Tag: 2024

The Desperate Chase (필사의 추격, Kim Jae-hoon, 2024)

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The peaceful life of Jeju Islanders is disrupted by the threat of crime and drugs in Kim Jae-hoon’s zany comedy, The Desperate Pursuit (필사의 추격, Pilsaui Chugyeok). Though nobody is really being desperately pursed, time moves quite slowly on Jeju, the film plays into a generalised anxiety in recent Korean film in which the local community is fearful of “foreign” incursion, not only from meddling mainlanders but from Chinese investors who are currently buying up land and thereby pushing locals out.

The main drama revolves around an old-fashioned market that Taiwan-based gangster Zhu (Yoon Kyung-ho) wants to use as a medical centre that will act as a drug hub. Everyone who works there uses Jeju dialect and is keen to protect this disappearing slice of their local culture. According to some, they’ve already seen off the yakuza and aren’t planning on giving in to Triads either, though Zhu has already proved himself more ruthless by murdering his mole at the market when he asked the gangsters to avoid using violence because it was making his job of convincing people to take the settlement money and leave more difficult. Meanwhile, detective Su-gwang (Kwak Si-yang) who has been transferred to the island temporarily due to excessive use of force in Seoul remarks on how the landscape has changed since he last visited with all the new Chinese-owned skyscrapers.

To that extent, the contrast between the area around the airport and the location Su-gwang eventually finds himself in couldn’t be more stark. Though he encounters difficulty finding accommodation ironically because he’s from the mainland and all the landlords assume he’ll end up doing a moonlight flit, echoing the issues faced by international residents in the city, he’s eventually billeted in a pleasant country cottage owned by Ms. Yoo (Ye Soo-jung), leader of the market resistance, despite the objections of the crotchety old man who rents the other room. He’s not anticipating having to do a lot of policing, but is put straight on the case of a known conman they think may be in the area despite having previously fled abroad to evade all the warrants out against him. 

The conman is one thing, but the other disruptive force is the beauty clinic run by Dr. Yang (Park Hyo-joo) with the very ominous name of “Omerta”. Yang is cahoots with Zhu after having spent some time in China after losing her medical license due to providing illegal pain killers to her VIP patients in a damning indictment of amoral and exploitative status-driven culture. Their aim is to start dealing fentanyl in Korea through Jeju, though Yang warns him it’s a risky prospect with no infrastructure in place and in consideration of Korea’s tight drug laws, but Zhu is insistent. One of the chief weapons they have against Yang is that she only treats “VIPs” of which there aren’t any in the local community. In order to create a diversion, the local women eventually storm the place demanding treatment and accusing Yang of discrimination in their proud Jeju accents. 

Meanwhile, Su-gwang and his colleagues battle police corruption while trying to attack the real source of disorder in the form of Zhu and his men who have already struck deals with the local authorities. Zhu speaks fluent standard Korean and claims to have had a Korean father, though he abandoned him when he was five, but is also irritated by the constraints placed on him in this new territory. It really does turn out that everything about personal connections in Jeju, though in a more positive sense than it first sounded as the islanders band together to protect the market and expel the corruption of Zhu’s gang who want to ruin the beautiful local landscape and corrupt the populace by dealing drugs.

It has to be said, however, that there’s something a little sinister in the justification of Su-gwang’s violent policing which is treated as a bit of joke while coming from a place of righteous fury at the contemporary society in which the rich and powerful are free to get away with their crimes thanks to their connections. Jeju, however, does seem to mellow him a little with its laid-back atmosphere and cast of quirky characters where everyone really does know everyone even if outsiders are still viewed with a degree of suspicion. Partly a kind of tourist ad for the local community, the film paints the island as a place of warmth both in terms of its climate and the kindness of the locals, at least once you get to know them.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

I, the Song (མོ་གི་གསང་བའི་ཞབས་ཁྲ, Dechen Roder, 2024)

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Nima’s (Tandin Bidha) boyfriend Penjor tells the tourists who come into his restaurant to experience the local culture that Bhutan is one big happy family where everyone knows everyone. This will turn out not to be the case, as Nima finds herself mistaken for someone else and struggling to affirm her own identity when everyone begins to tell she is someone she knows she is not. Dechen Roder’s I, the Song (མོ་གི་གསང་བའི་ཞབས་ཁྲ) paints a slightly less rosy vision of the so-called happiest nation of earth in which women like Nima are oppressed by patriarchal standards that are so deeply ingrained she had barely noticed them before.

