Tag: 2023

A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Hur Jin-ho, 2023)

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“Parents are weak before their children” according to an apparently doting dad in Hur Jin-ho’s A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Botong-ui Gajok), yet later he will have to ask himself what it means to be a father and what exactly it is that he’s raising his daughter to be. Based on the Dutch novel The Dinner and a departure for Hur who is best known for romantic melodrama, the film nevertheless takes aim at the chaebol culture of the contemporary Korean society in which consequences are only for those without means. 

Twin cases further exacerbate the rift between two brothers, cynical lawyer Jae-won (Sol Kyung-gu), and earnest doctor Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun) as one finds himself defending the feckless son of a wealthy industrialist, and the other doing his best to save the life of a child seriously injured when a case of road rage resulted in the death of her father. Meanwhile, the brothers’ respective children, Jae-won’s daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Ye-ji), and Jae-gyu’s son Si-ho are later the subject of a viral video which appears to show two teens beating a homeless man half to death. 

Jae-gyu had resented his brother and rejected the idea of Si-ho doing an internship at his hospital on the grounds that he wants him to grow up to be a person with “integrity” rather than one who’d unfairly use his privilege and connections to get ahead. Yet as time moves on we begin to wonder if it isn’t also a little because he’s ashamed of his son who is socially awkward and apparently struggling academically. His wife Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), meanwhile, is a classic helicopter parent who spends an evening out repeatedly calling Si-ho’s phone and irritated when he doesn’t pick up. The implication is that they’re so hellbent on getting Si-ho into a good university to fulfil their own sense of esteem as parents that they’ve raised a child to conventional success that they’ve lost sight of what might actually be best for him as a whole individual.

On realising Si-ho maybe the violent teen in the video, Jae-gyu’s first instinct is to go to the police but he soon loses his moral authority on failing to follow through. Once again, the question is whether they choose to protect Jae-gyu from the consequences of his actions because they fear for him or because they fear the embarrassment his criminal status would bring to them. On the surface, Jae-woo has no such qualms, immediately torching the dress Hye-yoon was wearing that night while going into damage limitation mode trying to keep the teens’ identities secret. Yet he must also reckon with the fact that he’s brought her up in a world without consequences in which conventional morality no longer really applies to her because she is wealthy and has an elite lawyer for a father. 

In any case, just as Jae-gyu’s morality began to crumble so Jae-won begins to wake up to the idea that perhaps it’s a problem that his teenage daughter and her cousin beat a man half to death and then went back to their lives without batting an eyelid. Hye-yoon shows no remorse, cheekily asking her father for a car he promised her if she passed her exams while later expressing the view that as the man was homeless, a person who in her eyes had failed to achieve personhood through attaining markers of conventional success such as a degree and steady job, his life was of no consequence. Yeon-kyung later says something similar, not understanding why they’re making a fuss over “someone like that” whose life is worth nothing in comparison to her son’s future. 

Yeon-kyung is also relentlessly rude to Jae-won’s second wife, Ji-su (Claudia Kim), who is from a much more ordinary background and does everything she can to try and get along with her. Ji-su presents a much more conventional moral compass in considering what kind of mother she wants to be not only to her own newborn child but to Hye-yoon who like Yeon-kyung mainly treats her with contempt. It’s she who begins to wonder if covering this up is really the right thing for Hye-yoon and Si-ho or if failing to show them that actions have consequences will only encourage them to behave in ways otherwise offensive to a commonly held sense of humanity. 

The brothers switch sides, but the truth is that each of them has been teaching their children the wrong lessons in creating a world in which money settles everything and consequences are only for those who can’t pay. Yeon-kyung tries to justify herself that as she’s done a lot of good deeds it somehow balances out, Si-ho too echoing her on suggesting going to church as if you could buy your right to behave badly by saving up goodness points which is also another way of saying that consequences don’t apply. The children think that as long as they fulfil the role they’re expected to play, get good grades and become successful members of society, then nothing else really matters. Darkly comic, Hur’s steely drama suggests that the inequalities of the contemporary society, the elitism and anxiety have slowly eroded not only the most essential of relationships but the soul of the nation’s children who know nothing other than those with money need not pay for their crimes.

A Normal Family screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

How to Have an American Baby (Leslie Tai, 2023)

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“Mama, why wasn’t I born in America?” a salesman promoting a programme bringing women from China to give birth in the US so that their child will have citizenship rather manipulatively states in an almost certainly made-up quote from a child jealous of another’s life of baseball playing freedom abroad. The never quite explained mystery at the centre of Leslie Tai’s documentary How to Have an American Baby is why exactly so many families find US citizenship so desirable given that they have no immediate intention of living there themselves.

