Tag: 2021

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. 

Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕, Daisuke Ono, 2021)

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Is there a point at which you should accept your artistic dreams won’t come true, cut your losses, and try to transition into a more conventional life? That’s the dilemma the heroes of Daisuke Ono’s Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕) find themselves contending with while wondering if it’s better to compromise your artistic integrity and surrender to the realities of the contemporary entertainment industry or resign yourself to the idea of your art becoming merely a side gig rather than a full-time occupation. 

The dilemma is all the more acute for Shinta (Daisuke Ono) because he’s recently turned 30 and is experiencing a moment of existential crisis. The band he’s been in since college has never really got anywhere, and this particular evening his guitarist, Naoya, hasn’t even bothered to turn up. Luckily for him, a sullen young female folksinger, Emi (Saori), offers to accompany him for just the one track so that he can still try and rustle up some interest in a few CDs but it’s clear during their set that Emi has real star power effortlessly outshining him vocalising on his own song. Shinta thinks the gig is up, eventually deciding his efforts might be better placed in helping Emi receive the recognition she deserves becoming her manager after spending a weird night in her apartment which is also the office of her record label which has only one other artist and is essentially the last hurrah of an ancient retiree. 

Part of Emi’s problem is that she’s an old school folksy singer-songwriter with intense Meiko Kaji energy. Even those who support her worry her music’s too old-fashioned for a chart-obsessed industry while her tsundere personality is distinctly at odds with the traditional ways in which female artists are marketed in what is still an incredibly sexist environment. Emi had complained that the club at which she first met Shinta was populated largely by slightly creepy middle-aged men there to see the main act, underground idol star Azuki (Rena Kato) who specialises in upbeat yet bland pop and makes the majority of her money through meet and greet sessions with her top fans who are perhaps sometimes dangerously obsessed with her star persona. These kinds of fans aren’t generally interested in folk music, but even so Emi is repeatedly advised to go down the same path of selling handshakes and autographs to ticket buyers more interested in the fan experience than hearing anything she has to say.

To that extent, it’s odd that neither Shinta nor anyone considers harnessing her tsundere energy to hook a different kind of audience that might be attracted to her defiance rather than the bland cuteness represented by Azuki. Azuki meanwhile may be cynical but perhaps she’s also sensible, explaining to Shinta that after hearing he and the others earnestly discussing music she decided it was better to go in a different direction realising she’d soon age out of the underground idol demographic in which the average career might last only a few months, deciding to turn her idol persona into a marketable brand and more or less ignoring the musical part of her act altogether. Shinta begins to wonder if he’s been marketing her wrong, that he shouldn’t have tried to push Emi towards the mainstream but focus on her unique talent as an old school live act. 

Then again, each 30 years old and already exhausting their budget perhaps it’s simply too late to move beyond the live house circuit. A visit from a colleague of Emi’s at the callcentre where she works to make ends meet, herself an aspiring actress, warns him that Emi may be at her limit but unable to quit in part in fear of letting him down even as their relationship is constantly eroded by the pressures of trying to make their musical dream come true. She has real talent, but doing what it would take to become successful might kill it and her, a music critic from a big paper bluntly telling Shinta that though he can see her newer album is more “commercial” that’s only made it “bland” robbing it of everything that once made it interesting. If playing to crowds of weird old men who’ve only come because Azuki told them to is as good as it gets, maybe it’s best to accept defeat rather than watch Emi tear herself apart. As it turns out the reason Naoya never turned up to the gig was that he won big on pachinko and realised he had much more chance of making a life for himself on that than he ever had with music. Maybe it doesn’t work out in the end and all you have is “nostalgic love” for a period in time, but that might not be so bad in and of itself and the music will always be there for you whether anyone’s listening or not.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Kim Tae-hyoung, 2021)

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“But even the most trivial moments of our predetermined fate are meaningful as pieces of the whole” according to embittered former monk Jin-su having reached a moment of philosophical epiphany after bringing his karmic retribution full circle. Another in the recent series of Buddhist supernatural thrillers from Korea, Kim Tae-hyoung’s The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Je8ileui Bam) once again turns apocalyptic as an ancient evil is set for accidental revival thanks, largely, to the wounded pride of a bitter old man. 

