Tag: 2024

Black Dog (狗阵, Guan Hu, 2024)

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When a dusty sign pops up in Guan Hu’s Black Dog (狗阵, gǒu zhèn) advertising the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a relic of a long forgotten past. On the edge of the Gobi desert, Chixa has a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, a kind of reverse frontier town for a society in retreat. It takes on an almost purgatorial quality for prodigal son Lang (Edward Peng Yu-Yan) who returns after spending nearly a decade in prison for an incident that seems like may not have been entirely his fault but for which he continues to face enmity and a petty vendetta from a local gangster/snake farmer Butcher Hu.

Lang himself is aligned with the stray dogs who have begun to reclaim the town which has long since been abandoned by industry. The moribund zoo where his father has taken to living is testament to the prosperity the area may once have had though now it’s a ghost town of China’s industrialising past strewn with the disused factories of Socialist era dealt a deathblow by the economic reforms of the ‘90s. Yet we’re also told that the reason the stray dogs must be expelled is so the town can be redeveloped and new factories take the place of the old which does not seem to hold the kind of promise for the townspeople one might expect. 

Constant references to the Olympics and its slogan “Live the Dream” only emphasise the irony. Geographically distant from Beijing, Chixa exists in an entirely different space from the Chinese capital and appears as if it were about to collapse in on itself. Half the town is plastered with demolition signs and in the end it’s the people who are displaced as much the dogs. Guan often rests on ominous visions of the strays standing on a small hilltop and then recalls the image in the film’s closing scenes as the dogs are replaced by townspeople watching a once in a generation total eclipse on the eve of the opening of the games.

With nothing much else to do, Lang, a former rockstar and motorcycle stuntman in the town’s more prosperous days which themselves even seem to echo the 1950s more than the late ‘90s, joins the campaign to beat the canines into retreat at the behest of local gangster Yao (played by director Jia Zhangke) but begins to identify and sympathise with them especially once it becomes obvious that the new regulations are exploiting dog owners by forcing them to pay to have their animals registered. Those who can’t or won’t have their pets confiscated, Lang silently rescuing one girl’s little’s pet pooch while her grandmother tries to argue with the dog catchers before they take them all to what is effectively a concentration camp for dogs. The film’s Chinese title is in fact “Dog Camp,” and it becomes clear that it’s Lang who’s stuck there, trapped by his past and the dismal realities of the socioeconomic conditions of late 2000s China.

Hoping to earn a little extra cash he decides to try catching a wanted fugitive, the Black Dog of the title who is mistakenly believed to have rabies only to end up bonding and identifying with it. At several points, Lang echoes the movements of the dog such as placing his head on the chest of his dying father as the crowd below his hospital room prepare to welcome the opening the Olympics via a large screen in the town square. His relationship with the dog begins to restore his sense of compassion and humanity while a tentative connection with a young woman equally trapped by her transient existence and toxic relationship with a fellow circus performer opens his eyes to new possibilities of a life of freedom on the open road no longer bound by the constraints of a society in flux. Elegantly lensed grainy photography and the occasional use of synth scores lend the film an elegiac, retro quality that recalls the cinema of the fifth generation while casting a subversive eye over the compromises of the modern China itself trapped by its past and trading on former glory from which stray dogs like Lang can find escape only by running from the pack. 

Black Dog is in UK cinemas from 30th August courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

All Shall Be Well (從今以後, Ray Yeung, 2024)

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There’s nothing that breaks a family apart as quickly as an inheritance. As a cynical lawyer points out, even mothers and sons fall out when it comes to money, so there’s nothing like it to to focus minds with an us and them mentality to clearly define who is and isn’t included under the umbrella of family. But why is it that meaningless pieces of paper hold so much sway over us when we ought to by be governed by the emotional truths that until a moment earlier ruled our lives?

Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) had been fond of saying “because we’re family.” She never doubted her place in that of her partner who all appear, at least outwardly, to love her and accept her relationship with Pat in the way they’d accept any other marriage. But when Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) suddenly passes away in her sleep after one last family celebration the situation changes. Well-meaning family members step in to help with the work that must be done when someone dies, but perhaps unwittingly begin to take over slowly erasing Angie from their lives as not really one of them after all.

