Tag: BFI London Film Festival

Youth (Spring) (青春, Wang Bing, 2023)

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There’s an almost eerie quality to the absence of age in Wang Bing’s sprawling exploration of the Zhili textile industry Youth (Spring). Perhaps for reasons of tact, the ages of older workers, unlike those under 35, are not displayed while they are also predominantly female. One has to wonder where the young men who currently work on the shop floor will later end up if they generally do not stay in this line of work though alternatively it may be further evidence of generational shift in which the young men of 30 or 40 years ago simply did not take up jobs as seamstresses. In any case, the only older men we see here are factory owners and floor managers while the older women are often at the forefront of mostly futile attempts at collective bargaining. 

Many young migrant workers apparently prefer the factories in Zhili because they offer a greater degree of freedom than the large state-run complexes which often micromanage the lives of their employees in almost prison-like conditions. But then it’s also obvious that they struggle and largely cannot earn a living wage despite the long hours they are often forced to put in. One younger worker tries to complain about the lack of overtime pay on offer, explaining that he needs to make at least 4-500 yuan a day and cannot do that without the extra payment but the manager simply tells him that he pays better than other shops and in any case there are plenty of rural youngsters who will be happy to take his job. 

The later part of the film is largely concerned with attempts at collective bargaining led by veteran workers who find themselves frustrated by the system. This kind of work is often seasonal and ironically unavailable in the spring during which many workers return home to their villagers. They are paid on piece rate contracts but the rate is set by the kinds of garments they’re making and they often can’t know how much money they’ll be getting by the end of the season. Consequently they try to work up the rate on certain items while at times resentful of other workers who’ve been able to make more solely because they were assigned different tasks which pay better. The managers give them all the usual excuses, largely refusing to budge or offering only a modest per item increase which as one worker points out will barely make a difference if the quota is small anyway. 

Wang gives more of an overview rather than focussing on a series of individuals but discovers an ironic intersection of the legacy of the One Child Policy and the economic realities of today. At the first workshop, a couple who met on the shop floor experience an unexpected pregnancy. The young woman, Shengnan, seems to be given little choice in the matter which is largely being decided by the respective parents on each side. Because of the additional complications of the residence system (they are each from different districts) the parents both want the couple to move closer to them especially as the boy’s parents are economically dependent on him as they age. Shengnan’s mother puts her foot down and negotiates with the manager to get Shengnan time off for an abortion but he refuses until Shengnan has finished her current quota after which he says he’ll be very happy for her to take some rest at home to get over it though as another suggests, trying to offer comfort, an abortion is just like getting bitten by a dog and then biting back. He does however accept that it’s the girls who suffer while all the men are “little emperors”.

Evidence of sexism is rife. Another worker needles his girlfriend about her job in an overnight internet cafe, telling her that it’s not good for girls and that it might cause acne while seemingly not bothering to think about how his long shifts at the factory might be affecting him. “Women are useless” another man later exclaims despite being largely supported by them in the workplace, not least by his own mother who works in the same factory. The younger workers are often cheerful, messing around with silly banter and constant flirting. It’s not surprising that relationships often arise with people trapped together such long periods of time with little possibility of going out to meet someone else, but they’re also largely impossible given the futility of trying earn enough to support a family through seamstressing. Another man faces a similar dilemma when he discovers his girlfriend has also become pregnant but cannot decide if he wants to get married, worrying about shouldering the responsibility of a wife and child while financially insecure. 

All of which would seem to conflict with a wider anxiety about children not getting married as parents often reject a potential suitor based on low economic status or residency while young men find themselves frustrated unable to envisage a time when they might be financially stable enough to start a family. Meanwhile, the old-style factory dorms are strewn with rubbish and in general depressing in their grey concrete exteriors and poorly lit rooms. An outburst leading to a physical confrontation between workers seems only natural given the fraught conditions though Wang presents it as a howl of despair from a generation trapped between the old China and the new with very little to show for it.

