story” the director barks, denying Hye Bin even her personhood in demanding she disappear into the role in which he casts her. Hye Bin meanwhile has begun having ominous visions perhaps linked to the fluidity of her personae, caught between the mad prophetess and the murderous wife, or else the intensity of the rehearsal process with its myriad petty humiliations. Set mainly within the liminal space of the rented villa where the cast drink Greek beer and are forced to “express themselves” with “feedback” offered in the form of self criticism, Pak’s claustrophobic if occasionally ethereal drama is, as Hye Bin puts it in her original verdict, to some a tale of “justice” as much as “vengeance”, the takedown of a tyrant whose dismissive snarling of the word “feminism” in Hye Bin’s reading of the play may have told us all about him that we needed to know. 

Clytaemnestra screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival

Kim Min-young of the Report Card (성적표의 김민영, Lee Jae-eun & Lim Ji-sun, 2021)

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Does surviving in the modern society necessarily mean sacrificing your essential self? The eponymous Kim Min-young of the Report Card (성적표의 김민영, Seongjeongpyoui Kim Min-young) says she wants to transfer from her regional uni to one in Seoul because her classmates are “too Korean” and she finds them tedious, but is simultaneously mean to and dismissive of the film’s heroine, Junghee (Kim Ju-a), who has defiantly decided to follow her own path rather than the one society lays in front of her. 

As the film opens, Junghee is one of three members of the “acrostic poetry club” along with her high school roommate Min-young (Yoon Seo-young), and a girl from down the hall Sanna (Son Da-hyun). Sadly, they’ve decided to wind the club up because they’re only 100 days out from the college entrance exams and need the extra time to study. We never find out exactly how well Junghee fared or whether her decision to lend her watch to an anxious boy (who does not pass) affected her grade, but in any case she does not attend university deciding instead to look for work while Min-young leaves to study nursing in Daegu. 

The third girl, Sanna, as we later discover did the best of the three and went all the way to Harvard. The trio had vowed to carry on the poetry club via Skype, Sanna making time for her friends even though the time difference makes it inconvenient while Min-young seemingly can’t be bothered to turn up. Nor can she really take time out for Junghee’s calls, her friend a little put out to hear loud party music in the background while trying to share important news. Even so, she’s delighted when Min-young suddenly invites her to visit her staying at her brother’s vacant apartment in Seoul during the summer holidays especially as she’d just been let go from the random job she’d managed to get manning the desk at a moribund tennis club. 

It’s in the Seoul apartment, a messy and chaotic place, that the differences between the two formerly close friends come to the surface. Despite having expressly invited her friend to come, Min-young isn’t really interested hanging out and is in the middle of some kind of crisis obsessing over a single bad grade on her end of term report card. Together they try to formulate a letter of complaint to the professor, Junghee doing her best to be supportive while privately wondering if Min-young isn’t being a little childish and that if she wanted a better grade she should have studied harder. Meanwhile, Min-young runs down all of Junghee’s life choices, constantly telling her she needs to be “realistic” and that she probably won’t get anywhere with her artwork in terms of financial viability. 

Junghee is visibly hurt by Min-young’s superior attitude, but in the interests of having a pleasant day chooses to let it go even while Min-young continues to ignore her. Even so the difference between them is perhaps at the heart of Min-young’s ironic “too Korean” comment about her new uni friends, criticising them for the conventionality to which she too aspires, singing the praises of Seoul but most particularly for its three floor claw game emporiums. A quick look at Min-young’s diary when she abruptly takes off leaving Junghee alone in the apartment reveals that in actuality she envies Junghee for her boundless imagination and willingness to be her true self rather than blindly trying to fit in while finding herself out of place among her new friends. Her opening poem hinted at low self-esteem and an insecurity about the future that perhaps leaves her a little self-involved, projecting her anxieties onto Junghee who is eventually forced to defend herself by pointing out that she has her own reality which is important to her no matter what those like Min-young may have to say about it. 

In the kindest of ways and with true generosity of spirit, Junghee writes the report card of the title praising her friend for her better qualities while pointing out her faults as supportively as she can. Giving her an “F” for “Koreanness” she advises her that she’s the one who is suffering because she worries too much about what other people think, searching for conventional “stability” rather than embracing her true self and ought to become “less Korean” in order to ease some of her anxiety. Offering a mild critique of a socially oppressive culture, Lee & Lim’s quirky drama with its random asides and flights of fancy makes a case for the right to dream positing the quiet yet free spirited Junghee as the more mature of the two women having embraced her true self and decided to follow her own path while being kind to those still trying to find their way. 

