Tag: 2023

The Goldfinger (金手指, Felix Chong Man-keung, 2023)

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Following Wong Jing’s Chasing the Dragon and Philip Yung’s Where the Wind Blows, Felix Chong’s financial thriller The Goldfinger (金手指) is the latest in a series of Hong Kong films revolving around colonial-era corruption in which the apparent lawlessness of the pre-Handover society allowed crime to flourish along with a nascent greed nurtured by the island’s rising prosperity as an increasingly important financial centre. In an ironic touch, the film even opens with mass protests against the introduction of ICAC with protestors calling for more respect for law enforcement officers while implying some dark authoritarian force is in play even as angry policemen demand the right to immunity from their own misconduct.

In any case, what arises is a cat and mouse game between wily conman/entrepreneur Henry Ching (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and ICAC investigator Lau (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) who chases him for 15 years trying to expose his web of financial fraud. A failed businessman on the run from debt having supposedly abandoned an idealistic desire to build homes for people, Ching arrives in Hong Kong seeking a land of opportunity and largely finds it though through dubious means. Teaming up with similarly embittered businessman KK (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), who is resentful towards his family who treat him with disdain for being a mistress’ son and force him to do their dirty work, to build a giant real-estate based empire that is in reality rooted in complex financial fraud.

Working on the rationale that stocks can be spent like money, Ching makes contacts and manipulates markets which is all very well as long as no one asks for the cash because it doesn’t exist. Chong hints at the realities of the housing market in Hong Kong today in which land is at a premium and apartments largely unattainable as Ching alternately allies with and subverts British rule to build a property empire, setting his sights on acquiring prestigious Golden Hill building as symbol of a new Hong Kong and his own hubristic desire for personal success. With shades of Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Beauty, Ching attends soirees organised by the British and puts on a show for his targets. In his attempts to woo a British bank, his office is suddenly invaded by salsa dancers and gold glitter falls from the ceiling much to the chagrin of a bemused and increasingly mistrustful KK.

Even so the title of the film is echoed in a comment Ching makes to Lau that though he may thinks he’s some genius with the Midas touch he’s really just a patsy, pushing him to investigate possible international conspiracy that is bigger than either of them. Ching has already become a legend with a series of stories about how he made his stake money which range from running into Imelda Marcos in a shoe shop and getting backing from the oppressive regime in the Philippines, to narrowly escaping a war zone and catching a CIA spy in Moscow. He even has the hutzpah to attempt to bribe Lau by offering him a vast fortune and a scholarship for his daughter to study abroad if only he’d find a way to nix the case.

The corruption is indeed embedded, as is obvious when a judge with a posh British accent actively welcomes Ching to the court in a friendly manner and suggests they conduct their business swiftly to avoid any unnecessary turmoil to the Hong Kong economy. Friends in high places largely assist him, whether through personal greed or blackmail though as another of his associates admits, in the end there is no real loyalty among thieves only increasing fear and desperation along with resentment that Ching seems to be taking more than his fair share of the loot. Loosely based on the Carrian Group scandal, the film never loses sight of the damage one man’s greed and duplicity can do as millions of Hong Kong citizens find themselves out of pocket and uncompensated when the shares they bought become worthless, but equally suggests that in the end justice will always be denied to ordinary people while men like Ching will never fully pay for their crimes. With gorgeous production design, Chong beautifully the woozy world of Hong Kong in the ’70s and ’80s amid an intense cat and mouse game of financial fraudsters and a compromised authority.

The Goldfinger previews from 30th December ahead of opening in UK cinemas 5th January courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Endless Journey (三大队, Dai Mo, 2023)

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The police officers at the centre of Dai Mo’s Endless Journey (三大队, Sān Dàduì) are soon stripped of their badges, accused of excessive force contravening laws existing since the medieval era to prevent vigilante justice. Yet in someways that’s essentially what they end up doing, extra-judicial investigators with a personal vendetta rather than a pure-hearted interest in justice even if the victim of the crime weighs heavily on their conscience. 