A father later suggests that he was looking for “security”, perhaps implying a sense of anxiety regarding the future direction of China while others insist they want their kids educated in the US presumably to take advantage of more global opportunities (additional press materials also suggest a desire for a legal security not afforded to children born out of wedlock). But it’s also true that the US has shockingly high maternal mortality rates in comparison to the rest of the developed world and that, though it seems they may not have realised it, these women are risking their lives and the lives of their unborn children undergoing an incredibly stressful and difficult period of confinement and later medical procedure usually alone and unable to speak the language. Most of the women appear to be under the care of Mandarin-speaking doctors, yet their manner is often rough and unkind while at least one woman seems to suspect that the advice she’s being given may not be impartial. As non-residents who do not have medical insurance, the parents assume that the hospitals are taking advantage of the Chinese patients and charging whatever they like with rates far higher than locals would typically pay.

One could therefore say that this is a very circular business. The hospitals make their money and they’re happy, while a small industry seems to have arisen with Chinese migrants running maternity hospitals to facilititate this practice. However, largely unable to speak English themselves, they can offer little help in a crisis and as they are operating in a legal grey area are not keen to get involved in any disputes. One woman, Lele, who unfortunately loses her baby she suspects as a result of medical malpractice is kept isolated from the other mothers and given almost no support. In the lengthy birth scene in which one mother undergoes a difficult labour lasting more than a day, the director is called away to translate for Lele with alarming warnings about a baby “coding” and that there is something wrong with their heartbeat all of which only places further stress on the mother giving birth who worries that her own anxiety is the reason the delivery is taking so long.  

Meanwhile, alarm is being raised by residents of the local area in which many of these “maternity hotels” are situated. They complain about increased traffic and noise due to the fact that ordinary family homes are now being used for a commercial purpose though one woman’s suggestion that they report such an innocuous sound as a baby crying (incorrectly assuming the women are also giving birth at the hotel) could obviously have unintended consequences and speaks to a greater degree of ingrained prejudice. A local government representative suggests that beyond instituting checks to ensure building safety there isn’t much they can do as the hotels aren’t breaking any laws or occupancy rules and even if they were they’d just pay someone to lease another property under a different name and set up somewhere else. 

As the salesman had suggested, for some of the women US citizenship is a status symbol and something they’re made to feel they’re denying their children if they chose to give birth to them at home. This process is expensive, and many of the families lead lives far more materially comfortable in China than they likely would in the US yet they see US citizenship as something that will be extremely beneficial to their children and so naturally want to give them the best if also securing their own status in being able to give it to them. Perhaps as one man at the neighbourhood meeting suggests, it’s only “smart” to take advantage of this obvious business opportunity but it’s also true that it’s the families who are perhaps being exploited in being missold a safe and easy path to engineering future possibility for their as yet unborn children. 

How to Have an American Baby screens Nov. 14 as part of DOC NYC and will be available to stream in the US until Nov. 26 before making its broadcast premiere on Dec. 11th on POV.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Elegies (詩, Ann Hui, 2023)

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Many of the poets featured in Ann Hui’s documentary Elegies (詩) are keen to emphasise that poetry is rarely about what it says it’s about and often as much about what doesn’t say. The documentary is much the same, making a point about the power of poetry in an age resistance, an elegy for the disappearing Hong Kong the poets lament two of them no longer living in the city but somehow still defined by it. 

The tables reversed by one of her subjects, Hui explains that the documentary is a labour of love. She admits that it’s not a mainstream movie and that no one would fund it, but she decided to do it anyway despite or perhaps because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic which is itself makes frequent appearances in the film. In any case, Hui splits her time mainly between veteran poet Huang Canran who now lives in Mainland China and his younger disciple Liu Wai Tong who lives in Taiwan. 

As Canran says, the poems prove his love for Hong Kong but he also feels as if it was Hong Kong that forced him to leave. Joking that he’s an economic exile, he explains that he mainly moved after being forced out by the rapid cost of living in the city. He cheerfully explains that being a poet means embracing destitution and is embarrassed about the other kinds of writing such as penning a newspaper column that he did solely for the money. Canran’s main source of income comes from translation though his personal motto is to work hard to not earn money while practicing his art. His daughter doesn’t really get it and is confused about why Ann Hui wants to make a documentary about her father, though as Canran admits prophets are rarely appreciated in their hometowns. The Hong Kong he writes about is another place, perhaps somewhere that never really existed or any rate exists no longer. 