Kim Min-young of the Report Card screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Days Before the Millennium (徘徊年代, Chang Teng-Yuan, 2021)

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Perhaps deceptively titled, Chang Teng-Yuan’s bifurcated epic traverses the millennial divide in the company of two Vietnamese women each with very different stories but eventually agreeing “your generation or mine things were not easy for us” as they share their stories of migration amid the changing fortunes of Taiwan-Vietnam relations. Beginning in the mid-90s, Days Before the Millennium (徘徊年代, Páihuái Niándài) finds a mail order bride dreaming of a better life on an “island of riches” but soon finding herself trapped by an overbearing mother-in-law and violent husband, while another woman two decades later arrives happily married for love and well educated but often frustrated in her attempts to help those like herself struggling to adapt to a changing society. 

As Tue (Annie Nguyen) puts it, she exchanged her youth for a future of hope in Taiwan escaping a childhood of war for a more peaceful existence abroad. At the time she arrives, however, Taiwan is not so peaceful as relations with Mainland China continue to decline with many fearing military escalation. Meanwhile, the “mysterious man” to whom she was to be married, is a sullen construction worker filled with a sense of impossibility. Ming (Chiang Chang-Hui) patiently lays one brick on top of another attempting to build his home but finds himself under the watchful eyes of a couple of “surveyors” with eyes on his land. Alone in their van, the two men often debate the modern society the one decrying increasing globalisation while looking down on women like Tue complaining that half the town is now Vietnamese, “polluted”, as if they think they’re losing something even as they attempt to snatch Ming’s land out from under him to build, one assumes, some of the half-completed apartment blocks “private investigator” Lan (Nguyen Thu Hang) drives past 20 years later. 

Tue’s attempts to reclaim some of her agency through opening a small business selling street food only further irritate the already frustrated Ming whose internalised rage eventually turns violent while his mother (Chen Shu-fang) looks on saying nothing, later berating Tue for not having fulfilled the role for which she was desired pointing suggestively at an empty crib which seems to have been in the corner ever since she came. It’s at this point that her marginalisation intersects with that of women born on the island as her Vietnamese friend attempts to get her help by talking to the local police in the light of new legislation recently passed against domestic violence. Though the officer is sympathetic he can do little for her seeing as she has no material evidence while Tue blames herself and is otherwise trapped knowing that leaving her husband before completing her period of residency means potential deportation. Later doing just that she finds solidarity first at a buddhist temple and then a woman’s refuge, but even that is later disrupted by natural disaster.  

Tue’s story becomes a source of inspiration 20 years later for recent immigrant Lan, Chang transitioning to the post-millennial city during a storm which seems to narrow the screen now in a boxy 4:3 rather than the strangely oppressive widescreen with which the film opened. Unlike Tue, Lan has a degree in Chinese and an extensive resume having apparently met and married her Taiwanese husband in Vietnam. She applied for a position at a detective agency, the same agency which once offered to “help” Tue “fight for her rights” but didn’t really want to rent her an apartment, because she wants to help other women like herself in inter-cultural marriages find better solutions to domestic friction but finds her goals at odds with those of her capitalistic boss. Perhaps for these reasons, her first job does not go to plan as she accompanies a Vietnamese mail order bride on a mission to spy on the husband she suspects of having an affair, failing to stop her confronting him after discovering that he is a closeted homosexual who married her to please his parents but now feels guilty and conflicted in his treatment of her. 

This is of course another marginalisation, but one that Lan is ill-equipped to process while the woman she hoped to help is, as Tue once was, faced only with her broken dreams for better life in Taiwan. The Vietnamese news remarks on Taiwan’s geopolitical positioning as a delegation is awkwardly asked to leave an international conference because of Mainland pressure, while it also seems that a Taiwanese factory is responsible for a toxic waste spill that has damaged local fishing stocks and caused widespread illness in Vietnam. When Lan and Tue eventually meet they talk of the changing fortunes of their nations, Lan explaining that the port town where she’s from is now a bustling big city, the Vietnamese economy now much improved while Taiwan’s is falling behind. 20 years between them their fortunes are entirely different, even so they each agree things have not always been easy if differing ways. Nevertheless, their mutual sense of solidarity and desire to improve the circumstances of those like them offers a ray of hope in what might otherwise seem a difficult and hopeless future, Chang’s sometimes experimental, etherial tale of historical echoes and awkward symmetry finally allowing each of its heroines the sense of the better future of which they once dreamed. 