Though the film plays into the recent trend in Sino-noir and popularity of mystery thrillers at the Chinese box office, it is surprising that a film that is at least subtly critical of the justice system, featuring police who break the rules and are sent to prison, was approved by the censors board even if the central message is one of heroism as Captain Cheng (Zhang Yi) doggedly chases his suspect all over China for several years. Then again, the hero of this true life case turns out to be China itself as Cheng is reminded that his search is unnecessary given that the fugitive, Eryong (Zheng Benyu), is sure to be captured by the burgeoning surveillance network of CCTV cameras then being rolled out across the country. Years later, it’s the system that allows Cheng to identify Eryong as his DNA and fingerprints throw up positive matches within seconds of samples being taken thanks to the nation’s DNA database. 

Even so, as the veteran officer, Zhang (Yang Xinming), reminds the rookie behind every major case there’s a ruined family broken by their loss which is one reason why he doesn’t relish the prospect of investigating one so late in his career. This particular crime is so heinous that it’s become front page news which means that they’ve also got their boss breathing down their necks to get it solved as soon as possible with the existence of Division 3 itself on the line. Cheng pops home for a matter of minutes to check on his wife and daughter, shutting down his wife’s suggestion that they get a security system for their windows on the grounds that it would be an embarrassing thing for a detective’s home to have. The reason she wants one is that the victim in this case had been a little girl of around their daughter’s age unexpectedly home alone when thieves broke in by climbing over their aircon unit and smashing a window. Finding nothing of value they raped and killed the daughter. 

After a police officer dies as a result of the investigation, the squad take things too far questioning the first suspect leading to his death which is how they end up disgraced and sent to prison. After his release, Cheng has lost his family, his home, his job and identity as a protector of justice yet his determination to catch Eryong is born more of his desire to avenge a friend than it is to prevent further crime. His fellow officers join him in the beginning, but during the endless searching each make the decision to move on for easily understandable reasons such as their marriages, children, and illness but Cheng cannot let go even when prompted by an old friend from the force who tells him they have this in hand though there is perhaps a subtle implication that the police force isn’t really doing enough otherwise Cheng wouldn’t have to be chasing Eryong all over the country. 

But haunted by reflections of his own face, ageing, at times dishevelled and hopeless, Cheng is also searching for himself and a means to reclaim the self he once was by vindicating himself as a policeman along with Division 3 in finally completing their mission. The ominous score by Peng Fei with its stinging strings adds to the noirish feel as does the perpetual inevitability of Cheng’s forward motion in the dogged pursuit of his prey, unable to rest until Eryong has been brought to ground. His quest robs him of his life, but there is an undeniable poignancy to it in Cheng’s inability to find himself outside of the chase only to be left with a moment of uncertainty no longer sure who he is or where he goes now, left alone and with no sense of direction in the absence of his quarry.

Endless Journey is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CMC.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Iron Mask (만분의 일초, Kim Sung-hwan, 2023)

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A young man seeking revenge sets his eyes on kendo glory in Kim Sung-hwan’s sporting drama Iron Mask (만분의 일초, Manbun-ui Ilcho). As his coach reminds him, a swordsman’s only opponent is himself though he continues to fixate on the man he blames for the destruction of his family still as an adult seeking reparation for the paternal influence he feels was stolen from him and the right to a legacy he feels to be rightfully his.

That might be one reason Jae-woo (Joo Jong-hyuk) is sometimes taken to task for his “entitlement” while some of the other students attending this training camp in the hope of making it onto the national team think he shouldn’t even be here seeing as he only came second in a regional competition when the others are veteran champions. But then as it turns out, Jae-woo has an ulterior motive for his participation. He is obsessed with number one challenger Tae-su (Moon Jin-seung) but for reasons outside of the sport, apparently hellbent on taking his revenge through kendo though it isn’t particularly clear what he hopes to achieve by it save personal vindication.

Kim pays particular attention to the peculiar rituals of the sport, a sense of rigorous order in the folding of the bandannas and tightening of the strings that fix the mask to the swordsman’s face while it’s clear that Jae-woo’s weakness is his emotional volatility. Though he manages to strike an impressive blow against Tae-su on the first day, his game then declines largely thanks to a hand tremor partly caused by a blow from Tae-su but also a manifestation of his jangling nerves.

He resents Tae-su on a personal level, irritated when he hears him talking on the phone to his wife about parenting their young daughter outraged that this man who he holds responsible for the implosion of his family has a family of his own while Jae-woo appears to have nothing other than his rage and resentment. He cannot forgive his estrangement from his kendo master father or that he chose to train another boy and not him, though perhaps that was simply his father’s way of coping with an impossible situation in the hope of making something good out of a personal tragedy. As another kendo master later tells him, as his father once did Jae-woo will have to find his own answers if he is to find success in kendo and indeed in life.