Youth (Spring) screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

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A man in late middle-aged quite obviously living in the past begins to wake up to the possibilities of change in Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set drama, Perfect Days. Even so, Hirayama’s (Koji Yakusho) days may be pretty much the same but that doesn’t necessarily mean that his life is dull or even predictable while it’s clear that he manages to find joy in small moments of serenity even if he may also seem to be harbouring a great sadness. 

The irony is that Hirayama lives in a rundown postwar tenement that happens to be almost directly under the Tokyo Skytree which Wenders often cuts back to as if to signal the disparity between the rich and glitzy skyline of the contemporary city and the lives of those on its margins. Hirayama’s home has an almost eerie quality owing to the glowing purple light shining out of the window of his spare room where he nurtures tiny saplings back to health. The traditional-style two-floor flat has two tatami-mat rooms on the upper level, the other filled with books and cassette tapes amid an otherwise spartan interior. Before leaving for work each morning he brushes his teeth over the kitchen sink, the place has no bathroom, and meticulously takes up his belongings neatly placed in order on a shelf by the front door. 

Perhaps it’s this kind of order that Hirayama craves, clinging to the security of the usual and dedicating himself to his work with unusual rigour. A municipal toilet cleaner, he painstakingly scrubs each and every bowl and urinal, checking the nozzles on the bidet function and shining a mirror underneath to make sure everything is as clean and tidy as it could possibly be only for drunken salarymen to push past him and quite literally piss all over his hard work. Like many such workers, he attains a kind of invisibility and should anyone need to use the facilities while he’s cleaning them he’s obliged to step outside and wait before starting all over again. When he finds a little boy crying alone in a park toilet he takes him by the hand and tries to help him find his mum, only when he finds her she completely ignores Hirayama and even goes so far as to wipe the boy’s hand with a wet wipe. The boy’s little wave of thank you as they leave is the only ray of comfort and recognition. 

Yet for all that, it’s as if this the life Hirayama has chosen. He barely interacts with his chatty colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) who has a habit of rating everything out of ten and sees no value in his work, hardly bothering to do much cleaning at all while complaining that he has no money to romance the bar hostess he’s hoping to make his girlfriend. Takashi and Aya are fascinated by Hirayama’s collection of cassette tapes which he plays in his van, though Takashi more so for the commercial value that may be attached to them in a world in which everything old is new again and specialised stores in the trendy neighbourhood of Shimokitazawa trade exclusively in secondhand LPs and Sony Walkmans. Even so, Aya too appears to have her private sadnesses drawn to the voice of Patty Smith but pressing stop when the tape mentions suicide. The melancholy office lady in the park and an elderly homeless man who lives there too must have their own stories as unknown to Hirayama as his is to them. 

A surprise visit from a teenage niece suggests that he may have come from a relatively wealthy family with a tyrannical patriarch and that this ascetic life of his is a kind of rebellion or else or a refuge, but there’s a look of pain on his face when the landlady at his favourite bar (played by enka legend Sayuri Ishikawa) laments that she wishes everything could stay the same. Perhaps he’s tired of this very analogue life and its otherwise pleasant monotony as he further confirms for himself realising that it’s not right for things not to change as he engages in a game of shadow tag with another middle-aged man who’s evaluating his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. In truth, the film risks straying into orientalism in its advocation of Japanese serenity in simplicity (something not helped by the final title card explaining the term komorebi) while the musical choices appear a little on the nose and the celebration of mundanity in Hirayama’s labour might otherwise seem flippant. Even so, Yakusho’s typically astute performance keeps the film on an even keel as Hirayama finds himself on a turbulent journey towards a “new world” of fulfilment and possibility. 