Days Before the Millennium screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Limecrime (라임크라임, Lee Seung-hwan & Yoo Jae-wook, 2020)

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Two teens from across the class divide form an awkward friendship through a shared love of hip hop but find their connection undermined by their differing circumstances and opportunities in Lee Seung-hwan and Yoo Jae-wook’s indie coming-of-age drama Limecrime (라임크라임). Loosely inspired by their own life experiences, Lee and Yoo once performed as a rap duo under the name Limecrime, the directors eventually find unexpected positivity in the boys’ life trajectory as they each reach a point of understanding and thereafter overcome their differences while pursuing their musical aspirations. 

16-year-old Songju (Lee Min-woo) is a struggling middle school student with hip hop dreams currently working part-time in his father’s auto repair shop. He attracts the attention of the well-off, academically successful Jooyeon (Jang Yoo-sang) when performing a classic rap during a vocal evaluation underneath a sign stating that hip hop is forbidden. Being something of a hip hop geek, Jooyeon immediately makes contact lending a mystified Songju a retro discman and some of his favourite tracks before suggesting they team up as a hip hop duo and enter an online competition. 

The duo’s name, Limecrime, is taken from an accidental misreading of “rhyme crime” which eventually sticks and becomes in a way ironic. Nevertheless, it demonstrates an early divide between the boys, Jooyeon mocking Songju for his rookie mistake while insisting that the art of rhyme is central to rap, demanding precision while Songju prefers the anarchy of freeform improvisation. To begin with they bond over their shared love of music, but over time the differences between them become increasingly obvious with Songju often uncomfortable among Jooyeon’s wealthier friends. Though they are mocked by some of their classmates at an early performance, a graduating hip hop club from a local high school offers to befriend them, but their rappers are much more intellectual than either of the boys sitting down to discuss philosophy while Songju feels left behind having no real idea what’s going on. He gets up to fix a broken mic stand, only for Jooyeon to tell him off insisting the repairman will take care of it while rolling his eyes as if implying he thinks Songju has shown himself up in front of their new friends. 

Jooyeon is indeed the sort used to having everything done for him, regarding it as somehow inappropriate to fix something yourself. His parents do not appear to be physically present in his life, heard only via infrequent telephone calls, while leaving the housekeeper to watch over him though she later quits abruptly having reached her limit when Jooyeon and Songju thoughtlessly trash the kitchen and leave the mess for her to clean up. Cleaning up after himself is not something Jooyeon has ever been taught to do and given his family’s wealth he’s also got the idea that all problems can be solved with money. Wanting Songju to attend the high school with the best hip hop club he crassly offers to pay for cram school classes, little realising how his suggestion makes Songju feel or how he’s effectively using and manipulating him to achieve his own aims. Irritated by his practicality, he finally relegates Songju to the space recently vacated by the housekeeper after he kindly fixes up his bike for him. 

Songju meanwhile is both attracted and repelled by Jooyeon’s upperclass world while finding his existing friendships strained when his buddies fall in with a local petty gangster and are pulled towards small scale street crime ironically selling counterfeit fashion from hip hop brands. Given Songju’s example some of the other boys dare to dream of different futures, even the most delinquent revealing he’d like to become an actor, but each is later forced to face the crushing reality that no matter their ambition they do not have the same opportunities as boys like Jooyeon whose family can afford to pay for fancy schools and private tuition. 

Matters finally come to a head when Songju ends up in trouble with the law and Jooyeon gets his father to pull strings on his behalf only to abruptly abandon him when he expresses anxiety over his less well-connected friends. There is something quite ironic in Jooyeon’s love of hip hop, declaring that he wants to “change what’s absurd in this world” through the power of music but later having no answer when asked if he wouldn’t be better to become a politician or activist than an indie musician reliant on being able to generate a platform. After deciding to give up, Songju nevertheless comes into his own and finds his voice but at the same time refuses to leave Jooyeon behind even when discovering solo success. Though the leads may be a little past convincingly passing for 16 (Jang Yoo-sang is 30, Lee Min-woo is 28), Lee and Yoo nevertheless craft a refreshingly positive coming-of-age tale which allows the boys to salvage their friendship and their musical dreams even if perhaps only by sidestepping the issues which initially divided them. 