A photographer and lecturer in poetry, Liu Wai Tong heads in a more philosophical direction while also living as an exile in Taipei, never quite explaining the reasons he left Hong Kong though perhaps because it would awkward to do so directly. He quotes Brecht and asks what the point of poetry is in an age of protest, how their voices can resonate among a thousand other horrors crying out for speech. Yet as other poets had said, poems about nature are not always about nature just as political poems are not always about politics. By saying one thing and not another they can make a message felt but then there’s nothing really wrong with talking about beauty amid myriad horrors. 

Another poet writes about the everyday, causing others to ask if you can really call it a poem if it’s just about the unexpected appearance of a cockroach. The words should be simple, they insist, their meaning at least clear even if the message is ambiguous. Obscurity for obscurity’s sake is always doomed to failure. Many of the poets write from their direct experience detailing their ordinary lives in the city while others rejoice in wordplay or metaphor, but Hong Kong colours all of their work. Echoing the other poets, Hui too admits that it’s poetry that sustained her in her darkest hours. The poems that she learned as a child gave her strength when she needed it. A woman who has been writing to a friend in prison is moved to tears on recalling his reaction to a poem she had sent him, feeling that poem if can touch someone years after it was written than it must have intrinsic meaning.

Thus poetry in itself becomes an act of resistance if solely in defiance and the determination to endure even the most difficult circumstances from the anxiety of a global pandemic to the spectre of political unrest and lingering oppression. At once an elegy for the Hong Kong the poets speak of and its many rueful exiles, the film makes a passionate defence of poetry as a lifeline thrown by one lonely soul to another across often turbulent seas and carrying with it a message most powerful in its silence. 

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Contestant (Clair Titley, 2023)

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“All humans are entertaining,” or perhaps “interesting” at least to the producer of a variety TV programme who later admits that he may have a kind of detachment that allows him to bypass normal ethical concerns or responsibilities towards others. His words may at first seem egalitarian or humanistic, but they also point to a commodification of the human spirit in which the everyman is merely a figure liable for exploitation by a puppet master like the later remorseful Tsuchiya. 

Clair Titley’s documentary character study The Contestant explores the birth of reality television in a Japan still mired in malaise following the collapse of the bubble economy asking both why someone would put themself through so much degradation and indeed why others would find their humiliation entertaining. From an audience perspective, there may be an assumption that Nasubi, the titular contestant, conceived this idea himself and is entirely consenting to the way he’s being treated but as he explains Nasubi had simply attended an audition to appear on popular variety programme Denpa Shonen and had no idea what was going on. Selected by lottery, he was led away by Tsuchiya and installed in a studio apartment where he was told to strip and that he was now taking part in a skit to see if someone could live solely on prizes won from magazine giveaways. He knew that he was being filmed, but was given the impression the footage would not air on television and was presumably intended for another purpose once the project was over. His ordeal would last more than a year.

As is repeatedly stated, Nasubi was never a prisoner. The door was always open and he could have chosen to leave at any time but did not do so. Asked why this is, why despite malnutrition and the possibility of starvation, the humiliation of being forced to eat dog food, the loneliness and isolation, an older Nasubi reflects that when you become so mentally and physically broken leaving no longer occurs to you. He considered suicide many times, but never simply walking out the door. 

The irony is that audience satisfaction is largely derived from Nasubi’s “happiness” in his overjoyed reactions to finally winning something. Edited down to a weekly digest, the programme includes only such happy moments rather than the crushing sense of futility and loneliness Nasubi recounts in his diaries which also become, unbeknownst to him, best sellers. A British BBC correspondent explains that the show was popular with younger people and less so with the older generation who remembered post-war privation and simply did not find the idea of a man facing starvation alone, naked, in a tiny apartment very funny nor did those who were suffering economically themselves.

Equally, some perhaps feel that as it’s only a TV show it isn’t really “real” and so it can’t really be affecting Nasubi in a negative or long-lasting way even if what’s really happening is more like torture at the hands of an out of control media puppet master who admits he didn’t really know what he was doing and was simply trying to push things as far as they would go without actually killing their subject. The film presents Tsuchiya and Nasubi as two sides of the same coin, both sons of policemen who were forced to move around a lot as children because of a common practice in Japan to rotate law enforcement officials and other civil servants to different areas every few years as a means of preventing corruption. Nasubi reveals that he got his nickname, “aubergine”, from the kids who bullied him at every new school objecting to his long face. Gradually, he developed the defence mechanism of making people laugh so they wouldn’t bully him. This might explain why he responds to what extends to sustained harassment from Tsuchiya by increased mugging for the camera, while Tsuchiya by contrast agrees that his childhood experiences have left him “detached” and unable to make deeper connections with other people. 

