Tag: 2023

Road to Boston (1947 보스톤, Kang Je-kyu, 2023)

Posted on by

The right to participate in a foreign marathon becomes a victory for the Korean in people in Kang Je-kyu’s sporting period drama, The Road to Boston (1947 보스톤, 1947 Boston). Skewing towards the nationalistic, the film finds two brands of exceptionalism colliding while hinting at the sense of destabilisation in a nation which has not only been divided but rather than the promised liberation only re-colonised by an entirely different military regime who insist that Korea is not a real country merely a protectorate. 

In 1936, Sohn Kee-chung (Ha Jung-woo) won a gold medal for marathon running in the Berlin Olympics but when he stood on the podium they played the Japanese anthem and flew the Japanese flag. They announced his name pronounced the Japanese way, and when Kee-chung covered the Japanese emblem on his uniform he was banned from sports and put under police surveillance. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, and the victories were accredited to the Japanese Empire. The country had been liberated from Japanese rule at the end of the war, but the nation was divided in two with the Americans occupying the South and the Soviets the North. 

Part of Kee-chung’s bitterness is that his family are trapped over the border and he’s been unable to bring them South, but it’s also that he was not able to run “freely” under the flag of his nation or in his true name. Yet now that they’ve been liberated, it’s as if only the names have changed. Loutish American GIs make trouble in the streets bullying the locals much as the Japanese had while the nation in general remains poor. There’s a chance that Korea could compete in the 1948 Olympics in London, but they’ve been told they don’t qualify because Korea doesn’t really exist and even in the way it does it’s only for a couple of years so they have no track record of international competition, all their previous successes are still attributed to Japan. To qualify, they decide to enter the Boston Marathon, but are told there are additional hurdles because Korea is a “refugee country” and the authorities are worried they might just stay there. 

When they do actually arrive in the US, they get a similar attitude told that winning the Boston Marathon might help them gain US citizenship as if that were some ultimate prize they must be secretly longing for when all they want is to be recognised as Koreans. Because the Military government signed off on their participation, the shirts prepared for them carry American flags, but Kee-chung does not want his protege Yun-bok (Im Si-wan) to suffer the same fate as him and compete under a flag that is not his own as he outlines in a powerful speech to the person in charge of the marathon while cheered on by outraged Asian Americans who also suffer racism and discrimination in the so-called land of the free.

At the press conference, reporters ask offensive and embarrassing questions such as whether Korea has universities, newspapers, or even electricity. The US guarantor Nam-hyeon (Kim Sang-ho) also states that even when he says he’s Korean, people ask him if he’s from China or Japan while Yun-bok receives racial slurs from a runner representing America. America is also presented as the land of immoral capitalism in which the only thing that matters is money in direct contrast to Kee-chung’s claims that runners aren’t in it for the cash. He originally rejects Yun-bok for his “arrogance” and lack of interest in anything that isn’t about money but later changes his mind on realising his crushing poverty and desire to help his ailing mother. 

On the other hand, the runners are constantly reminded how different the US (and elsewhere) is from Korea, asked if they know how to sleep on a Western-style bed or use a shower while reminded that everything in the mini bar you’ll be charged for. Yun-bok comically washes his face in the toilet seeing only a basin of water little knowing what taps are or how to use them. On his first taste of Coca Cola, a symbol of American capitalism, he is captivated and wonders if they should just accept the American flag for the right to run and a quiet life while Kee-chung will not be put through that humiliation again. The right to participate in the marathon under the Korean flag becomes a victory for the Korean people as a whole who had chipped in to crowdfund it in the face of resistance from the US military government. A big wig who made his money in dubious ways might have a point when he asks if it’s right to spend so much on a marathon when people are starving in the streets, but then what Kee-chung is trying to reclaim is national pride which to some at least is worth the price. In any case, the historical victory becomes a crowning moment of Korean independence, no longer a refugee state but (symbolically at least) a sovereign nation and finally free to run just as far as it can go.

Road to Boston screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Baian the Assassin, M.D. (Part 1) (仕掛人・藤枝梅安, Shunsaku Kawake, 2023)

Posted on by

A traumatised assassin takes it upon himself to get rid of a few villains on realising there’s something not quite right with his latest contract in Shunsaku Kawake’s classic jidaigeki homage, Baian the Assassin, MD: (Part 1) (仕掛人・藤枝梅安, Shikakenin Fujieda Baian). The titular hero is the protagonist of a series of novels by Shotaro Ikenami which have spawned several previous adaptations on the big and small screens. Produced in celebration of Ikenami’s centenary the film, one of two, harks back to the golden age of period drama if with a more contemporary sensibility. 