Nima’s outrage runs slightly deeper than the frustration of being accused of something she hasn’t done partly because of the shame and embarrassment involved with being associated with an erotic video, but also because of its inevitable consequences. She’s let go from her job as a schoolteacher when parents complain after identifying her as the subject as a viral “blue video,” one clearly shot and uploaded to the internet without the woman’s consent. No matter how much Nima protests that it isn’t her, nobody believes her. Not only is she fired from her job, even her boyfriend distances himself from her. He scoffs a little resentfully that she’s always so proper, yet has apparently done something like this with another man. Nima is indeed quite “proper”, a little stiff and repressed. She lives her life in a conservative way, always demure and polite. It is difficult to believe that she would have had a one night stand with a man who filmed their encounter, but despite the incongruity, everyone assumes she must be lying to protect her reputation. Nima determines that the only thing to do is find the woman in question and get her to confess so she can prove to them that it really isn’t her.

But that proves a little more difficult than she first assumed it would, because every lead she turns up turns cold. Meto has disappeared into the ether like a ghost. Some say she went to America, as Nima herself apparently once did, though she doesn’t seem particularly worldly. In any case, many remark that people change after they go abroad, almost as if they were equating it as a kind of death or transition to another world. One of Meto’s old friends even suggests Nima actually is Meto having returned from America with a new identity and changed personality. The more she investigates Meto, the less certain Nima becomes of herself. What was so wonderful about your life, Meto’s former boyfriend Tandin (Jimmy Wangyal Tshering) asks her when she explains why she’s looking for Meto and Nima has to admit that maybe she doesn’t have an answer.

In looking for Meto, is she of course really looking for herself but Meto has been a lot of people too. Nima discovers that Meto came from a small village to reclaim a song that stolen by the city. Meto’s grandmother says that bad things will happen in the village if they don’t get it back, but how exactly can you return a song? In the end, Meto has become a song to Tandin who struggles to accept her sudden absence assuming she must have just left him and decided to move on without a word as she apparently had from other lives before this. In a way, Nima is returning the song of Meto in learning to sing it, bringing it home to her grandmother as if closing a loop.

What she eventually realises is that it shouldn’t matter if it was her in the video or not. The shame wasn’t Meto’s to bear, and investigating her fate she uncovers a dark history of sexual harassment and exploitation. Using her newfound identity, Nima tries to get justice for Meto by reporting the man who did this to her as a means of standing up for herself and the other women of Bhutan held to unfair double standards while men like Meto’s abuser are free to continue abusing their authority. She has in a way learned to become herself while sort of becoming someone else and reclaiming an identity that should have been hers all along in the discovery of a newfound freedom.

I, the Song screened as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Last Woman on Earth (지구 최후의 여자, Yeum Moon-kyoung & Lee Jong-min, 2024)

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Wronged by an internationally famous film director, a pair of aspiring filmmakers set their sights on cinematic revenge in Yeum Moon-kyoung and Lee Jong-min’s meta comedy, Last Woman on Earth (지구 최후의 여자, Jigu Choehuui Yeoja). Even so, they find themselves mired in a world of sexism and artistic jealousy ruled over by powerful elites content to feed on their aspiration, chew them up and spit them out only to, on the one hand, insist that exploiting them made them sad, and then on the other barely remember them at all and claim they did nothing wrong.

Hana and Cheol each have painful histories with a Hong Sang-soo like festival darling that have frustrated both their lives and artistic careers. They meet in a film class where they workshop their movies that are also attempts to overcome their trauma. Hana’s is a high-concept sci-fi drama shot like a silent film and peppered with intertitles in which the only woman left on earth after a virus wiped out all the others is imprisoned by men who harvest her eggs and attempt to clone her. Cheol’s is Hollywood gangster noir set in Chicago in 1989 in which he kills an annoying old man who was holding him back. Cheol annoys Hana by pointing out the theme of her film was “misandry”, as if there were something wrong with that, while she points out his film is obviously about his resentment towards a father figure. Even so, Cheol thinks the reason no one likes his script its that it’s too manly, and he could use some female input to help him score points on the grant application, which is how they end up working together.