In some senses, it’s possible to think of reality television as frustrated bid for connection and that like his childhood self Nasubi is trying to gain control by owning the joke only to later feel damaged and traumatised by his experiences, insisting that the way Tsuchiya in particular treated him caused him to lose faith in humanity and left an unfillable void in his heart. The surprising thing is that unlike Tsuchiya, who later seems to accept that his actions were unethical and exploitative, Nasubi does not become cruel or embittered but finally finds a way to heal himself in helping others especially the people of his hometown, Fukushima, after the devastating earthquake in 2011. Though he admits it would be impossible not to harbour resentment towards Tsuchiya for everything he put him through, he also believes that the experience gave him something very special in showing him that no one can survive alone and granting him a better understanding of the importance of humanity and the spirit of supporting each other. 

Titley captures the sense of anarchism in late ‘90s variety with brief clips of the extreme onscreen graphics which have informed modern meme culture, even suggesting ironic use of an aubergine to cover Nasubi’s modesty may have given rise to the current use of the emoji. To dampen the sense of overstimulation which can often occur with these kinds of programmes, she dubs some of the original voiceover and replaces text with English in the same kinds of crazy fonts often employed in variety shows but is always very careful not to exoticise the content or imply these are things that only happen in “wacky Japan” but instead sensitively explores how Nasubi was able to find something positive in the midst of an incredibly traumatising situation and use that to lead a more fulfilling life despite those who may still try to mock or belittle him.

The Contestant screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Small Fry (잔챙이, Park Joong-ha, 2023)

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A dejected actor begins to feel like a fish caught on a hook only to be cast back in Park Joong-ha’s tense chamber drama, Small Fry (잔챙이, Janchaengi). Small fry is how Ho-joon sees himself, at least in comparison to Hee-jin, an up and coming actress recently the star of a Netflix show though equally insecure in her career while each of them find themselves at the mercy of a director with a fragile sense of masculinity and a tendency to bully that masks his insecurity. 

Indeed, the tale opens as masculinity drama as former actor Ho-joon turns up at a fishing lake intending to record an episode for his YouTube fishing channel only there’s a weird guy hanging around that immediately tries to oust him from his position on hearing his patter about a tip off about the best seat from the guy in the shop. The man later revealed to be a film director, Nam, is obnoxious and prickly. Not content with having forced Ho-joon to move, he loudly complains about the noise from his live-streaming using it as an excuse for not having caught any fish. 

You’d think it would be an unwritten rule that touching another guy’s rod is inappropriate, yet a third man soon turns up while Ho-joon is taking a break and messes with his equipment apparently resentful of his status as a top YouTuber insisting that he’s “cheating” by using Japanese techniques and his success is entirely down to the Japanese-style paste he uses for bait. The same man turns up later but obsequiously plays the devoted fan, asking for an autograph much to the consternation of the all but ignored director and his star who has also tagged along. 

Nam evidently feels threatened by Ho-joon’s relative fame along with genuine fishing skills, petulantly rejecting his hints like a man who won’t ask for directions while Hee-jin, the actress, grows ever more exasperated wanting to keep Ho-joon around if only as a buffer between herself and Nam who she realises had ulterior motives for this trip. Then again as it turns out each of these three people is connected in unexpected ways that play into the drama between them as well as into that of the screenplay for the film Hee-jin has all but been promised the lead for. 

Repeated fishing metaphors suggest that both Ho-joon and Hee-jin are just waiting to reel in their big break while at the mercy of the dupliciotous Nam who never catches anything. Gradually He-jin realises that he may already have given the part to another, more famous, actress while continuing to string her along. He later makes a kind of promise to Ho-joon to consider him for the male lead, but as expected blames the drink and feigns ignorance once the sun has risen. Yet even Nam claims he’s at the mercy of others, insisting that there are times when you just need to tell the producers to “fuck off” while secretly placating them in preparing to cast an actress with a profile over one with the skills to do the job. 

They’re all small fry, just waiting around trying chomp on a hook and get reeled into something good but finding that they move too quickly or that even if they’re caught they’re soon thrown back in favour of bigger fish. At 40, Ho-joon is beginning to feel as if he’s missed his chance and his fishing-themed YouTube channel may be all he’s got left even as he’s forced to play another kind of role humiliating himself filming sponsored ads for bait manufacturers to earn his keep. “There are too many ordinary people like you,” Nam cruelly tells him affecting an authority he doesn’t really have to suggest he has no future as an actor. Hee-jin, meanwhile, is wondering if it’s worth putting up with Nam’s false promises in the hope of finally getting her big break even if her management still won’t let her do the films she really wants to do. 