Baian (Etsushi Toyokawa) is ostensibly an acupuncturist though by night he uses his needles to kill rather than to heal. Hired to take out the second wife an inn owner, Omino (Yuki Amami), his suspicions are raised on realising that he had also been the assassin who killed the man’s first wife two years earlier. He blames himself in part for having agreed to assassinate a woman in the first place, and remains conflicted even after accepting the job wondering if Omino is next in the firing line or if she was actually the one who had the other woman killed in order to usurp her place. 

The film makes clear from the outset what a difficult place Edo could be for a woman as Baian carries out an assassination on a boatman who had raped a samurai’s wife and then blackmailed her into further sexual favours only for her to hire an assassin and then kill herself confessing all. Omino had apparently been the stepdaughter of a gang leader who sexually abused her and then died leaving her with no support and nowhere to turn except to sex work. Maybe no one could blame her for taking advantage of a besotted client to escape her terrible circumstances though getting rid of his wife would obviously be a different matter. Omon (Miho Kanno), a maid Baian takes a liking to while investigating, admits something similar that as a widow with a young son realistically speaking there is nowhere else that could she work to support him except on the fringes of the sex trade. Then again, as she says the previous mistress was strict but it was because she cared, whereas Omino is just mean and self-interested. She’s fired all the old staff and brought in pretty young women who are quite obviously being expected to entertain their male customers in more direct ways. 

In any case, Baian soon finds himself drawn into a wider series of plots when his friend Hiko (Ainosuke Kataoka), a skewer maker who assassinates people with poison darts, is tasked with taking out first a lascivious carpenter and then a rogue samurai who has supposedly raped and kidnapped the daughter of his lord which obviously turns out not quite to be the case. Rape and kidnap are depressingly common in Edo-era society where it is largely women who suffer under a patriarchal society with intensely oppressive social codes that demand female purity. In a post-credits sequence, we come to understand that Hiko too is seeking vengeance for the death of a woman who killed herself and her child after being raped by bandits. Meanwhile, Baian reveals that he had a mild hatred of women himself born of pain in having been abandoned by his mother who left with another man and took only his sister with her after his father’s death. He had to overcome that resentment in order to fulfil himself as a doctor treating women’s bodies but struggles when he realises that someone involved in the case is closely linked with his own traumatic past and death may be the only way to save them. 

Both he and Hiko end up breaking the assassin’s code but only in defence of justice, which might sound odd considering the nature of their work. Nevertheless, they each have their scruples and don’t like to think of themselves as having been used or inadvertently killed someone who didn’t really deserve it. As Baian puts it, the greatest villains may really be “well-meaning weak cowards” though perhaps corrupt lords can’t really complain about falling victim to their own tactics. With noticeably polished production values and atmospheric cinematography, Kawake pays tribute to classic jidaigeki and eventually sets his heroes back on the road awaiting the next battle for justice in the distinctly unjust feudal era. 

Baian the Assassin, M.D. (Part 1) screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Hidden Blade (无名, Cheng Er, 2023)

Posted on by

In a moment of calm in Chang Er’s Hidden Blade (无名, Wúmíng), a man is served drunken shrimp and watches the poor creatures flail as they’re cooked alive in a bloody soup before placing them in his mouth still kicking, the red liquid dripping from his lips. The heroes are to some extent much the same, plunged into the dangerous waters of the Sino-Japanese war and drowning among its myriad confusions no longer even certain of their own identity let alone that of others. 

It’s at this that the Chinese title, Anonymous, hints for in this world of constant duplicity names are rarely exchanged or on occasion given only posthumously. That is aside from Mr. He (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who introduces himself promptly after giving a secret knock to enter a hotel room marked with a Japanese character to meet a Mr. Liang who, it seems, intends to betray the Communist cause and instead serve the Wang Jingwei Regime which has sided with Japan in the puppet state of Manchuria, though we can in no way be sure if either of these men are telling the full truth or are who they claim to be. 

Chang replays this scene later with additional content as he will with several scenes throughout the film adding new context as he goes. Like Lou Ye’s Purple Buttlerfly, the fractured narrative hints at the chaos of an age in which nothing is quite as it seems and the truth is always obscured if at times irrelevant. Spanning the second Sino-Japanese war and its immediate aftermath, the film suggests that the motivations underpinning Japanese imperialism are anti-Communist and that Manchuria is a key asset for them as a bulwark against Soviet incursion. Collaborating with the Japanese, the Wang Jingwei Regime is the third point in a triangle lodged between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communist Party with the implication that it essentially needs to drop out lowering the barriers for a confrontation between the two and the eventual victory of the Communists which occurs three years after the end of the film in 1949.