Limecrime screens 15th November as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Josée (조제, Kim Jong-kwan, 2020)

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When Isshin Inudo’s adaptation of the 1984 short story by Seiko Tanabe Josée, The Tiger and The Fish was released back in 2003, it quickly gained popularity across Asia and is fondly remembered by many as a melancholy love story neatly anticipating the junai boom that would arrive a year later. Nevertheless, almost 20 years on the film’s depiction of disability might seem very of its time while its heavy focus on the male hero’s internal conflict realising that in the end he wasn’t strong enough to fight for love may also seem misplaced. Very loosely inspired by the same short story, Kim Jong-kwan’s Josée (조제) while still largely told from the hero’s point of view does its best to redress the balance in returning agency to the heroine as she resolves to live a freer and more independent life if still to a degree confined by an internal sense of ableism. 

As the film opens, Josée (Han Ji-min) is lying in the road having been thrown out of her electric wheelchair. Student Young-seok (Nam Joo-hyuk) comes to her rescue, grabbing a nearby stool while inspecting the chair only to discover the wheel is broken and the power is out. Thinking quickly he borrows a wheelbarrow from a storeowner and takes both her and the wheelchair back to her home where he’s treated to a meal but also endures Josée’s scorn, she feeling quite ambivalent thinking that she should repay his kindness but also not really wanting to engage with him. Young-seok meanwhile is somewhat captivated by her mystery, later helping her grandmother out after spotting her struggling with a heavy cabinet in the street and thereafter becoming a regular fixture in the young woman’s home. 

Unlike the earlier version, the reasons for Joseé’s largely self-imposed isolation are internal rather than to do with social stigma towards disability or a history of abuse. Nevertheless she harbours a degree of trauma owing to having been abandoned as a child and is reluctant to form close relationships with others which is one reason why she rebuffs Young-seok’s attempts at friendship believing he too would one day leave her while there is also a rather large age gap between them, Young-seok still a student in his early 20s while it appears Josée is at least 10 – 15 years older. Through Young-seok’s intervention Josée discovers that there are systems in place she could go to for support along with community organisations that are keen to help her live independently as an integrated member of society the only reason she had not found them before being her desire for isolation partly caused by the mistaken belief she is wanted by the police. 

Young-seok meanwhile despite his earnest desire to help her is still somewhat immature, naively asking his sometime college girlfriend insensitive questions about her rent and living arrangements while unable to understand the consequences of his actions in carrying on an affair with one of his professors and being exploited by another. Josée accuses him of pitying her which he perhaps does but is also drawn to her because of her sense of mystery discovering that little of what she says of herself is true, merely the expression of the escapist fantasies she uses to overcome the inertia of her life. The irony is that Young-seok is attracted to her precisely because of this quality of otherness and unknowability, while through forming a relationship with him she grows to know and love herself, finally accepting that she is worthy of love if also perhaps viewing herself as a burden as if she would trap Young-seok with her in world of isolation unfairly denying him the right to the fullness of the life. 

Because of her isolation Josée experiences the world differently, living vicariously through books travelling the world in spirit if not in body. Her marginalisation is compounded by her poverty, unable to afford the things that would make her life easier and unaware that there is help available because of her distrust of of authority figures born of her previous experiences which contributes to her desire for solitude. Yet through her relationship with Young-seok she begins to develop a sense of possibility, embracing her independence in driving an adapted car at the film’s conclusion while reconnecting with a childhood friend and his partner not to mention having a little cat to take care of at home. “I’m OK now, I’m not lonely” she offers, if a little sadly, romanticising the memory of love if not its actuality. Imbued with a deep sense of romantic melancholy, Kim’s richly textured drama nevertheless hands agency back to Josée who finally comes to love and accept herself through loving and being loved by another person seizing her independence to live a full and active life but ready to accept the help and support of others as she does so. 

Josée screens 14th November as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Hold Me Back (私をくいとめて, Akiko Ohku, 2020)

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“Humans fly solo from the day we are born. You need to make an effort to be with someone” the heroine of Akiko Ohku’s latest chronicle of the contemporary woman’s inner loneliness, Hold Me Back (私をくいとめて, Watashi wo Kuitomete), is reminded. Like the heroine of Ohku’s mega hit Tremble All You Want, 31-year-old office worker Mitsuko (Non) is an introverted lonely soul through unlike the slightly older protagonist of My Sweet Grappa Remedies she is clearly much less happy with her single life than she likes to pretend often talking over her existential worries with an inner voice she refers to as “A” for “Answers”. 