Their various traumas highlight the problems in the mainstream film industry, even if Cheol’s problem is, in another meta touch, with indie filmmakers who make indie films to show to indie people at indie festivals. After being talked into a nude scene a more famous actress had refused to do, Hana became the talk of the town while her scenes from the movie ended up porn sites. She became a sex symbol, but was shamed out of show business. The only jobs she got offered were erotic movies and all she could do in the end was abandon her old identity. As she reveals in a lengthy musical number, she still wants to make films even though it’s painful and no one wants to seem to letter.

Like her, Cheol sought the approval of a master but feels betrayed by him. Tak stole his screenplay and used it to win awards in Europe without crediting him. Even since then, he’s been determined to become the Ant-Tak by doing what he couldn’t, making a hit popcorn movie that’s nothing more that an good time at the movies. But even Cheol can’t completely abandon the patriarchal mindset, first gender-flipping his revenge drama, then changing gears to make Hana the hero only to suddenly appear as a male character to swoop in and save her from the evil professor, Tak. 

Throughout the runtime, there’s the sense that the world is coming to an end, and of course it is because the world of this film lasts only until the closing credits. Still, they want to make the film anyway, even if there’s no tomorrow and no one will see it, because it’s what they have to do. They start out by making a documentary about Tak, hoping to destroy the Korean film industry by exposing what he’s really like. But Tak doesn’t really take them seriously. He points out he’s not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon Ho, so no one’s going to watch their film anyway. Though he claims to feel bad about what happened to Hana after he used her for his film, he also says that it’s not his fault because that’s just how things were and everybody did it. Like Cheol, he’s now trying to make a “feminist” film to atone, laying bare the cynicism of these kinds of gestures intended only to whitewash the image of a tainted artist. But films after all “next world” and the way out. You can make one on your own, and it doesn’t really matter if no one sees it. Killing her past trauma, Hana transfers fully into the world of cinema, staying with Cheol to watch the world end as the camera continues rolling on waiting for the next world to enter the frame.

The Last Woman on Earth screens in Chicago March 27th as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Adabana (徒花 –ADABANA–, Sayaka Kai, 2024)

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What constitutes a good life? Is it what you leave behind, or the experience of comfort and contentment? The Adabana of Sayaka Kai’s existential drama refers to a barren flower that will never bear fruit and is intended to survive for only one generation, yet its life is not without meaning and for the time that is alive, it is beautiful. Accepting the burden of death can be liberating, while the burden of life provokes only suffering born or constraint.

Or at least, the conflicted Shinji (Arata Iura) has begun to contemplate after becoming terminally ill pressured to undergo surgery that will save his life at the cost of his “unit”, a kind of clone intended for the provision of spare parts should their individual encounter some kind of medical issue. In this world, a virus has inhibited human reproduction and led to a desire to prolong life in order to provide a workforce. This is done largely through the use of clones, though it’s clear to us right away that this is a technology only accessible to the wealthy elite.

In the Japanese, the units are referred to euphemistically as “sore” or “that”, as if their presence was slightly taboo and Shinji is encouraged to view his not as a person but as a thing to be used when needed, like a replacement battery or parts for an engine. Nevertheless, it nags at him that another being will die for him to live. The hospital director instructs him that he cannot die because he is important as the heir to this company which suggests both that his existence is more valuable than others and that he is actually worth nothing at all outside of his role as the incarnation of a corporation. Kai often presents Shinji and his clone on opposite sides of the glass as if they were mere reflections of each other or two parts of one whole. Their existences could easily have been switched and either one of them could have been designated the “unit” or “original”. 

On Shinji’s side of the glass, the world is cold and clinical. He feels constrained by his upper class upbringing and feels as if he is ill-suited to this kind of life. He has flashbacks to a failed romance with a free-spirited bar owner (Toko Miura) whom he evidently abandoned to fulfil parental expectations through an arranged marriage deemed beneficial to the family’s corporate interests. He has one daughter, but has no feelings for his wife and resents his circumstances. Beyond the glass, meanwhile, is a kind of pastoral paradise where his unit fulfils himself with art, though Shinji never had any artistic aptitude of his own. The unit says that there was a female unit he can’t forget who was taken seven years ago hinting at his own sad romance, yet he’s completely at peace with the idea that his purpose in life was only to give it up so that Shinji might live. In the surgery, he will achieve his life’s purpose, though Shinji is beginning to see it only as a prolongation of his suffering. 