Still he struggles with fatherly relationships, first bonding with an older man who has two sons of his own and tries to impart paternal wisdom and comfort to the volatile Jae-woo but later accidentally injuring him during a sparring match when his temper gets the better of him. The only way he can free himself, is by moving past his image of his father to become his own man and also claim his own kendo rather than being resentful of that which was not bequeathed to him but to Tae-su for whom kendo is also a means of atonement and honouring of a paternal legacy.

Kim lends the battle a quasi-mythical quality, shooting a realm of eye-shaped mist as Jae-woo confronts Tae-su in his mind seeing only clashing swords and shadows while still unable to recognise that the man he is in competition with is only himself, his resentment and hurt in his abandonment, still a lonely little boy failing to become a man while Tae-su at least seemingly has been able to move on and make something of himself. Only by calming his nerves can he begin to perfect his art, taking the advice given to him by the team’s video replay expert seriously and apologising for his petulant behaviour. 

In essence, he has to escape from the “iron mask” of his repressed emotion and deal seriously with the traumatic past in order to progress to adulthood and also assume his rightful place on the kendo board. A psychological sports thriller, Kim lends a noirish touch to Jae-woo’s dark obsession even as it continues to consume him but finally implies the implosion of his rage through a dissolve transitioning to the falling snow as he now in white allows his resentment to melt away in favour of a more balanced hope for a peaceful future.

Iron Mask screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Redemption with Life (兄弟, Zhang Wei, 2023)

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A young man with old-fashioned values is slowly consumed by the contradictions of the modern China in Zhang Wei’s indie drama, Redemption with Life (兄弟, Xiōngdì). The Chinese title translates as the more straightforward “brothers” and hints at the strong bond between the three men at its centre who each find that life has not turned out quite as they hoped. While one silently plugs away, another pushes the boundaries of the law, but the third allows himself to be pulled into callous inhumanity and the exploitation of the dreams of others while working for an enigmatic businessman running what is quite obviously a dodgy pyramid scheme. 

As the film opens, Jianhua has just been released from a two-year prison sentence after taking the fall for the financial impropriety overseen by his boss, Li Gang. He is met by his two sworn brothers, fellow bikers Peng and aspiring photographer Shaofeng, and is intent on starting over described by Peng as some kind of financial hotshot though it’s surprising he would even be able to return to that line of work after being imprisoned for mismanagement. In any case, he ends up returning to Li Gang while justifying himself by using the vast amounts of cash he’s been given to repay victims who lost their life savings when the bottom finally fell out of the Ponzi scheme they’d been running. 

Though his youthful dream was to travel the world, Jianhua is materially ambitious and ties his masculinity to his ability to become wealthy. After starting a relationship with a female biker, he gets deeper into the scam telling her that he wants to make enough money for them to go travelling while otherwise claiming not to be interested in the high life of fancy parties and expensive goods that Li Gang represents. She eventually leaves him because he caused her to feel insecure with all his dodgy dealings though he repeatedly fails to learn his lessons thinking he can solve all of his problems with money. Some debts must be repaid, he solemnly intones, yet as Peng reminds him there are some things that can’t simply be compensated for and some money you just shouldn’t make if causes you to act immorally.

Peng had given his dream as making a lot of money and seems to look up to Jianhua because he works in “finance”, but is otherwise happy enough with the life he’s made for himself running a motorbike garage which is mostly honest work except that he makes extra money by selling smuggled bikes to other bikers. He wants to help Jianhua but worries that he’s already in over his head and unable to escape the allure of his old life. Shaofeng meanwhile is financially stable and pursuing his art on his own terms, turning down an offer Jianhua gets him to work with some top gallery owners because on one level he knows if Jianhua’s involved it’s not legit and on another wants to do things his way even if he’s unsuccessful. 