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

If Only I Could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон, Zoljargal Purevdash, 2023)

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A teenage boy finds himself torn between his dreams for the future and the responsibility he bears towards his family in Zoljargal Purevdash’s gentle coming of age drama, If Only I could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон). Spoken by the hero’s younger brother, the title lays bare the children’s sense of despair as they gaze up at the giant hole around the chimney in their yurt longing for an escape from the cold while Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh) longs for an escape from this life by winning himself a place to study overseas. 

After his father’s death two year’s previously, Ulzii and his family moved to the city but still live in a yurt on its outskirts. Ulzii’s mother is recovering from a period of alcohol abuse and struggles to hold down a job while Ulzii has become responsible for his younger siblings. A new teacher (Batzorig Sukhbaatar) at his school notices that he is bright and has an aptitude for science, advising him to take special classes and enter local competitions with the aim of winning the national one which comes with a scholarship to an elite private school.

The sense of possibility begins to bring new light and focus into Ulzii’s life, but his hopes are quickly shot down by his mother who has decided to move back to the country. He wins the right to stay behind with two of his siblings but soon finds himself alone and desperate, unable to buy coal or food while his mother fails to send money. Earlier his mother had berated him for buying an expensive pair of trainers only for him to counter that he saved up for ages and bought them with his money from a part time job the rest of which he’d given to her. Ulzii spends anything he gets on coal for the family, taking very little for himself while trying to protect his siblings.

Some might find his dream naive, that his conviction that he can study his way out of poverty is unrealistic while his resentment also has a degree of of pettiness in his refusal to become what he describes as a “weak beggar”. In the yurt district people are always keen to help each other, but Ulzii is proud and finds help difficult to accept while he also feels belittled by his wealthy, apartment-dwelling aunt who soon turns nasty when he refuses to surrender a keepsake from his father. He is also at times cruel to his mother, insensitively revealing her illiteracy to his younger brother in an attempt to get him to stay in the city and go to school so he doesn’t end up like her. 

Ulzii’s mother is not someone suited to city life, though as it turns out the country doesn’t suit her so well either. Ulzii finds himself having to skip classes and take part in illegal logging to help support the family while his friends ask him to join them in committing a burglary on the home of rich friend of their father’s. Driving into the city to help an old man sell the last of his lamb, Ulzii is surrounded by protestors complaining about the air quality and suggesting perhaps that this kind of urbanity is literally wounding the land in contrast with the symbiotic lifestyles of the nomads like Ulzii and his family. Ulzii’s younger brother eventually becomes ill because of their inability to heat the yurt along with the poor air quality in the village while Ulzii cannot afford the money for his medicine. 

The kids just want an end to the winter and for their mother to come back so everything can go back to normal, but instead find themselves embracing a new family while trying to find signs of positivity for the future. Ulzii ends up rediscovering aspects of his culture in opening himself to the community and learning that it isn’t “weak” to accept help when you need it or to give it in return. There are no easy answers, and learning to forgive his mother for what he sees as her fecklessness may take a little longer but the siblings have at least begun to discover new ways to survive the winter that are filled with laugher and warmth rather than the coldness of resentment and futility.

If Only I Could Hibernate screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cobweb (거미집, Kim Jee-woon, 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Asog (Seán Devlin, 2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Only the River Flows (河边的错误, Wei Shujun, 2023)

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Spoiler warning

In the opening moments of Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows (河边的错误, Hébiān de Cuòwù) children run through an abandoned building playing cops and robbers amid the ruins of a changing China. One could argue that detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) is little different from the boy who chases after the other children with a plastic toy gun in his hand and an apparent love of justice in his heart only to enter a room and find himself on the edge of precipice looking down on a digger several floors below already sweeping up the rubble while Ma and his police partner look on obliviously. 

Wei fully recreates the aesthetics of sixth generation cinema, filming on grainy 16mm with a score that immediately echoes the films of the 1990s. Yet this small town in southern China is also a noirish place full of dank corridors and crumbling buildings that reflect the slow death of the old factory system along with the accompanying anxiety and displacement. Ma Zhe is also somewhat displaced. As he’s first introduced it’s as the only plainclothes detective in a room full of policemen in military uniform. His genial boss sells a message of “collective glory” that sounds somewhat outdated and is continually undermined by the fact he seems to do little himself and in fact continually instructs Ma to close the case he is working on even if he isn’t really convinced that primary suspect really is the guilty party. 