The unit’s speech is soft and slightly effeminate in contrast with the suppressed rage and nervousness that characterise Shinji’s way of speaking, and what becomes clear to Shinji is the ways in which they’re different rather than the same. He wonders if his unit would be kinder to his family and more able to adapt to this way of life from which he desires to be liberated. His psychiatrist, Mahoro (Kiko Mizuhara), too finds herself conflicted by his interactions with his unit beginning to wonder what her own nature and purpose might be. The units are shown videos featuring the memories of their originals, though apparently only the good parts, which suggests that in some cases the original actually dies and is replaced as if they and the unit were otherwise interchangeable with the unit learning to perform a new role despite having had completely different life experiences that are only partially overwritten by a memory transfer. What is it then that makes us “us”, if not for our memories both good and bad? On watching her own tape, Mahoro feels as if it’s somehow changed her, resulting in a nagging uncertainty about things unremembered coupled with the pressures of being under constant surveillance. For Shinji at least, it may be that he too sees liberation in death and envies a life of fruitless simplicity over his own of suffering and constraint.

Adabana screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Images: © 2024 ADABANA FILM PARTNERS _ DISSIDENZ

Ghost Train (괴기열차, Tak Se-woong, 2024)

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Why are there so many stories about haunted stations? Perhaps it’s their liminal status that gives them an eerie quality. By definition, you’re not supposed to stay here. To that extent, they’re a kind of purgatorial space between one destination or another. We leave so quickly it’s like a part of us is left behind, hovering, and never able to find the exit. In any case, Gwanglim seems to have its fair share of ghost stories as investigated by “horror queen” Da-kyung (Joo Hyun-young) in an attempt to boost the fortunes of her failing YouTube channel.

She herself admits that her problem is she’s run out of content, which is why she’s badgering the stationmaster (Jeon Bae-soo) for information on this supposedly haunted spot. The funny thing is that the stationmaster seems to know a lot more than you’d expect about these cases, including their full backstories, which have nothing to do with the station or his job. You’d think that would give Da-kyung pause for thought, but she’s already drunk on the promise of a scoop and has ironically convinced the stationmaster to talk with the gift of alcohol. As she continues to listen to his stories and the ratings of her channel improve, she takes on an increasingly vampiric appearance while the stationmaster seems to become ever sicker. Nevertheless, Da-kyung only becomes thirstier for gruesome tales even as the stationmaster tries to warn her off by asking what the real reason behind her animosity to rival beauty influencer Lina (Jung Han-bit) might be.

In this, her story parallels that of a young girl on the train who is insecure in her appearance and contemplating plastic surgery only to be haunted by a woman in bandages seemingly jealous of the beauty the young girl doesn’t know she already has. Da-kyung has a crush on her boss, Woo-jin (Choi Bo-min), but thinks he prefers Lina and not just because her channel pulls in millions of viewers. Lina is a classic mean girl who endlessly puts Da-kyung down as a means of asserting her own superiority while Da-kyung secretly looks down on her for her vacuity. As her channel improves and she grows in confidence, Da-kyung sheds her dowdy outfits for something a little more stylish but is still consumed by resentment towards Woo-jin in her, it seems possibly mistaken, belief that he prefers Lina because she aligns more closely with socially defined ideas of typical femininity in her tendency to behave like a silly girl who can’t do anything for herself except look pretty around men. 

It is, as the stationmaster says, foolish to chase after what you think you’re missing and end up losing what you already had instead of learning to happy just with that. The other stories too are about overreaching greed, such as that of a homeless man who discovers a magic vending machine that disappears people and allows him to pick up their clothes and wallets to enrich himself though he never escapes the station despite his increasing desire to disappear random people until the point he realises he has consumed himself. Da-kyung is urged to delete her videos by someone who encountered something dangerous at the station, explaining that it’s built on the former site of a chapel that belonged to a cult where a mass suicide took place, further suggesting that the location itself is greedy for the souls of those who were, in a way, trying to turn away from this hyper-capitalistic vision of the world only to fall victim to it.

The stationmaster too dislikes those who profit from the misery or misfortune of others, which is what he assumes Da-kyung to be doing in her voracious appetite for ghost stories. In the very first tale, a young woman repeatedly bangs her head into a glass door, but no one attempts to help her. Everyone just moves to another carriage or generally away from her. These stories are only interesting for their gore and strangeness, no one really cares about the victims or learning from the past, which is to say we’re stuck in the station reliving the same trauma and unable to progress to a better a place. Da-kyung is stuck here most of all, and in her way, also hungry for souls lured in by lurid tales of untold horrors.

