Tag: 2024

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)

The Killers (더 킬러스, Kim Jong-kwan & Roh Deok & Chang Hang-jun & Lee Myung-se, 2024)

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Led by Lee Myung-se, The Killers (더 킬러스) was originally billed as a six-part anthology film featuring different takes on the short story by Ernest Hemingway, but somewhere along the way took a kind of detour and now arrives as a four partner with a looser theme revolving around noir and crime cinema. Frequently referencing the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, the film hints at urban loneliness and a haunting sense of futility along with the mythic quality of noir as a tale that tells itself.

At least that’s in part how it is for unreliable the narrator of the first episode, a petty gangster who wakes up in a mysterious bar after being cornered by rival thugs. While in there he meets a similarly lost, middle-aged film director in the middle of a strange date with a fawning young woman who’ve definitely wandered into the wrong place. A sense absurdity is echoed in the fact that the man continues to sit in the bar oblivious to the knife in his back until the bar lady pulls it out for him and exposes the real reason why she lures lonely souls to this strange place out of time. Even so, thanks to her dark initiation the gangster is able to become himself and stand up against the rival thugs who were bullying him with his newfound “feistiness” having overcome something of the futility of black and white, classic noir opening sequence.

That’s something that never really happens for the heroes of part two who are a trio of youngsters trapped in Hell Joseon unable to escape their lives as cut price contract killers working below minimum wage for a chaotic company in which everything has been sub-contracted into oblivion. Ironically, one had dreams of becoming a policeman and another a nun while the third has recently had plastic surgery in the hope of landing an acting gig and claims he’s not in this for the money but to make the world a better place. Seeing their work as a public service, they tell each other that it’s wrong to grumble over their unfair pay because other people get less and are otherwise incapable of standing up for themselves until they take a leaf out of the boss’ book and try a subcontracting of their own which doesn’t quite go to plan.

While the first two episodes had been set in the present day the second two are set during the long years of dictatorship, the first sometime in the 1960s under the rule of President Park as an undercover detective and two men who appear to be unsubtle KCIA agents descend on a noirish, rundown bar with a picture of Nighthawks on the wall waiting for a mysterious fugitive to arrive. They don’t appear to know anything about why their target needs to be caught or who he is save for a daffodil tattoo on his arm and are merely they shady figures of authoritarian power we can infer are hot on the tracks of someone hostile to the regime. In any case, they are they are about to have the tables turned on them in a demonstration of their inefficacy in their power.

It’s the fourth and final piece unmistakably directed by Lee himself, however, that brings the themes to the four as it opens with an allusion to the assassination of President Park as the narrator tells us that it is 1979 and someone sent a bullet into the heart of darkness but the darkness did not die. The two goons who later show up are KCIA thugs working for the new king Chun Doo-hwan come to threaten the denizens of the cafe which include a man called “Smile” because he can’t and a woman called “Voice” because she has none while trapped inside an authoritarian regime. Inhabitants of Diaspora City, a home to the exiled, they have only a small hole to another world which affords them the ability to dream. Relentlessly surreal the segment is marked by Lee’s characteristic visual flair and sense of noirish melancholy that extends all the way out to a world more recognisably our own though no less lonely or oppressive.

The Killers screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

A Balloon’s Landing (我在這裡等你, Angel Teng I-Han, 2024)

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A dejected Hong Kong writer longs to find the path back to paradise if in the most ironic of ways, but finds something quite different after accidentally being befriended by a young street tough in Teng I-Han’s lowkey queer romance A Balloon’s Landing (我在這裡等你, wǒ zài zhèlǐ děng nǐ). Seemingly inspired by the boy’s love genre, the film is chaste in the extreme and overly subtle in its central love story which seems to borrow heavily from other similarly themed East Asian romances such as Il Mare and Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

Director Peter Chan is in fact name checked several times, while Taipei street tough A-Xiang (Fandy Fan) has a poster of Patrick Tam’s Nomad on his wall which of course features the face of Leslie Cheung who occupies a similar space to that of Teresa Teng in Comrades in connecting the would-be lovers. Cheung tragically took his own life in 2003, the same year writer Tian Yu’s (Terrance Lau) parents were killed, while Tian Yu himself seems to have suicidal thoughts and intends to end his life at a place called The Bay of Vanishing Whales he thought he’d made up for his novel but is informed is real in a letter from a little boy in Taiwan he continues writing to as a kind of pen pal older brother. 