As the opening voice over explains, thousands of years ago the world was threatened by a powerful demon. Luckily, Buddha managed to vanquish him, tearing out his two eyes, one black one red, and burying them on opposite sides of the Earth in order to prevent them ever being reunited. Some people, however, just can’t resist chaos which is presumably why Professor Kim (Park Hae-joon) insists on retrieving the canister containing the Red Eye from its desert resting place, thereafter releasing its power when his discovery is rejected by both Buddhist and scholarly authorities. Sensing a disturbance in the equilibrium of the world along with the upcoming Blood Moon, priest Hajeong (Lee Eol) realises the prophecy of which he has been a guardian is about to come true. His big, somewhat unethical plan, is to kill off one of the seven pre-ordained victims of the Red Eye which he plans to possess in order to reunite with its partner in and stop it body hopping towards the apocalypse. 

You can make a case for greater good, but murdering an innocent person to put an end to a curse seems at best unfair, not to mention not very Buddhist. Hajeong sends young monk Cheong-Seok (Nam Da-reum) to track down his former pupil, Jin-su (Lee Sung-min) then known as Seonhwa to give him the instruction to assassinate the “Virgin Shaman” with a holy axe to stop Red Eye in its tracks. Jin-su is seemingly unconflicted about the murder but is carrying his own baggage, now living as a resentful construction worker. As it turns out, he and Cheong-seok are also linked by a karmic circle of guilt and trauma that the boy doesn’t remember and Jin-su has been running away from since leaving the temple. Meanwhile, he is also plagued by voices of departed spirits he for some reason refuses to help cross over to the other side. 

Meanwhile, over on the side of the rational, two policemen mirror the monks’ movements as they investigate the strange paper chain of mummified corpses turning up all over the city. Veteran cop Ho-tae (Park Hae-joon) feels responsible for his feckless associate Dong-jin, blaming himself for an accident which has left him physically impaired while resisting instructions from his boss to fire him. Yet the pair are entirely ill equipped to investigate this case of spiritual malevolence, confused by its religious connotations but perhaps filled with suspicion on realising that all of the victims belong to the same “meditation group” for people with suicidal thoughts which has been offering “free” blood tests and apparently paying for attendance. Described by one as more like a cult, the shady meditation group might be one kind of evil but what they’re currently facing is on an entirely different level. 

The irony is that it’s Jin-su who must learn to save the world by finding closure with his own traumatic past, generating a paternal bond with young monk Cheong-seok who is so excited by the world beyond the temple that he accidentally breaks his vow of silence and then can’t stop talking. Cheong-seok’s sense of wonder and confusion, unsure what to do about the meat he keeps finding in his food but also slightly bemused by Jin-su’s willingness to eat it for him, stands in direct contrast to Jin-su’s embittered cynicism as he attempts to resist his destiny only to receive a ghostly reminder that you can’t escape your fate and, in any case, his duty would simply fall on the successor, Cheong-seok. In order to save the world, he has to free not only himself but also Cheong-seok too from the cycle of karmic retribution which binds each of them in the “agony and anxiety” of the monster’s separated eyes, determining to set them to rest once again to restore a sense of balance in a destabilising world. A buddhist procedural, Kim’s supernatural horror may rediscover that hell is a place on Earth but eventually allows its heroes the possibility of escape if only in the willingness to free themselves from the shackles of the traumatic past. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, Kim Se-in, 2021)

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A mother and daughter remain locked in a toxic cycle of resentment and dependency in the debut feature from Kim Se-in, The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, gateun sogoseul ibneun du yeoja). While the English title may have an unfortunate sexist connotation implying that such a dysfunctional relationship is inevitable when two women live together, the Korean “two women wearing the same underwear” more closely suggests the awkward intimacy between them as they each seem to seek escape from the other but in the end are left with no option than to return or choose independent loneliness.

The awkwardness is obvious from the opening scenes as middle-aged, pink-haired mother So-kyung (Yang Mal-bok) chats to a friend on the phone while using the toilet even as her 20-something daughter Yi-jung (Lym Ji-ho) washes her undies in the bathroom sink. Once done, So-kyung slips off her underwear and simply throws them in with the others for Yi-jung to scrub, taking one of the newly washed but not yet dried pairs as a replacement before breezily leaving for work. So-kyung often becomes angry with her grown-up daughter for no ostensible reason, hitting and slapping her while a defeated Yi-jung can do nothing but cry no longer seeing much point in even asking what it is she’s done wrong. Matters come to a head when the pair argue in the car at supermarket car park. Yi-jung gets out and begins to walk away, but her mother suddenly jumps on the accelerator and hits her. So-kyung tries to claim the car malfunctioned but Yi-jung has long believed her mother would prefer it if she were no longer alive. 