Ghost Train is released on Digital in the US on February 17 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Shinichiro Ueda, 2024)

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According to hostess bar and real estate mogul Tachibana (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), the secret to living a peaceful, ordinary life is to avoid becoming angry. Though it may not altogether be bad advice in that it’s often best to try to remain calm and reach a rational solution rather than losing one’s temper and acting impetuously, the way he says it is a veiled threat. Leave me alone, he means, and I’ll leave you alone too, otherwise neither of us will know peace again.

Shinichiro Ueda’s timely heist caper Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Angry Squad: Komuin to 7-nin no Sagishi) makes unlikely heroes of the tax man in exploring the disparities of wealth and power in the contemporary society. Middle-aged tax officer Kumazawa (Seiyo Uchino) is a man cowed by conformity. He’s been doing his job a long time and believes in cracking down on notable evaders, but has also become cynical and if, on one level, aware of the corruption that exists within the system that allows the very wealthy to overcome the rules, he’s content to keep his head down and ignore it. After all, he has responsibilities too with a family to support. He can’t afford to lose his job playing the hero. His much younger and very ambitious colleague Mochizuki (Rina Kawaei) has no such concerns and is willing to take on Tachibana without real fear of the consequences. 

Yet at the same time there’s a quiet rage that seems to be simmering in Kumazawa about the compromises he’s continuing to make. He jokingly tells a young woman how to fudge her taxes to claim an eel dinner as a business expense, but knows better than to poke the bear by looking into Tachibana’s tax affairs. When Mochizuki takes him to task, Tachibana comes for him directly by accusing him of using violence and threatening to have him fired unless he apologises and promises never to come after Tachibana again. Conscious of his own financial situation Kumazawa nods along. Mochizuki refuses and has her promotion withdrawn, though she does at least keep her job.

But the thing that really makes Kumazawa angry is that Tachibana didn’t even remember the name of his friend who took his own life after Tachibana framed him for misconduct to get rid of him. It’s this that convinces him to team up with what later seem to be ethical con people who are after Tachibana as a kind of revenge on society that is later revealed to have a personal dimension. Though Kumazawa is conflicted about the idea of committing what amounts to a crime, he accepts that it’s the only way they can ever hope to take Tachibana down. Even his old policeman friend tells him that his boss is chummy with Tachibana so they won’t go after him either suggesting this rot goes right to the top and the super wealthy essentially exist outside the law.

In a funny way, the weapon then becomes mutual solidarity and community action as this disparate group of people who each have a grudge against Tachibana come together to confiscate what he should have paid in taxes to force him to pay his fair share. The fact that his empire is built on hostess bars and is expanding into real estate suggests that his business is already exploitative while he only gets away with it because people don’t get angry enough to stop him. The authorities either take kickbacks, are being blackmailed, or enjoy being a part of his celebrity milieu so they shut down any attempts to ask questions. 

This Angry Squad are, however, prepared to play him at his own game harnessing Tachibana’s greed and vanity as weapons against him. As expected, they do so in a very humorous and intricately plotted way as the gang pool their respective strengths to pull off a major heist with a little unexpected help along the way. It turns out that you might need to take an unusual path to make even the tax office see the error of their ways, but it is after all for the fairly noble cause of reminding people that the rules should apply to everyone equally and all should be happy to contribute their fair share for a better run society.

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kaneko’s Commissary (金子差入店, Go Furukawa, 2024)

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The tranquil life a man has built for himself after leaving prison is disrupted by unexpected tragedy in Go Furukawa’s social drama Kaneko’s Commissary (金子差入店, Kaneko Sashiireten). The commissary of the title refers to a service run by those like Shinji (Ryuhei Maruyama) which handles deliveries to people in prison and arranges visits by proxy. In Japan, visiting hours only take place during the day on weekdays making it difficult for visitors who work regular jobs or live far away. There’s no way to make an appointment, either. Visitors must simply show up and wait with the possibility that it might not be possible so see their friends and relatives after all given that there are only so many meeting rooms available.

