Tag: 2022

Walk Up (탑, Hong Sang-soo, 2022)

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“Really all of us are like that. We’re different when we go out” an older woman tries to console, ”you want to believe that the person you see at home is the real him”. The second remark may come out more cuttingly than she means it, unsubtly suggesting that really you never know anyone and the intimacy you might believe exists within a family is just a performance. The director at the centre of Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up (탑, tab) is indeed several different people with several different women across multiple floors of a small building owned by an old friend, Mrs Kim (Lee Hye-young), with whom he repeatedly checks in across the space of several years. 

Distance does seem to define Byungsoo’s (Kwon Hae-hyo) existence. When he turns up at Mrs Kim’s the first time, it’s with his daughter, Jung-soo (Park Mi-so), whom he later reveals he had not seen for five years. Jung-soo is there trying to make a connection, hoping Mrs Kim will take her on as an apprentice interior designer having experienced a moment of crisis on leaving art school and discovering that “art has nothing to do with money”. That’s also a problem that repeatedly plagues Byungsoo. During their conversation he’s called away to a meeting with a film producer, and later reveals that a project has fallen through after the funding was pulled at the last minute. Byungsoo embarks on a small rant about the commercialisation of the film industry in which artistic decisions are overruled by investors and no one really cares anymore about whether the film is any good only if it’s going to make money. 

Jungsoo had described her father as “feminine” and “domesticated” during her early childhood before her parents’ divorce, explaining that he seemed to change after his film career took off. Where once he’d been content to spend time a home, suddenly he was out all the time partying with actresses. Jungsoo seems to regard this personality shift as a kind of betrayal, hurt by Mrs Kim’s suggestion that Byungsoo may have been repressing himself at home and the “real” Byungsoo was the one who liked to go out on the town. Then again, people can be many things at once and perhaps there’s no one “real” Byungsoo so much as there’s the Byungsoo of the moment. Sunhee (Song Seon-mi), another failed painter who now runs a restaurant on the second floor, panders to his wounded ego repeatedly telling him how much she likes his films, though mostly for the things they’re not, and that she hopes that he will go on making films for many years to come. 

But it’s obvious that Byungsoo is deeply insecure, eventually drifting into an affair with Sunhee and living with her in the second floor apartment having taken a break from filmmaking due to ill health. He bristles when she tells him she’s going to visit a friend who slighted him on a previous occasion and tries to guilt her into not going, repeatedly texting her while she’s out to a degree that seems uncomfortably possessive and controlling. Yet he eventually ends up hugging his pillow and admitting to himself that perhaps he’s no good at relationships and deep down gets along better on his own. Even so, he later ends up with a third woman, an estate agent, who brings him wild ginseng to help with his health worries while he moves up to the studenty top floor flat which while barely big enough to turn around in comes with a spacious roofgarden. By this point his relationship with Mrs Kim, who basically begged him to move in when he first visited with Jungsoo, has clearly become strained, she perhaps also a little hurt in appearing to have carried a torch for him while hinting at feeling trapped in an unsatisfying marriage as the building itself continues on a course of disrepair. 

Mrs Kim too appears to have differing personas as she shuffles between the floors of the building she owns while each of the episodes replays with only slight differences and subject to the consequences of the last. Failed artists moving to Jeju to start again becomes a repeated theme, though it’s as if Byungsoo is resisting the pattern, talking of buying a dog with Sunhee when they relocate but then putting it off for another three years while they save money. By the time he’s made it to the top floor it’s like he’s hit rock bottom, raving about a vision from God telling him to move to Jeju and make 12 films while still ostensibly on an extended break from filmmaking. Shooting once again in a crisp black and white, Hong finally brings us back to where we came in leading us to wonder how much of what we’ve just seen really happened and how much was just a kind of thought experiment created by a bored and insecure director feeling maudlin and trying to figure himself out while his career collapses around his ears. Maybe you have to go up so you can come back down, but it doesn’t seem to leave you any less lonely as the melancholy Byungsoo discovers smoking a solitary cigarette looking up at the house from outside as if trying to decide where exactly he belongs. 

Walk Up screens at Ultrastar Mission Valley on Nov. 9 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer

Gaga (哈勇家, Laha Mebow, 2022)

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“Children will find their own way” a grandmother reassures while her community fractures all around her in Laha Mebow’s lighthearted drama, Gaga (哈勇家). “Gaga” refers to the traditional rules of the Atayal people which find themselves under increasing pressure from the wider society. While one granddaughter returns after living abroad in New Zealand and is caught between her affection for her family and her desires for her future, her cousin is devotes himself to his culture but may end up marooned amid encroaching modernity. 