Skipping back and forth over a number of years encompassing time served in prison the film chronicles Jianhua’s corruption and eventual disillusionment in the realisation that he too is being scammed by Li Gang and his futile attempts to make money with money are forever doomed to failure. The suggestion is that he wants the high life he wanted to reject in order to secure his masculinity in a world now more ruled by the corporate even if this kind of corporatism is itself ruled by violence and vulgarity, not to mention a healthy dose of misogyny and female exploitation. Jianhua’s partner in crime, the similarly deluded Haitao, eventually renounces desire altogether and becomes a Buddhist monk to atone for the destruction his lust for riches wrought on those around him, though Jianhua’s solution is one of old-fashioned manliness that is predictably futile. Slowly, the biker convoy makes its way towards Tibet and a more spiritual place supposedly freer of the destructive consumerism that has already consumed Jianhua and ruined the lives of those he convinced to invest in a scheme he always knew was a scam not to mention morally wrong. A mild critique of the contemporary society ruled by status and acquisition the film’s advocation for an unconstructed masculinity may sit uncomfortably but does nevertheless make the case for a beneficial brotherhood over mutual exploitation. 

Redemption with Life screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Hopeless (화란, Kim Chang-hoon, 2023)

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“Why is everyone out to get him?” the stepsister of the hero asks, wondering why it is that everything in his life seems to go wrong. As its name suggests, Kim Chang-hoon’s Hopeless (화란, Hwaran) take places in a city of despair in which lives are largely defined by violence and money while a young man dreaming of a utopian future in Holland is dragged even further towards an abyss of crime and immorality.

As the film opens, a school boy picks up a rock and hits another on the head. The boy, Yeon-gyu (Hong Xa-bin) goes on to explain that he couldn’t let it go as they live together, hinting at a possible slight against his step-sister Hayan (Bibi) that he avenged more out of a code of masculinity than a genuine desire to protect her. Then again, Yeon-gyun often masks his true feelings and struggles to express himself in any other language than violence. At home, Hayan is his protector against her father, a violent and embittered drunk who makes Yeon-gyun’s life an unending hell. 

Attacking his classmates gets them to leave Hayan alone, but also to double down attacking him while he’s also liable to pay a large settlement his family can’t afford. Yeon-gyu is gifted the money unexpectedly by sympathetic gangster Chi-geon (Song Joong-ki), but his life is upended once again once again when his step-father leaves him with a nasty scar around his eye. The boss at his part-time job fires him because of it and no one else will hire him leading him straight to the gang to ask for a job. 

Yet Yeon-gyu continues to dream of escape to peaceful Holland, looking at sunny scenes of windmills and flowers while torn over his new criminal career. Though bonding with Chi-geon over a shared sense of parental disappointment and emotional abandonment, Yeon-gyu is uncomfortable with the moral dimensions of his crimes in feeling sorry for the people they rob including a man whose young son is hospitalised and in a coma because of the gang’s violence. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the gang has political ambitions and has been bankrolling a particular candidate for an upcoming election. When the gang discuss taking out a rival, Yeon-gyu suggests blackmailing him illicit photos instead so no one ends up getting hurt .

Yeon-gyu asks Gi-cheon questions about their violence and he often tells him that these are just things that they have to do as if it were an automatic operation of the gangster code. He describes himself as already dead, a ghost of the child who drowned when his father abandoned him on a lake but takes on a quasi-paternal role over Yeon-gyu seeing him as a younger version of himself equally betrayed by corrupted paternity. Yeon-gyu in turn looks up to him, but continues to mess things up for himself by trying to help the people they’re robbing.

It does indeed seem as if everyone is out to get Yeon-gyu who finds himself engulfed by despair and hopeless, unable to see a way out for himself from his desperate situation. The irony is that a lack of communication eventually results in a kind of tragedy, but one that one ultimately frees both Chi-geon and Yeon-gyu from a word of self-destructive violence allowing Yeong-gyu to renounce it once and all and seek a better future with Hayan in a less a less hopeless place. What Chi-geon had tried to offer was in effect brotherhood, a surrogate family and a home, explaining that Yeon-gyu would be a perfect fit yet Yeon-gyu struggles to play the role assigned to him unable to put aside his humanity to commit the acts of theft and violence the gang expects. 

The irony may be that Yeon-gyu’s mother only married the violent stepfather to protect herself from the unwanted attentions of another man, attempting to fight male violence with a male protector but finding herself once again victimised. Violence arises from insecurity and an inability to communicate and it’s no wonder that Yeon-gyu finds himself caught in its snares while struggling to break free of the futility that surrounds him. Kim captures his sense of despair in his steely camera contrasting the blue skies of Yeon-guy’s Dutch dream for the grimy streets of his rundown neighbourhood but does eventually discover renewed hope for a better future in the choice to walk away from a world of violence towards one of compassion and solidarity. 