Based on a novel by Yu Hua, the film’s Chinese title more accurately means “a mistake on the river bank” which could refer to the murder itself, a strange case of an apparently well liked old lady killed with a sharp object, or to an encounter Ma later has with the suspect who is referred to only as “The Madman”. Apparently adopted by the old woman, Granny Four (Cao Yang), to stave off loneliness after her husband’s death (presumably they had no children of their own) the Madman is middle-aged with some kind of learning difficulties and otherwise mute and docile never having displayed any signs of violence or volatility. Yet in his way Ma is also a “madman”, increasingly out of touch with objective reality and driven near out of his mind by his preoccupation with the case. 

Pushed past his limit, Ma feels himself stalked and eventually descends into a lengthy dream sequence in which he watches his recollections projected on a cinema screen only for the negative to dissolve in flames as if it were burning a hole in his memory. His own perceptions are not reliable as confirmed by the confusion surrounding a commendation he received at a previous posting that he can no longer find, while a friend he contacts says he can’t remember him every receiving it and would have been surprised if he had as back then Ma was drinking quite heavily. Overburdened by the case, he begins drinking again and is also filled with paternal anxiety while his pregnant wife spends her time to trying to construct the image of their family by completing a jigsaw puzzle featuring a picture of a mother and child. 

The couple are told, by a very unsympathetic doctor, that there is a small chance the baby may be born with a genetic abnormality that could result in cognitive impairment. While Ma leans towards an abortion (the one child policy in this era perhaps influencing his decision) his wife is determined to keep it, calling Ma a heartless man but also suggesting that the fate that has befallen him is some kind of karmic retribution. He feels the Madman in himself echoed in the fate that awaits his child and is unwilling to accept it, wondering what their life would be like with the world the way it is.

His sense of “madness” is centred in his individuality as the member of a collective and something that he finds echoed in the frustrating dead ends of his case. Several witnesses saw the body but did not report it, fearful of their own secrets being exposed. More deaths soon occur, not exactly related to the first but somehow as a result of it as if murder were catching and Ma is a point of infection bringing a hidden truth to light that accidentally exposes something others would have preferred remain private. Ma’s quest is to quell the madman within himself, as perhaps he does in once again putting on his uniform and joining the collective even if it means accepting their truth above his own or the doubts in his heart. A brief coda featuring Ma and his wife happily bathing their son in an atmosphere of warmth and comfort might suggest that order has been restored were it not for the unsettling look in the child’s eyes in the film’s final frame. Beguiling and mysterious, the film lends itself to multiple viewings in its consistently slippery realities and noirish sense of existential dread as Ma attempts to find himself amid the contradictions of ‘90s China in a land very much under construction. 

Only the River Flows screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and will be released in UK & Irish cinemas in spring 2024 courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment.

International trailer (English subtitles)

BFI London Film Festival Confirms Complete Programme for 2023

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The BFI London Film Festival returns to cinemas across the city 4th to 15th October. East Asian highlights this year include stupendous Chinese animation Deep Sea, tense Korean drama Cobweb, and the latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Hirokazu Koreeda. Here’s a look at the East Asian features on offer:

China

Hong Kong

  • Expats – feature-length fifth episode of the Amazon TV series revolving around the lives of three American expats against the backdrop of the 2014 Hong Kong protests.

Japan

  • The Boy and the Heron – semi-autobiographical fantasy animation from Studio Ghibli & Hayao Miyazaki.
  • Evil Does Not Exist – latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) focussing on a construction project in a peaceful rural village.
  • Monster – latest from Hirokazu Koreeda starring Sakura Ando as a mother who confronts a teacher after noticing changes in her son’s behaviour.
  • Perfect Days – Tokyo-set tale from Wim Wenders starring Koji Yakusho as cleaner living a simple but soulful life.