During a blackout towards the film’s conclusion, So-kyung again insists the accident wasn’t deliberate reminding that Yi-jung that it wasn’t the first time she swore she’d kill her and forcing her to admit that she remained so calm because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. Later someone asks why she didn’t leave seeing as she is a grown woman with a salaried job capable of supporting herself and she answers that she thought she needed to save more money before making her escape but it’s also true that years of So-kyung’s emotional abuse have eroded her confidence in her ability to survive alone and that finally she is just so lonely that even her mother’s continual resentment is preferable to being on her own with no other friends or family to turn to. 

Yi-jung begins to bond with a woman at work who is in a similarly abusive situation with their employer, disliked by her co-workers and exploited by the boss who often hands her additional tasks to be completed for the next morning when everyone else is about to go home. But So-hee (Jung Bo-ram) evidently has troubles of her own, and in any case Yi-jung simply ends up in another apartment with two women while beginning to realise that So-hee is not interested in a close friendship with her for she too longs for “independence” and is turned off by her obvious neediness. So-kyung meanwhile is in a relationship with a genial man of around her own age, Yong-yeol, who has a teenage daughter, So-ra, to whom So-kyung more well disposed than to own but eventually cannot stand. So-ra is in many ways much like herself and So-kyung’s narcissistic tendencies prevent her from sharing Yong-yeol with another woman. When it comes to picking an apartment for them to live in after they marry, it comes as a surprise to her than Yong-yeol intended to bring So-ra to live with them roundly telling him that the “spare” room is for storage not a daughter. Given this ultimatum Yong-yeol choses So-kyung, agreeing that So-ra will live with her grandmother in a decision that shocks Yi-jung on discovering his letter prompting the realisation that her mother will happily abandon her too. 

Su-kyung is in many ways a narcissistic nightmare, refusing to apologise for who she is and always insisting other people are to blame for the way she treats them. All Yi-jung wants is an apology but what she gets is justification as her mother explains to her that her clients at her massage parlour dump all their negativity on her though she is also living a stressful life and so she dumps all of her negativity on Yi-jung whom she resents for trapping her poverty and loneliness as a reluctant single mother. Yi-jung asks her what she’s supposed to do with that, but her mother simply tells her she should have a daughter too. In any case it appears as if Yi-jung may finally be finding the strength to extricate herself from her toxic familial environment, finally being measured to figure out her correct bra size having presumably been forced to wear whatever her mother wore throughout all of her adult life in a moment which brings us back to underwear once again. At times darkly comic, Kim Se-in’s intense family drama circles around toxic dependency and an inescapable cycle of cruelty and resentment but does at least allow its heroines the glimmer of new beginnings in a more independent future.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Angry Rice Wives (大コメ騒動, Katsuhide Motoki, 2021)

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“Even if women try to do something, nothing will change” a condescending husband insists cautioning his wife not to take part in any more protests lest he lose his protected status and the family its source of income. Set in the middle of the Taisho era, Angry Rice Wives (大コメ騒動, Dai Kome Soudo) dramatises a small moment of revolution in which the resistance movement organised by a community of women towards the spiralling cost of rice sent shock waves through a changing society and in its own way provoked a change of course in an increasingly capitalistic society. 

Beginning in April 1918, the small fishing village of Toyama sees an exodus of its young men who must spend the off-season when the catch is low working other jobs in order to make ends meet, This necessarily means their wives and families are left behind and must make do with what they themselves can earn in doing menial jobs such as transporting rice and the little their husbands might be able to send before their return. A farmer’s daughter who married into the fishing community, Ito (Mao Inoue) is one of the few literate women in the village and looked to as a kind of oracle reporting the contents of the morning paper to the other wives who are keenly interested in the continually fluctuating price rice which seems set to rise still more with news that Japan plans to send troops to Siberia. 

As the voiceover relates, with the catch so low rice is the only form of sustenance available but prices have already exceeded what most of the women can earn in a day leaving them unable to feed their feed their families and giving rise to increasing discontent with the inequalities of the contemporary social order. Taking drastic action and led by eccentric old woman Kiyonsa (Shigeru Muroi), they stage a rebellion by intercepting their locally grown rice in order to stop it being sent to Hokkaido which is reported in the newspapers as an “uprising”. The term is indeed a little grand for what actually took place, but it does at least seem to spark a spirit of rebellion echoing around the country even if nothing much as changes in Toyama. Buoyed by a sense of wider support, the women continue their protests merely asking for the rice merchants to sell at a more reasonable rate (which they are perfectly capable of doing) while decrying the immorality of the obvious profiteering by corrupt authorities including local bigwig Kuroiwa (Renji Ishibashi) who are deliberately stockpiling rice to push the price up while planning to sell it to the government for a hefty price to feed their troops. 

