Tag: 2022

In the Distance (距ててて, Saki Kato, 2022)

Posted on by

Can two people who have completely different outlooks and ways of living learn to get along and eventually become friends? A pandemic-era dramedy, Saki Kato’s In the Distance (距ててて, Hedatetete) asks just this question when two women are unexpectedly forced to co-exist on a greater level after their roommate is suddenly stuck abroad. A series of surreal adventures might leave them with no option other than to confront their differences, but also shows them that difference can be complementary rather than disharmonious. 

The main issues between Ako and San are those which are common to any house sharing arrangement particularly if the people involved did know each other well previously. Ako is an aspiring photographer who sees part-time work as a necessary evil but continues to struggle amid the vagaries of the covid-era economy. She is neat and tidy and likes the house to be in order. San, meanwhile, is picking up most of the rent and has a job which has not been too badly affected by the pandemic. But she’s also a total mess when it comes to her share of the housework and has an annoying habit of picking up everyone’s post and stuffing it somewhere in her room without letting her roommates know a letter has come for them. Obviously, this is also an invasion of privacy on top of simply being annoying so Ako’s irritation is understandable but she has a kind of animosity towards San simply for being what she sees as a boring wage slave while she’s just slumming it until she gets a break with her photography.

But then again, San is “artistic” if in a problematic way in that her accordion playing has caused complaints from neighbours but when their property manager comes to have a word with them he ends up bringing his ocarina to join in the fun. San vents her frustrations to a friend, Tomoe, who has a similar problem of her own in that she’s in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend because they keep disagreeing over trivial things like brands of rice or misaligned printing on greetings cards. They only talk to each other in terms of metaphor with Tomoe apparently sick of their mismatched pairing and hoping to find a new partner with more common interests while the boyfriend seems near distraught by the thought of the relationship ending. 

Ironically it’s San who points out their relationship may be fairly complementary and it’s more the case that they can get along together because they are different yet she still struggles with her relationship with Ako whom she finds uptight and pretentious. Ako, meanwhile, is having a strange encounter of her own with a teenage girl looking for a misdirected letter presumably spirited away by San. She claims not to have a phone or use a computer and implies that her mother is very strict, though when she actually arrives at the house she’s incredibly nice and even cooks a hearty meal though there is something a little sinister in her manner lending the pair a kind of supernatural quality like something out of a fairytale. 

In any case, a misplaced keepsake eventually prompts a confrontation between the two women that allows them to clear the air and find a way to work together. Turning somewhat surreal in its final section, the film hints at a transportational quality of their new alliance that drops them in a new and unfamiliar place with only each other to rely on. The lesson seems to be that sharing an environment necessarily gives rise to various interpersonal issues which can be dissolved while outside of it, and that even if two people seem completely incompatible they can still find common ground and learn to get along especially against the stressful backdrop of a global pandemic in which enforced isolation can exert additional pressure on an already strained relationship just when mutual cooperation becomes an absolute necessity. Filmed with everyday naturalism and a surrealist, deadpan humour Kato’s indie dramedy hints at the strangeness of the ordinary but also discovers the small moments of unexpected connection often brokered by casual misunderstanding.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Na Hyeon, 2022)

Posted on by

“Justice is preserved by being just” according to the idealistic hero at the centre of Na Hyeon’s Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (야차, Yacha) , though he’ll eventually come round to his sometime mentor’s belief that “Justice must be preserved by any means necessary”. Any means necessary is indeed the motto of the titular hero named for the unpredictable Buddhist deity and regarded by his superiors as a dangerous maverick though as it turns out he does indeed have justice in mind even if his idea of justice might not fully align with those whom he is intended to serve. 

The failure of the regular justice system is signalled in the film’s opening as idealistic prosecutor Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo) finds his case against a corrupt CEO falling apart because of procedural mistakes by his own rookie team. Humiliated on the courthouse steps, Ji-hoon is given a punitive transfer to the NIS where he is kept out of trouble, told to draw a salary but given very little work. He and his jaded colleague who was once known as the “bulldozer of justice” but has been ruined by this bizarre form of punishment and no longer has the will do to anything much at all mostly spend their time doing jigsaw puzzles stave off boredom. When his colleague admits there’s no more hope for him and turns down an offer of reinstatement, Ji-hoon agrees to travel to Shengyang, a hotbed of international spies in China, to find out what’s going on with a series of false reports from their agents on the ground led by maverick black ops officer Yakska. 