As the film opens, Enoch is hiking with his grandfather Hayung on the mountain where he tells him that he used to come to catch fish in his youth but not anymore. Back then, he explains, it was considered important not to transgress on another’s turf. If someone had set fish traps already, you’d be expected to move yours somewhere else. But it doesn’t work that way anymore, as the family discover on entering a dispute with a neighbour who’s engaged a surveyor to essentially annex a third of their land. Father Pasang appeals to the mayor, but is given short shrift and reminded that making an offering is no longer sufficient to mark a boundary. This crisis informs Pasang’s fateful decision to stand for mayor himself which places increasing strain on family relations especially in the wake of Hayung’s death. 

With Hayung gone, there is a sense that the traditional practices of the Atayal people are being lost. His grandson, Enoch, has a Christian name but is close to his grandfather and seems to be devoted to preserving their culture, often seen playing his mouth harp, singing traditional songs and dancing. His cousin Ali, meanwhile, has been studying abroad in New Zealand and seems increasingly at odds with the traditional ways of the village not least when it is discovered that she’s become pregnant out of wedlock with her overseas boyfriend who is also of an Asian background but is unable to speak Mandarin let alone the Atayal language. Ali isn’t sure she wants to keep the baby, but abortion is against Gaga while her father is chiefly worried about his electoral prospects amid a scandal concerning his only daughter. 

Pasang’s response hints at the inherent corruption in the electoral system. Resolving to neutralise a scandal before it takes hold, he decides to slaughter 10 pigs as a sacrifice and give the meat to other villagers, holding what is staged as a wedding reception for Ali and her oblivious boyfriend Andy who suddenly arrives for a surprise visit. Local politics is essentially transactional, villagers are accustomed to voting for whoever gives them the most stuff rather than whoever offers them the best prospects for their future perhaps cynically deciding to take what they can get having little faith that those in power are really going to have their best interests at heart. Pasang plays the game, but the game costs money endangering not only his own financial security but that of his family and most particularly his younger brother Silan whose land was at issue in the first place. Pressured by his mother, Silan is emotionally blackmailed into “helping” his brother with the promise that he will pay him back when he wins which he must do or else they are all ruined. But Pasang soon discovers that taking power over one’s life is not so easy, because those who already have power will be forgiven for breaking the rules while those who do not will not. 

On some level, Pasang is still expecting Ali to stay in the village and Andy to move there to be with her, while Andy, a little older than Ali, is seemingly unfazed by the prospect of youthful fatherhood but wants to take his family home to New Zealand. Communication issues are only part of the problem, the indigenous community switching between their own language, Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien while adding English into the mix but eventually discovering that in the end they don’t need really words to communicate with Andy but are satisfied that he loves their daughter while the choice should be hers alone. Ali meanwhile is beginning to feel railroaded, as if everyone is trying to make her choices for her. Grandma has already named the baby after Hayung seemingly assuming that she will raise it to be an Atayal adult in the village. 

In parallel, Enoch’s sister Agnes is forced to enlist in the military in order to support the family following their financial ruin each of them accepting that Enoch is not suited to life outside the village and can do nothing other than continue their traditional way of life. But then again, it’s also clear that as an alternative revenue stream the villagers are forced to parade their culture as entertainment for tourists. Pasang even strikes a funding deal agreeing to host a temple on his land where tourists can stay, while attempts to construct a “traditional” Atayal house in the central square to provide cultural education are co-opted by builders from the city who ignore all of Hayung’s advice about how to build. Part of the roof collapses during the opening ceremony. Enoch asks why some of the children are excited about the “real” New Year which they think of as the Spring Festival pointing out that the Atayal celebration takes place after the harvest, Christmas is for Westerners and Dec. 31 the Japanese. In the end it’s up to him alone to stoke the fires of his culture amid an uncertain modernity. 

Gaga screens at USCD Price Center Theater Nov. 6 and Ultrastar Mission Valley on Nov. 7 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pretty Heart (心裏美, Terry Ng Ka-wai, 2022)

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An idealistic teacher finds herself questioning her views on education while confronting her traumatic past in Terry Ng Ka-wai’s gentle drama, Pretty Heart (心裏美). Partly a contemplation of the nature of education, the film has some serious questions to ask about the contemporary school system and in its inbuilt inequalities along with the complicated relationships between parents and children while ultimately opting for a kind of balance in which there is room for many kinds of learning. 

For Chloe (Jennifer Yu Heung Ying) education shouldn’t just be about passing tests but learning about how to live life, gaining the ability to think critically and enriching one’s existence. But at her school, which is funded by both public and private means, she’s regarded as something of a troublemaker by Mrs. Tsang, the wealthy head of the board who seems to have the headmaster well under her thumb. Mrs. Tsang is so hands on because her son Chi Kit is a pupil though a somewhat indifferent one sure that his money and connections will engineer his success. A small fight breaks out when a young girl, Shu Ting, who comes from an impoverished single parent family, tries to hand out tickets for video lectures by top cram school teacher K.K. Ho with Chi Kit insisting that only the elite who have the means to pay deserve a place in the room. 