Malaysia

  • Tiger Stripes – femininst pre-teen body horror in which a young woman begins to change in unexpected ways.

Mongolia

Philippines

  • Asog – road movie docudrama following a non-binary schoolteacher on the way to compete in a drag competition soon after surviving a typhoon.

South Korea

  • Cobweb – meta drama from Kim Jee-woon set in the authoritarian 70s in which a director becomes obsessed with the idea of reshooting the ending of his completed film despite the interference of the censors.

Vietnam

  • Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell – 178-minute slow cinema epic in which a man reconnects with his estranged family following the sudden death of his sister.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place at various venues across the city from 4th to 15th October 2023. Full details for all the films as well as screening times and ticketing information are available via the official website. Priority booking opens for Patrons on 4th September, for Champions on 5th September, and Members 6th September, with general ticket sales available from 12th September. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심, Park Chan-wook, 2022)

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“I went through hell for you but without you my life would be empty” a fugitive murderer asks an insomniac detective to tell the woman he loves, making his own Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심, Heojil kyolshim) which will in fact be one of many in Park Chan-wook’s achingly romantic noir. Tinged with fatalism, the pursuit of love is also one of death and leads inevitably to a kind of haunting from which there is no real escape though you wouldn’t really want one anyway. 

In any case, the detective Park Hae-joon’s (Park Hae-il) sense of reality is already fracturing under the strain of his incurable insomnia. As he tells his partner, it’s not that he can’t sleep because of his obsessive stakeouts, it’s that he goes on stakeouts because he cannot sleep. Unfortunately for him, there have been relatively few murders lately. He wonders if it’s because of the nice weather, as if homicidal rage were being held in check by the gentle art of picnicking which it has to be said has a strange logic to it. Living apart from his wife who is a nuclear engineer in provincial Ipo, Hae-joon prides himself on being a good policeman and is preoccupied by his failure to catch two suspects currently on the run for a vicious murder. When he’s called to the scene of a dead body lying below a cliff, most are ready to rule it a tragic accident or perhaps a suicide but Hae-joon isn’t so sure especially given the unusual behaviour of the man’s much younger widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who appears almost indifferent to her husband’s death and giggles to herself during an interrogation a habit she later claims is born of nervousness and a lack of confidence in her ability to speak Korean having migrated from China. 

Seo-rae’s Korean is perhaps a little better than she makes out, but still we see her repeating lines from romantic dramas on television, lines she later repeats to Hae-joon, while he wonders if her taste for historical romance has lent her Korean its archaic quality. They are each in a way out of time, she remarking that he strikes her as “dignified” to a degree she didn’t expect in a “modern” man while he ironically tells her that he was drawn to her because like him she liked to look at things directly. Yet there’s nothing at all direct about the mysterious Seo-rae whom he suspects of murdering her husband, and though there might be something unspoken directly understood between them their attempts at communication are always frustrated. Not only is there an ever shifting language barrier, but a mediation through text message and voice note or else through the act of being observed at a distance. As they grow closer, Hae-joon allows Seo-rae to listen to his surveillance tapes recorded as he voyeuristically watched her apartment from the rooftop opposite. She immediately deletes them but later does something similar herself, and is finally undone by her inability to delete a potentially incriminating recording because it has come to mean too much to her. 

The pair are in a sense perfectly matched. Hae-joon’s melancholy wife finally exclaims that he needs murder and violence in order to be happy, while Seo-rae admits that she ends up with terrible men like husband because it would take something extreme such as a murder for a good man like Hae-joon to take notice of her. As the couple dance around each other, Park colours their non-romance with shades of the gothic in the repeated motif of the crow feathers each of them find as they work their way towards the apotheosis of their love. As they say every love story is a ghost story and what is love if not an unsolvable mystery? Hae-joon’s sense of reality is forever in flux, Park playfully dressing Hae-joon’s new team and his old team in similar outfits as he segues between fantasy, reality, and memory while trying to parse out an objective truth. Hae-joon’s tragedy may be that he discovers more than he ought to know but not enough to solve the mystery, destined to be haunted by his unresolved cases and the elusive silhouette of lost love lingering silently in the mists of memory. 