Kuroiwa is entirely unsympathetic to the women’s predicament while the local police chief Kumazawa (Junichi Uchiura) believes himself indebted to him and is therefore entirely under his thumb. Neither of them think the women are much of a threat, Kumazawa randomly arresting a middle-aged man close to several of the women the rationale being as the husband of one puts it that women can never achieve anything no matter how hard they try but a man’s involvement in such rebellious activity would be cause for concern. Similarly, Ito is often told that her education is of no use, partly because the other women feel inferior for not having any, but struggles to find the self-confidence to standup to the corruptions of lingering feudalism owing to her liminal status as a non-native villager despite having given birth to three children there. Even so she is often looked to as a local problem solver and potential successor to Kiyonasa as leader of the village women if only she could learn to embrace the courage of her convictions. 

The children, by contrast have no such qualms, Ito’s young son Soichiro directly telling the profiteering proprietress of the rice store Mrs Washida (Tokie Hidari) that it’s her own fault another child stole food because if she hadn’t insisted in pricing her customers out to the point that they were starving she would never have needed to steal. “What exactly has capitalism done for us?” an opportunistic visitor from the workers party asks but receives short shrift from the cynical Kiyonsa who agrees they should rebel but is non-plussed by the flummoxed canvasser’s admission that he has no real plan for what do afterwards. Washida plays divide and conquer, pitting the women against each other and tempting even Ito with offers of under the table rice deals to feed their starving families if only they back down but though the solidarity of the women is temporarily ruptured it is never truly broken as they stand together to fight for fairness in the face of the Kuroiwas and Washidas of the increasingly capitalistic society. Their resistance eventually forces the government to backdown, realising they can’t simply ignore the plight of society’s poor or take their complicity for granted while attempting to starve them into submission. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

My Lovely Angel (내겐 너무 소중한 너, Lee Chang-won & Kwon Sung-mo, 2021)

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“You’ve got to be brutal to survive in this world,” according to a coldhearted gangster remonstrating with down on his luck chancer Jae-sik (Jin Goo) for his seeming inability to be as bad as the world around him in Lee Chang-won & Kwon Sung-mo’s touching drama My Lovely Angel (내겐 너무 소중한 너, Naegen Neomu Sojunghan Neo), “You won’t get anywhere the way you handle stuff.” He might have a point, Jae-sik doesn’t really have the heart to be a heartless gangster but for the moment at least has been driven into cynicism by the futility of his life. 

When one of the women in the small troupe of performers at promotional events he drives round in his van doesn’t turn up for work, Jae-sik is irritated and not really all that remorseful on realising that the reason Ji-young hasn’t arrived is that she died in a freak accident. Like most of the other women, he doesn’t know much about her personal life hearing from the police that her family record only lists a seven-year-old daughter. Investigating her apartment he makes two important discoveries. Firstly, Ji-young’s lease is about to expire and there’s a 70,000 won deposit looking for a new owner. Secondly, Ji-young’s daughter Eun-hae (Jung Seo-Yeon) is still in the apartment though she behaves as if she doesn’t know he’s there and seems to survive on packets of bread her mother had left on the kitchen table. 

It takes Jae-sik quite a while to realise that Eun-hae is deafblind, but in any case he ends up moving into the apartment and superficially looking after her in the hope of claiming that he’s Ji-young’s common law spouse and entitled to the deposit money and anything else Ji-young might have to bequeath. But as he discovers, deafblind people find themselves trapped in an awkward limbo of the contemporary welfare system which recognises only deaf or blind people, leaving those who are unable to see or hear without any kind of support. Jae-sik tries to take Eun-hae to school, but she’s put in a class for blind children which is taught through spoken language that she is obviously unable to hear. Jae-sik complains that the classes are no good for her while she becomes obviously bored and frustrated by them, but the teacher’s only suggestion is that she also take the classes for deaf children which are taught in visual media she obviously can’t see. 