Hopeless screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Eye of the Storm (疫起, Lin Chun-Yang, 2023)

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In the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan was thought of as kind of safe haven which had largely managed to keep the disease a bay allowing many to live their lives more or less normally while much of the rest of the world contended with intermittent lockdowns of varying severity. The reasons for their success are said to lie in their experience during the SARS crisis of 2003. 

To that extent, there’s a kind of eeriness in Lin Chung-Yang’s poignant drama Eye of the Storm (疫起, yì qǐ) in watching the early days of this present pandemic play out 20 years earlier as medical personnel attempt to deal with a new illness about which they know almost nothing save that it appears to have a frighteningly high mortality rate. As the film opens, self-involved surgeon Xia (Wang Po-chieh) is clocking off a few minutes early in an attempt to make it to his daughter’s birthday party, rudely brushing off the complaints of warmhearted male nurse Tai-he (Tseng Ching-hua) and dismissing requests from his colleagues. Leaving in a taxi, however, he’s soon called back to deal with an emergency operation and becomes trapped when the hospital is placed into lockdown after the report of a possible SARS case. 

Unlike so many dramas centring on frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, :Lin does not necessarily portray the medical staff in the best light. As the suspected case was being treated in B Wing it is the first to be shut down and some of the doctors and nurses start a protest refusing to treat patients with SARS resentful that they’ve been locked up with the disease. Meanwhile, in A Wing some of the nurses also go on strike holing themselves up in the rec room and refusing to come out. As Tai-he had been helping out in B-Wing, he is quickly rejected by his peers and exiled there despite having no symptoms while the nursing staff otherwise know that they maybe condemning him to death in sending him to the frontline battle against the disease.

Also on the frontline is journalist Yu-zhong (Hsueh Shih-ling) who snuck into the hospital after a tip off and is determined to let the people know by capturing the chaotic scenes at the hospital first hand. He and Xia eventually end up going through old records to figure out how the virus took hold while Xia mainly spends his time hiding in a storage cupboard and trying not to come into contact with anyone who might have SARS which is not very doctorly. Though originally desperate to get out of the hospital, Xia’s mindset begins to change when he sees how bad things are in B Wing after being charged with transporting food supplies while he later comes to realise that he may bear some responsibility in the rather cavalier treatment of a patient he recently operated on.

Then again, perhaps there is something also a little on the nose in the constant references to the disease’s origins in China while it’s the hospitals choice to use a Mainland construction firm that directly leads to the infection. In any case, Xia eventually beggins to come around realising that it’s selfish of him to refuse to help when the hospital is already so short staffed with some medical personnel on strike and others already falling ill and even dying. Lin lends the tunnel connecting the two wings an eerie quality in the ominous opening and closing of its oversize doors, as if Xia were really descending into hell dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit of yellow overalls. 

Xia had appeared to be a narcissistic surgeon with little interest in his patients. Criticised by Tai-he he clapped back that it’s the nurse’s job to care for them, not his, while continuing to keep his distance and fixating on being allowed to leave the hospital before beginning to empathise with the sick. Yet many other medical staff react in a similar way, overwhelmed by the fear and chaos of the situation while resentful in feeling that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned only later coming to accept the situation and returning to caring for the patients as best they can. Eerily echoing our present times, Lin’s poignant drama eventually finds a kind of serenity even among so much panic in quiet moments of small victories and human solidarity.

Eye of the Storm screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Immersion (忌怪島／きかいじま, Takashi Shimizu, 2023)

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Technological anxiety was at the heart of millennial J-horror, but perhaps the more things change the more they stay the same. Takashi Shimizu’s latest ghost story Immersion (忌怪島／きかいじま, Kikaijima) sees a grudge-bearing spirit cross over from the virtual world neatly suggesting we take our monsters with us into our simulacra and to that extent the brave new world is not so new at all. Then again, the hero thinks he desires a private world but paradoxically wants to share it and eventually discovers that what he craves is connection.

Tomohiko (Daigo Nishihata) has accepted a job as a programmer helping to build a new virtual world exactly replicating a remote island. He is greeted by his boss, Ide, in the digital space, but shortly after his arrival discovers that she died some time previously along side a man she may have been experimenting on in a project exploring brain syncronicity. When Tomohiko enters the virtual world he is confronted by strange and dangerous visions which suggest there’s a threatening bug in the system. Soon enough, the data breaks loose and somehow awakens in our world.