The incident at once lays bare the fallacy that education is a levelling force enabling social mobility under in meritocracy when kids like Chi Kit will always be able to game the system in ways that those like Shu Ting cannot even if, as Mr. Ho tells another pupil, at the end of the day it’s the effort you put in that counts. What annoys Chloe about the elite cram school with its good-looking teachers and flashy showmanship is its devaluing of education in giving kids tips on how pass exams while telling them that they can safely ignore half of the syllabus to focus on the bits that are most likely appear to on the test paper without actually needing to understand much of what they’re memorising. Defending himself, Ho eventually argues that he merely provides a complementary service intended to run in concert with the kind of education Chole offers which is less geared towards test scores than comprehensive learning. 

Yet he also takes Chloe to task for her lack of connection with the kids and image of herself as a teacher pointing out that she has never really bothered to learn much about their lives outside of the classroom. Much of her animosity towards the cram school stems from the fact is it is run by her estranged father whom she assumes to be cynical and unfeeling yet has generated a fatherly relationship with Shu Ting and is doing his best to support her while she contends with difficult family circumstances trying to balance her need to support herself and her mother financially with her education. 

Witnessing Ho’s innate kindness to those around him forces Chloe to rethink her preconceptions while accepting that her reserve has sometimes interfered with her intentions as an educator. Re-encountering her father also causes her to revisit longstanding childhood trauma which may in part have been born of a childish misunderstanding she may be better placed to process as an adult woman. As her father says, the most important thing to learn may be the art of forgiveness and it seems that she has been poisoning herself with hate and resentment as manifested in her literal heart problems. 

The conclusion that the film comes to is that it’s not all so black and white and perhaps the good comes with the bad. Having begun to deal with her emotional trauma, Chloe seems to have become a better and more engaging teacher committed to helping her students in all aspects of her lives. It may not solve the problems of social inequality in the school system or fix the commodification of education symbolised in the existence of the cram school but does at least seem to generate a shift in the general environment which sees even a relieved Mrs Tsang step back from her elitism. Admittedly a little contrived in its melodramatic narrative, the film nevertheless has its heart in the right place as the melancholy heroine learns a few lessons of her own in dealing with the traumatic past.

Pretty Heart screens in Chicago on Nov.6 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema where actress Jennifer Yu Heung Ying will be in attendance to collect her Bright Star Award.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Novelist’s Film (소설가의 영화, Hong Sang-soo, 2022)

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Once again in a meta mood, Hong Sang-soo’s The Novelist’s Film (소설가의 영화, Soseolgaui Yeonghwa) seems to be peopled by those who’ve already given up. The heroine’s friend has given up her writing career to run a small-town bookshop while she herself is struggling with writer’s block, her friend’s assistant has given up acting to learn sign language, and a movie star she later meets has apparently retired because she doesn’t feel the desire to act anymore. In similar fashion a director declares that some have perceived a shift in his career that leads him to concede that he just doesn’t feel the sense of “compulsion” that used to drive him and his work may have become freer and more authentic as a result. 

As usual, Hong may partly be taking about himself, about his relationship to filmmaking and to his muse Kim Min-hee who is herself given a meta moment when berated by the director, Park (Kwon Hae-hyo), who tells her that her decision to retire is a “waste” of her talent only to be shouted at by blocked novelist Junhee (Lee Hye-young) who is hoping to make a film in order to rejuvenate her creative mojo. Junhee tells Park in no uncertain terms that Kilsoo is not a child and if this is the choice she’s made he ought to respect it, circling back to the offensiveness of the word “waste” and its various implications. The situation is so awkward that it leads Park’s wife to leave it all together, but it’s true enough that after this outburst Junhee seems to find a more comfortable relationship with Kilsoo than with any of her old acquaintances as they bond in mutual admiration and shared creative endeavour. 

It’s with a sense of tension that the film opens, Junhee venturing into the bookshop run by an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) only overhear a heated argument between her friend and a younger assistant, Hyunwoo. As so often with Hong the nature of the relationship is unclear, the argument intimate in quality not really the kind one has with an employee or casual acquaintance and so awkward that Junhee decides to wait outside until it’s over. In any case, Junhee’s manner even with the friend she’s deliberately tracked down and come to see is somewhat accusatory and passive aggressive as if hurt by her friend’s decision to abruptly drop out of contact apparently having given up writing and intending to cut herself off from her city life in its entirety.