Her problems are two-fold. The biggest being that Pat never got round to making a will, nor did she think to put Angie on the deeds to the apartment they shared together or leave her financially provided for seeing as she’d managed all the money they’d made when they owned a factory and ran it together. The secondary problem is that Hong Kong does not recognise same sex marriage and so their relationship was not legally recognised. Had Angie been legally married to Pat, she should have inherited everything anyway because she was her spouse even without a will but with things the way they are she’s at the mercy of Pat’s brother Shing (Tai Bo). She never thought this would be a problem, because they’re family, but slowly realises that perhaps they don’t actually see her that way and with Pat gone no longer feel the need to include her.

Her sister-in-law Mei (Hui So Ying) insists on using a feng shui expert to plan the funeral who quickly puts the kibosh on Angie’s desire to have Pat buried at sea as she’d requested. Leaving aside the possibility that the feng shui master is conning them and receiving financial incentives from the people who run the columbarium, the family quickly begin to ignore Angie’s concerns swayed by the claims that interring her ashes will be more beneficial for her descendants which are Mei and Shing’s children seeing as Angie and Pat had none of their own.

A little disappointed in her kids, Mei at one point insensitively remarks that Angie is lucky not to have any though we’re also told that she almost gave in to parental pressure to marry a man in order to become a mother. Daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) makes lowkey racist remarks about her Indian neighbours as a way of expressing her frustration with her moribund marriage and unsatisfying living arrangements, while son Vincent (Leung Chung Hang) struggled to find employment and now works as an Uber driver thanks to the gift of a car from Angie and Pat which allows him to earn a living. He’s originally upset with his family’s suggestion of kicking Angie out of the apartment, but is also in a difficult position himself when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and they can’t find anywhere habitable to live on the kind of salary an Uber driver can earn. Though in her 60s, Mei is still doing a physically strenuous job as a hotel maid while Shing has taken a position he finds degrading as a nightwatchman at a carpark following the closure of his restaurant some years previously. 

The implication is these socio-economic pressures encourage them the abandon their responsibility to Angie as the beloved aunt they’ve known all their lives. But then there’s also the mild homophobia that rears its head, introducing Angie as Pat’s “best friend” and not allowing her to stand in the front with family at Pat’s funeral as if their relationship wasn’t really real because they were both women. Of course they may have behaved the same way had Pat been a man, squeezing Angie out because she had no legal claim as a common-law spouse, but it certainly seems to make it easier for them to abandon her and take everything she worked so hard to build with Pat as if they were really entitled to it. Shing justifies himself that he has to look after “his” family, which doesn’t include Angie, while cruelly implying that it’s what Pat would have wanted. 

In the end, Angie is left with no other option than to sue for her “rightful” share as a ”dependent” in an effort to force the family to recognise the legitimacy of her relationship with Pat. Thankfully she has another family in her community, though her own still living parents only partially accepted her relationship with Pat again referring to her as a “best friend” and making cracks about how she never married. But her family was Pat, and Pat is gone. Yeung paints a touching picture of grief as Angie reacts all the things she did with Pat but now alone, accompanied only by a sense of absence and comforted by her memories while otherwise exiled from a world that had seemed until then filled with familial love.

All Shall Be Well screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Junichi Yasuda, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Is there something a little sad about being forced to reenact your reality as theatre, or is it something to be proud of in adapting to the times and bringing the essence of what you once were with you? Junichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Samurai Time Slip) like A Boy and His Samurai sees an Edo-era retainer transported to the present day but is less about contrast with the feudal past than how to carry on or start again when your time has ended.

At least that’s how it is for Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi), a member of the Aizu Clan loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate in the twilight of the feudal era. In arriving in our present, he’s forced to admit that days of the samurai are long over, and finds himself a man with out a place, adrift in a classless society in which the only skill he possesses, swordsmanship, is all but obsolete. The irony is that, after being transported by a Terminator-style lightening strike, Shin arrives on the set of a jidaigeki, or samurai-themed television drama which is to say an artificial recreation of his reality. Thus he’s confused when he tries to ask passers-by for directions and they seem alarmed and ignore him while his attempt to intervene when a young lady is bullied by rogue samurai earns him a dressing down from a man in strange dress we obviously know is the director. When he’s knocked out from a bump on the head, everyone assumes he’s got amnesia and has become confused between his role as an extra on a samurai drama in which he may have overinvested and his “real” life, which in a way maybe true.