What no one knows is how a vengeful ghost got in the machine in the first place, though a shinto priestess later likens the new digital space to the “over there”, a perfect simulacrum of our world existing on another plane where spirits and their victims gather. Then again, it seems the problems are mainly on this side with an old man mocked by children and shunned by society because his mother suffered some kind of mental illness and was filled with a lust that was taboo at the time. The man’s mother is linked to the legend of Imajin, a slave raped by her master whose wife then took against her causing her to become a vengeful spirit who drove people out of their minds.

The purpose of the new world Tomohiko is creating isn’t clear, but it’s certainly very well resourced. The implication seems to be that the virtual is already haunting us and we can’t be sure of what we’re “really” experiencing and what we’ve been primed to experience. Tomohiko increases “the reality” of the virtual space by coding to it to activate “real” sense memories such as the smell of the sea or the feel of the sand. He can’t be sure if he’s the ghost in this world or the other while remaining aloof and diffident, unable to communicate effectively with his teammates. Tamaki, the estranged daughter of the dead man asks him if he doesn’t like people, to which he has no real answer though she replies that she doesn’t really like them either. What he realises is that doesn’t really want a world of solitude, but to be with others though it seems it might not matter whether in a “real” or virtual space.

But in contrast to all this modernity, the island is a traditional community with a strong interest in shamanistic lore and ritual. Tomohiko says he doesn’t really believe in any of that stuff, but is still prepared to go along with the shamaness’ advice in order confine the vengeful spirit to another world even if it means sacrificing the virtual space they are trying to build. Perhaps the message is that this kind of technological advance is dangerous and hubristic, unleashing forces we are ill-equipped to understand and would not be able to quell. As the shaman implies, you have to close the door from this side and not the other, which is a serious problem for the engineers who find themselves struggling to destroy the portal of a Torii gate in both spaces while the ghost continues to wreak watery vengeance.

Shimizu conjures an atmosphere of lurking dread in which digital ghosts haunt us in reflections of the ancient past even as our reality is destabilised by the overlay of the virtual. Tamaki reflects that the island is like a ghost town with few figures on the streets save themselves though they too sometimes appear like lingering spirits. What they discover may be a kind of refuge or escape, but perhaps not in the way we might expect while vengeful ghosts aren’t quite so easy to exorcise as they might once have been.

Immersion screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Soulmate (소울메이트, Min Yong-keun, 2023)

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“Why should you step out for him?” one friend asks another, seemingly cutting to the quick of the fracture point in their relationship though ultimately unwilling to carry the conversation to its natural conclusion. A remake of Derek Tsang’s Soul Mate, Min Yong-keun’s frustrated love story is warmer and shorn of the icy angst which defined the original if also less certain in its implications and in the end profoundly melancholy in the missed opportunities and awkwardness of an unspoken affection. 

In the present day, a near 40-year-old Mi-so (Kim Da-mi) is called to a gallery to witness a giant and intricately drawn photorealistic portrait of herself attributed only to “Ha-eun.” The gallery owner has reason to believe the two women are friends and asks Mi-so to help her contact the reclusive artist, though she says that she knew only briefly in childhood and hasn’t been in contact with her for many years. This surprises the gallery owner as she’s uncovered a lengthy blog that outlines the entirety of their friendship in sometimes painful detail. 

The portrait staring back at her with her own gaze which is also the gaze of Ha-eun (Jeon So-nee) the artist confronts her with the painful realities of her past and the continuing absence of Ha-eun from her life. All we can know for the moment is that at some point they were separated and that Ha-eun has seemingly disappeared, though the Mi-so we see now seems so different from the one we encounter in childhood who is as Ha-eun describes her “free and also very delicate”. 

Inseparable for much of their youth, the relationship between the two women begins to fracture in adolescence as their paths begin to diverge. Ha-eun meets a boy, Jin-woo (Byeon Woo-seok), which necessarily disturbs their friendship by disrupting its dynamic. Unlike Tsang’s original in which it becomes clear that perhaps neither woman was in the end very interested in the boy who was himself a kind of proxy for the mutual attraction they could not articulate, Min presents him as a more conventional romantic rival albeit one who represents the sense of conventionality that the more conservative Ha-eun continues to cling to in contrast to the free spiritedness represented by Mi-so and her love of Janis Joplin. 