In a way, A-Xiang represents his desire for life, fond saying that there’s “always a solution” and begging him not to die just like one of the letters he received urging him to carry on living because the sender would be waiting for him at the Bay of Vanishing Whales. A-Xiang is also his literal saviour in that they meet when he rescues him from a group of conmen after he got very drunk bar but though their first meeting is sexually charged with both men wandering round in their pants their romance is slow-burn to the point of non-existence. While on road trip to find the mythical bay, the pair grow closer with Tian Yu slowly giving up on the idea of finding it along with the death it represents only for fate to intervene.

At this point the film changes direction in allowing Tian Yu to rewrite his present, no longer in search of death but of love and a way to save A-Xiang in the same way A-Xiang has saved him. At least, A-Xiang becomes a kind of symbolic other self as hinted at in his stories of men as lonely islands casting messages in bottles out into the sea in longing for connection. This sense of isolation may stem from a feeling of otherness born of his sexuality, though the film never clearly defines it, along with the more literal orphanhood and existential loneliness he shares with A-Xiang. 

As expected there is a fated connection between the two men which is more than a little contrived if perfectly in keeping with the genre of romantic melodrama as Tian Yu begins to chase a future rather than the past even while actively rewriting it to engineer a better outcome. It might be tempting to read something more into the connections between these two men each orphaned, floating islands seeking new futures together though the central theme seems to be less romance than desire for life in which Tian Yu is able to overcome his depression and desire for death through his connection with A-Xiang who gives him a new reason for living. 

A-Xiang’s symbolic value as Tian Yu’s desire for life might explain why the relationship between them never sufficiently ignites in what is at least billed as a queer romance though could easily be taken for simple friendship or platonic brotherhood with the only expression of desire longing looks and tentative motions from A-Xiang. In any case, Teng lends the beautiful Taiwanese landscape a note of wistful melancholy, a place of infinite nostalgia in Tian Yu’s mind and an evocation of the paradise he’s seeking that’s simultaneously past and future waiting for parallel lines to cross. The lyricism cannot however overcome the coyness of the central romance that for its potential poeticism remains somewhat obscure, an unrealised desire awaiting its season but also a shift in the times born of a new desire for life rather than the melancholy loneliness of past emptiness.

A Balloon’s Landing screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Bushido (碁盤斬り, Kazuya Shiraishi, 2024)

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The hypocrisies of samurai society have led a dejected ronin into prideful penury but there is perhaps a fine line between properness and priggery that he struggles to accommodate. Like his earlier film Blood of Wolves, Kazuya Shiraishi’s Bushido (碁盤斬り, Gobankiri) is a loving homage to a classic genre, in this case jidaigeki, albeit one with a modern twist in which it’s the murkiness of the society and contradictions of its code that make it impossible to live in rather than the innate corruptions of the samurai class. 

Even so, it’s samurai society which has betrayed Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), now a seal-carving ronin living in a tenement house and months behind on his rent. Largely silent, Yanagida projects an air of calm but also a dangerous tension that hints at a deeply buried rage often echoed in the hellish glow of the candlelight that bathes his face in red. Not a natural gambler, he is nevertheless a Go enthusiast and talented player who gives the impression that he is always several steps ahead of any game in play. 