What he soon discovers is that he’s been dragged into some murky geopolitical shenanigans between North Korean spies, his target’s possibly corrupt team, and the Japanese who are once again up to no good trying to prevent a possible alliance between North and South believing such a union would present too much of a threat to their economic position in North East Asia. His problem is that Yaksha’s field craft does not measure up to what he regards as appropriate conduct. He engages in firefights and commits what seem to be summary executions while later threatening to torture a hostage to force her to reveal the location of their missing asset, a North Korean financial kingpin, Moon (Nam Kyung-eup), who had been acting as a double agent for the Japanese but had become disillusioned with their imperialist outlook and decided to defect to the South bringing valuable information with him. 

It has to be said that however uncountable it may be to see a Japanese spy who behaves like a gangster committing acts of torture in a well appointed lab on a Chinese woman in China, Yaksha cannot exactly claim the moral high ground having attempted to do something similar only in his filthy hideout in an abandoned mine. Ji-hoon’s dilemma is that he doesn’t know whose side, if any, Yaksha is on or if he’s after the North Korean trillions Moon had been managing rather than a hugely beneficial national asset. Exposed to this morally grey world, however, Ji-hoon’s idealist edges begin to soften as shifts towards Yaksa’s “by any means possible” philosophy while trying to stop evil Japanese spy turned lobbyist from recovering the valuable data Moon had to sell and going on to do even more nefarious deeds undermining the possibilities for reunification along with the Koreas’ economic potential. 

Somewhat uncomfortably, the film does then more or less condone torture, betrayal, and summary execution if conducted in the pursuit of “justice” even while simultaneously approving of Ji-hoon’s idealistic pursuit of the rich and powerful who continue to misuse their position and cause pain to ordinary people. It comes to something when the safest ally is a gang of human organ traffickers with whom Yaksha seems to be suspiciously familiar. Nevertheless, what Yaksha eventually asks Ji-hoon to do is to “clean things up” hinting at the duo’s complementary qualities as they pursue “justice” in both the legal and more immediate senses. Filled with some quite literally explosive action sequences along with some admittedly broad comic book antics as the guys face off against Hideki Ikeuchi’s Japanese arch villain Yaksha is certainly a good looking film if one with a dark heart beating at its centre. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Blind War (盲战, Chris Huo Suiqiang, 2022)

Posted on by

After losing his sight in an explosion, a former swat officer must battle his way to the top of a human trafficking network in a fictional South East Asian nation in Chris Huo Suiqiang’s action drama, Blind War (盲战 máng zhàn). The film opens with an assault on justice, but the wounded cop must in effect turn vigilante to protect his daughter from a failure of the judicial process and pervasive misogyny in a culture in which women and girls can be sold at will while the corrupt police force do nothing.

In fact, the local cop Rama (Dou Dou) is played mostly for comic relief and is otherwise incredibly stupid, determined to nail blind former cop Dong (Andy On), whom he knows to be the father of a murdered girl from a neighbouring nation, as the king pin of the drug smuggling and people trafficking operation. Dong’s struggle runs concurrently with a succession drama in which Zha Kun (Qi Shenghan), son of drug dealer McQueen who was blown up in the dock in the opening courthouse sequence, seeks to cement his authority over the gang and get revenge on Cena (Yang Xing) for the death of father while she wants revenge on Dong for blowing up her husband. 

Dong is in fact dismissed from the police force in disgrace due to public opinion which blames him for the deaths of his men who were killed by the gang when he decided to check out a funny noise in the courthouse though he was only supposed to be guarding McQueen’s post-trial extradition. Having lost both his sight and his status as police officer, he begins to lose his mind becoming violent and paranoid with looking after his teenage daughter Yati (Cheng Sihan) his only other outlet. When she’s taken by the people traffickers, he’ll stop at nothing to get her back though it has to be said is not particularly interested in the other women or stopping the gang and in the company of Cena who is using him for her own revenge plot becomes increasingly corrupted in his willingness to use violence. 