Ha-eun is confronted by the darker sides of Mi-so’s unconventionality during a trip in which she witnesses Mi-so get a bottle of wine out of a collection of drunk businessmen by offering to mix them drinks. An argument about money and power dynamics soon returns them to the fault line in their relationship, Jin-woo and their complex feelings for each other. Wilful misunderstandings lead to irresolvable resentments, each believing they are somehow in the way while equally hurt by the dissolution of their friendship and too proud to say so.

Min’s drama decreases the homoerotic undertones of Tsang’s original and opts instead for the defence of a deeply felt platonic friendship that may have developed into an unconventional family unit if given the opportunity. An exchange of earrings on two separate occasions seems much more convincing as an act of marriage than the more literal union between Ha-eun and Jin-woo. Yet maybe that’s the message the portrait was trying to deliver, a sign of an unspoken love that reunites Mi-so with the childhood self who knew it was possible to draw one’s feelings while seeing herself as Ha-eun saw her, Ha-eun’s own eyes reflected back at her. The two women in a sense switch places, becoming one while split in two and eternally connected if physically separated. 

The irony is that it’s the fear of losing it that erodes their relationship, and pride more than shame that divides them even if it’s ultimately the unwillingness to confront their feelings and the inability to articulate them that keeps them apart. Nevertheless, they eventually come to an acceptance of themselves as sun and moon, two halves one whole continually incomplete happiest only in each other’s company. Then again, there are some very unreliable narrators in play and perhaps we can’t be sure that everything we’ve been told is true yet even if not literally so still speaks of a deeper emotional truth and the deepening wound of lost love comforted only by memory and the act of recapturing it. 

Soulmate screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English & Korean subtitles)

Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0, Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

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When Godzilla emerges from the waves in Takashi Yamazaki’s entry into the classic tokusatsu series Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0), he does so as an embodiment of wartime trauma most particularly that of the hero, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who failed die. Some might call his actions cowardice, returning to base siting engine trouble rather than doing what others regard as his duty, though the film implies it’s simply a consequence of his natural desire to live, a desire which the tenets of militarism which in essence a death cult insisted he must suppress. 

But for Koichi as he’s fond of saying the war never ends. He’s trapped in a purgatorial cycle of survivor’s guilt and internalised shame, feeling as if he has no right to a future because of the future that was robbed from other men like him because of his refusal to sacrifice his life. When he first encounters Godzilla on a small island outpost, he is ordered back into his plane to fire its guns at him but freezes while the rest of the men, bar one, are killed. Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), a mechanic who had already branded Koichi a treacherous coward, gives him a packet of photographs belonging to the dead men each featuring the families they were denied the opportunity to return to. Photographs on an altar become a motif for him, though he has none for his parents who were killed when their house was destroyed by the aerial bombing of Tokyo. A surviving neighbour similarly blames him, directly aligning Koichi’s act of selfish cowardice with the razing of the city.

The return of Godzilla is literal manifestation of his war trauma which he must finally confront in order to move into the new post-war future that’s built on peace and solidarity rather than acrimony and resentment for the wartime past. But then again, the film situates itself in a fantasy post-war Tokyo in which the Occupation is barely felt and the government, which mainly consisted of former militarists, is also absent. Both the US and the Japanese authorities refuse to do anything about Godzilla because of various geopolitical implications making this a problem that the people must face themselves, though they largely do so through attempting to repurpose rather than reject the militarist past. Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a scientist who worked on weapons production during the war, gives a rousing speech in which he explains that this time they will not pointlessly sacrifice their lives but instead fight to live in a better world which is all very well but perhaps mere sophistry when the end result is the same. 

Called back by their old commander, many men say they will not risk their lives or abandon their families once again because they have learned their lessons but others are convinced by the message that they must face Godzilla if they’re ever to be free of their wartime past. Koichi wants vengeance against Godzilla but also to avenge himself by doing what he could not do before. The film seems to suggest that this time it’s different because he has a choice. No one has ordered him to die, and he is free to choose whether to do so or not which is also the choice of being consumed by his war trauma or overcoming it to begin a new life in the post-war Tokyo that Godzilla has just destroyed. 