But that turns out not quite to be the case when he’s blindsided by a series of unexpected events that quickly destabilise his calmly ordered existence. Cast out of his clan after being accused of thievery, he is accused once again of taking 50 ryo from a pawn broker who had become a friend, Genbei (Jun Kunimura). Behind on his rent as he may be, Yanagida would not steal for stealing is beneath the dignity of a samurai and this stain on his honour is more than he can bear. But for all his righteousness we learn that he is also an ironic victim of his own priggishness and responsible for several other men meeting similar fates, cast out of the clan for something Yanagida turned them in for. In his reduced state, he seems to feel guilty and wavers momentarily on hearing the man who framed him for stealing a scroll from his former lord say he did so to gain money to support disenfranchised samurai but is caught between the spirit of samurai integrity and its letter. As his quarry told him, fish cannot live in water that is too clean and his oppressive enforcement of these arbitrary rules did no one any good. 

Yet his seeming righteousness does seem to improve the world around him, proving an epiphany in pawnbroker Genbei who develops a new determination for doing business fair and square after witnessing Yanagida’s conduct at the Go table. The irony is perhaps that everything on the Go board is black and white whereas Edo society is decidedly grey. Even the madam from the Yoshiwara Yanagida and his daughter are on good terms with (Kyoko Koizumi) can switch from wise mother to heartless gang boss in an instant. One moment, she’s giving maternal advice to Yanagida’s daughter Okinu (Kaya Kiyohara) and the next berating a runaway geisha who’s obviously been beaten while her lover has been killed for his transgression. The theft of 10 ryo will also it seems get you killed in this world of heartless rigidity and universal suspicion. 

Yanagida may not be much better in some respects. He is prideful and reckless, endangering himself and his daughter, whom he allows to pawn herself in the Yoshiwara knowing it’s very unlikely they will be able to repay the debt before the New Year deadline seeing nothing other than his obsession with vengeance against the man who wronged him in so many ways, Shibata (Takumi Saito). Shibata is his opposite number, cynical and amoral he subverted the samurai code for his own gain yet in its way perhaps it’s just a rebellion against the kind of austerity a man like Yanagida represented. In the end he can only escape his self-imposed prison by abandoning his rigour and accepting compromise, slashing the Go board with its black and white mentality in two though it leaves him further exiled. He cannot return to the world of samurai, but neither can he live among these ordinary people and like so many jidaigeki heroes seems to be condemned to wandering in this imperfect world. To that extent, the resolution seems much more cheerful than we might have been expecting. Everything works out, no harm done, but there’s a lingering tension even amidst apparent good fortune in a world of constant watchfulness. 

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Frankenstein Father (프랑켄슈타인 아버지, Choi Jea-young, 2024)

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A teenage boy confronts his paternal legacy but finds it largely hollow in Choi Jae-young’s pointed familial drama, Frankenstein Father (프랑켄슈타인 아버지). Frustrated by his circumstances, the boy begins asking questions about his genetic history in search of an explanation of all his “faults”  but begins to realise that perhaps the faults were not his own in any case and what he really wants is freedom, the right and opportunity to be his own man rather than a reflection of her father’s desires.

Left largely alone after his mother’s death amid the absence of his truck driver father, Young-jae decamps at the home of doctor Chi-sung who illicitly sold his sperm as a medical student 17 years previously. Af first Chi-sung wants nothing to do with the boy but is worried by his attempt to blackmail him, insisting he’ll expose the illegal sperm donation and ruin Chi-sung’s medical career. He sets about trying to disprove hie’s the father, but is finally forced to accept it and there after determines to prove to Young-jae that his “faults” are not his fault and he doesn’t owe him anything as per the contracts he signed with his parents. 

Of course, Chi-sung is also keen to prove himself “faultless”, that his austere life is the correct path because it’s order, rules, and discipline that have allowed him to become what he is today. To that extent, it niggles at him that he could have had a son like Young-jae who is sullen and rebellious. Young-jae describes himself as “dumb,” and has a host of other qualities that dissatisfy him such as shellfish allergy but is perhaps looking for some kind answers about himself and his relationship with Dong-suk, the man who raised him but is also a disappointment in Young-jae’s eyes. A long distance truck driver, Dong-suk is unsophisticated and fond of a drink. He is also controlling, insisting that Young-jae continually check in with him via text and send photos to prove he’s where he should be, and crucially preventing him from doing what he most wants to do which is run.