Yet in some senses, Ho-joon is still on the hook hoping he can reel something in while Hee-jin may have decided that her big break’s not worth all this bullshit and there will other opportunities or perhaps it doesn’t really matter even if there aren’t. Maybe it really is all about the paste after all and a poor fisherman like Nam is likely to end up with nothing in the end while at least Ho-joon and Hee-jin though small fry they may be have a better idea of which lines to cast. 

Small Fry screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

My Heavenly City (我的天堂城市, Yu Sen-I, 2023)

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After taking a job as an interpreter working with the social and courts systems, overseas student Mavis (Vivian Sung) sits under a sign at centre for teens reading “you are not alone.” As she reveals to her client, alone is something she’s often felt while living in New York where everyone has “people to see, things to do, and homes to go to” while she feels herself in limbo with nothing and no one to turn to for support. Inspired by her own experiences, director Yu Sen-i’s My Heavenly City (我的天堂城市, wǒ de tiāntáng chéngshì) explores both the freedom and loneliness that can come with living abroad through the stories of three Taiwanese migrants who share unknown connections. 

Mavis is nursing heartbreak and finding it difficult to concentrate on her studies while her money runs out and she feels as if she isn’t getting anywhere. When an opportunity teaching Mandarin to the son of a Taiwanese-American couple falls through, she applies for a job as an interpreter but soon discovers that it requires more than language skills not least because many of the cases she’s called in on are emotionally difficult. Though reminded that an interpreter should maintain a professional distance and avoid becoming friends with a client, she can’t help bonding with 16-year-old Xiao Jian. Suspected of having come to the US undocumented, Xiao Jian was found wandering around alone in Bryant Park and is refusing to speak. 

What Mavis discovers is that she can’t really help him and no one wants to hear what he’s got to say anyway but in any case she comes to see him as a mirror for herself, another lost soul struggling to find a footing in the city. The same is true of street dancer Jack (Keung To) who is conned out of money by duplicitous locals but bonds with a young woman from Singapore, Lulu (Jessica Lee), who hoped that she’d find herself in New York but discovers only more lonely rootlessness and uncertainty. Even her connection with Jack is threatened by looming visa issues. Even so, in New York, Jack discovers greater freedom to be himself in embracing his love of dance if fulfilling parental expectation by continuing to study computer science.

Jack describes his mother’s micromanaging as oppressive, and is relieved to be if not freed from it that at least at a greater distance. These differing ideas of parenthood are also beginning to erode the relationship between successful architect Jason (Jack Yao), who came to the US 20 years previously, and his Taiwanese-American wife Clare (Mandy Wei) who struggles to deal with her own fiercely authoritarian father. The couple have a son, Jasper, who is autistic and also has emotional problems that have resulted in problematic violence that echoes a case that Mavis was brought in on of domestic abuse. Only nine years old, Jasper explains that he gets “very, very angry” when frustrated and it seems that he may not be well suited to busy city life. Clare’s father doesn’t believe in mental illness and assumes it’s discipline issue, believing that Clare and Jason are at fault for spoiling him rather than correcting his behaviour.

The conflict may echo a cultural divide between the authoritarian patriarchy of traditional culture and the aspirations of Clare who says she wants to try a new parenting style founded on love, but the fundamental problem for the family is in effect and absence of the father. The economic demands of living in an expensive city have forced Jason to abandon his family while he also seems unprepared to deal with Jasper’s complex needs and leaves everything to Clare who is then overburdened on the brink of burn out. Jasper’s increasing volatility and its effects on his mother finally convince Jason that he must find a way to rebalance his commitments and be emotionally, rather than just financially, present in the family and in his relationship with Clare.

A final visit to a lost and found office echoes the sense of displacement each of them feel but also what they discover in the city and the connections they make there whether they plan to stay or not. Though it may sound bleak in its exploration of the difficulties of living in an unfamiliar culture, the film discovers a sense of serenity in the improbably sunny city that cuts through its shadows and offers an unexpected of connection between its melancholy exiles. 

My Heavenly City opens in UK cinemas on 10th November courtesy of CineAsia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)

One Second Ahead, One Second Behind (1秒先の彼, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2023)

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If you’re a step ahead and someone else is a step behind, then the gap between you ought to be twice as big but in an odd kind of way it can bring you closer. At least, that’s how it is for the protagonists of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s One Second Behind, One Second Ahead (1秒先の彼, Ichibyo Saki no Kare), a remake of the Taiwanese rom-com My Missing Valentine scripted by Kankuro Kudo. 