Just as he’d come from the end of the feudal era, so he’s arrived in the dying days of the jidaigeki. Once a mainstay of the entertainment industry in its heyday of the ’50s and ‘60s when historical dramas ruled the airwaves, the genre has long been in decline and somewhat out of favour with both filmmakers, seeing as they’re much more expensive to make, and audiences. In fact, the place where Shin arrives is a former shooting set that’s been turned into a theme park recreating the reality of the jidaigeki serial rather than that of the feudal era.

In an analogy which might prove slightly awkward, Shin’s fate is aligned with that of the jidageki itself but by accident of birth he is also on the wrong side of history both literally and metaphorically. As he later learns, his Aizu clan and the shogunate it served would not prevail. Yet ultimately he likes this new Japan, a place of prosperity where anyone and everyone is free to eat what to him seems like the food of the elite. Embarking on a career as a jidaigeki stuntman, a kiriyaku or extra who dies on screen, he becomes committed to protecting the jidaigeki in the same way he protected the shogunate even as everyone around him says he must be mad to take up this sort of work now when jobs are few and far between. 

To that extent, it’s really about learning to adapt to another reality preserving what you can (and wish to) about the past but continuing to move forward like a samurai living life fully in service of an ideal. In a sense, this is something the Aizu could not do for they were defeated during in the Boshin War which solidified the victory of progressive revolutionaries who believed that modernisation and Westernisation were the only ways to save Japan bringing the age of the samurai to a close. In strange ways, Shin finds himself re-enacting this internal dilemma through his meta performance, bringing a note of authenticity to the jidaigeki genre which as we can see from that being filmed is not always terribly serious or earnest about historical accuracy. 

There is though an earnest desire to preserve it, if also to modernise for a contemporary era accepting that the days of classic jidaigeki are over but the genre may live again if in different ways. Through roleplaying his internal conflict, Shin is able to overcome his lingering feelings of guilt towards the clan and attachment to the more destructive sides of the samurai code, rejecting his opportunity for revenge and deciding to live well instead in this brave new world seemingly filled with potential for reinvention and recreation in which the past need not be cast away or overwritten but carried forward into new futures of its own.

A Samurai in Time screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Place Called Silence (默杀, Sam Quah Boon Lip, 2024)

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Can the hammer of truth break the rock of silence? At the end of Sam Quah’s remake of his own 2022 film by the same name, A Place Called Silence (默杀, mò shā), you might ask if you really want to or if some secrets are best kept that way. Then again, Quah’s persistent focus on leaky roofs suggests the truth will out and that the slow drip of quietly collecting water will eventually erode even the strongest stone.

Though remade for the Mainland market, the film takes place in the fictional city of Doma which like many recent similarly themed films is ostensibly not located China but another area of South East Asia, the police uniforms and complex mix of languages and cultures strongly echoing those of the original Malaysian setting. This also extends to the increasingly Christianising imagery which leads back to a cult-like local charity that pedals a good book full of aphorisms landing somewhere between Confucius and Proverbs and are at best a superficial salve for the deeply rooted problems in what turns out to be a judgemental and classist society. 

At least, the reason no one challenges the increasingly extreme behaviour of school bully and queen bee Angie is because she’s the headmaster’s daughter. Angie has been relentlessly tormenting Tong largely because she has a disability and had until recently been taught in the special needs class. According to her mother, Han, Tong has been mute since birth and it’s in an attempt to get her a better education that she’s given up her job in accounting and taken a position as a cleaner at the school. Her mother’s profession is also another reason for Angie to bully Tong, though she also accuses Han of having seduced her father which does not appear to be true though his later admission to an “abuse of power” that gives Han leverage over him puts a different spin on the situation and does not cast him in a very good light. 

Neither does the state of disrepair at the school which has a persistently leaky roof that is at least according to handyman Zaifu structurally unsound and may cave in any minute. Some of the blame is placed on a recent tsunami which caused mass loss of life, and the school seems to be proud of itself for having taken in pupils from another institution that was swept away though they don’t appear to have been welcomed by everyone. When a pupil ends up dying because of Angie’s bullying, the headmaster delays calling for help in part it seems to evade a scandal while planning to simply bribe anyone who tries to look into the matter. 

In short, it’s not difficult to see why someone may feel they’d have to take the law into their hands to break the persistent silence that protects the wealthy and the powerful from the consequences of their actions. Though, truth be told, not everyone is very interested in the disappearance of the girls, Han is driven to distraction when she suspects that Tong has been abducted by a serial killer with a very particular motive who also seems to be aware of some secrets she herself had been keeping. Then again there are a lot of wilful silences, like that of Mrs Xu who later snaps that the whole building knew Han had suffered domestic violence yet apparently did nothing help her other than maintaining superficial politeness by avoiding bringing it up. 