Her encounter with the director is similar in that she seems clearly annoyed with him, firstly pretending not to recognise his wife then accusing of them of deliberately hiding from her at a popular tourist attraction. Picking up on the vibes, he asks her if she’s still upset with him over a project to adapt one of her novels that fell through. She says she isn’t but is obviously annoyed about something while his wife elaborates on his creative process and the ways she thinks he and it have changed. Then again the wife is also a little strange, introducing herself to Kilsoo, whom they’ve randomly bumped into in a park, as someone who lives with director Park rather than as his wife answering Kilsoo’s question of how long she’s lived with him with a very matter of fact 30 years. Junhee is similarly vague about the extent of her relationship with an ageing poet and former drinking buddy (Gi Ju-bong) with whom she had herself lost touch or perhaps partially ghosted when his interest turned romantic. We hear brief snippets about Kilsoo’s personal life, an allusion to scandal and drinking problem but never see her offscreen husband, only his filmmaker nephew (Ha Seong-guk). 

Yet the the serendipitous connection between Kilsoo and Junhee allows each of them to reignite their creative spark while generating an unexpected friendship. The film novelist envisions is scripted but intended to capture something of Kilsoo as she is while ostensibly playing a character, exposing the reality of the vague relationships by cutting through artifice to the truth. In another series of meta comments, the poet reminds her she needs a hook to draw the audience in but she simply tells him she’ll figure that bit out later because the story is in its way irrelevant. “He writes what he lives” she later says of him, a little dismissively. In any case, the film she makes takes on another meta quality, Hong himself perhaps behind a camera as Kim Min-hee and another woman gather flowers eventually ending with a mutual declaration of love and a sudden burst of colour in what has been a static and monochrome affair which hints at the sense of freedom and comfort Hong like the director may have found in new artistic connection. 

The Novelist’s Film screens at Ultrastar Mission Valley on Nov. 4/7 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

US release trailer (English subtitles)

Hunt (헌트, Lee Jung-jae, 2022)

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“How long can you fight violence with violence?” one accidental ally asks another towards the conclusion of actor and star Lee Jung-jae’s 80s-set directorial debut, Hunt (헌트). As the title implies, this is a story of two men stalking each other but also each ironic representatives of an ideological divide both seeking a better future while torn between violent overthrow and peaceful revolution in the dying days of a Cold War in what could be termed its ground zero. 

As the film opens, the South Korean president, a stand-in for an unnamed Chun Doo-hwan, faces mass protest from local Korean-American democracy activists on return to his hotel while on a diplomatic visit to Washington. His security team is itself somewhat compromised in that it is a joint operation between foreign and domestic intelligence teams neither of which have must trust in the other. When it’s discovered that a plot is underway to assassinate the president, foreign intelligence chief Park (Lee Jung-jae) is taken hostage but insists on capturing the suspect only for domestic chief Kim (Jung Woo-sung) to abruptly shoot him, leading Park to wonder if Kim did it to keep him quiet rather than simply to neutralise an immediate threat. Assuming North Korea is most likely behind the plot, each begins to suspect the other is a mysterious double agent known as Donglim. 

What soon becomes apparent is that the two men, the domestic and the foreign, are being pitted against each other by the questionable authority that is the Chun regime. Recently promoted from the military, Kim had in fact instigated Park’s torture in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of the previous president, also a military dictator, Park Chung-hee. Both men appear to be conflicted in their association with an authoritarian government in the wake of widespread state violence including the brutal suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980. Nevertheless, both are party to acts of torture many of them enacted on teenage democracy activists they routinely smear as communists. 

In short, no one could really blame anyone who wanted to overthrow this brutal regime but as oppressive as it is, it’s also backed by the Americans who would rather keep Chun in power than risk the students’ wishes that the American military pull out of Korea coming to fruition lest it lead to a similar situation in Okinawa, which had only returned to Japanese sovereignty a decade earlier, undermining their ongoing foreign policy goals in Asia. If there is one clear villain, aside from Chun, it’s the shady the international order that is content to watch authoritarian leaders enact violence on their people when it supports their own interests. Nevertheless, it’s also true that Park and Kim’s personal vendetta sparks major diplomatic incidents in two sovereign nations which in any other case would seem primed to turn this cold war hot.

What emerges is a cat and mouse game in which each attempts to unmask the other while on increasingly unstable ground unable even to rely on support from their superiors who in any case answer directly to Chun. It seems there are several factions who would like to unseat him even if they do not necessarily object to authoritarian rule only to persistent state violence against citizens who are more often than not mere children. The differences between Park and Kim are ideological in more ways than one, torn between the belief that only violence can free them from violence and the desire to seek a better solution but each agreeing that assassination is the only viable path to deposing Chun and ushering in a better future despite the failure of the assassination of the previous president to do the same . 