Luckily, Dong was blessed with superior hearing to begin with and with the loss of his sight is largely able to navigate the world by ear alone, giving him an advantage over his opponents even if he can’t see them. The film sets him up with almost supernatural powers, at one point using a conveniently placed climbing rope to jump from one window to the apartment below. The fight scenes are often impressive and well choreographed, especially one tortuous sequence in which Dong is attached to Cena by chain and his position dictates whether or not she’s dunked in the water, and in terms of scale display impressive production values for a low budget streaming film.

Nevertheless, Dong is often eclipsed by the villainess, Cena whose tragic backstory makes her claim to vengeance just as valid as Dong’s as she battles to take down the gang that raped and controlled her after being sold by her father to a Thai warlord as a child. The local police seem to be much more interested in the drugs than the people trafficking, and Rama’s unintentionally ironic cries that Cena’s bumped off the only female officer they have, which is presumably why he had a crush on her, bares out the misogynistic attitudes in play in which female life is cheap and the only way to escape subjugation to oppress other women, like Dragon King (Qian Zhiyi), or to become crazed and cruel like Cena.

In any case, though it was never really in question, Dong’s fatherly devotion is eventually proved by his knowledge of his daughter which eventually enables him to save her, with the help of his loyal friend Yun (Wang Hanyang) who doesn’t really seem to mind that Dong went rogue and endangered his life while he’s been hanging around in the shadows the whole time in case anyone needs him. Perhaps in a concession to the censors, it’s clear that Dong is also paying for his transgressions though through his vigilante action is able to reclaim his position as a father and protector despite his career setbacks and the loss of his sight.

Blind War is available now in the US on Digital and Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA

Trailer (English subtitles)

God Seeks in Return (神は見返りを求める, Keisuke Yoshida, 2022)

Posted on by

It’s perfectly natural a lot of the time to feel as if you expect nothing in return for helping someone, after all it’s only what you should do as a fellow human being. But really we do expect something even if it’s just acknowledgement and it can be hurtful and upsetting if don’t feel we get it while the sensation that we’re being taken advantage of can leave us feeling silly for having offered in the first place. Keisuke Yoshida’s Good Seeks in Return (神は見返りを求める, Kami wa Mikaeri wo Motomeru) revels in these human paradoxes as a self-confessed nice guy is pushed to breaking point by the fallout from all his attempts to be neighbourly which seem to have backfired exponentially. 

Then again, Tamogami (Tsuyoshi Muro) almost certainly does at least hope for something in return when he agrees to help out struggling YouTuber Yuri (Yukino Kishii) with her moribund channel by enlivening it with his skills in video editing and design. He isn’t helping her in order to engineer a sexual relationship, and in fact turns Yuri down when she suddenly disrobes exclaiming that it’s the only way she can repay him for his kindness, but does appear interested and is additionally irritated when she begins hanging out with a bunch of vlogger cool kids he thinks are just exploiting her naivety. Yuri had already payed him back with homemade beef stew, an offer that was accepted in the interest of friendship, but her constant references to repayment of a favour expose her idea of relationships as essentially transactional which to be fair they well may be. Even so, she appears somewhat guileless, opportunist rather than calculating and desperate for attention.

That might be why she can’t see that the reason she became unexpectedly popular after agreeing to a “body paint” stunt with a pair of more established YouTubers is that people wanted to see her naked which is why they’re always requesting more of the same. The first half of the film plays as quirky comedy, an offbeat romance between a nice middle-aged man and a dippy young woman who thinks she’s no good at anything and incapable of being alone. But things soon turn sour when one of Yuri’s stunts seems like it might have serious consequences for a local business owner and Tamogami has to muster all of his PR skills to put this particular fire out. The simple friendship between them that was brokered by a weird ogre-like mascot suit Yuri christens Jacob is disrupted by Yuri’s desire for fame as she undergoes a complete personality transformation after falling in with a group of more successful, media savvy YouTubers who have fancy design skills and marketing teams. She dismisses Tamogami as old-fashioned and joins in when the others make fun of him in rejection of the genuine friendship that had arisen between them.