Kudo wisely avoids some of the awkwardness of the original by reversing the genders of the misaligned romantics so that it’s now male post office worker Hajime (Masaki Okada) who wakes up to realise that he’s lost an entire day while having no recollection of how he got sunburnt or why there’s sand in his trousers. The host of a radio show he’s fond of listening to asks him about something he’s lost, causing him to remember his father who went out one evening for ginger and then never came back. Hajime’s problem is that he’s always a little ahead of himself, in too much of a hurry to fully grasp the situation around him. That might be one reason that he falls so hard for singer-songwriter Sakura (Rion Fukumuro) and becomes far more invested in the relationship than might be wise for someone you’ve only just met. 

Reika (Kaya Kiyohara), meanwhile, is always a little bit behind. Shy and somewhat reserved she struggles to get her words out and while Hajime has often left before the end of a conversation she is usually left hanging by an inattentive or impatient partner. Out of sync with the world around them, they have each lost something precious besides the obvious and are looking for a way to get it back. Kudo’s script largely drops the magical realism of the Taiwanese original with its strange world of talking lizards and opts for something a little less surreal if just as sweet while maintaining the borrowed time motif that suggests the universe is fair and willingly adjusts itself so that those who find themselves missing out will get that time back though there’s not a lot they can do with it other than reflect. 

Even so within this miraculous dream space regrets can in a sense be cured and anxieties worked out. Those awake to stopped time have the opportunity to set things right, or at least to say their piece even if no one else can hear. There’s something more than time that they can recover, though it may be only small comfort and offer little more than one-sided closure. Rather than the Valentine’s Day setting of the Taiwanese original Kudo and Yamashita shift the action to the summer which with its many fireworks displays has a rather poignant quality focussed more on the loss than the rediscovery while emphasising the short-lived quality of human relationships which can nevertheless leave a warm afterglow even if the memory itself has been lost. 

Setting the film in the historical city of Kyoto also adds to the magical feel, the emerging sunlight at one point appearing almost like a halo around the head of a frozen Hajime while he perhaps comes to accept his mother’s rationale that his father did not leave him but ran away from reality and ironically a world he felt he could not keep up with. In a repeated gag, Hajime calls up a requests show and pours his heart out to the host only for his mother to dial in and dispute everything he’s says especially reminding him that he’s not a loser but should slow down a bit and at least listen to the end of the conversation. Reika meanwhile might have to work herself up to speedier means of communication than the good old fashioned letter but can at least see that she gets there in the end even if it might take a little longer than for others. 

Despite the differences between them, they are in fact perfectly in sync and just waiting for the times to align to bring them back together. Kudo and Yamashita lend their quirky romance a melancholy and heartwarming quality, steering clear of the awkwardness of the otherwise sweet and wholesome Taiwanese original in suggesting that the “date” at the film’s centre is the fulfilment of long forgotten promise rather than the momentary whim of a lovelorn romantic. Suggesting that the things you lose cycle back to you and that the universe itself is fair and kind, the film’s pure-hearted romanticism offers a hopeful reassurance that in the end it all really will work out for the best if only you give it time.

One Second Ahead, One Second Behind screens Nov. 4/5 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

As If It’s True (John Rogers, 2023)

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An influencer enters into a mutually exploitative relationship with a vulnerable musician only to find herself falling for him for real, or perhaps not, in John Rogers’ non-rom-com As if It’s True. Taking aim at the wilful inauthenticity of influencer culture, Rogers explores the ways in which romance is really just performance while mutually beneficial relationships can nevertheless contain a power imbalance that adds to their emotional volatility. 

It could be said that Gem (Ashley Ortega) is permanently on the rebound. A subject of a viral meme after an ex filmed her having a mental breakdown after being fired from her job, Gem went on to harness her fame becoming a popular YouTube vlogger. But then fame seems to have got the better of her. Gem’s girlfriend Yara left amid rumours of her toxic behaviour and her feeds are now full of trolls berating her. Hoping to recapture the magic, Gem recruits Anthony to be her “boyfriend” though he soon tires of the arrangement, taking up with Gem’s friend Cielo.

Anthony resents the limitations placed on his romantic freedom by his empty relationship with Gem, though it seems that she may at least have harboured some “genuine” feelings for him. At a Halloween party, Gem meets melancholy musician James (Khalil Ramos) who is wearing the same Harry Potter costume as she is and undergoes a moment of romance that is equal parts flirtation and role play. A photographer asks them if they’re a couple and they don’t quite know how to respond but then each accept the label. It’s here that things start to get weird as Gem asks James to punch Anthony. He jokingly agrees but didn’t think she was serious, until she offered to compensate him for his efforts. 