Technically the third part in the “China Victory Trilogy” which was conceived as “a gift to the Communist Party for its centenary” the film may make some bold claims as to the role of Communist spies in the 1930s but nevertheless neatly aligns the covert resistance movement with the Party’s eventual triumph if subversively ending on a note of loss and melancholy which leaves the survivors in lonely exile, ideologically victorious but emotionally ruined. Both Liang and the ambivalent Japanese soldier Watanabe (Hiroyuki Mori) talk of wanting a quiet life retiring to ancestral land as ordinary farmers freed from the murky world of politics but are each frustrated while He and Watanabe’s young goon Ye (Wang Yibo) wrestle with the romantic costs of their political choices. Yet the most dignified performance is reserved for an impossibly beautiful KMT assassin caught before she was able to take out a government minister while posing as his mistress “He used to write poems, now he writes execution orders,” Watanabe laments of the Minister (Da Peng) who later it seems pays a heavy price for his ruthless opportunism. At least his would-be-assassin remained true to her ideals and accepted her fate with dignity. Indeed, she may be the only one who is certain of herself and her identity even in her impeccable elegance which is a something of a mixed message given her political affiliation. 

In the end, it may be the self-denial that slowly erodes their souls while forced to conceal their true intentions even to those close to them. Then again, it’s impossible to know what’s for real and what’s for show. An intensely emotional exchange could in fact be intended for someone else’s ears or merely a cruel tragedy of misrepresentation. The real hidden blade is the self-repression living in an atmosphere of oppressive suspicion requires rather than the communist sleeper agents who in this version of the tale beat the Japanese into retreat. Featuring top notch production design and costuming, Chang’s oscillating venture through an abyss of cruelty and betrayal finds its heroes victorious but no so much anonymous as robbed of both name and country, lonely exiles of a war not quite won. 

Hidden Blade is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (dialogue free)

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Bên trong vỏ kén vàng, Pham Thien An, 2023)

Posted on by

Late into Pham Thien An’s three hour spiritual epic Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Bên trong vỏ kén vàng), a youngish man rides through endless fog as if echoing the miasma of his life. He finds himself displaced, admitting that he no longer has any reason to return to his hometown now that his parents have moved to the US and the girl he loved has become a Christian nun, yet he continues to yearn for a greater meaning in his life or something that would anchor him in an Earthly world that seems somehow fragile and intangible much like the soul itself. 

Tellingly, in the film’s opening scene Thien (Lê Phong Vũ) is situated across from a man who is giving up his life in the city for a more spiritual existence in the mountains. The third friend between them cannot understand his decision, remarking that he knows many who’ve tried the same thing but have all eventually returned if for no other reason than money. “The existence of faith is ambiguous,” Thien admits when pressed for his opinion but cannot fully choose either side neither able to accept the certainty of the man bound for the mountains nor the cynicism of his city-dwelling friend. He wants to believe, but he can’t. “My mind holds me back,” he explains, trapped in an existential limbo still searching for a truth he is unsure exists. 

While the men are talking, they are momentarily distractedly by a loud noise that turns out to be a nearby traffic accident in which two motorbikes have collided. The man died instantly while the woman is seriously injured but the child with her has apparently escaped more or less unscathed. No one really reacts very much to this seemingly horrific event, perhaps it is simply too common an occurrence to bother them. Thien too remains in his seat, barely looking up. At massage parlour he ignores his ringing phone, jokingly telling the masseuse that “God is calling,” apparently an ironic pet name for his client, only to receive a visit from a member of staff telling him to answer to because there has been a “family emergency”. It turns out that the woman in the crash was his sister-in-law, Hahn, who has since passed away and he must now take charge of his young nephew, Dao (Nguyễn Thịnh), who is now orphaned in the absence of his brother who disappeared without trace some years previously.

No one knows what happened to Tam, though some speculate that ran off with another woman or recalling that he once wanted to become a priest assume he encountered a spiritual calling that caused him to abandon his family. In the wake of tragedy Thien begins searching for him, but as an old lady insists it’s really a way of searching for himself in an attempt to make peace with the ineffiablities of life. Unable to understand what’s happened to his mother, Dao asks his uncle abour the nature of “faith” but Thien has few answers for him explaining that it’s what he too is looking for. Dao childishly asks what shape it is, only for Thien to admit that it is formless and in essence he does not know what he seeks. 