Running is a symbol of Young-jae’s desire for freedom, but he remains constrained by each father figure. After warming to him, Chi-sung offers him what he wants in promising to get him experimental treatment for his heart condition so he can run again, but soon turns out to be much like Dong-suk insisting he follow his rules and stick rigidly to the plan that he has designed for his sophistication which is also an effort to turn him into a mini Chi-sung. Young-jae is to him an echo of himself for he also grew up with a father who drank and disappointed him. Like Young-jae he too learns for escape as symbolised by his dream of buying a yacht and going to sea that he seems to be continually putting off. 

Yet as Young-jae points out, it wasn’t him who broke when he found out Dong-suk wasn’t his biological father but Dong-suk himself. Chi-sung hints that his decision to use sperm from a A+ donor was informed by insecurity, that he wanted to raise a son who was better than himself though as Dong-suk told his patient human’s can go back to what they once were but can never exceed it. The battle of over paternity of Young-jae isn’t so much a contest of nature vs nurture but a vicarious tussle of masculinity between each of the men who each want to prove themselves through asserting paternal authority over Young-jae and determining the course of his further life.

But Young-jae is almost a man himself and is no longer content to be bound by such corrupted authority. As he later says, he’s no desire to become another of his fathers’ “faults”. Conversely Chi-sung is clearly still trapped by his own father’s legacy and and afraid of the freedom Young-jae chases realising that the fault also did lie with him. In attempting to father Young-jae, he’s also attempting to father himself, insisting Dong-suk raised the boy “wrong” and he must correct him, but perhaps realising he learned a few wrong lessons himself and must make peace with his own past to set himself free while allowing Young-jae to run in a direction of his of choosing no matter the risks to his heart.

Frankenstein Father screens July 25 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Cha-Cha (チャチャ, Mai Sakai, 2024)

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Love can make you do funny things. It can also blind you to the world’s realities and colour the way you interpret the actions of others. At least, that’s how it is for the protagonists of Mai Sakai’s Cha-cha (チャチャ) who are all suffering with unrequited love and unbeknownst to them quite mistaken in their assumptions about the loves of others while otherwise solipsistically trapped in a bubble of frustrated romance.

Sometime narrator Rin (Sawako Fujima) is resentful of colleague Cha-Cha (Marika Ito) who is, ironically, the the total opposite of herself in that she’s free spirited and eccentric each qualities she assumes attract the opposite sex which Rin fears she herself does not. Chiefly she resents her because she has an unrequited crush on the boss, Kato, who is married with children though the interoffice gossip incorrectly suggests Cha-cha only got her job because she’s sleeping with him. According to Cha-cha, she is quite popular with men though describes herself as not being conventionally attractive and thinks men’s interest in her is usually more to do with conquest than romance. She develops a small crush on a handsome chef, Raku (Taishi Nakagawa), who smokes on their rooftop but though she ends up moving into his ramshackle home he does not appear to be interested in her and may in fact be suffering unrequited love for someone else. 

Because of all of these emotions can be awkward or embarrassing, no one really talks about them openly which obviously gives rise to a series of misunderstandings about the feelings and actions of others. Jealous of Cha-Cha, Rin ends up stalking her to find out if she really is sleeping with the boss though as she herself is not willing to be an adulteress it seems like something of a moot point. Cha-Cha likes the chef precisely because they have nothing in common and are in fact total opposites, much as she’s also the total opposite of Rin. She likes the idea that they could lead complementary existences because while she hates melon but likes cucumber, he likes cucumber and hates melon. 

She is also possibly drawn to him because they share a certain kind of darkness, admitting that she has a desire to lick the blood of the person she’s dating while he has a secret stash of lenses saved from the animal heads they sometimes get at the restaurant. Ironically, this shared quality may signal doom for their romance or ultimately force them together in a mutual act of settling for second best when their ideal romantic plans are disrupted by an unexpectedly extreme series of events. The most ironic thing is that the only genuine romance where feelings seem to be mutually returned, if imperfectly and with hints of exploitation, is doubted by others and motivates its own series of misapprehensions and petty jealousies. 