The original meeting is then consumed in confusion and contradiction in which neither party is entirely sure what was really going on between them aside from a genuine sense of attraction. Gem wants James to get back at Anthony and also boost her ratings, while James seems like he’s interested in a more genuine romance but captivated by Gem’s wealth and illusionary power. The pair find themselves playacting romance for the cameras, coming up with a fake story of how they met while filming a series of couples moments to prove how in love they are. 

But the flaw in the plan is that the fans don’t take to James, seeing him as bland and taking an instant dislike to his coffee-shop style music. James begins to worry that Gem won’t like him if the fans don’t, while she becomes fed up with what she sees as his lack of drive. A climactic dinner tables fight provokes a series of harsh words on both sides as James complains he’s nothing but a pawn in Gem’s game and she accuses him of being a golddigger yet the rawness of the fight suggests two people who can’t be honest with themselves about how they feel let alone with each other.

Rogers plays with our own ability to discern the reality, leaving us unsure which scenes might be “real” and which are simply part of the skit. Trapped in Gem’s confusing world of inauthenticity, James begins to lose grip on himself, lost in a kind of dream world while Gem exploits his insecurity to prank him by suggesting she may leave him for another woman. They each at times claim that the relationship is now “real” and they’ve developed genuine feelings for each other but seemingly can’t quite accept them or escape from the performative quality of their romance.

As much becomes plain when Anthony and Ceilo get engaged, Cielo looking a little sheepish showing off the ring while implying that James must have something up his sleeve to one-up Anthony in the romance stakes, further fuelling his sense of jealous resentment and fragile masculinity. Even a “real” relationship is also performative in its empty gestures such as random flowers and cheerful selfies. Gem puts on act to meet James’ mother, but then who isn’t on their best behaviour to meet a potential in-law? She ends up liking her, finding something in her that her own parental figures may have lacked in the childhood trauma she shares only with James (or so she claims) that explains why she is the way she is. 

James has also had his fair share of mental health issues, something Gem recklessly exploits in getting him to make a video in which he “opens up”, while otherwise growing tired of feeling like Gem’s pet just trotted out to look cute on the internet while his attempts to use her to further his music career largely flounder. Then again, we have to wonder about the authenticity of what we’re seeing as Gem once again seems primed to put something together in the great highlight real of their “relationship”. Perhaps this is all a bit too, Gem “coming clean” about her real fake romance with James seemingly nowhere to be seen. Raw and embittered, Rogers’ anti-rom-com resents the digitalisation of love in which romance has become a public act defined by deed rather than feeling and the fake affirmation of social media clout has itself begun to trump human connection.

As If It’s True screens Nov. 3 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈, Chiu Keng Guan, 2023)

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A single mother experiences separation anxiety when she discovers her teenage daughter plans to study abroad in Chiu Keng Guan’s heartwarming drama, Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈). While the daughter yearns for freedom, she is also understandably wary of heading out into the world alone and as much as she fears her mother’s sometimes worryingly obsessive love also recognises that it’s costing her own freedom in her inability to rediscover something to live for outside her daughter.

The bond between the pair is unusually strong in part because of the father’s early death in an accident at the beach which has left Bee Ling clingy and over protective. Now 18, Qi Qi is acutely embarrassed by her mother’s habit of turning up unannounced when she’s out with her friends while insisting on driving her everywhere rather than letting her drive herself or take public transport. That’s one reason that she hasn’t told her she’s given up her part-time job to take French lessons and has applied to study at a university in France. 

It’s obviously a big adjustment for Bee Ling who has devoted her entire life to raising her daughter. Even her job as an insurance agent for which she has won countless awards as a top employee is something she’s only worked hard at to provide for Qi Qi with the end goal of buying a home where they can live together. As her friends and family try to point out to her, children aren’t meant to live with their parents forever and Qi Qi isn’t a child anymore. She wants her own life and the freedom to explore, while Bee Ling should also have the freedom to find new interests and ways to fulfil herself. 

While her friend Li Yan is excited about the idea of her son Zi Hao studying overseas, Bee Ling tries to do whetever she can to prevent Qi Qi going including visiting a shrine to pray that she fails the interview before boldly stating that she will simply go to France with her which is the opposite of what Qi Qi wanted. “I want to go to a place without you” she rather bluntly states, trying to get through to her mother that she wants to be free of her helicopter parenting. 

But then Qi Qi is perhaps a little more anxious than she makes out and afraid to head out on her own without her mother to look out for her. Following a series of setbacks, she appears to have given up walking blankly through an apartment Bee Ling wanted to buy vacantly replying that she’s happy to go with whatever her mother decides. Even Bee Ling is by this point a little less controlling, looking for a place with similar sized rooms and keen that Qi Qi decide how she wants to decorate her space but is also still quite dependent on her daughter not really knowing what she’d do with herself without her.