Silence seems to be the only refuge for the bullied whether in school or the wider world for there’s little good in speaking up anyway. Tong tries to help a bullied friend, but her mother stops her, wary of their own need for silence and that Tong will simply become the next target which of course she does. Terrible things are done in the name of protection, but sometimes silence is necessary too and a means of atonement if not a weapon against life’s unfairness. An ambiguous mid-credits sequence somewhat muddies the waters in its implications though perhaps a concession to the censors demanding that crimes must be answered, but Quah otherwise depicts a hellish society of violence and powerlessness in which the only choices are silent complicity or murderous revenge.

A Place Called Silence is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Alienoid: Return to the Future (외계+인 2부, Choi Dong-hoon, 2024)

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Choi Dong-hoon’s hugely entertaining sci-fi-inflected fantasy adventure Alienoid ended with a classic cliffhanger promising resolution only in an as then unscheduled sequel. Part two arrives almost two years later and thankfully opens with a brief recap before delving straight into the ongoing drama as the older Ean pursues the Divine Blade that will allow her to stop humanity from being wiped out in a toxic gas attack by fugitive aliens.

Thus the majority of the first half takes place in the 14th century past as various parties vie over the blade in the manner of a wuxia serial. Ean is also on a quest to recover Thunder and get back to the crashed spaceship in order to get back to the future and stop the world being destroyed. But in some ways, she’s also now an orphan of time. She’s spent half her life back in the feudal era and will return to 2022 ten years older than she should be. Reuniting with Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), she finally figures out his identity and is more well disposed towards him, but also decides it would be better for them to head in different directions given the possibility that Muruk is a possible host for the missing Controller, the leader of a resistance movement among the alien criminals who have been imprisoned in the minds of humanity. 

Once again, the key to salvation lies in the past as we discover that Gae-lin (Lee Hanee) is a descendent of a blind swordsman who left very specific instructions for what to do during the alien attack. Ultimately, the aliens can only be defeated by a perfect integration of past and present as the Joseon team end up in 2002 complete with their magical weapons to fight a decidedly scientific threat. Though it’s true enough that the lines between science and magic are often thin and defined by a perspective on knowledge, it’s clear that Joseon magic continues to work in our world as the two bumbling shamans fight back with minor and pipe and Muruk pulls an incredibly heavy sword out his fan. 

Ean tells him that no matter if he may have a monster inside, Muruk is still Muruk guiding him on his journey towards an acceptance of himself as someone useful with genuine talent rather than just a hack. Choi throws in a series of twists and turns over who may be hosting the Controller at any given moment along with the true identities of several others as Ean attempts to handle her own baggage while tracking down Thunder and attempting to restore his energy levels so they can get back to the future and save the world. In order to defeat the aliens, they must all be united, past and future, coming together to defeat an alien threat.

Yet like the first film, we can see that this moment is both ending and beginning. Following a surprisingly poignant closing sequence the possibility of a new opportunity to set the past to rights is raised if on a more personal level that would allow orphans Ean and Muruk to unite in new time thereby closing a circle which otherwise remains open. In any case, the looping, elliptical quality of the cycling narrative eventually becomes clear and we understand where each of these disparate heroes belongs in the grand plan apparently orchestrated by Thunder and the now absent Guard. That’s not to say the rich lore underpinning the intricate world building is completely exposed and there is a sense that there are many other stories to be told in this madcap universe of scientists and magicians in the high tech present and feudal past.

In any case, Choi ups the ante with large scale sequences including a train chase that culminates in a derailment, while in the Joseon era the heroes leap from rooftop to rooftop and run through idyllic forests while pursued by mystical forces. Every bit as charming as the first instalment, the film builds on the existing relationships between its vast list of characters and generates a sense of warmth and familiarity that also has its melancholy as er really these two worlds cannot remain bridged forever but must eventually separate whether the alien threat prevails or not.