Of course, to begin with Jae-sik only accepts Eun-hae as a means of getting the money, otherwise little interested in what will happen to her now. He tries to ring her estranged birth father, but he rejects all responsibility for her presumably having walked out on the relationship because of his reluctance to care for a child with special needs. Jae-sik tells the landlady, who thinks he’s Eun-hae’s dad, that he’s looking for a nanny because he wouldn’t be able to care for her on his own while working only for the landlady to point out that Ji-young was managing it alright hinting at the patriarchal double standards which still see childcare as an inherently female domain. 

Still despite himself, Jae-sik begins to bond with Eun-hae who is after all completely dependent on him. He begins to communicate with her through teaching her words written in hangul by tracing them on her palm, while she seems to blossom in a new world of sensation when the pair embark on a road trip to the country. Though his past chases him, the further Jae-sik travels from the city the less cynical he seems to become no longer interested solely in money but beginning to care about those around him, not just Eun-hae but those he meets along his journey many of whom are also dealing with their own problems which sometimes echo his own as in a single-mother’s attempts to care for her ageing father as his dementia worsens. Lee & Kwon lend a golden glow to the expanses of the rural farmland where Jae-sik and Eun-hae find themselves taking refuge, Eun-hae in thrall to the natural world cheerfully dancing in the rain, smelling the flowers, and befriending animals even as the city snaps at their heels. Avoiding obvious sentimentality, the film nevertheless tells a poignant story of paternal redemption and the blossoming of a little girl finally finding a means to express herself.

My Lovely Angel screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, KENTARO, 2021)

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An aimless young man unexpectedly embarks on a spiritual journey after being sent to Mongolia to look for the daughter his grandfather left behind 70 years previously when he was a prisoner of war in the dreamlike debut feature from actor KENTARO, Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, Turquoise no Sora no Shita de). A circular tale of longing and abandonment, the film is both a charmingly surreal road movie and a poetic meditation on time and memory amid the infinite expanses of the Mongolian Steppe. 

Our guide is “horse thief” Amaraa (Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam) who cheerfully rides off on a stallion owned by the ageing Saburo (Akaji Maro) only to be chased down by police officers in much the same way he will be again on his return to Mongolia. Saburo jokingly asks him if he meant to ride all the way home and perhaps he did, in a way. Falling asleep in the van he later shares with Saburo’s grandson Takeshi (Yuya Yagira) he dreams of stealing an old lover away from her wedding to another man replying only that he’s been “busy” when she asks why he made no attempt to contact her during the previous three years. One might also ask why Saburo never returned to Mongolia and the woman and child he left behind, but perhaps there is no real reason save life and then it was too late. Now close to the end of his days, Saburo charges Amaraa with the mission of tracking his now 70-year-old daughter down taking the spoilt and selfish Takeshi with him in the hope that he will spontaneously discover purpose in his life. 

There is something quite poignant in the melancholy strains of My Dear Companion accompanying the van’s passage along a lonely Mongolian road, a song that at least in its more modern version is a lament for lost love and a yearning for one who seems to have disappeared to a distant land no longer caring for those they once loved. The other frequent refrain is that of Beautiful Dreamer which similarly hints at the impossibility of romantic resolution particularly as it plays over Amaraa’s fantasy of reclaiming a love he once left behind. On arrival in Mongolia, Amaraa quickly reverts to traditional dress, dismissing the driver Saburo has hired for them along with his fancy car to take off in a much more ordinary van stopping every so often to ask everyone they run into if they’ve ever heard of a woman named “Japanese Tsermaa” until getting some helpful directions from a traditional shaman with a surprisingly familiar face. 

Unable to speak the language, Takeshi mostly looks on amused but soon discovers that words are often superfluous. Amaraa even at one point has a totally wordless negotiation with a fellow nomad over borrowing his motorbike and sidecar when the van inevitably breaks down. Suddenly left alone in the expanses of the Mongolian Steppe, Takeshi enters a kind of dreamscape and almost lives his grandfather’s life over again after being taken in by a pregnant woman who gives him Mongolian clothing and shares with him the local food, but the outside world soon comes calling and just like his grandfather he leaves behind a woman and child along with the sea and the sky having experienced some kind of enlightenment that shakes him out of his hedonistic aimlessness. 