When a friend he’d helped out financially and even stood guarantor on his debts takes his own life Tamogami is deep in the hole. Finally he wonder’s if he shouldn’t have something in return for all the unpaid labour he’s been doing for Yuri but she predictably brushes him off until he finally embarks on a weird vendetta trying to “expose” her YouTube channel for being founded on lies and exploitation. There may be something in her that’s regretful, wistfully looking at the sweater Tamogami had given her with cute illustrations of her and Jacob on it, while her new “god” Murakami openly mocks him leaving her conflicted about the dark side of their new internet endeavour effectively bullying a guy whose only crime was being nice and bit too dull and middle-aged for her new hipster friends sure to drop her like she’s hot as soon as something goes wrong.

Though not as extreme as some of Yoshida’s other films, God Seeks in Return suggests that nice guys never prosper but also that no one’s really as “nice” as they think they are. We wall want something in return even if it’s just a thank you and not to be belittled or taken advantage of. There can be something paradoxically selfish in niceness in which people do it more for their own gratification or to feel they are better than those they help and conversely the same in those who take advantage of others. In it’s way bleak and melancholy in its vision of human relationships, the film nevertheless holds out a faint hope in the reality of the genuine connection between its mismatched heroes no matter how dark and twisted it may eventually become.

God Seeks in Return screens 1st June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

International trailer (English subtitles)

Drive Into Night (夜を走る, Dai Sako, 2022)

Posted on by

Small-town futility leads to tragedy when two frustrated scrapyard workers attempt to cover up a crime in Dai Sako’s dark psychological drama Drive into Night (夜を走る, Yoru wo Hashiru). Oppressive in its atmosphere, the film situates itself in a world of constant humiliations where life is cheap and reputation everything. Its heroes seek escape from their disappointing existences through consumerism and extra-marital affairs, but no longer see much of a future for themselves while even the dissatisfying present seems to be ebbing away from them. 

Asked what makes his life fun, Akimoto (Tomomitsu Adachi) replies “not much”. A classic mild-mannered guy, he’s regarded as the office dogsbody and at the beck and call of his abusive manager, Hongo (Tsutomu Takahashi). When a new female sales representative, Risa (Ran Tamai), visits the yard, Hongo runs Akimoto down in front of her apologising for having such a useless employee who does nothing other than drive around all day. His sense of masculinity is also wounded by an older colleague who tries to sell he and his friend Taniguchi (Reo Tamaoki) some kind of aphrodisiac but reflects that Akimoto is too “tame” to ever make use of it, while even Taniguchi needles him about being a 40-year-old man who’s never had a girlfriend and still lives at home with his parents. In many ways he’s the classic “nice guy”, but there’s also something a little dark about him that makes it seem as if he may snap any moment. That may have been what happened when he and Taniguchi went to a bar with Risa shortly after she’d been coaxed into a works drink with Hongo. Something obviously went dreadfully wrong in the night, because Risa is soon reported missing and both Akimoto and Taniguchi begin behaving oddly. 

It is true enough that both men, and many of their colleagues, also consider themselves to be on the scrap heap. Akimoto is tempted to quit his job to put distance between himself and the scrapyard but reflects that he’s unlikely to find another job even if quitting so suddenly might arouse suspicion as Taniguchi warns him. Meanwhile, he knows the yard is in trouble. They have him running round doing cold calls but returning empty handed, while office workers are constantly fielding calls about unpaid invoices. His irritation is palpable when he spots the boss, Miyake, leaving one morning soon after he arrives, loading expensive golf clubs into his fancy car. Hongo bullies him, but later says he does it out of respect because Akimoto is the only one who bothers to do his job properly. But then again even Hongo concedes that hard work gets you nowhere. Most of his paycheques go on child support and he often sleeps in his car in the car park. The only reason he’s not been fired is that he has a personal connection to Miyake.

Even so, this fairly tenuous relationship does not really explain why Miyake goes to such great lengths to protect Hongo when he becomes the prime suspect in Risa’s disappearance and is framed by Taniguchi and a guilty Akimoto. It may be in a way that he really does think of the company as a kind of family, as perhaps do the loan sharks who keep calling them after Akimoto ends up in debt having joined a weird cult encourages him to think there is nothing wrong with him and the fault is all with an unaccepting world. The cult leader tells him that he is “full of anger”, which perhaps he is. This being in the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, Akimoto is often questioned about still wearing a mask long after most people have abandoned them and part of the reason is as an attempt to hide his true self. After joining the cult he takes it off, but soon adopts another disguise in dressing in Risa’s clothes as his mental state continues to decline. 