Alienoid: Return to the Future is out now on DVD & blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

House of Sayuri (サユリ, Koji Shiraishi, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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An excited family discover the perils of buying a “used” home in Koji Shiraishi anarchic haunted house horror House of Sayuri (サユリ, Sayuri). Unlike many other nations, Japan does not really have a comparable housing market as, given changing building regulations etc, it’s common to demolish the original structure and build a bespoke home in its place rather than move into one someone else has vacated. That obviously means that opting for an existing property can be a little bit cheaper, which is presumably how the Kakimis have finally managed to move into what they describe as the dream home, escaping a cramped city apartment for a spacious rural mansion with room enough for grandma and grandpa too.

Of course, this particular home is probably cheaper because something untoward once happened there, though the Kamikis probably don’t know that, and everyone who’s lived there since has moved out a short time later. In a way referencing Shiraishi’s previous work, we can’t really tell whether the malevolent spirit wants the family out or is merely trapped in a loop of revenge on the family that badly betrayed them. In any case, it makes its way through the Kamiki family unit starting with daughter Keiko and causing all manner of strange events in the house. Sensibly, older son Norio begins to ask why they don’t just move but the parents are so committed to their dream of homeownership that they can’t bear the thought and remain determined to hang on to it at whatever cost. 

In any case, some wise words from grandma advance a more positive way of battling the ghost, that they should fight it with the force of their lives. They laugh in its face and shout vulgar phrases that send it scuttling away in outrage. The best way to fight the darkness, grandma says, is to live well. Like the house itself, it seems grandma has a well hidden secret that makes her the film’s key asset, a hilarious force of nature and eternal wise woman otherwise ignored because her dementia undermines her credibility. Meanwhile, Norio makes an unexpected friend at school who just happens to be a psychic and is keen to warn that a little girl ghost has latched on to him and it would obviously be better if he could just move out on account of all the evil emanations that appear to be coming from his home.

But as grandma says, it’s the grudges of the living they ought to be afraid of. The house of course holds its secrets and its labyrinthine, multilevel structure is perfect for concealing them. Unfortunately the Kamikis have bought into this poisoned legacy and slowly start seeing their familial bonds fracturing while the ghost takes advantage of their vulnerabilities, their negative emotions and insecurities. In a sense it becomes a question of whether they can endure a place of trauma to maintain their dreams of homeownership or are prepared to make the more sensible decision of ceding ground and moving somewhere less toxic while Norio tries to reclaim his place in his family and protect what remains of it. 

Truly heading in some unexpected directions particularly in its unpredictable send half, the film takes on an absurdist quality but also returns to classic genre tropes of the legacy of child abuse and the betrayal of a parent who saw and did nothing perhaps because, like the Kamikis, they were prepared to accept this this kind of toxicity to maintain a happy family home and be seen as a model upper-middle class family living in a country mansion. It turns out, the only way to exorcise this much more literal ghost is by directly confronting the traumatic past and attempting to find accommodation with it be that through violence or forgiveness. But as grandma had said, the best weapon is love and life, throwing back at the ghost what it no longer has in a defiant expression of being alive and that joy contains which is also of course as grandpa had said a way of honouring the dead resolving to make the most of one’s remaining time in their memory. In any case, Norio discovers that you do not have to continue living in a haunted house but unlike a ghost are in fact free to leave the scene of trauma and seek new happiness in a less upsetting place.

House of Sayuri screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야, Kim Da-min 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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The sad thing is that Dong-chun, the heroine of Kim Da-min’s charming if also searingly bleak exploration of a Korean education FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야), is full of questions the adults around her don’t want to answer. To be charitable, it could be because they want her to have the ability to solve problems on her own, but less so because in the adult world there really is only one correct answer and finding solutions that are entirely your own can make others uncomfortable. 

This is something Dong-chun starts to realise, remarking that she now understands why adults don’t like it when you ask questions when her two imaginary friends ask her how she’s going to explain that she got the winning lottery numbers from a bottle of makgeolli that communicates with her through morse code but in Persian. Even Dong-chun knows, she probably shouldn’t mention that part out loud but there’s something quite poignant about the fact that the makgeolli is her only real friend. Her tendency to ask questions, which is difficult for her because of he shyness, has already seen her labelled as weird as by several of her classmates including the obnoxious Na-young who pretends to get along with her because their mothers are friends but is really much more of a model child try hard already obsessed with being on the right track and getting in the best lane for the university application she won’t be writing for another decade.