But then it’s almost as if it never happened at all. He simply takes his grandfather’s place while the wheel keeps on turning. Workers in his grey office block shuttle about like ants in an ant farm even if, as we gradually realise, united under the turquoise sky that stretches from Mongolia though fading as if goes. Unexpectedly moving in its moments of reunion, the film makes the most of the beautiful Mongolian landscape shot a stunning 8K while exploring the warmth and hospitality of the local people who share their culture with a bemused stranger who finally gives himself over to their dance. “What’s important is that we’re together now” Amaraa tells the woman in his dream, hinting at the impossibility of his circular journey and the poetic yearning that underlies these various stories of lost love some eventually recovered at least in part but others left to echo on the breeze as faint memories of other lives painfully unlived.

Under the Turquoise Sky screens in New York Aug. 4 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Restart the Earth (重启地球, Lin Zhenzhao, 2021)

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Maybe it’s only fair enough if the plants finally turn against us and reclaim the world from the effects of our industry. We haven’t taken very good care of this planet, after all. In Lin Zhenzhao’s well produced low budget streamer Restart the Earth (重启地球. chóngqǐ dìqiú), humanity ironically tries to use science to repair its scientific mistakes but predictably ends up making everything even worse when an experimental program designed to halt desertification suddenly causes plant life to become sentient and develop a craving for human flesh. 

Yang Hao (He Shengming) lost his wife, a botanist, during the original attack and has spent the last two years safeguarding his little girl Yuanyuan (Zhang Mingcan) from the same fate. He wants to find a shelter, but ends up running into a troop of soldiers after a plant attack who tell him that the plants are about to launch a new offensive and all human life will end in a matter of hours if they are not able to achieve their mission of injecting a neutralising element into the plants’ root base in the core of the Earth. Like any good post-apocalyptic dad, Hao has a choice to make. As he tells Yuanyuan he has no interest in saving the world and only wants to save her, but is shamed into joining the cause by Yuanyuan’s disapproval and decides to accompany the soldiers who are in dire need of his engineering skills. 

Personal sacrifice for the greater good is very much the theme of the film. Several of the soldiers actively sacrifice their own lives either to save Yuanyuan or to make sure the planet-saving serum makes its way to the next checkpoint while reminding us that they too have families who might be waiting for them at home. As Hao later affirms, he’s just an “ordinary Chinese citizen”, somehow convincing several world powers not to give up on saving the planet no matter how hopeless it seems simply by reminding them of the power of hope. But it’s precisely this “ordinary” heroism that later saves the world, sending a message that is both egalitarian and collectivist in insisting that everyone has a role to play in a well functioning society. 

Then again, the “catastrophe” as it’s called is very much manmade. It began with climate change which then led to the scientific experimentation which quite spectacularly backfired. In essence it’s all down to “bad” science (and some bad plants that were brought in from abroad by a foreign scientist). Man likes to think it can master its environment, as someone later puts it, but the environment decided to fight back. Even so the solution lies in more of the same as Hao has the bright idea of harnessing the power of nature to break through the plants’ firewall. 

The plants themselves take on the appearance of dragon-like monsters snaking through ruined buildings or else snapping up humans with claw-like tentacles. As the plant-based ring of terror encircles the Earth, giant hand-like branches seem to sprout from the ground ready to smash and grab. Post-apocalyptic production design conjures a land of ruin half-reclaimed by nature, while Lin pays frequent homage to other similarly themed franchises. The soldiers’ uniforms have more than a touch of Attack on Titan, while he also seems to directly reference Aliens as well as a series of other post-apolypytic dramas in which a tightly bound team of survivors must band together to face off against an insidious enemy. 

The idea is essentially to reboot the Earth, but in another sense perhaps that’s what the plants were also trying to do. Maybe we shouldn’t really be rooting for a human victory though it’s also possible that the supercharged plants would soon consume the planet anyway. In any case, the messages about the dangers of climate change and importance of responsible science are secondary to those of the heroism of personal sacrifice for the greater good along with the determination to keep hope alive when it seems all is lost. Noticeably well put together for a low budget streamer Lin’s post-apocalyptic action drama suggests the end of the world might not be that far away but can at least be held at bay if only by the power of human selflessness.

Restart the Earth is released in the UK on blu-ray, DVD, and Download to Own on 22nd May courtesy of Dazzler Media.

Trailer (English subtitles)

So Long Summer Vacation (暑期何漫漫, Bo Ren, 2021)

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A small boy tries to work out what to do with a seemingly endless and infinitely boring summer in early ‘90s rural China in Bo Ren’s nostalgic childhood dramedy, So Long Summer Vacation (暑期何漫漫, shǔqī hé mànmàn). Told largely from the boy’s point of view, the film meditates on a China in the midst of transition along with the effects of the pre-reform work system on the family, the One Child Policy, sexism and conservatism all while the hero watches and learns.