Anchored by strong performances from veteran actors Lee Jung-jae and Jung Woo-sung, the film also features a host of cameos from some of the nation’s top stars including Hwang Jung-min as a manic North Korean airforce defector and Lee Sung-min in a small but pivotal role as a Korean-Japanese asset. With notably high production values and truly astonishing action sequences, Lee excels in capturing the paranoid atmosphere of the conspiracy thriller and an almost unbearable tension between its twin protagonists who will later discover that they are quite literally on the same bus even if they have very different destinations in mind. 

Hunt screened as the opening night gala of this year’s London East Asian Film Festival and arrives in UK cinemas/digital on 4th November courtesy of Altitude Films.

UK release trailer (English subtitles)

Deliverance (源生罪, Kelvin Shum, 2022)

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A young woman haunted by the buried memories of repressed trauma discovers that sometimes it really is better not to know but also comes to a new appreciation of familial love in Kelvin Shum’s visually striking psychological chiller, Deliverance (源生罪). Meaning something more like original sin the Chinese title hints at the reconsideration of the traditional family which lies under the central mystery and prompts the heroine, long separated from her siblings, to question the nature of her familial bonds and whether she can really say that those closest to her have her best interests at heart. 

After living abroad for 15 years, Nicole (Summer Chan) has married and returned home to Hong Kong with her husband but is haunted by a shadowy figure that reminds her of her childhood trauma in being unable to remember anything about the night her mother passed away after a long illness. Back in a familiar environment and reconnecting with her siblings, old memories begin to surface particularly after a few sessions with her famous hypnotist brother, Joseph (Simon Yam). Gradually she begins to suspect that her mother may not have died of her illness as she was led to believe but may have been murdered and possibly by a member of her immediate family which was then under intense pressure from loansharks due to debts run up by her absent father who ran away and abandoned the family to their fate. 

The theme of abandonment continues to resonate, Nicole insecure in her familial relationships as her brothers sent her abroad to study shortly after their mother’s death. She can’t escape the idea that they are keeping something from her, and is quite literally haunted by her inability to remember what happened on the night her mother died. But as Joseph had said during one of his lectures, memory is a treacherous thing and if you don’t remember something perhaps that’s because it’s better not to. Then again as her brother Will adds, it’s impossible to escape your past and someday you will be expected to answer for it whether you remember it or not. 

Nicole’s insistence on knowing the truth may partly be motivated by the fact that she is shortly to become a mother herself, though Joseph tries to convince her that her eerie visions and increasing paranoia are side effects of her pregnancy. Trust is the foundation of relationships, and Nicole is beginning to feel as if she can’t trust anyone anymore, but nor can she trust her memories many of which are influenced by her brother’s hypnotism. Working as a doctor she is touched by the relationship between an elderly couple who remain devoted to each other as the husband (Kenneth Tsang) contends with terminal cancer, but is also struck by the discord between their children who argue loudly in the corridor about the responsibilities of care and the financial burden of their father’s medical treatment. 

The understanding she begins to come to is that all of these reactions can in fact come from a place of love even if it doesn’t really seem like it on the surface. Whatever happened to her mother it may be no different, and if her family are indeed keeping something from her it may be out of a desire to protect her from the truth however misguided a desire that may be. As Joseph had said in his speech, emotions can take lives but they can also save them, though it appears the pain of not knowing is eating away at Nicole’s soul and only the truth can set her free. Mr Lam, the terminal cancer patient, cheerfully explains that all of life is a journey towards death but only to emphasise that it’s how you use the time that’s important so obsessing over the past might not serve you so well in the end. In any case, the journey into her own psyche may be uncomfortable and reveal truths that are painful but allows Nicole to begin overcoming her trauma while repairing her existing familial bonds before beginning new ones. Shot with noirish visual flair featuring high contrast colour and a dreamlike eeriness in Nicole’s ever present haunting, Shum’s psychological mystery suggests orphaned files must be brought back into the fold and that there can be no healing without truth but also that the expression of love can take many forms not all of which are easily understood. 

Deliverance had its World Premiere as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (dialogue free)

The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊, Ho Cheuk-tin, 2022)

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Loosely based on a real life case in which a man murdered his parents then reported them missing and even went to the media for help looking for them, Ho Cheuk-tin’s The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊) distances itself from the sensationalism of the crime to ask a series of questions about human nature and the operation of the criminal justice system. The first of those questions is obviously why, but not just why did he murder the people who raised him but why did he go to the media and why did he eventually decide to confess. 

One reason Henry (Yeung Wai-lun) gives for killing his parents is that his upbringing was abusive, a fact later confirmed by his sympathetic cousin herself a devout Christian. It seems fairly clear that Henry has an inferiority complex for which he blames his mother and father, resentful that they made him play piano and wouldn’t let him play basketball to which he attributes the small stature that led to merciless bullying in school and fractured masculinity in adulthood. Ho often places the camera slightly behind Henry’s shoulder, emphasising his smallness and neatly reflecting the way in which he literally feels as if everyone is looking down on him. He has so far had a life full of failure, studying abroad but failing to make the grade and resentful towards his more successful older brother Ho Jin to whom his parents force him to sign over his share of a flat they bought as an investment after Henry’s gambling debts and inability to find a job left him unable to pay the mortgage. Losing a flat in Hong Kong is worse than losing a life Henry’s lawyer points out at trial, attempting to justify the resentment that led to Henry’s decision to not only murder but brutally dismember his parents. 