That’s something else that’s difficult and inexplicable. The education system keeps changing so you can’t even try to game it because they constantly move the goalposts. The reason why the mothers enrol the girls in Persian classes is because they think top universities will be making special offers to people who speak Persian when they come to apply, but also they might not. Concerned that she’ll be disadvantaged by her short stature, Dong-chun’s mother Hae-jin starts injecting her with a growth serum and advises she go to bed earlier, but the girl points out that she needs to stay up to 11pm to finish all her homework. She has cram school and activities nearly every day including an art class that doesn’t even start until 9pm. No one seems to be asking what effects persistent sleep deprivation may have on her later life and mental health besides impacting her height. 

In short, it’s not surprising if her mind’s begun to crack under the constant pressure of being forced to conform to a very rigid sense of social success which begins in early childhood and largely disregards everything that makes Dong-chun interesting from her insatiable curiosity to her empathetic nature and bashful friendliness. We can also get a glimpse ahead by looking at the life of her mother, Hae-jin, who reveals that she suffers from depression in part because she won a full scholarship to a good university and had a high paying corporate job she was pressured to give up to become a housewife and mother. A therapist perhaps problematically told her that she had the wrong attitude because she was now doing the most important thing in the world by raising a child which is why she begins pinning all her vicarious hopes on Dong-chun as a vessel for her own success as a mother in submitting herself to the nation’s relentlessly patriarchal social codes. 

Dong-chun’s parents aren’t bad people, they love her and are actively supportive. They aren’t angry when she experiences stage fright at a speech competition and later tell her she can sit the next one out if she feels uncomfortable (genuinely, not out of a desire to avoid their own embarrassment). But they’re so focussed on her future they’re missing her present, which is why it takes Hae-jin so long to realise she’s fermenting makgeolli in her room. Later she reflects that perhaps they should move to another country, one where Dong-chun would be free to be herself but it may already be too late. In any case, we can see Hae-jin’s contempt for those who choose to live outside of Korea’s rigid ideas of social success in her reaction on finally finding her long lost brother who graduated from Seoul University and had a big corporate job but dropped out to be hippy living off grid. He doesn’t know it and neither does she, but he ends up forming an unexpected connection with his neice Dong-chun being one of the few people who actually listens to her. 

When it finally speaks, the makgeolli has the voice of her science teacher who was the only person who did actually answer one of her questions if only to explain that know one knows yet but he’ll be sure to pass on the information when they do. In a way, getting this cosmic message and focussing how to solve this great mystery at the centre of her life help Dong-chun find her direction even if it’s leading towards “fermentation” in the great black hole of adulthood. The ambiguity of the ending restores a kind of darkness to Kim’s quirky tale but in any case allows Dong-chun to escape through the imagination and free herself from the constraints of a rigid society in which asking questions, let alone answering them, is very much not the done thing. 

FAQ screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, Wang Ding-Lin, 2024)

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You go to the trouble of planning a massive heist, and then it turns out you have to put it all back again. The gang of theives at the centre of Wang Ding-Lin’s hugely entertaining crime caper Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, huán qián) brand themselves modern day Robin Hoods, pausing for a laugh when they claim to help the poor, “yeah, us”. Yet there is something a little suggestive about this particular gig as they find themselves hired for an inside job by an obnoxious bank chief who claims the most important thing in life is yourself and those around you are merely passengers to be jettisoned at will..

Chen (Wu Kang-ren) is a rich kid who inherited the family bank and thinks he’s hot stuff after studying abroad, speaking Mandarin like foreigner and peppering his speech with English. His big idea is a cryptocurrency called BST and his tagline is “Peace, Love, and Money” while ironically enough he is also claiming to run a charity to help the poor. It’s obvious he’s running some kind of scam and not altogether surprising that he’d plot to rob his own back and then have the thieves bumped off to keep them quiet along with the two employees he’s decided to frame for the crime. Unfortunately for everyone, one of his scapegoats, Shen Shu-wen (Cecilia Choi), is the long lost flame of chief crook Po-chun (Chen Bo-lin) who, having realised Chen plans to bump her off, comes to the conclusion his only option is to mess up Chen’s plan by putting the money back in the vault.  