The commissary service is intended to mitigate this inconvenience by acting as a bridge between the imprisoned and their families, educating them about the prison system and advising them on what can and can’t be delivered. For Shinji it seems to be a means of atonement. Sent to prison for a violent crime when his wife Miwako (Yoko Maki) was pregnant with their first child, he’d angrily lashed out her when she skipped a visit little knowing it was because she was busy giving birth. Nevertheless, several years later he’s bonded with his son and is living a happy, peaceful life. The film subtly suggests that his is partly because he’s gained a strong and supportive familial environment anchored by his formerly estranged uncle who occupies the paternal space Shinji may otherwise have been lacking. He has a complex relationship with his mother who mainly visits when he’s not home to pressure Miwako into giving her money which she fritters away on toy boys much to Shinji’s embarrassment. It’s these complex feelings towards his mother that seem to fuel his fits of rage and threaten the integrity of his new family.

But by the same token, there is external pressure too in the low-level stigma and prejudice which surrounds them simply by virtue of their proximity to crime. Though they appear to be well accepted by the community, when their son Kazuma’s friend Karin in murdered by a young man with mental health issues, it refocuses the rage of the community on them too. Someone keeps smashing the flower pots outside their home, while Miwako is ostracised by the other women in the neighbourhood and de facto sacked from her part-time job because the other employees refuse to work on the same shift as her. Kazuma starts getting bullied at school because someone found out his father had been in prison, though what his father did is obviously nothing at all to do with him. 

In Japanese society, the extended family of those who’ve committed crimes is dragged into the spotlight. The mother of Karin’s killer Takashi is hounded by the media though as she says, much as she can’t understand why he did something like this, he’s a grown man and she’s not really to blame for his actions. Though we might originally feel sorry for her, especially as Takashi coldly rejects all her efforts on his behalf, she quickly becomes entitled and almost threatening. She pressures Shinji for news about her son, while he tries to avoid telling her that Takashi rejects her gifts and isn’t interested in her letters. Being forced to visit him tests the limits of his compassion as he too wonders if the man who killed Karin is really worthy of this level of care.

At the prison, he runs into another young woman who repeatedly tries to get in to see a prisoner despite the fact he keeps denying her requests. The lawyer Shinji works with has a theory about the girl, Sachiko (Mana Kawaguchi), and the yakuza she wants to wants to see. Now institutionalised, the yakuza discovered there was no place for him on the outside. His old boss was no longer around and he had no status in the underworld, so he probably committed a crime to be put away again, but at the same time maybe there was more to it than that. People save each other in unexpected ways, even it’s just with gentle acceptance and patience with a world that it is itself often lacking in the same.

Kaneko’s Commissary screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Silence of the Sea (海の沈黙, Setsuro Wakamatsu, 2024)

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Can there be any greater humiliation than having your work plagiarised and the other person’s being better? Renowned artist Tamura (Koji Ishizaka) feels he has to say something on seeing an old painting at an exhibition honouring his late mentor and realising it’s not the one he painted. He doesn’t think he ever had the ability to paint something with this kind of power even when he was young, and he didn’t even use the materials which appear to have given this version a emotional depth that the original never had.

In some ways, this is Tamura’s past literally coming to the surface to show him that his life has been a series of mistaken choices and whatever success he may have achieved it’s come at the cost of his artistic soul. The first part of Setsuro Wakamatsu’s Silence of the Sea (海の沈黙,, Chinmoku no Umi) ponders why Tamura might be so keen to confess this work isn’t his when he admits that it’s objectively “better”, but even if that might be true, he has to concede it isn’t him and therefore shouldn’t have his name on it. Though he appears to have become greedy and vain, trading on his connections and more of a celebrity artist than someone with real and urgent ideas to express, he is apparently willing to burn all his bridges on the altar of authenticity while simultaneously refusing to divorce his wife, the daughter of his late mentor, despite living with another woman and their child on the other side of the country.

But as someone else says, does it matter whose name is on the painting when it is beautiful in itself? Then again, this beauty is intended both to cover something up and to expose it. In his youth, Tamura apparently threw another artist, Lyuji (Masahiro Motoki), under the bus. 40 years later, Lyuji is a master forger living a life in the shadows tattooing young women with his fevered artistic visions. It’s true enough that he seems to see them only as “canvases” and otherwise rejects personal connection while still carrying a torch for Tamura’s now wife Anna (Kyoko Koizumi). He seems to be stuck in the past, forever meditating on a particular pairing, The Silence of the Sea, which reflected his own moment of trauma when his parents both drowned when he was a child. 