All Xiaojin (Tian Siyuan) really wants for this summer is to learn to swim in the river, but his parents have banned him from going near it for the understandable reason that it’s dangerous. Usually, his father’s (Sun Bin) parents would be around to look after him, but they’ve decided to spend the summer with their other son while his father objects to his mother’s (Ding Ji Ling) idea of sending him to stay with his maternal grandma further out into the country because he thinks she’s too indulgent and last time he got into trouble for digging up the neighbours’ radishes. As Xiaojin is already 12 years old, they decide to let him stay home alone, but they also lock the front gate and tell him to spend his time studying though there’s not much else to do and he’s evidently bored and lonely as a child of the One Child Policy stuck in the house all day on his own. 

His problem is compounded by the fact that most of his friends have also gone away for the summer, the boy from next-door despatched to Shenzhen to spend time with his absent father. But while Weidong is away, Xiaojin begins to understand the hidden sadness of his mother, auntie Fengying (Mei Eryue), who has taken to having presents sent to herself to pick up at the local post office pretending that they are from the husband who otherwise seems to have abandoned her. As she tells Xiaojin, aside from the office job that affords her a slighter higher status than her factory worker neighbours, she has nothing to fill her time other than a little gardening. As no one else has much to do either, her life also becomes fodder for one of the few available activities, gossip, with the other neighbourhood ladies making scandalous allusions to her many “affairs” which are sadly unfounded. Pushed to the brink by the hopeless of her life, she even begins to consider suicide.

Xiaojin’s parents, meanwhile, are mainly consumed by their role as workers and left with little time to look after him. His father is preoccupied by the factory’s 100-day labour competition, seemingly less excited about the prospect of winning a significant prize than being “busy with work” and showing off his dedication through his productivity, while his mother is a seamstress who sometimes works unsociable hours. Little Xiaojin is pretty self-sufficient and as he is fond of saying has figured out how to do things like light a stove or cook a meal simply through having observed his mother and grandmother doing the same, but is obviously lonely at one point agreeing to swap one of his father’s valuable stamps with another boy on the condition that he comes to play with him for only three days. The other boy, Bin, hadn’t really wanted to because there’s “nothing to do” at Xiaojin’s house whereas his family has a TV set which still seems to be a rarity in the local area. 

When Bin takes Xiaojin to the river and they end up getting into trouble, one could argue that it wouldn’t have happened if only his parents had taught him to swim whether in the river or in a modern pool as his father suggested doing but never followed through. But their response is to tie him to a bench and beat him so badly that auntie Fengying and the other neighbours bang on their door and tell them to stop. Even grandma from the country who’s somehow ended up finding out about it comes straight over to tell them off, basically sending them to their room to think about what they’ve done while she looks after Xiaojin and asks the ancestors for their forgiveness. Part of his Xiaojin’s anxiety had rested on the fact that, because of the One Child Policy, she has only one son and has the twin pressures of needing to get it right with Xiaojin so that he grows up into a responsible member of society and living in constant fear that something will happen to him and they’ll be left alone in their old age. A short coda featuring Xiaojin in the present day as a father raising a son of his own suggests he’s doing things a little differently but still reflecting on that one very boring summer when the highlight of his day was ripping a page off the calendar and the only thing he wanted was to be able to swim in the river.

So Long Summer Vacation streams for free in the US and Canada until Feb. 5 as part of Asian Pop-Up Cinema’s Lunar New Year celebration.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Intolerance (空白, Keisuke Yoshida, 2021)

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At times of tragedy it may be natural to look for someone to blame, as if being able to pin all of this pain and anger on a single source would somehow help you to accept it. But in other ways tragedy is just a confluence of circumstances that are either everyone’s fault or no one’s. How far back can you really trace the blame? There would be no end it. That’s perhaps the conclusion that the protagonists of Keisuke Yoshida’s Intolerance (空白, Kuhaku) eventually come to, realising that their attempts to blame others are often born of a desire to deny their own responsibility or else to protect something else they fear losing. 