The old lady pushes him towards a more concrete religion, detailing an experience in which her soul detached from her body and she was able to discern the mortal world’s rottenness while even the most pious of souls continue to suffer for their sins. She urges prayer and attendance at Mass, while an old man who spent his youth in war tells him that money is merely dust and the way he’s made peace with his life is through helping others. In the city, Thien had been like a lost thing scooping up a lonely bird like him marooned in urban emptiness, but is also restless in the country. He tells his former girlfriend that he admires her decision, which only makes her laugh, but is unable to find such certainty himself and seems set on a path of endless wandering searching for a truth which may not even exist. Pham Thien An follows him with an etherial gaze, segueing into memory as the current Thien stands in for his former self literally reliving the past much as in the lyrics of the melancholy song he performs at karaoke which speak of a lover trapped in nostalgia still hoping their love will return to them. Thien is much the same, searching for himself while lost in the fog of an everlasting road. 

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート, Kenichi Ugana, 2023)

Posted on by

“This film depicts a pure and genuine love between an awkward boy and a girl with a pure heart,” according to a pop idol starring in a film called “garbage love”, but it’s a true enough description of Kenichi Ugana’s genre-crossing slasher romance, Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート). Co-scripted by Hirobumi Watanabe, the film has a deadpan, surreal sensibility but has a lot to say about entrenched patriarchy and a bullying culture. 

As the film begins, Wakaba is a cheerful little girl who has an all encompassing obsession with a handsome pop idol, but is secretly enduring an oppressive atmosphere of domestic violence in her family home at the hands of her cruel and violent father. In this she might have found a kindred spirit in classmate Koki who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of his mother who openly tells him how much happier she’d be if only he’d never been born. Koki is also being bullied by a pair of mean kids at school and meekly takes it, unable to stand up for himself. When Wakaba steps up and tries to help him, the bullies turn on her too and their teacher (Atsuko Maeda) seemingly does nothing. After the pair bond through a screaming session at a local river, the bullies mysteriously fall out of a window which Koki is then seen ominously staring out of. 

The film jumps on seven years to a teenage Wakaba (Sayu Kubota) who discovers the world is not a safe place for women, repeatedly encountering a series of skeevy guys beginning with her favourite pop band who lure her to a cabin in the woods where they openly talk about getting her drunk to take advantage of her or spiking her drinks. One of the chief victimisers is another woman, Moeka, whose apparent “job” it is to recruit girls for the guys to have fun with. Wakaba’s friend Kanna (Riko) wants to leave, sensing that there’s something not quite right but Wakaba is naive and unable to see the danger. A similar thing happens when she visits Tokyo alone and has a meet cute with a guy who spills coffee on her shirt and offers to buy her a new one, then to show her around, takes her for sushi, declares his love and makes a proposal of marriage. 

As might be expected, many of these men end up dead at the hands of a vicious, chainsaw-wielding serial killer in a white hazmat suit, gas mask, and goggles. You can’t quite blame him for his crimes because everyone he kills is so irrediambly awful while it really does seem that he might be trying to protect Wakaba in some way from the hidden dangers she remains unable to see because of her pure heartedness. While her own father had been cruel and violent, she discovers that Moeka’s, police detective Kamiyama (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), is the opposite but worse in his unsettling obsession with his daughter, whom he believed to “pure and earnest” little knowing that she had been procuring young girls to serve up to the sleazy band members.

In a strange way, the serial killer turns out to be Wakaba’s healthiest relationship even if he’s basically stalking her not to mention murdering people with chainsaws because they threatened her happiness. The film runs through a series of genres from the cute childhood romance that soon turns ominous and the cabin in the woods slasher movie complete with creepy monkey and trainset, to martial arts epic as Wakaba abandons her life to train with a YouTube serial killer catching guru in a tropical resort town but retains its sense of anarchic innocence and internal integrity. As the pop star had implied, it really is a tale of genuine love between an awkward boy and a pure hearted girl in which they gradually realise that they each have a right to be happy and can be so together despite all violence and mayhem around them which includes killing a guy by shoving a grapefruit blender on his head. Strange and absurd the film nevertheless has a heartwarming romantic sensibility along with a desire for a less destructive world defined more by kindness and compassion than bullying and violence. 

Love Will Tear Us Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Cobweb (거미집, Kim Jee-woon, 2023)

Posted on by

An insecure filmmaker becomes entangled within the movie in his mind in Kim Jee-woon’s homage to golden age Korean cinema, Cobweb (거미집, Geomijip). The film has caused some controversy with the family of director Kim Ki-Young attempting to file an injunction to prevent its release complaining that it shows him in a bad light, which is one reason earlier prints of the film listed the protagonist’s name as “Kim Ki-yeol” while it has now been changed to simply “Kim Yeol”. Kim Jee-woon argues that the character is not intended to represent Kim Ki-Young but is an amalgam of various directors of that time, yet it is true that his filmmaking has more than a little in common with that of the late director of The Housemaid.