The film seems to pain Tamura and Lyuji as two sides of the same coin. The more Tamura’s star rose, the sicker and more humble Lyuji became as if he were literally bleeding him dry. In the words of his assistant, Lyuji had an imperative to depict beauty, but art seems to deplete him. He literally vomits blood on the canvas while struggling to recreate his lost painting and thereby return to the source of his trauma. The sea for him seems to represent life and death along with life’s beauty and terror, while for Tamura it is perhaps merely picturesque even if for both of them the sun is always setting.

One man has almost painted over the other, stolen a life that might have been meant for him though his talent may lie more in an ability to play the game than in art itself. But at the same time, Lyuji has destroyed himself through his selfishness and single-minded obsession with his art along with the internal traumas it turns out he cannot simply paint over. His life is like the candle that Anna makes in his image, slowly melting away and producing only a single tear from a lonely soul. His eventual conviction is that beautiful things need only exist in our hearts and minds as memory rather than as material things. As he says, measuring art in money is mere foolishness, which paints his career of forgery as an ironic revenge against the art world which values only what’s popular and has become a game for the rich to play to enhance their status little caring for the nature of the art itself. Yet this covering up and later revealing of a truth has led to several deaths, among them a man who lived for art and a woman who yearned for love only to end up a scorned muse of an emotionally distant man. The sea took them all, but for Lyuji at least it may finally have fallen silent in the final perfection of his art.

Silence of the Sea screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 Eiga Umi no Chinmoku INUP Co.,Ltd

The Hotel of my Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2024)

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What does a girl have to do to get her book published in this town? Adapted from the novel by Asako Yuzuki, Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s The Hotel of My Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Watashi ni Fusawashi Hotel) follows its eccentric heroine through a literary feud with an established master in an attempt to defeat a misogynistic, hierarchal and exploitative publishing industry and finally publish a full-length novel. In part a meditation on identity, the trades on its heroine’s charms and the comedic prowess of leading lady Non.

Set in 1984, the film begins and ends at the Hilltop Hotel popular with writers through the ages thanks to its proximity to book town Jinbocho and the offices of big time publishers. Using the pen name Taiju Aida, Kayoko (Non) is an aspiring author who won her publisher’s newcomer prize a few years previously for a short form essay but has been unable to write anything of substance since after being stung by a harsh review from literary master Higashijujo (Kenichi Takito). After learning from her editor Endo (Kei Tanaka) that Higashijujo is in the room upstairs and is on a tight deadline to complete a story for an upcoming anniversary anthology, Kayoko decides to impersonate a hotel maid so he’ll stay up all night and not make it, forcing Endo to use her story instead.

The irony is that Kayoko’s story is popular with readers and she has real talent as a writer that’s being suppressed by the publishing industry at large in the form of her former publisher, Endo, and Higashijujo. Higashijujo is a representative of a particular kind of older writer and is effectively acting as a gatekeeper by suggesting that young women like Kayoko have no place in the literary scene. Even so, he’s captivated by the story she tells him that’s the same as the essay she later has published which cleverly weaves in some of his own personal details. She plays on his vanity and lasciviousness in telling him she’s a big fan and is romantically naive as if dangling herself as bait. Higashijujo realises that Kayoko is Taiju Aida and kicks off a kind of literary feud in which he disrupts her career and she puts on various different personas to upset or embarrass him. 

Nevertheless, his rivalry with her does seem to stimulate his own latent artistic mojo and have him writing manically once again if partly out of resentment, while Kayoko is forced to change her name again before winning a note literary prize as “Junri Arimori” and writing with a completely different style. On realising that they may both be being manipulated by Endo who is setting them against each other in order to stimulate their writing, they team up against him by attempting to disabuse his daughters of the notion that Santa’s not real only they already know. They were just going along with the ruse because that’s a child’s job in much the same as Higashijujo suggests a writer’s is to conjure a pleasant fantasy for the reader and Kayoko creates a series of false personas further her own literary dreams. 