At least that’s how it is for grizzled fisherman Mitsuru (Arata Furuta), a man well liked by no one. A rude and violent bully, he terrorises all around him not least his teenage daughter Kanon (Aoi Ito) who is meek and passive with a slightly ethereal quality as if she’s learned that blending into the background is the best way to protect herself. Stopping in to a local convenience store on her way home from school, she’s accosted by resentful store manager Naoto (Tori Matsuzaka) who grabs her by the arm and accuses her of shoplifting nail polish. At some point, Kanon panics and bolts out of the store. Naoto chases her along a busy highway until she suddenly darts out into the road trying to get away from him and is hit first by a car driven by a young woman and then by a truck travelling in the opposite direction. Despite his gruff exterior, Mitsuru is quite clearly destroyed by his daughter’s death but becomes fixated on clearing her name of the shoplifting, insisting that he never saw her wear any makeup and that Naoto is to blame for her death in acting with such a heavy hand. 

Of course, it doesn’t occur to Mitsuru that Kanon may have worn makeup in secret and made sure to keep it from him knowing how he’d likely react. Likewise, perhaps she ran from the store because Naoto would have called her father and she was frightened of what he’d do if he found out she was caught pilfering, and pilfering nail polish at that. He remembers that she wanted to talk to him about something to do with school the night before she died but he didn’t listen, assuming she must have been being bullied and was forced to steal the nail polish only to hear that no one at school really even remembers her. She was a just a vague presence they can’t even quite identify. Her teacher meanwhile begins to reproach herself, realising that she failed in her duty of care repeatedly shouting at Kanon that she had “no motivation” rather than trying to help her find some or to get along in her own way, let alone figuring out what caused her to behave the way she did or if there were problems at home. Sick of Mitsuru’s belligerence the school finally set him on the new target of Naoto who was once accused of molesting a teenage girl he accused of shoplifting. 

Like Kanon, Naoto is a slightly hollow presence who also had a strained relationship with his father. As he lay dying, Naoto failed to answer his calls because he was playing pachinko and felt ashamed, afraid of another lecture from his dad about wasting his life on gambling. He struggles with his role in Kanon’s death, on the one hand guilty feeling he overreacted and inadvertently caused her to stray into harm’s way while otherwise resentful, justifying himself that it’s only natural for a storeowner to chase a shoplifter down the street. Both he and Mitsuru soon fall foul of a media culture that likes sympathetic victims and heartless villains, the media shocked by Mitsuru’s boorish behaviour but more so by Naoto’s callous indifference trimming an otherwise nuanced statement to imply that he feels his supermarket is the real victim as customers stay away or else issue complaints about their obviously heavy-handed shoplifter policy. 

“Imposing your own views on others is nothing more than torture” Naoto tells a well-meaning middle aged woman whose narcissistic cheerfulness is a neat mirror of Mitsuru’s intimidating aggression. Aggressively mothered by Kusakabe (Shinobu Terajima), Naoto carries an additional burden of guilt in realising he’s lost the store his father left to him, but she embarks on a tasteless “real victim” campaign insisting they did nothing wrong and it’s all Kanon’s fault for stealing in the first place. Kusakabe can’t bear to lose the store because it seems there’s not much else in her life. The film’s Japanese title translates as “blank” or “void” and it is indeed a void that Kusakabe is trying to fill in needing to feel needed by centring herself in her various volunteer activities such as working at a soup kitchen in addition to her crusade to save the store. 

It’s this giant abyss of grief and guilt which pulls each of them towards the edge, but in the end there’s really no way to apportion blame. The poor woman who first knocked Kanon down is completely undone by the experience though it really wasn’t her fault, repeatedly approaching Mitsuru asking for his forgiveness only to be cruelly rebuffed. It’s her mother’s (Reiko Kataoka) quiet show of dignity which stands in such stark contrast to his own white hot rage that finally forces him to realise the destructive quality of his intimidating behaviour, accepting his responsibility in his daughter’s death while understanding that in his fierce desire to control he robbed himself of the ability to know her. Really you can’t say whose fault it was, Mitsuru’s for the fear he instilled into his daughter, Naoto’s for his insecurity and misplaced zeal in hunting down a thief, the drivers’ for failing to brake, Kanon’s mother’s (Tomoko Tabata) for remarrying and having another child, the teacher’s for making Kanon feel useless, the other kids’ for rejecting her, or Kanon’s own for darting out into the road. For each of those there are a hundred other branches. There would be no end to it. But then, the strange thing is that Kanon shares her name with Buddhist deity of mercy, Mitsuru beginning to soften now willing to offer an apology where it’s due and to bear his own degree of guilt if not yet entirely able to forgive. In any case, ending in bright sunshine, Yoshida concludes with a return of the gaze between father and daughter that suggests forgiveness may indeed have arrived. 

Intolerance screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)