Another reason they may have been upset is that the film turns on a tragic studio fire that cost the life of a director while Kim Ki-Young himself really did die in a house fire though 20 years later at the age of 78. Meanwhile, the director who dies in the studio is clearly modelled on Shin Sang-ok. The actor who plays him (Jung Woo-sung) is styled to look exactly like Shin who often appeared wearing sunglasses. The film’s Shin Sang-ho (Song Kang-ho) is an example of an artist who gave all of himself for his art and then was quite literally consumed by it, stepping into the flames to get the perfect shot while burning with artistic passion. 

Kim Yeol (Song Kang-ho) by contrast can only watch. He’s hassled by some film critics in a diner who call him a “trash” director while suggesting that only his debut was any good and that was probably because it was Shin Sang-ho’s script though Kim Yeol is forever telling everyone that he really did write it himself. They ask him if he is still a servant in Shin’s house, a question that deeply wounds him not least because he has become the inheritor of Shin’s production company but struggles to emerge from his shadow. 

These themes of servitude and oppressive hierarchies are expressed through the film that Kim Yeol is making, itself titled Cobweb, which he has a sudden urge to reshoot in order to make it a “masterpiece” and prove that he is more than just a hack director of “trashy” genre films. The problem is that in the authoritarian 70s in which the film takes place, Korean cinema was constrained by an ever tightening censorship regime which prohibited any criticism of the government and required that films push conservative moral messages. Kim Yeol wants to take his conventional melodrama in which a young woman takes her own life in sacrifice for her family, and turn it into a story about a “modern woman” who refuses to do so. The wife, Mi-ja (Im Soo-jung), will now be a woman plotting a slow-burn revenge against the wealthy family who callously cast out her pregnant mother who had been their maid eventually teaming up with a Housemaid-esque factory girl who had given birth to her husband’s child, along with a former servant turned forest-dwelling hunter. 

Getting that past the censors might be difficult, even if they weren’t already on high alert after finding out about Kim Yeol’s unauthorised changes to the script which had already been passed. Kim Yeol is confident he can get it all shot within two days, but his cast aren’t very happy about being brought back or about the new direction of the film. “Why is it all so corny and overblown?” an exasperated veteran actress sighs unconvinced by Kim Yeol’s “vision”. Fiction and reality are increasingly blurred. The leading man really is having an affair with the woman who plays the factory girl who is secretly pregnant, a huge scandal in the waiting in the stringent 70s society where adultery is a criminal offence. A method acting policeman claims he has a prison cell in his home and spies on the illicit couple in noir fashion making little notes in his notebook. Kim Yeol meanwhile is so wrapped up in the film that he answers the phone on set rather than the one on the lot which is actually ringing. At a climatic real life moment, it’s the music cue from the melodrama which finally breaks in.

There’s a striking contrast between the full colour set design as we see it and the way it appears in the high contrast black and white of the film within the film which is full of gothic touches such as driving rain and thunderstorms not to mention film noir lighting and eerie composition. Kim Jee-woon includes a series of homages to golden age directors from the obvious nods to The Housemaid to echoes of The Devils Stairway while director Lee Man-Hee gets a name check as, perhaps ironically, a more established figure whom Kim Yeol fears his AD will leave him for.

Lee Man-Hee also had a fair amount of trouble with the censors and was actually arrested for breaking the National Security Law due to his overly sympathetic depiction of North Korean soldiers. In an attempt to get the censors off his back, Kim Yeol lies that the film is “anti-communist” while the head of the censor’s board relents because he’s just so excited about seeing North Korean spies get burned to death in Kim Yeol’s incendiary long shot. In a running gag, no one but Kim Yeol really understands the ending of the film though calling it anti-communist might be a stretch even if it might satisfy the censor’s moral concerns. In any case it remains uncertain if Kim Yeol, who has a hallucination of Shin Sang-ho giving him a fiery pep talk while hopped up on anxiety mediicine that might be destabilising his sense of reality, is really happy with his work and has finally managed to overcome his insecurity or is still entangled in Shin’s web and in the end slowly consumed by it.