Yet as Kayoko says she’s not given the kind of support that other writers get and even after getting a book published has to go round to stores on her own to encourage them to stock and promote it. She only rises to prominence by charming a bookseller after catching a notorious book thief who didn’t even steal hers because he only takes “popular” books. Kayoko is indeed a total crazy lady, but perhaps you need to be in order to survive in this environment that’s still dominated by men like Higashijujo writing borderline sleazy novels and hanging out with hostesses in upscale Ginza bars. Resented by his daughter, he stays out in hotels for days at a time, leaving his wife alone and neglecting his family. Kayoko has to fight tooth and nail for her place in this space and to prove herself worthy of a room at the Hilltop Hotel while Higashijujo’s ride was must less fraught with difficulty even if it may not have been easy. The final message seems to be, however, that art is created best in opposition and success isn’t always good for an artist as Kayoko finds herself frustrated, feeling as if she hasn’t achieved all of her revenge but has no left to take it against while perhaps still manipulated by Endo who provides a source of authority for her to kick back against as literary queen trying to hang on to her throne.

The Hotel of my Dream screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2012 Asako Yuzuki_Shinchosha © 2024 “The Hotel of my Dream” Film Partners

Faceless (正体, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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The Japanese title of Michihito Fujii’s crime thriller Faceless (正体, Shotai), “true identity”, might suggest that there is a mystery surrounding the hero, that he is deliberately misrepresenting himself so that it is difficult to know who he “really” is. But in reality the opposite is true. His cover identities are only ever superficial and, in essence, he is always his true self which is one reason he encounters so many supportive people during his flight from the law in an attempt to clear his name after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.

Inspired by Tamehito Somei’s novel, the film is another in a long line critical of the authoritarian Japanese justice system which has a 99% conviction rate. Though its defenders may say that the lack of acquittals proves that cases are only brought to trial when the police are absolutely sure, that isn’t quite the case and the judicial system is often over-reliant on confessions which may be given under extreme duress and are therefore unreliable. Sayaka (Riho Yoshioka), a reporter who becomes determined to prove Keiichi’s innocence, has her own negative experience with the justice system when her father, ironically a lawyer, is falsely convicted of groping a schoolgirl on a train. As her father points out, when so many people are hounding you he can understand why some give in and just say they did it to make it all stop. 

The police officer, Matanuki (Takayuki Yamada), also appears conflicted from the beginning and requests a full investigation of the crime but his superior tells him to just pin it on Keiichi (Ryusei Yokohama). The law is about to change so that 18-year-olds will be tried as adults, so he thinks it would set an example for other young people that they can’t take advantage of their adolescence to commit crimes assuming they won’t be prosecuted fully or that their records will be wiped when they come of age. There had been a minor moral panic at one time about children actively exploiting this legal loophole, though Matanuki’s boss’ dismissive attitude hints at his conservative perspective and authoritarian viewpoint. When Keiichi’s case begins to receive public interest, he tells Matanuki that the conviction must stand and that the “truth is unimportant in this case” because admitting they made a mistake would be disadvantageous for the police force’s reputation. Despite himself, however, Matanuki continues to follow his boss’ orders and pursue Keiichi even if he stops short of following them fully by refraining from firing at him when he tries to get away. 

Asked by Matanuki why he tried to escape from death row, Keiichi tells Matanuki that he wanted to believe the world was good and that if he stood up for what was right people would listen. It’s a trite sentiment that’s undermined by the central flaw of the narrative which is that Keiichi is an ideal wrong man. That he prospers simply being “nice” seems like a kind of cosmic judgement that insists, despite all the bad things that have happened to Keiichi, the universe rewards people who are “good” which is both a moral judgement and highly unrealistic. Like Fujii’s Day and Night, the film hints at the prejudice directed at men like Keiichi who have no blood family and were raised in care while also pointing the finger at similar systemic injustices such as exploitation of labourers denied proper compensation for workplace injuries by thuggish bosses who intimidate them out of pressing for their rights under existing labour law.

As such the film posits solidarity as the best weapon against an oppressive system as the various people who’ve witnessed Keith’s “true self” and been helped by him come to his aid in return. What turns his fortunes is a critical mass of ordinary people standing up and saying that this isn’t fair, giving Matanuki the confidence to defy his boss by going rogue and admitting their mistake publicly at a press conference thereby returning the case to the people and preventing the authorities from covering it up. That justice is eventually served sort of reinforces the idea that this is a good world after all because it’s filled with basically good people who believe in truth and fairness even if the people that govern them don’t, which, though it might be a superficially happy ending for all, is rather optimistic and otherwise ignores that not everybody is so lucky and nothing has fundamentally changed within the justice system to prevent things like this happening again.

Trailer (no subtitles)