Of course, Chen is a kind of gang leader too complete with his own chief minion, Hu, though at one point he simply shoots one of his guys in the back of the head after he complains that Chen that doesn’t really value him. By contrast, Po-chun’s gang is a close-knit family, a brotherhood of thieves founded on mutual solidarity and infinite loyalty. Chen’s philosophy maybe that the individual is all, but these men live and die for each other. Nevertheless, Po-chun has a problematic hero complex that sees him, as others put it, aways trying to “take responsibility alone”, sacrificing himself for the group rather than allow his fellow gang members to shoulder some of the burden. That’s presumably one reason he (un)intentionally ghosted Shu-wen after getting arrested and going to prison, convincing himself he was doing the noble thing by avoiding getting Shu-wen mixed up with crime but perhaps also ashamed and insecure unwilling to let her know he met her as part of a heist and his cover personality wasn’t real while never giving much thought to her feelings. Shu-wen spent the last five years looking for him which was apparently a primary motivation for changing her career to work in the bank.

Po-chun’s quest is really one of maturity, to stop being the lone hero and fully integrate into the group by sharing responsibility with the others rather than jump straight to self-sacrifice. As he says through the medium of a montage sequence, their secret weapon is teamwork which is how they’re able to fight back against the well equipped Chen and his minions when the reason Chen flounders is his arrogance and the indifference of his men. That is not to say there isn’t tension in the team, such as the unrequited attraction bruiser Wen-hao has for Po-chun that is quite definitely antagonised by the resurfacing of Shu-wen who seems to have figured out the group dynamics pretty quickly in addition to seeing through Po-chun’s strong man act. 

It’s the warm-hearted, lived-in relationships between the team members that give the film it’s charm along with the quirkiness of the elaborately planned reverse heist and its mild dig at corporate tyranny along with class-based inequality. But most of all what it seems to advocate for is a collective spirit and the triumph of the intellect over the pampered authority of rich kid Chen as Po-chun strategises a way out of his grasp while ending his influence and getting the girl. Wholesome and charming, the film makes the most of its surreal humour along with some hilariously placed reality gags such the infuriating slowness of a “high end automatic door” that ironically prevents a wealthy crook from fleeing the scene.

Breaking and Re-entering screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival and is also screening as part of the Taiwan Film Festival in Australia

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Suffocating Love (愛的噩夢, Liao Ming-yi, 2024)

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Everything seems to put pressure on M, the cavalier hero of Liao Ming-Yi’s quirky exploration of confused male desire Suffocating Love (愛的噩夢, ài de èmèng). At heart, the problem might be that he doesn’t know what he wants, or he’s just someone who chases the dream of romance and is unsatisfied by its reality. Then again, the Chinese title of the film means something like “nightmare of love”, and it maybe that M (Austin Lin) is simply ill-equipped to deal the pressure of grown-up romance.

Conversely, the pressure he feels might be understandable given the nature of his relationship with Chia-chi, a manic pixie dream girl he falls for after meeting her through a book exchange app. Chia-chi describes herself as having “quirks” though at first they don’t seem to extend much past her vegetarianism, issues connected to a longstanding health condition, and her religiosity. But after dating for a year, M moves into her apartment and is confronted by a series of “rules” he must follow which make it clear that Chia-chi is controlling and possessive in the extreme. M must agree to send her updates every two hours to prove where he is with photographic evidence and reply to her messages right away. To begin with, M thinks it’s a small price to pay in the name of love, but eventually begins to feel the “pressure” of Chia-chi’s ever watchful gaze especially once another woman arrives on the scene. 

If these gender roles were reversed, we would be certain M should leave this abusive relationship though he seems to view it with a kind of nonchalance and only mild but increasing irritation. Ai-hsuan, a high school crush serendipitously turning up at work, offers the fantasy of escape to a more liberating kind of romance that’s tinged with teenage innocence even if Ai-hsuan’s problem is that she has cold feet about an impending marriage to a man she feels she’s grown apart from during their seven year relationship. Of course, this affair doesn’t place much pressure on him because for the moment it’s casual, an illicit bubble of freedom from Chia-Chi’s control in which he can be himself again. 

But is that what he really wants? After being transported to a strange dream realm, a bunny man harking back to the Alice in Wonderland reference that brought M together with Chia-Chi puts a gun to his head and forces him to make a wish at which point he wakes up with an other woman entirely, Kurosawa Yumi, a half-Japanese photographer and social media influencer who was his celebrity crush. The pair don’t live together, but Yumi seems to pop round to change his sheets and cook his dinner which is perhaps more reflective of a male fantasy than M realises even as he describes as her at the woman every man wants, What he wants is a woman who takes care of him domestically, and sexually, but demands nothing from him so that he doesn’t feel “pressured” by emotionally interacting with her or having to accept that she’s a whole, real person (which this Yumi at least obviously is not). 