Another question mark, however, hangs over Henry’s accomplice and why exactly he chose to take him down with him. Angus (Mak Pui-tung), a man he met at a job interview, seems to have learning difficulties and may not quite understand what is going on. His sister describes him as naive and explains that he has a tendency to make friends with those who only hope to exploit him and may have been manipulated by Henry in fear for the safety of himself and his family or else simply not to lose the friendship. The extent of his involvement with the crimes remains unclear, Henry claiming that he was present and participated in the killing of his mother, while Angus insists that he only took part in the disposal of the bodies. Perhaps uncomfortably the film asks how much we can really trust Angus, suggesting that he may simply be manipulating the sympathy of others and is not really quite as naive as he makes out. 

In any case, his treatment at the hands of the police is as unjust as it comes, intimidated into offering a confession simply to make the interrogation stop so that he sleep and get something to eat. In court the truth hardly matters, a trial is about constructing a credible narrative. The lawyers for joint defendants Angus and Henry attempt to undercut each other, Henry’s arguing he is not responsible on the grounds of mental illness while implicating Angus as the instigator, and Angus’ intent on emphasising his disability suggesting was merely manipulated by Henry. The jurors in the jury room struggle to make sense of the case but also of their own role, tasked not with assessing guilt or innocence but the strength of the argument based on the evidence they’ve been given only for some of them to base their convictions on gut instinct anyway. 

They are perhaps aware that Henry is a master manipulator, he lied to his own brother and fooled all of Hong Kong with his video appealing for support before dramatically confessing online. He has obvious delusions of grandeur and idolises Hitler, claiming that had he been born at the right time he could have done what Hitler did. Ho often dramatises his moments of introspection as fantasy in which Henry poses as Hitler and speaks German to those around him before snapping back to reality and finding him experiencing a moment of clarity that makes him step back. Yet there are moments of heartbreaking authenticity in the “friendship” between the two men such as in their meeting at the job interview as they bond in a shared sense of rejection, the subtext of their crimes inviting the reading that they are intended as acts of vengeance against the society into which neither of them was able integrate. 

In the closing scenes, a policeman remembers evidence left behind during the initial sweep of the crime scene by his incompetent boss and returns to Angus’ apartment to find a migrant family living there who tell him they know there was a murder but they don’t care about things like that and are just grateful to have a home. Henry too continues his dark jokes about permanently devaluing his family’s apartments, but seems genuinely distressed on realising that his brother really may abandon him for his total lack of remorse while Angus finds himself exploited by the tabloid press only too eager for all the gory details. Ho’s closing images which find Angus enveloped in the webs of the spiders which plague his dreams perhaps hints at his place in a complex network of forces which contribute to his exclusion from prejudice towards the disabled to fatphobia along with the manipulation of men like Henry who promise friendship but only take advantage of his inability to resist. Then again, the fact of the matter is that you’ll never really know the truth, whether Henry did it all for the attention and ended up alone anyway or if it really was Angus who planned everything and fooled all of Hong Kong, like the jury all you can do is weigh up the evidence and draw your own conclusions.  

The Sparring Partner screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival and will open in UK cinemas on Nov. 18 courtesy of CineAsia.

Leonor Will Never Die (Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago, Martika Ramirez Escobar, 2022)

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A grief-stricken screenwriter resolves to write her way out of self-imposed inertia while trapped in a world of her own creation in Martika Ramirez Escobar’s meta dramedy Leonor Will Never Die (Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago). Drawing inspiration from the action exploitation films of the 1980s, the film asks some big questions about grief and agency and the role stories play in our lives while celebrating a sense of community in cinema along with the accidental immortality it may grant. 

Once a successful screenwriter of action films, Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) is now an elderly lady who has largely shut herself away following the tragic death of her eldest son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon). Her youngest, Rudie (Bong Cabrera), still lives with her but as she later reveals there is distance between them and a sort of repellant dependency in which each resents the other and longs for freedom while simultaneously afraid to chase it. When Leonor “forgets” to pay her electricity bill and is berated by Rudie, she is handed a newspaper by the ghost of Ronwaldo containing an ad for a screenplay competition and decides to dust off the script she broke off when he died. While taking a cigarette break, she is hit on the head by a flying TV thrown out by the man next-door fed up with his wife’s addiction to soap operas and finds herself falling into the world of the film hoping she can save the hero, also named Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides), from his tragic fate. 