The strange events are at times narrated by a utility pole and telephone box who alone stand sturdy amid the changing and emotionally confusing environment of the present society. They are amused by the bizarre goings on among humans who seem incapable of being clear or honest in their romantic desires and often entirely misread the body language and behaviour of those around them to suit their own narrative. Rin thinks Cha-Cha probably is sleeping with the boss because they ignore each other, while a co-worker who admires her thinks she dislikes the boss because she avoids looking at him and assumes she likes another colleague, Aoki, ironically because she looks at him without bashfulness. 

It’s all par for the course in cha cha cha of love, and despite the dark turn the narrative may eventually take Sakai maintains an air of absurdist normality aided by quirky production design and a sense of wonder for a world that remains remains strange and difficult to understand, the protagonists individually blinkered views not withstanding. In any case, Rin’s eventual acceptance of Cha-Cha leads her to a desire to live “a more impulsive life” that will probably never be fulfilled but in some ways perhaps love is better as an unrequited fantasy than compromised reality if only it did not become an all encompassing obsession. As an imperfect man cheerfully in love tells her, perhaps Cha-Cha should focus on how to make herself happy rather than chasing an illusionary dream of love though in the end perhaps it’s all the same anyway. 

Cha-Cha screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Cursed Land (แดนสาป, Panu Aree & Kong Rithdee, 2024)

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The architecture professor teaching a young woman in Panu Aree and Kong Rithdee’s The Cursed Land (แดนสาป) says that a house is like a machine with a person inside, but what’s inside the house at the film’s centre is not quite human at all but a supernatural creature who like the house itself seems straddle a divide both cultural and spiritual while standing itself at the nexus of the many layered historical curses which have given it its dark legacy.

It’s in part a rejection of this difference and lack of respect for culture that creates a series of problems for Mit (Ananda Everingham), a middle-aged engineer moving into this rural backwater on the outskirts of Bangkok. Despite receiving a very serious warning to get rid of anything that’s in the house, he tears off a series of talismans thereby releasing some very dark energy and destabilising his new environment. Mit is also suspicious of those around him and does not really make much of an attempt to make friends with the local community who are largely Muslim. Though he may not think so, it is Mit who is the intruder here, an outsider walking into a traditional environment and finding himself isolated despite the ostensible friendliness of some of the locals to whom Mit takes offence after being told not to leave his dog outside because some of the Muslim community dislike them. 

But then again, Mit also seems to be a compromised figure apparently still suffering from shock and confusion some time after a car accident that killed his wife. He complains that his medication has been misplaced due to the move while seemingly increasingly paranoid and unreasonable. We also get hints that Mit’s previous life may not have been plain sailing either and part of his stress is down to a need to prove himself in his new job. He is in his way haunted by the car accident and struggling to overcome his guilt and regret. A shamaness later describes him as “weak-minded” and therefore a prime target for an evil spirit. 

This also seems to be implicitly reflected of an internal absence of the spiritual as Mit has renounced Buddhism and seems suspicious of Islam. His daughter May (Jennis Oprasert) eventually calls in a Brahmin to exorcise the house, installing Buddhist shrines and other talismans as if overwriting the those of the local muslim community though this only causes more problems. Later, May consults a Buddhist priest but is told that he can’t help because the problem is on a different system though she’s also told something similar by other members of the community. Running underneath the conflict between Buddhist and Muslim culture is echo of a much older spirituality in the references to “black magic” and shamans. 

What May learns is that this land has been cursed and counter cursed many times over, though they do perhaps manage to exorcise one particularly problematic spirit in literally digging up the past to learn the history of the house and that of the entities who seem to inhabit it but there are many other curses yet to be undone on this patch of scorched land that exists in a nexus between cultures, part of both and neither. What emerges is a kind of co-existence and a crossing of the streams as they must in the end marshal all of the spiritual powers to counter the  danger presented by this extremely disgruntled spirit. 