Taniguchi meanwhile makes an effort to continue with his “normal” life which includes visiting his mistress. Unbeknownst to him, his wife Misaki (Nahana) is also having an affair with the consequence that neither of them is able to fully devote themselves to their young daughter Ayano who eventually ends up in a potentially dangerous situation because of her parents’ various transgressions. Nevertheless, despite discovering that her husband may have been involved in a murder it’s Misaki who decides that he has to “protect our family” above all else. Amid all of this, Risa becomes almost literally lost before later being unceremoniously dumped like so much scrap. After framing Hongo, Taniguchi tries to convince Akimoto that Risa isn’t their problem anymore as they each struggle to hang on to the previously disappointing realities they had been so desperate to escape. 

It has to be said that aside from the misogyny of its worldview, there is also an uncomfortable quality in the film’s characterisation of a shady Chinese businessman who of course knows how to get rid of bodies along with the fact his chief associate is Korean-Japanese gangster. Though the film’s strongest character may in fact be the Filipina bar hostess, Gina (Rosa Yamamoto), on whom Akimoto fixes most of his hopes who defiantly tells the cult leader that she’s happy with her life and has no reason to join his organisation, Akimoto exposes himself by telling her she’s wrong because he doesn’t see why a “foreigner”, “a woman”, who works in a “dirty” bar, could be happy or averse to being “saved” by him. Still he insists that he hasn’t “changed”, it’s the world that’s changed around him. Taniguchi later says something similar, and they each may have a point. In any case, this world is largely one of resentment and futility in which there is no release. Sako captures the drudgery of his protagonists lives with crushing naturalism but also perhaps little sympathy.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Dead Fishes (僕らはみーんな生きている, Tomoaki Kaneko, 2022)

Posted on by

Fearing he knows nothing of the world, a young man comes to Tokyo in search of experience but finds his horizons broadened a little more than he might have liked in Tomoaki Kaneko’s bleak indie drama Dead Fishes (僕らはみーんな生きている, Bokura wa Minna Ikiteiru). Legacies of poor parenting, either from an overabundance of love or.a lack of it, continue to cast a shadow over the futures of the young while love otherwise makes people do funny things that defy both logic and humanity.

One of the key reasons Shun (Yutaro) leaves his rural hometown is to get away from his parents and their tempestuous marriage though it’s also true that his mother has become more than a little possessive and he clearly does not want to end up trapped by her all his life. He dreams of becoming a writer, but tells new friend Yuka (Noa Tsurushima) that writing for him was more of an escapist than artistic exercise. Most of his books are of the kind where nothing really happens, a kind of wish fulfilment writing stories about the happy family he never had in which parents and children enjoy cheerful days out at the beach or the zoo, which is why he suspects publishers aren’t biting.

But Yuka has parental resentments too, explaining that her mother took her own life after her father abandoned them before she was born. She has a healthy distrust of adults and the in-built cynicism of someone twice her age but also resents herself for having been unable to enact revenge on her absent father. Nevertheless, she feels sympathy for the old people living in the local care home who have also been, according to her, “abandoned” by their families who no longer wish to care for them. Their boss, Yuriko (Maki Kuwahara), is currently caring for her mother who is suffering with dementia and occasionally becomes violent or refuses food though as the pair discover she is also mixed up with her much older boyfriend’s heinous scheme to help overburdened children knock off their elderly relatives through slow poisoning or an “accident” in return for a portion of their life insurance money.

The scheme both bears out the corrupted relationship between parent and child and the darkness of the contemporary society in which, as the Chairman (Hiroyuki Watanabe) says, the elderly can benefit their families only by dying. Despite having become aware of the goings on at the bento shop, neither Yuka nor Shun are particularly motivated to do anything to stop them, simply living on in resentment or disapproval. Yuriko tells him that he can’t understand her actions because he’s too young and has never been in love, but it’s also true that she was supposed to get a healthy payout for the slow poisoning of the man the Chairman made her marry for appearance’s sake who is likewise aware they’re planning to kill him but basically allowing them to because of love. Love is also the justification Shun’s mother gives when she arrives unnanounced and ends up talking to Yuka, explaining that she’s never thought Tokyo was right for her son so she’s found him a job back home which is after all not really her decision to make. 