Cobweb screens 13/14th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Asog (Seán Devlin, 2023)

Posted on by

A non-binary former teacher bonds with a student during an impromptu road trip in the wake of a typhoon in Seán Devlin’s hilariously empathetic dramedy, Asog. As the opening title card explains, everyone in the film is a survivor of Typhoon Yolanda (also known as Super Typhoon Haiyan) which struck in 2013 causing mass devastation and loss of life, but it’s also clear that the effects of the storm are still being felt not least in the waves of corporate colonialism that keep lapping at the shores.

As Jaya (Rey Aclao) recalls in their voice over, Yolanda took everything from them when the TV station where they filmed their TV show was plunged underwater ending their career as a presenter. Returning to teaching they can see that the storm has created a generation of traumatised children struggling to allay their fear and anxiety or otherwise deal with loss. Arnel (Arnel Pablo) lost his mother some time previously and seems to have been more or less abandoned by his father of whom he eventually goes in search at the behest of his aunts keen to start preparations for her memorial service. 

Jaya is also beginning to question their relationship with partner Cyrus (Ricky Gacho Jr.) which is only further strained when they abruptly quit their job after arguing with their boss, announcing that they plan to travel to Sicogon to enter a gay beauty pageant. It’s on the way that they meet up with Arnel who is travelling in the same direction but confused and alone having had to jump off a bus after dropping half his traveling expenses, which he was cradling in coin in his hands, in the road. Arnel perhaps hopes that his teacher whom he knows as “Mr. Andrade” will take him under their wing, but as it turns out Jaya doesn’t really have it together either. They’re travelling on a shoestring mainly by push bike and side car and sleeping on benches at railway stations. 

In any case, their journey takes them through the ravaged landscape until they finally reach the island and hear from its remaining villagers of what’s happened there, a corporate invasion which offered them aid but only if they surrendered their rights to their ancestral property. The venue for the beauty pageant is in the new resort built on top of stolen land while a small number of islanders who’ve refused to leave continue to fight for their rights and it seems are winning. Devlin casts real locals as the aggrieved islanders, and tells their story through the roundabout medium of a children’s story in which a swarm of mosquitos eventually deposed a king because though they were small, there were a lot of them, they stuck together, and they didn’t give up. 

Jaya likens the corporatising takeover as akin to that of the Philippines itself by Philip the Second of Spain who gives the islands their name and becomes in a way the crabby king of the fairy tale. They recall a story about Laurence Fishburne remarking in an interview that the Filipino people made him feel far more welcome than he ever had in America, though Jaya has often felt unwelcome themself. An old lady complains to see them putting on makeup on a bus and when they make a witty retort it’s Jaya and Arnel who are thrown off the bus. Cyrus and his previous partner had tried to have a child via a surrogate but the birth mother changed her mind, stating that she did not want the baby to be raised by a gay couple so had decided to keep it. But by contrast the old lady in Sicogon tells them that there have always been people like Jaya and that had they a name in an older language, Asog, so they always have been and belong here an integrated and accepted part of their culture. 

Through their journey together Jaya becomes a kind of mother figure to the young Arnel who felt alone in his grief abandoned by a father who abruptly left him behind. Grief changes shape, but it doesn’t end they advise him, quoting Keanu Reeves, revealing that they have learned to see their own mother who died when they were a child in the beauty of flowers or sunlight or passing birds as Arnel will too in time. The passing crisis allows Jaya the chance to quite literally rebuild their relationship with Cyrus while feeling grateful that at least they have this time to wait around together. As they said, their job was to help people cast away their troubles, countering despair with joy and laughter and togetherness which in itself gives the mosquito to the courage to keep swarming, fighting for its rights and refusing to be beaten by intimidating corporatising colonialists.

Asog screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Keiko Tsuruoka, 2023)

Posted on by

Which traditions should we keep and which should we lose? A young woman finds herself frustrated by outdated gender norms in her desire to take over the family lacquerware business in Keiko Tsuruoka’s gentle rural drama, Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (バカ塗りの娘, Bakanuri no Musume). While her family, save older brother Yu (Ryota Bando) who has already rejected lacquerware, do nothing but run her down and claim she’ll never be a success at anything all she wants to do is devote her life to a traditional craft her father no longer believes has any kind of future. 

Even so, Seishiro (Kaoru Kobayashi) is dead set on Yu taking over the business to the point that they have become semi-estranged. He calls Miyako (Mayu Hotta) “clumsy” and complains that she has no aptitude for anything unlike Yu who was always good at anything he tried. Miyako too later suggests that she was her brother’s opposite, while he was cheerful and outgoing she is shy and melancholy but then perhaps it’s hard to be cheerful when everyone’s always telling you you’re useless and doing everything wrong. In an interesting parallel, Yu is also trapped by outdated social codes in that he is gay and he and his partner have decided to move to London where they can legally get married and live their life out and proud in a way they feel they cannot do in contemporary Japan. 