Ironically, through her campaign to frustrate Qi Qi’s plans to study abroad, Bee Ling begins to develop new interests and make new friends. An older French woman living in their building explains to her that life began again for her at 70. Her children are grown up with lives of their own, so why shouldn’t she be free to live as she pleases? Meanwhile, Bee Ling’s mother also begins to reflect that perhaps she made the same mistake coloured by the times in which they lived thinking that a girl should stay at home. She now regrets what might have been and sees that Bee Ling’s mistaken attempts to stop Qi Qi going abroad will only bring harm to them both.

In any case, as the title implies the pair eventually discover a way to rebalance their relationship with Qi Qi reflecting on the difficulties her mother faced raising her alone and Bee Ling discovering a new sense of possibility for the future in setting her daughter free. Together they begin to move past the shared trauma of the sudden loss of Qi Qi’s father while ready to embrace new challenges. “Life is elsewhere,” Bee Ling is told by a French teacher, suddenly finding herself ready to look for it while allowing her daughter to do the same.

Ma, I Love You screens Nov. 3/4th as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

It Remains (釀魂, Kelvin Shum, 2023)

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Grief-stricken souls find themselves trapped in a hazy dreamworld of haunting guilt and vengeful spirits in Kelvin Shum’s eerie supernatural horror, It Remains (釀魂). Shum’s second feature following noirish psychological thriller Deliverance delves into the realms of classic ghost movies but discovers its heroes mainly haunted by the unresolved past. “We’re all afraid of facing reality,” heartbroken waiter Finn (Anson Lo) finally accepts though perhaps still lacking resolve to move on from his tragedy.

That would be the death in a car accident of his girlfriend of five years, Ava (Summer Chan). Finn was supposed to meet her for an anniversary dinner but got busy with work and left her sitting alone at which point she left and had a collision with fate. Unable to forgive himself, Finn has taken to drinking and is in a grief-stricken stupor. In an attempt to cheer him up, his friends from the restaurant where he works, chef Luke (Tommy Chu Pak-Hong), waiter Liam (Ng Siu-Hin), and Cora (Kwok Tsui-Yee) from front of house, are taking him camping only the location Liam has chosen turns out to be a little different than expected. Fetching up on a remote island where the boats only run every few days, the gang find themselves wandering through an eerie, seemingly abandoned village where it seems a wedding was once taking place.

As might be expected, they don’t really want to hang around to find out what happened here and are in any case told to leave in no uncertain terms by a mysterious woman and an angry old man who say this village is closed off to insiders. But with no way off the island they have little choice other than to hole up in an abandoned house and try to make the best of the situation. That becomes admittedly difficult when they start experiencing strange visions and are pulled back towards their own unresolved, internalised grief.

It seems Finn wasn’t the only one struggling to let go of the past and whatever evil lurks here quickly latches on to the buried anxieties of each of the group attempting to manipulate them to unleash a pent up spirit sealed away for good reason. Though clues scattered around the abandoned village point to something further in the past and indeed more ancient, it appears this particular moment of trauma occurred this century even if the darkness that surrounds it is older and apparently imparted by a passing Tibetan monk. Someone here also could not face reality and has been caught in another kind of limbo trapped alone and unable to resolve their pain.

The film’s Chinese title means something like “wine ghost” which is in its way ironic seeing as the main coping mechanism employed not just by Finn is alcohol, while the evil spirit itself is bound in a wine jar. This is however one jar it’s best not to open and a series a ghosts that should not be unleashed, despite the well honed logic that sealing the spirit is not really enough to keep it from ruining your life. Finn and the others are too afraid to face reality in knowledge that it may consume them and so remain trapped in the past though they may have been right to fear that in the end they would not be able to resolve their grief if they opened the jar and attempted to deal with it.

Swapping the noirish urbanity of his previous film for the eeriness of nature found in misty forests and forbidding signs of human absence, Shum conjures an atmosphere of spiritual dread in which each of the protagonists is plunged into their own kind of hell and forced to confront the unresolved past. Hoping to deal with at least one ghost, Cora performs a Taoist ritual but ends up summoning more spirits than intended and opening the door to something that none of them are able to control. There’s more than one way to quell a ghost, but the desire not to may be equally strong and for some moving on may not be what they actually want. Facing reality is to accept it, but it’s difficult to say if that represents liberation or constraint or if the only way to deal with a wandering ghost is to join it in eternal suffering.

It Remains opens in UK cinemas on 3rd November courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)