But then again even Shun’s writing dreams become corrupted by the city when he’s hired to write a column for a pornographic magazine that’s only distributed in local brothels. Even the editor who hires him appears beaten down and desperate, explaining that he was once a writer too but seemingly ashamed of his current profession later decided to cut his losses and return to his hometown stopping to warn Shun only not to turn out like him or to let himself be changed by the environment he now finds himself in.

By contrast, Yuka’s flighty roommate Mika (Haruka Kodama) says she’d rather die than live with dead fish eyes escaping from her own despair and disappointment through casual sex work to supplement her income from working at a black company. Claiming that all you need in life is a money and good reputation, she’s planning to string this out until the end of her 20s in the hope of meeting a nice man to settle down with for a traditional housewife existence. Bleak in the extreme, Kaneko leads this moribund small town a sense of futility and emptiness and sees little way out for an orphaned generation other than to surrender themselves to the indifference of the world around them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Cat Kiss (고양이 키스, Hwang Soo-bin, 2022)

Posted on by

A widowed single father’s life is suddenly thrown into disarray when his son’s decision to take in a local stray cat forces him to confront the trauma of his wife’s death in Hwang Soo-bin’s light-hearted drama, Cat Kiss (고양이 키스, Goyangi Kiss). Less a study in the inertia of grief than an empathetic tale of how caring for others can reopen a heart that was closed, the film leans in hard to its cat-themed metaphors of finding comfort and support in expected places. 

In any case, since his illustrator wife passed away Young-hee’s (Oh Dong-min) been unable to venture into her drawing room without having a panic attack. That might be why his son, Jae-in (Shin sua), decides to hide a kitten in there that he claims followed him home from a school trip. Unfortunately, Young-hee is allergic to cats and immediately wants to get rid of it but is convinced not to by Ro-un (Ryu Abel), an energetic and cheerful woman who runs a local repair shop and comes to fix their leaky roof.

Fixing the roof is partly what she carries on doing, bonding with the family and trying to help them move on with their lives through turning the drawing room into a cat room in a kind of compromise with Young-hee’s allergies only it’s as much the emotional connection that he’s allergic to as the feline itself. The same might be said of his odd relationship with his neighbours, a family of three who live across the way that includes a little girl Jae-in sometimes plays with. Finding Young-hee collapsed after a panic attack, the neighbours tell him he can always come knock on their door if he has a problem but he isn’t really ready for that kind of connection yet. 

Young-hee’s grief-stricken inertia is plain from his expressionless face and generally melancholy aura. Even Jae-in remarks that he’s always sad a little moody. Ro-un’s mission is to make the family smile again though she has an uphill battle but equally, Young-hee does not try to deflect her attentions which some might see as overbearing given that she’s more or less forced him to erase the last traces of his late wife from their home, but as if responding to a cat kiss slowly allows her into their lives and hearts as a more positive influence amid their melancholy.

She meanwhile is carrying a heavy burden of her own which goes a little beyond the loss of her cat which closely resembles that rescued by Jae-in. They are all in a sense stray cats looking for someone to take care of them and restore some of what they’ve lost. Even the family across the way which Young-hee had so envied has its sources of tension stemming from the unfulfilled desires of the parents with salaryman dad dreaming of becoming a dancer and the mother looking for more things to do outside the home now her daughter’s a little older. The daughter meanwhile has a hangup of her own in regards to traditional femininity, resentful that people have said Jae-in is prettier than she is despite being boy, and criticising her being “strong”. 

Another strong woman, Ro-un tells her not to be afraid of her physicality though her choice of words somehow backfires. A kind of runaway herself, she too is trapped in a state of inertia by a traumatic past she hasn’t fully dealt with while remaining upbeat and relentlessly cheerful as a kind of coping mechanism for the blows life has dealt her. Focussing on the cat provides them with a roundabout way of communicating and an opportunity for developing a shared intimacy that gently guides them back into the world. 