Lacking other direction in her life, Miyako has been working a part-time job in a local supermarket which she hates while her father occasionally allows her to help him finish big orders though it’s clear her salary is now their main source of financial support. A local inn keeper who is a good customer of theirs explains to some of his guests that craftsmen rarely construct large pieces such as tables because they are no longer cost effective while fewer young people are willing to take up apprenticeships leaving the traditional art in danger of dying out despite the frequent remarks that everything tastes better out of a lacquerware bowl which is after all in the modern parlance “sustainable” in that it will last for many decades and can easily be repaired if damaged. 

Seishiro doesn’t seem to have a reason for rejecting the idea that Miyako might take over aside from basic sexism in preferring to hand the business over to his first born son. It might be tempting to think that he dissuades her because he thinks there isn’t a future in lacquerware, but if that were the case he could simply retire. Her mother (Reiko Kataoka), who left the family some years ago in part it seems because of her own animosity towards lacquerware and its lack of financial promise, seems to feel much the same comparing Miyako to a more successful cousin who has kids and a high powered job at an international trading firm, telling her that she should be settling down and getting married suggesting that she is simply incapable of becoming a successful lacquerware artist and should at best keep it as a hobby. 

Her mother had also shut down her desire to learn piano as a child by telling her there was no point because she’d never be good at it. Miyako’s decision to prove herself by re-laquering an abandoned piano in her disused school is then an act of rebellion against both parents showing them what she can and will achieve along with the direction she has chosen for her life. Not everyone respects it even if her father begins to come around but really it doesn’t matter because the decision is hers alone whatever anyone else might have said. Far from being insular, the embrace of traditional culture gives Miyako new opportunities and allows her to grow in confidence until she’s finally ready to set off along her own path. Even so, it seems there are some traditions she thinks it would be better to lose, such as her father’s sexism and the homophobia that has forced her brother to emigrate in order to live a happy life just as he is. They call it “fools lacquer” because no one but a fool would go to all this trouble to make a bowl but in many ways that’s the point. Miyako pours all of herself in to the lacquer, piling layer on layer dotted by handfuls of thrown rice that give it its pattern much as she herself is slowly tempered by the world around her.

Tsugaru Lacquer Girl screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Drive (드라이브, Park Dong-hee, 2023)

Posted on by

“Be sincere if you want other people’s money” an influencer is told during a contract negotiation, but as she’s forced to admit in Park Dong-hee’s tense kidnap thriller Drive (드라이브) her whole world is hollow. Even so, sincerity was it seems something people wanted from her and tragically did not get, though for others what undoubtedly sells is a fantasy life of “easy” money and total independence free from an oppressive work culture if not quite from the patriarchal society. 

An opening sequence charts the gradual evolution of Yuna (Park Ju-Hyun) from shy young woman venturing into streaming to rising star of the online world. As someone points out she’s good at negotiating though is prepared to screw over even those closest to her in the hope of advancement while indulging in underhanded tactics such as encouraging companies to break contracts with other streamers with the promise of covering their damages. She’s also secretly plotting to throw over her long time manager and join a large media conglomerate even if, as it turns out, the boss is about to make her an indecent proposal. 

Yet the truth she’s confronted with after being kidnapped is that none of it’s quite real. She doesn’t actually have vast wealth, nothing really belongs to her but is merely on loan to use as endorsements. Stuffing her in the boot of her own car, the kidnapper asks for a million won which Yuna can’t pay leading them to force her to livestream her own kidnapping and hopefully earn the remainder of the money from her adoring fans. The problem is that no one really believes she has actually been kidnapped. Everyone assumes it’s a publicity stunt while the kidnapper tells her if she doesn’t get the money she’ll be driven into a scrapyard and never seen again. 

Now dependent on her “fans” whom she had previously described as “creeps”, Yuna is repeatedly told to reveal her real self. The boot of the car becomes a kind of purgatorial space, Yuna later coming to the realisation that the reason she’s not been able to escape is that she has not yet succeeded embracing herself as she is. Her YouTube persona is constructed as much for herself as others, to protect herself from unpleasantness or the stigma of being unsuccessful. She invents a life for herself as the daughter of a businessman who took his own life after his business failed, but prides herself on being a good businesswoman even if that means some underhanded tactics but then she’s not the only one playing dirty in the influencer game.