Shifting into a grainy 4:3 with mono aural sound, Escobar perfectly recreates the world of retro action drama but subtly updates it from its Marcos-era backdrop in replacing activists with drug users, her authoritarian thugs carrying out extrajudicial killings for reasons of intimidation. The movie Ronwaldo is set on revenge against a corrupt mayor and his vigilante son who shot his brother and then placed a pistol and a small packet of drugs next to the body, resisting authoritarianism in a way it may not have actually been possible to do so directly in the movies of the past. In any case, Leonor slips into her own screenplay as an awkward omnipotent force writing as she goes but struggling with her own role and agency before picking up a hammer and venturing into danger to rescue the hero and his love interest herself.  

From the other side of the screen, Rudie asks her if she’d be OK with someone else finishing her screenplay which is in a way asking her if she’s alright with her final decisions being made for her. That might be what Leonor is trying to decide for herself by rewriting in real time, searching for the right ending for her life’s story. Rudie had resented his mother, blaming her for keeping him behind when he planned to apply for an overseas work visa to join his boyfriend abroad but she wonders if he isn’t just using her as an excuse while afraid to take the risk. She by turn insists she can manage alone, but is perhaps afraid she can’t which, along with the grief she feels over Ronwaldo’s death, leads her to push him away. 

Leonor’s coma perhaps brings them both clarity that allows them to discover what it is they really want, Rudie finally handing agency back to his mother in telling her do what she has to do in a world of her own creation while she tells both her sons to be sure they write their own lives. The doctor had told Rudie that Leonor was trapped in a world between sleeping and waking and that you can’t wake someone who is not asleep, they will have to find a way to escape by themselves something which in one way or another Leonor perhaps does coming to terms with Ronwaldo’s death and breaking free of her grief through recapturing her creative spirit if writing a poetic end for herself. Then again as an authorial voice breaks through, life is never as simple as narrative and we’re rarely given the opportunity to edit our own stories or decide the way in which they end, perhaps Leonor isn’t either but even so passes into a world of joy and song in which there are no real endings only a great expanse of cinema. Charmingly surreal and filled with good humour, Leonor Will Never Die is at once the story of an old woman rediscovering herself while letting go of her grief and a celebration of escapist pleasures as paths towards self actualisation. 

Leonor Will Never Die screens in Amsterdam on 30th October as part of this year’s Imagine Fantastic Film Festival.

US release trailer (English subtitles)

The Roundup (범죄도시 2, Lee Sang-yong, 2022)

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Force of justice Ma Seok-do returns five years after The Outlaws to right more wrongs in jet-setting action comedy, The Roundup (범죄도시 2, Beomjoidosi 2). By this stage in his career, actor Ma Dong-seok has succeeded in creating a persona for himself as a loveable bruiser whose violence is just a way of being and always in service of a greater good. These are qualities very much in play as Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok) finds himself defending the interests of Korean citizens abroad against crooks the cops failed to catch at home.

Seok-do is however in the dog house for being accused of using excessive force in the papers after neutralising a hostage incident in a convenience store. To keep him off the front pages, the higher ups decide to send him on a mini mission abroad bringing home a Korean fugitive who has apparently turned himself in to the Vietnamese authorities. Given that this is quite an odd thing to do and the criminal’s explanation that he was suddenly overcome with guilt and wanted to repay his debt to society doesn’t ring true, Seok-do smells a rat. As he discovers, it all points back to the kidnapping and murder of a rich man’s son by vicious gangster Hae-sang (Son Seok-koo) who preys on unsuspecting tourists. Rather than get the police involved, the boy’s father has decided to hire a bunch of mercenaries to take revenge further destabilising the local underworld in Ho Chi Min City. 

It has to be said that there is something a little uncomfortable in the quasi-nationalist posturing of the film’s central premise. Korea has effectively been exporting crime by allowing dangerous criminals to flee abroad where the law can’t touch them. Korean crooks then make trouble for Korean tourists even if not quite to the extent of Hae-sang, all of which ignores the effects on the local Vietnamese population in concentrating on Korean on Korean crime. At the end of the film it’s even suggested that Korean police officers might be dispatched to other areas of Asia to look after Korean tourists which shows a certain lack of respect for national sovereignties while more or less letting the same police officers off the hook for failing to catch criminals in Korea or address the issues which led to them entering lives of crime. A maverick cop, Seok-do does rather throw his weight around in a foreign country, caring little for protocol and threatening to spark a diplomatic incident every few seconds. 

Then again he is just particularly keen on shutting down Hae-sang and exposing him for his heinous acts, cleaning up a mess that has ended up spilling over abroad. Ironically enough, the bereaved father, Choi (Nam Moon-cheol), maybe a powerful CEO but he made his money loansharking and is pretty much a petty gangster himself so of course he wants personal vengeance once again uncomfortably hiring mercenaries from China. Meanwhile, Seok-do ends up enlisting the help of a formerly undocumented migrant when Choi ends up getting kidnapped himself by a cornered Hae-sang.