Despite the melancholia of the situation, Hwang keeps the tone light and adds a little quirky, down to earth humour including small instances of animation echoing Young-hee’s late wife’s occupation as an illustrator. Somewhere between offbeat romcom and grieving drama, the film is a kind of testament to the healing power of cats along with their tendency to find good people to take care of them just as those who become cat butlers slowly begin to open their hearts while generally making the world a slightly less unfriendly place.

Cat Kiss screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Polar Rescue (搜救, Lo Chi-leung, 2022)

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US trailer (English subtitles)

The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Shingo Matsumura, 2022)

Posted on by

A young woman with a growing desire for independence is thrown into turmoil by a totally unexpected diagnosis of cancer in Shingo Matsumura’s gentle coming-of-age tale and maternal drama, The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Atsui Munasawagi). Perhaps because of her youth, the heroine finds herself struggling not with a fear of pain or death but of being unsexed while preoccupied with what it might mean for the rest of her life if she were to lose her breasts at such an early age.

It seems that Chinatsu (Mizuki Yoshida) has had a particular hangup about her chest size since the onset of puberty when her mother, Akiko (Tokiko Tokiwa), first refused to buy her a bra, making her wait a year longer than the other girls and leaving her with a sense of embarrassment that might be out of keeping with her age. One of the things that most bothered her about the doctors visits is that she was treated by a middle-aged man who was then the first person ever to touch her breasts which is something she’s unhappy about while also feeling insecure that she’s never had a proper boyfriend and might never get one if it turns out she needs a mastectomy. As it turns out, she’s carrying a torch for childhood friend Ko (Daiken Okudaira), an aspiring actor, but is too shy to say anything especially with this threat to her sense of femininity hanging over her. Of course, it doesn’t help that the doctors are asking her to make advance decisions about things an 18-year-old wouldn’t usually consider such as if and when she might want children because her feelings about her fertility might affect her treatment options. 

Then again, it’s also true that she remains trapped in adolescence resentful when her mother tells her not to worry she’ll make all the decisions but also perhaps relieved. A little sick of their co-dependency she’d been thinking of moving out though it seems difficult to believe she’d be able to afford rent with just her part-time job while studying full-time at university. But when her mother shows a little interest in an incredibly awkward man at work it sends her in the other direction, now feeling resentful and rejected while fearing the loss of their familial intimacy given it had just been the two of them for so long after her father’s death when she was four.

Motoharu (Masaki Miura) accidentally demonstrates the entrenched sexism of the world around them when he makes a misogynistic joke as an attempt at an icebreaker when introduced as the boss at the factory where Akiko works. It later comes to light that he left his last job due to an accusation of sexual assault, and though it turns out to have been a misunderstanding highlights a lack of awareness in the working environment that feeds in to Chinatsu’s ongoing preoccupation with her femininity and the elusiveness of romance. Her homework assignment over the summer holidays is to write a story about her first love, a topic which might be seen as bordering on inappropriate, perhaps discriminatory against those who do not feel romantic desire not to mention that Chinatsu is only 18 so it is only natural that she is still in the process of figuring things out and cannot be expected to have much of a perspective on what is to her still a fairly recent (in fact ongoing) event. 

Meanwhile, her mother and Motoharu are each feeling a pang of regret that they always let things pass them by like the arrival of the circus, destined to be in town for a limited time only so it’s best to catch it while you can. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done especially when not everyone’s on the same page. The lump in Chinatsu’s heart is her yearning for romantic love, though she still lacks the courage to be honest with her feelings even if it’s helped her repair her relationship with her mother. An unexpected piece of compassionate advice also helps her begin to re-imagine her femininity in accepting that the loss of her breasts might not mean that she’s destined to be alone forever nor undeserving of romantic love symbolically dissolving the lump in her heart in allowing her to move forward with her life no matter what the future might hold.

The Lump in My Heart screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkvGCRzlivc&pp=ygUWVGhlIEx1bXAgaW4gbXnCoEhlYXJ0IA%3D%3D

In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Park Dong-hun, 2022)

Posted on by

Education is supposed to be the great leveller, a true meritocracy in which a combination of hard work and innate ability can enable anyone to follow their chosen path as far as it will go. The reality is however far less idealistic. Park Dong-hun’s In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Isanghan Naraeui Suhakja) is the latest in a series of Korean films taking aim at corruption within the educational system along with a persistent classism that ensures only the “right” kind of people are allowed to prosper. 