Yuna certainly has a “drive” to succeed, but the paradox lies in the enigma of the degree to which people, including herself, expect or deflect sincerity. Some obviously crave it, desperate to believe that Yuna really is their friend who cares for them deeply while others want the exact opposite, a hollow figure onto which they can project their image of contemporary success and fantasy of living the high life. It seems that success has made Yuna less forgiving, adopting a haughty attitude and frequently dismissing those around her. If she wants to get out of the boot, she’s going to have to face her authentic self finally looking at her own reflection in the blank screen of a tablet long after the stream has ended. 

The kidnapper challenges her to debase herself, asking how far she’ll go to save her life but equally if her “fans” are willing to pay to save her while other streamers later get in on the action too, mainly getting in the way and willing to endanger Yuna’s survival for their own livelihood. In someways exposing the hollow artifice of influencer culture, the film eventually pulls back to ask if it isn’t a frustrated desire for connection fuelled by those who long to be seen and are in effect attempting to fill an emotional void with the quantifiable love of an online following. At the peak of her success, Yuna realises her time may be ending as young stars creep up behind her and she has to run to stay in the game but in the end can no longer run from herself or the hollowness of her life whether she really does end up on the scrap heap of contemporary culture or not. 

Drive screens in Chicago Oct.7 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Bunji Sotoyama, 2023)

Posted on by

Japan’s rapidly ageing society has provoked an epidemic of loneliness but also perhaps new business opportunities in Bunji Sotoyama’s empathetic social drama Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Chanomi Tomodachi). The phrase may sound innocuous enough, but given some potentially outdated cultural connotations the men who spot the advert cunningly placed in a newspaper to catch the eyes of older readers may have reason to assume that it’s more than just tea and chat on offer. Though as it turns out, it’s not just the old who are lonely as a younger generation in turn often in conflict with their parents also attempt to seek security and comfort in found family.

That said, there’s something a little cult-like about the way that Mana (Rei Okamoto), a former sex worker, talks about her organisation which aims to cure late life loneliness through what others might describe as an elderly sex ring. Employing a collection of older women, she accompanies them to meet new clients where they silently slide viagra over the table. The gentleman caller subscribes to a plan to purchase “tea” and anything that happens inside the hotel room they subsequently go to is just “free love” rather than “prostitution”. Mana sees herself as running a “community safety net” and helping elderly people who might otherwise have become isolated and depressed keep active as part of one big happy family along with the other members of staff who have, like her, become estranged from their parents and relatives. 

For Yoshiki, one of the men who escorts the ladies around, it’s that he views his father as a failure for leaving a well-paid corporate job to open a bakery which subsequently went bankrupt and has led to him living in his car. He thinks that in the end it’s better not to try at all than be left with the humiliation of things not working out. But then for Mana herself it’s more a sense of parental rejection. After a difficult childhood, her now terminally ill mother continues to reject her on the grounds of her history of sex work while she continues to crave the unconditional love of a family. Like a mother hen, she nestles those around her into the Tea Friends organisation which operates out of her own home and strives to create a place where everyone can feel they belong. 

Which is all to say she’s the loneliest one of all, but as someone else later cautions her you can’t cure your own loneliness with the loneliness of others. What she sees as a social enterprise others may see as a deliberate attempt to take advantage of vulnerable people who have admittedly been let down by an indifferent society and are in need of the money even more so than comfort or validation. At the other end of the spectrum, a young woman working at Tea Friends discovers that she is pregnant but her boyfriend immediately rejects her, insisting that he refuses to take responsibility and revealing that he is already married. Chika wants to have her baby, but everyone seems to be telling her that she shouldn’t. The doctors seem to look down on her after realising she isn’t married and the father most likely not in the picture, while an attempt to inquire about benefits at the town hall leads only to judgement as the clerk pithily tells her that they’re there for when you need them but she shouldn’t “depend” on them too much virtually calling her a scrounger and implying she’s been irresponsible in becoming a single mother. 

As another of the older women admits, being used was better than being ignored and at least being part of Tea Friends gave her a sense of purpose and acceptance if only for a time. In any case, Mana’s attempt to find unconditional love from her new “family” largely flounders as even those she’d come to believe herself close to desert her when the threat of legal proceedings enters the picture leaving her to face the music alone while she continues to protect them insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong even if it it was technically against the law. An old man’s devastation on picking up the phone and getting no answer suggests that Mana might have had a point when she said it was a social service seeing as no one else seems keen to tackle the problem of late life loneliness even if she did go about it in a problematic way. As Mana often says, righteousness does not equal happiness and it is often outdated social brainwashing that keeps people unhappy and not least herself as she struggles to find the unconditional love lacking in her life that would enable her to cure her own loneliness even in the prime of her youth.

Tea Friends screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)