Panu Aree and Kong Rithdee conjure an atmosphere of intense eeriness rooted in a classic haunted house movie aided by the gothic environment of the Western-style home itself standing alone and isolated, not really part of a community yet not totally independent. What emerges is a kind of integration, the house as a machine with people inside it creating a home through diverse community and entrenched support systems that allow even the “weak-minded” Wit to shakes off some of his demons and begin to move forward with his life. Perhaps the key really is not to throw anything away, because everything belongs in the house and the house belongs to everything. Attempts at exclusion only invite fear and acrimony that cannot but eat away the foundations of a home built on cursed land.

The Cursed Land screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

For Alice (給愛麗絲, Chow Kam Wing, 2024)

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“I don’t know if I’m really lucky or really unlucky,” a young woman wonders after a series of narrow escapes amid the otherwise dismal circumstances of her life in Chow Kam Wing’s debut feature, For Alice (給愛麗絲). A lament for failed fatherhood, Chow plays with noir tropes and the legacy of classic Hong Kong cinema in his neon vistas of despair but eventually discovers a kind of catharsis even as the absent patriarch can redeem himself only in his absence.

Shuang has spent his life in and out of prison and evidently chose to not to maintain contact with his wife and daughter during his latest stretch. The titular Alice is like her namesake lost in the wonderland of contemporary Hong Kong though she named herself for the song and is doing her best to overcome the many problems in her life many of which stem from her relationship with her often absent mother and her string of problematic boyfriends including the latest one, a tailor, who is sexually abusing her. When her mother disappears yet again on a gambling trip to Macau she decides to run away, intending to stay with a friend and sleeping rough when it doesn’t pan out. She meets Shuang, she thinks, by chance sensibly wary but also grateful for the kindness of a stranger. 

As it turns out, her mother may have had a reason for all those gambling trips and it isn’t all that different from Shuang’s for his life of crime in that they are both doing it for Alice while constantly frustrated by the socio-economic realities of contemporary Hong Kong. Now in his 60s, Shuang wants to make amends and live a more law-abiding kind of life while redeeming himself as a father but struggles to find a foothold while slowly but anonymously building a paternal relationship with Alice who is facing similar problems to those he faced as a young man. Longing to escape her circumstances she sets her sights on independence and is tempted by criminality, ironically suggesting she will become a smuggler or deal drugs to support herself even as Shuang counsels her against it, encouraging her to pursue her education so she doesn’t end up like him. He didn’t have a choice, he explains, but she does and could make a better life for herself. 

But she’s still constrained by an overly patriarchal social system as she finds herself scrambling when her teacher wants to talk to her parents to discuss her smoking on school premises. Who could she possibly ask with her mother absent and the man in the position of a step-father actively harmful and in no position to help? Unbeknownst to her, Shuang accepts his paternal role and offers a genuine apology for his failed fatherhood, his irresponsible absence and its effects on the life of his daughter who was then left unprotected, vulnerable to life’s vagaries and the impossibilities of a stratified society. Yet in the end the only way he can help her is to damn himself, accept his choices and his absence and do what he can for Alice from afar. 

Chow’s Hong Kong is place of constant danger and ever present futility filled with dank corridors, rundown buildings, and neon-lit streets. Yet there is something resonant about Alice’s resilience and desire for freedom while accepting the friendship, help and support of a friendly neighbour adopting a less oppressive paternal role that aims, like the bird in bottle, to set his daughter free both of his own destructive legacy and the constraints of the situation she finds herself in. A parallel is seen in the life of Shuang’s friend, Jiu, again fixing his sights on one last job to provide a better future for his family but at the same time risking it knowing that it may mean forfeiting it entirely. Nevertheless, Shuang redeems his paternity in its denial, an act both of self-sacrifice and revelation in which he restores to Alice a more positive paternal legacy along with a sense of love and support otherwise absent from her life as a young woman largely alone in an often hostile environment.

For Alice screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.