In any case, Seok-do more than holds his own against the bloodthirsty villains in a series of well choreographed action sequences culminating in a one-on-one showdown on a bus. Much of Ma’s appeal lies in his effortless ability to take down bad guys which he does a plenty, even dispatching one via escalator to his waiting teammates below. Even so, he knows not to take himself too seriously and is keen to cede screen time to the ensemble allowing a gentle camaraderie to appear among his squad members despite their separation while Seok-do and the Captain are in Vietnam trying to have a covert holiday and the rest of the team are left behind to do regular admin work in the office. Though it may present some rather uncomfortable ideas in a kind of Korean exceptionalism that implies a degree of superiority over and disregard towards other Asian nations, the film is nevertheless a charming retro action comedy and perfect showcase for the charismatic star as his no-nonsense policeman makes a point of slapping down bad guys and fighting international crime while generally living his best life hanging out with similarly justice-orientated buddies. 

The Roundup screens in Amsterdam on 27th October & 4th November as part of this year’s Imagine Fantastic Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심, Park Chan-wook, 2022)

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“I went through hell for you but without you my life would be empty” a fugitive murderer asks an insomniac detective to tell the woman he loves, making his own Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심, Heojil kyolshim) which will in fact be one of many in Park Chan-wook’s achingly romantic noir. Tinged with fatalism, the pursuit of love is also one of death and leads inevitably to a kind of haunting from which there is no real escape though you wouldn’t really want one anyway. 

In any case, the detective Park Hae-joon’s (Park Hae-il) sense of reality is already fracturing under the strain of his incurable insomnia. As he tells his partner, it’s not that he can’t sleep because of his obsessive stakeouts, it’s that he goes on stakeouts because he cannot sleep. Unfortunately for him, there have been relatively few murders lately. He wonders if it’s because of the nice weather, as if homicidal rage were being held in check by the gentle art of picnicking which it has to be said has a strange logic to it. Living apart from his wife who is a nuclear engineer in provincial Ipo, Hae-joon prides himself on being a good policeman and is preoccupied by his failure to catch two suspects currently on the run for a vicious murder. When he’s called to the scene of a dead body lying below a cliff, most are ready to rule it a tragic accident or perhaps a suicide but Hae-joon isn’t so sure especially given the unusual behaviour of the man’s much younger widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who appears almost indifferent to her husband’s death and giggles to herself during an interrogation a habit she later claims is born of nervousness and a lack of confidence in her ability to speak Korean having migrated from China. 

Seo-rae’s Korean is perhaps a little better than she makes out, but still we see her repeating lines from romantic dramas on television, lines she later repeats to Hae-joon, while he wonders if her taste for historical romance has lent her Korean its archaic quality. They are each in a way out of time, she remarking that he strikes her as “dignified” to a degree she didn’t expect in a “modern” man while he ironically tells her that he was drawn to her because like him she liked to look at things directly. Yet there’s nothing at all direct about the mysterious Seo-rae whom he suspects of murdering her husband, and though there might be something unspoken directly understood between them their attempts at communication are always frustrated. Not only is there an ever shifting language barrier, but a mediation through text message and voice note or else through the act of being observed at a distance. As they grow closer, Hae-joon allows Seo-rae to listen to his surveillance tapes recorded as he voyeuristically watched her apartment from the rooftop opposite. She immediately deletes them but later does something similar herself, and is finally undone by her inability to delete a potentially incriminating recording because it has come to mean too much to her. 

The pair are in a sense perfectly matched. Hae-joon’s melancholy wife finally exclaims that he needs murder and violence in order to be happy, while Seo-rae admits that she ends up with terrible men like husband because it would take something extreme such as a murder for a good man like Hae-joon to take notice of her. As the couple dance around each other, Park colours their non-romance with shades of the gothic in the repeated motif of the crow feathers each of them find as they work their way towards the apotheosis of their love. As they say every love story is a ghost story and what is love if not an unsolvable mystery? Hae-joon’s sense of reality is forever in flux, Park playfully dressing Hae-joon’s new team and his old team in similar outfits as he segues between fantasy, reality, and memory while trying to parse out an objective truth. Hae-joon’s tragedy may be that he discovers more than he ought to know but not enough to solve the mystery, destined to be haunted by his unresolved cases and the elusive silhouette of lost love lingering silently in the mists of memory. 

Decision to Leave screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and is now on general release in US & UK cinemas courtesy of MUBI.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Angae (Mist) by Jung Hoon-hee (1967) which is also the title song for Kim Soo-yong’s 1967 film of the same name.