Han Ji-woo (Kim Dong-hwi) knows he’s not the “right” kind of person and feels out of place at the elite boarding school where he is bullied by teachers and students alike for being a scholarship boy amid the children of mostly wealthy families. Though he won the place though being a top student at his previous school, now his grades are merely average and he’s bottom of the class in maths. Ji-woo’s odious, elitist teacher coldly tells him that his case is hopeless and he’ll never get into a top league university with these kinds of grades at this kind of school. He pressures Ji-woo into applying to transfer out which he is reluctant to do because he knows how much his attending such a prestigious school means to his widowed single mother. In any case as we later discover, the teacher merely has it in for him openly complaining with other members of staff about having to fuss with paperwork for kids on scholarships and bursaries who in his opinion don’t really belong in a place like this which is clearly geared towards perpetuating the privilege of the children of the elite at the expense of those like Ji-woo. 

When Ji-woo is caught smuggling in pork and soju at the behest of his exploitative roommates he refuses to dob them in, making the unlikely claim that he intended to consume all four meals himself. The teacher first praises his idealistic stance but then calls him an idiot because the other boys wouldn’t do the same for him nor are they coming forward themselves to take responsibility. Perfectly happy to let the scholarship boy take the blame one of them even crassly slips Ji-woo some money afterwards, genuinely confused when Ji-woo tries to turn it down claiming such things are unnecessary between friends. Nevertheless, the incident brings him the attention of the “commie officer”, a North Korean defector (Choi Min-sik) working as the nightwatchman who easily solves Ji-woo’s impossible maths problems. The officer eventually agrees to teach him maths but only on the premise that he doesn’t care about tests or grades but solely on the art of learning. 

What he teaches Ji-woo is a valuable lesson that cuts straight to the quick of the issues within the educational system in which children are being taught to blindly answer standardised questions without developing critical thinking skills. The first problem he shows him has a deliberate error in it, but Ji-woo is so focussed on giving the correct answer he doesn’t stop to consider the question itself may be wrong and as the officer is fond of saying there can be no correct answer to an incorrect question. Yet this new philosophy of maths in particular being a purely rational science in which there is only one true answer brings Ji-woo back into conflict with his teacher who complacently teaches to test and humiliates him when he points out one of the test questions is badly formulated. The teacher tells them the correctness of their answer is irrelevant for they must answer in accordance with the textbook and willingly say that black is white if the textbook says it’s so. Meanwhile it also becomes apparent that he has been taking kickbacks from parents getting wealthy students into an elite tutoring group where he leaks the questions on upcoming exams.

This discovery prompts a minor rebellion by rich kid Bo-ram (Jo Yun-seo) who becomes disgusted with her elitist mother after being unwittingly enrolled in the cheating cabal while already resenting her for having made her give up playing the piano. For the officer, music is a mathematical language and merely an expression of the beauty of numbers which can used to explain everything there is in the world, yet as we discover he left North Korea after finding out that his research was used in weapons production only to become disillusioned with the South on realising that here people merely use it as a tool for advancement towards dull and conventional lives in the service of capitalism. When Ji-woo admits that he supposes he wants good grades to get into a good uni and then get a good job to be set for life, the officer decides to broaden his horizons encouraging the better instincts the elites at the school had rejected and showing him how to think for himself rather than blindly follow what he’s being taught. 

All that might seem quite ironic for a man from North Korea pointing out the unhelpful brainwashing of a rote learning system along with the unpleasant complacency of Ji-woo’s teacher not to mention his unethical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the officer has his own tragic past which suddenly rears its head just as the two begin to form a paternal bond and Ji-woo finds himself at a moment of crisis once again pushed towards a transfer. Though the system is stacked against them, Ji-woo and Bo-ram eventually find their way through it in their shared resistance bolstered by the officer’s teaching as they gain the strength to fight back with honesty and integrity. It may be a slightly rosy conclusion implying the system has been corrected as if Ji-woo’s teacher were the only problem rather than the product of its corruption but does at least make the case that integrity is the one thing that pays but can’t be bought.

International trailer (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBJF_TZGWMY