Despite the desperation and acrimony he returns to, Koichi maintains his humanity bonding with a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who agreed to take care of another woman’s child. Even the neighbour, Sumiko (Sakura Ando), who first rejected Koichi and is suspicious of Noriko, willingly gives up her own rice supply for the baby proving that in the end people are good and will help each other even if that seems somewhat naive amid the realities of life in the post-war city ridden with starvation and disease. In any case, it’s this solidarity that eventually saves them, Godzilla challenged less by a pair of large boats than a flotilla of small ones united by the desire to finally end this war. Like Yamazaki’s previous wartime dramas The Eternal Zero and The Great War of Archimedes, the film espouses a lowkey nationalism mired in a nostalgia for a mythologised Japan but as usual excels in terms of production design and visual spectacle as the iconic monster looms large over a city trapped between the wartime past and a post-war future that can only be claimed by a direct confrontation with the lingering trauma of militarist folly.

Godzilla Minus One opens in UK cinemas 15th December courtesy of All the Anime.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Snow Leopard (གསའ།, Pema Tseden, 2023)

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When a snow leopard breaks into a herder’s pen and kills nine of his castrated rams, the herder traps it and effectively holds the animal hostage in the hope of gaining compensation in Pema Tseden’s mystical drama Snow Leopard (གསའ།). He is reminded that the snow leopard is a “first class protected animal” but understandably asks who’s going to protect him, why is the snow leopard’s life so much more important than his own?

Prone to angry rants, Jinpa (Jinpa) is more often than not portrayed as a snow leopard himself grunting and struggling to get free when the forestry police attempt to restrain him. He says that the herders and local wildlife used to live in harmony. If a snow leopard eats one or two sheep, then they just accept it but as climate change and other environmental forces have pushed them further down the mountain Jinpa feels the snow leopards in particular have become greedy and must be stopped. He wants to kill the snow leopard in revenge and refuses to let it go until the government agrees to compensate him for his financial loss. His rage is such that it’s economically irresponsible, calling in a local man with a digger to rescue the remaining sheep and telling him that it’s fine if one or two die while agreeing to pay the same price as the sheep is worth to have him try to rescue them. 

Jinpa’s brother, a monk obsessed with photographing snow leopards, and father are each of the opinion that it’s spiritually irresponsible to keep the snow leopard bound up as it is the embodiment of the spirit of the mountains. It’s possible to read Jinpa’s animosity towards it as rage against the natural world and his fierce, almost mad diatribes against it as a kind of irrational hatred. Yet like him the snow leopard contains dualities. The one in the pen has a cub on the mountainside and seems to be capable of true tenderness though also violent carnality in its attack on the sheep. Jinpa more than anyone seems to be aware that the snow leopard is simply being what it is, but cannot forgive it for this very personal act of betrayal. 

The monk, meanwhile, has a unique relationship with the captive snow leopard segueing into a surreal black and white sequence in which he eventually sets it free and is rewarded for his act of kindness. This seems to hint at the ways in which human life and animal could coexist but also at the essential spiritual quality of the snow leopard as a symbol of something elemental along with the roots of traditional Tibetan culture which are now on the brink of eclipse. A TV news crew tipped off by the monk with whom the reporter went to school turn up to capture these bizarre events but appear uncertain as to what they’re actually filming. The cameraman is frequently so awestruck that he forgets to film anything while the reporter is constantly fending off calls from his girlfriend.

A farcical stand off occurs when representatives from the government turn up, seemingly looking down on Jinpa and irritated by his demands for compensation while insisting that the snow leopard must be released. He refuses to give in even as they remind him that if anything happens to it, it’s him that will be held legally responsible. The forces of authority are also intruders, making an incursion from the world of modernity much as the snow leopard descends from the mountain and the ancient past. Men like Jinpa occupy a liminal space, caught between the old and the new while their way of life is increasingly threatened by the forces of modernity. 

In a way, perhaps you could say the monk is trying to capture the snow leopard too even as he shares a special affiliation with it that connects him to the land and his culture along with something deeper and older that the modern world may lack. Yet what they need to do is set it free and restore an order that’s natural rather than manmade. Director Pema Tseden sadly passed away at the young age of 55 shortly after completing the film but offers a sense of the eternal in the snow-covered expanses of mountains and the cruel tenderness of those who live there.

Snow Leopard screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)