As we first meet Mitsuko she’s taking part in a weekend workshop making fake food samples out of wax, later stopping off to pick up take out tempura on her way home because it saves stinking out her kitchen frying for one. She spends her free time thinking up things to do on her own on the weekends, but always seems to carry a degree of anxiety about her culturally taboo singledom. Having decided to try out a popular sandwich place, she finds herself leaving a nearby park because she feels awkward taking up a picnic table for four surrounded by couples and families on a day out. For similar reasons she nixes an idea to go to the beach, frightened she’d stand out as a lone woman. She finds herself asking A what she could do to make people like her more, clearly hungry for company but also afraid of it admitting it’s much easier to relax when she’s on her own and presumably free from the pressures of potential judgement.  

It’s potentially because of this awkwardness that she ends up in an ill-defined non-relationship with an equally diffident salaryman who often visits her office. The perfectly pleasant Tada (Kento Hayashi) is a young bachelor surviving off cutlets from a food stand in the neighbourhood where they both coincidentally live. Mitsuko tells a few fibs about her gourmet lifestyle but is actually a good cook though her probably made out of politeness invitation to make Tada dinner somewhat backfires as she finds herself cooking him “takeout”, preparing a meal while he waits awkwardly in her hallway before taking it home to eat on his own. A conversation with A reveals she does indeed have a crush on Tada and would like to ask him to stay but is fearful of ruining the non-relationship they already have if he should suddenly mention a girlfriend or refuse her invitation. 

Unrevealed even with her conversations with herself is a potential history of personal trauma, recalling a bad date with middle-aged dentist who told her he didn’t want to date a patient in public but had already booked a hotel room while getting handsy in the bar. On an onsen getaway she’s gifted by a friend who got it at wedding she doesn’t want to spend time thinking about, Mitsuko witnesses a comedian stage rushed by a pair of creepy guys and desperately wants to say something but finds herself unable. Talking it over with A she berates herself for her internal complicity with a patriarchal society, remembering all the times she let it go when a sleazy boss grabbed at her, an older co-worker who tried to convince her that it wasn’t OK eventually forced out of her job. She takes refuge in the fact her supportive female boss has managed to carve out a career for herself, believing she will eventually triumph over sleazy and incompetent men who take credit for the work done by their talented female subordinates but also assumes that Ms. Sawada (Hairi Katagiri) must be a lonely workaholic who sacrificed her personal life for the professional. 

An invitation from uni best friend Satsuki (Ai Hashimoto), meanwhile, who married an Italian and moved to Rome further deepens her sense of early life crisis, especially on discovering that Satsuki had neglected to mention that she was pregnant in any of their correspondence. It’s telling in a sense that A seems to desert her when she has someone “real” to talk to, absenting himself for the entirety of her time in Italy during which she realises that happy as she is Satsuki is also lonely living in an unfamiliar country and understandably anxious about the birth of her first child so far from home. Yet A’s frequent absences only exacerbate her fear of abandonment, after all if even her inner consciousness is jumping ship what possible hope is there for anyone else? 

But then as he tells her “You cannot escape being you”, her inner voice will always be there even if she doesn’t really need him anymore. “It was easier fighting loneliness alone” she exclaims in panic, suddenly getting cold feet about a possible step forward in terms of human intimacy, only later calming down after a final pep talk with A convinces her it’s worth the risk. Less surreal than Tremble All You Want while less rosy than My Sweet Grappa Remedies, Hold Me Back embraces its heroine’s internal vulnerabilities with a relatable realism as she tearfully asks the absent A “I’ll be OK this time, right?” before daring to find out come what may. 