At this point, events take a rather strange turn with implications of black magic and manipulation beyond the weird dream realm and its Alice-esque butler forcing M to play Russian roulette with his romantic desires. With a gun to his head, can he really say what he wants or will he always be chasing romantic fantasy? In truth, M’s tunnel vision has its share of latent misogyny and a fear of being “controlled” by women if in a less literal way than he wilfully submits to in his relationship with Chia-chi, a generalised conviction that each of his potential matches is manipulating him while it’s clear that his view of them is blinkered by his selfish desires so he’s incapable of seeing them as whole people or really giving much thought to their thoughts and feelings. Is he suffocated by love, or does he himself suffocate it in his reluctance to engage with the reality? In any case, the jury seems to the out on whether or not M is awakening from his nightmare of love or perpetually trapped inside it by external pressures he is ill equipped to bear.

Suffocating Love screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Love Lies (我談的那場戀愛, Ho Miu-ki, 2024)

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The heroine of Ho Miu-Kei’s cybercrime dramedy Love Lies (我談的那場戀愛) later rejects the idea that she has been deceived for she was only falling in love and love once believed is real which paradoxically hints at the idea of romantic love as fantasy or self-delusion. There is undoubtedly some truth in what she says, if only in the fact that the young man scamming her also begins to fall in love if not exactly with her but with the image of himself as reflected in her eyes. 

From what we can see of Joe (Cheung Tin-fu), he doesn’t quite fit our image of romance scammer. He isn’t cruel or heartless and has more or less fallen into this kind of work, learning to see it as a kind of game which conveniently allows him to ignore the real human he’s exploiting in order to win. Awkwardly still living with his ex-girlfriend’s family, he’s bonded with her father and seems to be seeking something like familial love and acceptance along with the feeling that he’s wanted and valued by another person. Of course, being a romance scammer gives him what he needs as his targets are drawn into his trap and eventually become dependent on him though it’s obviously not “Joe” they’re dependent on but whoever he claimed to be online who is perhaps all the things he’s like be rather than who he is. 

In any case, he finds himself conflicted while trying to scam Veronica (Sandra Ng), a fantastically rich gynaecologist still struggling to deal with the death of her husband four years previously from whom she was about to get a divorce. Veronica is also not being entirely honest online, posing as a 25-year-old nurse named Linda and using a random photo from the internet while planning to have some idle fun chatting to a stranger in this case a heartbroken French widower named Alain. Like Joe, Veronica is also a little unhappy in herself, explaining that she’s a difficult person who blows off steam by rearranging the goods in convenience stores and has few friends. Being “Linda” also affords her another perspective on herself and a means of reassessing her thoughts about her husband and marriage. 

But this vulnerability is also what makes her vulnerable to the scammers as mastermind Joan (Stephy Tang), who used to be a TV screenwriter, points out in instructing Joe that he’ll really have cracked Veronica when she feels comfortable enough to tell him about her husband. Ho presents the scammers as an unusually well equipped yet old school bunch who have an actual art department to construct props to help Joe sell his fantasy though he’s pretty slow to cotton onto the idea of stalking Veronica’s social media profiles for information he later uses to create a bond with her. 

Though quirky and somewhat wholesome, the film does hint at the dangers of online interaction and the information we choose to share with strangers, perhaps unwisely. Intellectually, Veronica is aware of the potential of scamming but also sees herself as “better” than that, as if an educated, successful woman such as herself should be too smart to fall for something so obviously untrue and is later unwilling to accept that she’s sent large amounts of money to a conman despite the advice of her bank which of course only keeps her in the scam so she can prove to herself that she’s not being conned. 

But the conclusion she finally comes to is that if she fell in love with someone who didn’t really exist, then that doesn’t mean the love itself wasn’t real. In any case, it allowed her to re-engage with lost love and recover herself and her memories of romance while finally beginning to deal with her husband’s death and the end of her marriage which arrived more abruptly than expected. In much the same way, Joe begins to realise that he ended up scamming himself, half in love with the image he created as reflected back to him while more aware of his own needs and desires along with the emotional consequences of the scamming game. To that extent, maybe love itself is a long con or beautiful fantasy but there might also be truth in a lie and a genuine connection between lonely souls beyond all the wilful deception and misrepresentation.

Love Lies screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)