Hold Me Back screens in Brisbane (Nov. 14), Melbourne (Nov. 20/24), and Sydney (Nov. 27 / Dec. 3) as part of this year’s Japanese Film Festival Australia.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)

Cloudy Mountain (峰爆, Li Jun, 2021)

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In recent years, Chinese big budget disaster extravaganzas have dedicated themselves to celebrating the selfless heroism of the undersung branches of the emergency services, firemen for example in Tony Chan’s The Bravest or the coast guard in Dante Lam’s The Rescue. Li Jun’s Cloudy Mountain (峰爆, Fēng Bào) features its fair share of fearless rescue teams, but is nevertheless dedicated to the rather unlikely source of pride, the Rail Soldiers whose lives, at least according to the closing credits, were sacrificed in large numbers to complete the infrastructure necessary for the expansion of the Chinese state yet in 1984 they were renamed “China Railway Construction Corporation” a development the film at least seems to regard with a surprising degree of ambivalence. 

This becomes most obvious in the conflict between the two heroes, an estranged father and son burdened by personal trauma, one a former Rail Soldier and the other a high tech engineer working for a commercial enterprise on the building of a high speed railway network through terrain known to be geologically volatile. Grandpa Hong (Huang Zhizhong) is set to visit his son Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) for New Year, though he doesn’t really want to see him knowing that his father will only criticise his work on the tunnel leading to another intergenerational argument. Meanwhile, Yizhou also finds himself unpopular at work for requesting additional safety checks many seem to regard as a pointless waste of time, and oddly they might have a point seeing as Yizhou’s monitoring fails to detect a shift in the rock formation which causes water to flood the almost complete tunnel during routine blasting. 

The fact is Hong was a Rail Soldier and is also one of those old men who think they know best about everything. He kicks off at a bored young lady at service station because she doesn’t want to accept payment in cash and has no change to offer confused as to why Hong can’t just pay with Alipay or WeChat like everyone else. Despite his years of hands-on experience, he no longer understands the modern high tech engineering industry and thinks his son is somehow unmanly with his scientific data and use of drones, believing that if you want to solve a problem you just get in there and do it. This causes a minor problem when a manmade earthquake strikes just after his arrival as he pushes rescue crews out of the way to set about rescuing everyone trapped underground on his own only to end up trapped himself. 

The film is almost on his side, definitely ambivalent about the state of modern Chinese infrastructure. Mrs. Ding (Chen Shu), the female manager of the tunnel project, is initially positioned as a villain, insisting that the tunnel must be completed on schedule and they can’t be wasting money on things like safety checks, hinting at the nation’s notoriously lax approach to public safety and widespread corruption in the construction industry. One might even ask if it was a good idea to build this tunnel at all given the geological volatility of the local area, yet Mrs. Ding later becomes something of a hero in finally agreeing to sacrifice 10 years of her own work when it becomes clear a nearby town cannot be evacuated before disaster strikes. Stepping into propaganda mode she advances that while Westerners may pin their hopes on Noah’s Ark, Chinese men move mountains convincing the workmen to blow up the tunnel they’ve been spent the last decade working on by reminding them that they can simply build it again. 

Meanwhile, Yizhou and Hong begin to sort out their father/son problems underground most of which go back to the death of Yizhou’s mother for which he blames himself but also his father for failing to return home when his wife was ill because he had important nation building work to do. This minor barb might hint at a conflict between selfless dedication to the State and familial responsibility, which would seem to run against the secondary message that unchecked capitalism is doing the same thing while also endangering public safety. One reason the crews didn’t want to fall behind through “needless” safety checks was because they’d already agreed to sacrifice New Year with their families to get the tunnel done on time. Nevertheless the only way to save both the tunnel and the town depends on father and son working together, a mix of Yizhou’s high tech data analysis and Hong’s hands-on experience as they perilously climb up the slide of a sheer rock face in torrential rain to blow up an entirely different mountain to create a protective shield. 

The major villain, if there is one, is personal greed born of irresponsible capitalism, and its only cure is, paradoxically, a recommittal to the State as Mrs Ding offers inspirational messages about the legacy of the Rail Soldiers while self-sacrifice for the public good is held up as the only moral responsibility. In any case, Li piles on the tension with a series of possible negative outcomes from the tunnel disaster not only swamping the town and killing off the local population but also endangering an adjacent chemical plant, never quite making the case for why the tunnel is so necessary in the first place even as it swaps its literality for the metaphorical in allowing the reconnection of father and son overcoming a generational divide to find an ambivalent accommodation with the demands of the modern China. 

Cloudy Mountain screens at ChiTown Movies Drive-in Chicago on Nov. 13 courtesy of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Collectors (도굴, Park Jung-bae, 2020)

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“Grave Robber” is ordinarily not a nice thing to call someone, let alone to be, yet the heroes of Park Jung-bae’s Collectors (도굴, Do-gul) are just that if in effect more like cultural Robin Hoods robbing the dead to reclaim the past than heartless thieves interested only in profit. Operating with a “this should be in a museum!” mentality, these grave robbers have a variety of motives, among them revenge both personal and national, as they take aim at lingering historical betrayals stemming back to the days of Japanese colonialism. 

As the film opens, intrepid thief Dong-gu (Lee Je-hoon) manages to trick a pair of Buddhist monks suspicious on the grounds that he’s a bit handsome for the religious life into letting him “guard” a pagoda that’s set for imminent dismantling in order to nab a precious miniature Buddha located inside. What puzzles the authorities is that Dong-gu leaves obvious evidence of the theft along with a trademark chocopie wrapper which suggests he wants everyone to know how clever he is. This may be true, Dong-gu is quite smug about his obvious abilities as a tomb raider, but he may also have ulterior motives in play. As a duplicitous broker points, out, however, it’s surprisingly difficult to make money trafficking artefacts because they are simply to famous to be sold openly meaning thieves and fences are all dependent on a small pool of super rich “collectors” with whom they have personal relationships or else are stealing to order. 

Stepping back a little, what this means is that not only are those like Dong-gu robbing the dead and selling their affects on the black market, but that they are in a sense traitors to their nation often selling these precious historical artefacts to foreigners and most problematically to the Japanese, ironically enough grave robbers themselves in having looted half the country during the colonial era. It will come as little surprise that the main villain Jin Sang-gil (Song Young-chang), a hotel entrepreneur and head of the Korea Cultural Asset Foundation, in fact owes his inherited wealth to his family having sold artefacts to the Japanese from 1910 onwards, and himself is keeping a large selection of plundered treasures in an ultra secure vault underneath his offices. 

The Buddha brings Dong-gu into Jin’s orbit, first made an offer by his gangster underling Gwang-chul (Lee Sung-wook) who is, perhaps conveniently, Chinese-Korean hailing from Yanbian, and then by his smart assistant Sae-hee (Shin Hye-sun) who is fluent in English, Chinese, and Japanese acting as a broker for wealthy Japanese clients which is how she finances Dong-gu’s upcoming operation to steal an ancient frieze from a grave located in what is now technically China but was then Korean. Dong-gu, meanwhile, despite claiming he got into grave robbing because he realised he’d never be able to buy a house working “like regular people do”, is remarkably uninterested in the money refusing Sae-hee’s “gift” of a fancy car, and instantly losing his fee in the hotel casino. As we later realise, what he seems to want is for the artefacts to be returned to their rightful owners, the Korean people. 

To complete his heist he recruits a series of “experts” including the slightly nerdy souvenir peddler nicknamed “Dr. Jones” (Jo Woo-jin) who even dresses like Indy himself, as well as a former miner recently released from prison renowned for his tunnelling abilities. Dong-gu’s methods are traditional in the extreme, locating the entrance to a burial mound by tasting the soil looking for traces of decomposing flesh, while his sister Hye-ri (Park Se-wan) is much more technologically advanced making frequent use of drones and angering her father and brother by drilling a tiny hole in the Buddha to insert a GPS tracker hoping to figure out what Jin is doing with the artefacts. In a touch of irony, the vault has itself been designed to mimic the security features of an ancient tomb if updated with biometric eye scanning and fingerprint technology topped off with a good old-fashioned key, but as it turns out there’s no security system that can protect you from betrayal especially if you’re generally unpleasant and no one trusts you anyway. 

Dong-gu’s target, however, is a royal tomb located in the centre of Gangnam from which he intends to steal the “Excalibur of Joseon” appealing to Jin’s sense of hubris, leaning into a kind of mythical prophecy in which he’d become a contemporary hero ruling over all Korea as the wielder of the sword. Taking in some additional social commentary in which the government has chosen to improve their approval ratings through spending money buffing up a tomb while when the guys try to rent a subbasement the flirtatious realtor admits the rents are low in this area because it often floods only to shake off some of her disapproval when they tell her they’re part of the restoration team, the central message is that the historical relics of Korea’s past belong to the Korean people, not to the shady businessmen further corrupting an already compromised economy, nor to former colonial powers. Sometimes, it seems to say, digging up the past is a necessary act of national reclamation. 

Collectors screens 13th November as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)