Decision to Leave screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and is now on general release in US & UK cinemas courtesy of MUBI.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Angae (Mist) by Jung Hoon-hee (1967) which is also the title song for Kim Soo-yong’s 1967 film of the same name.

Autobiography (Makbul Mubarak, 2022)

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“It’s 2017. Forget about hierarchies. We are friends” a former general disingenuously reassures from the other side of the bars in Makbul Mubarak’s pointed exploration of the mediation of power in contemporary Indonesia, Autobiography. A young man with few prospects for the future is drawn towards authoritarianism by a charismatic father figure but is soon confronted by the realities of his quasi-fascist posturing only to discover that there may be no real escape from the violent world of toxic masculinity that he has unwittingly entered. 

19-year-old Kib (Kevin Ardilova) lives alone in a vast mansion, the country home of a former general, Parna (Arswendy Bening Swara), who soon arrives unexpectedly with the intention of beginning his political career. Kib is quite obviously awestruck by the figure of the General, gazing at him like some long lost saviour drunk on the sense of power he exudes from every pore. On silently collecting the old man’s laundry, he stops to stare at a large portrait of him in uniform on the bedroom wall as if somehow thinking he too could one day be a fine general wielding such infinite power for himself. 

Such a thought might in a sense be transgressive. Kib is a servant in this house and as his father Amir, currently in prison for standing up to developers who were trying to steal his land, points out, their ancestors have always served the ancestors of Purna. Purna may tell him that no one cares about class anymore, but it obviously isn’t true or these two men wouldn’t be on opposite sides of the bars, or perhaps they would but their positions might be reversed. “Be careful who you trust” Amir tries to warn his son, but it’s already too late. Kib is ambitious. There’s something that bristles in him when Purna asks after his brother and wonders how well he can be doing as a migrant worker in Singapore with thinly concealed disdain in his voice. When Purna gives Kib an army shirt and says he looks just like him when he was young, a resemblance soon noticed by others, it flatters him to think he may be the General’s son rather than that of a mere servant turned convict. 

The more time he spends with Purna the more like him becomes, walking around with a swagger, exuding power and intimidation as if he really were a soldier not just a boy in a green shirt. Tragically he doesn’t even quite understand how this power mechanism works or what it’s implications are. When he accidentally bumps into a mosque while attempting a tight three point turn, local men surround the car demanding compensation. Purna gets out and puts on a show of authority. On realising what they’re dealing with the men instantly back down. Purna has a sheepish Kib apologise, and the men apologise to him, before explaining that sorry is a powerful word that can turn rage into blessing. What Kib fails to realise is that Purna is talking not about humility but intimidation, a mistake he learns to his cost in bringing a boy only a little younger than himself to Purna to “apologise” for disrespecting him expecting the General to pull the same trick again but shocked when events take a much darker turn than he’d anticipated. 

The boy he brought in, Argus, was the son of a woman whose coffee plantation would have to go if Purna got his hydroelectric plant approved. Purna sells the plant as a way of dealing with the problems caused by inefficient infrastructure but hides the corruption at its centre, forcing families off their land for the developers’ benefit through violence and intimidation. Argus is just as angry Kib, only he’s not falling for Purna’s sales patter. Kib watches the General shift the blame onto the developers, whom he backs and back him, while claiming to be a man of the people and giving a glib speech at the funeral of a boy he killed in nothing other than pettiness. 

Yet Purna is ageing and his grip on power may not be as firm as it once was while his seeming sentimentality in his attachment to Kib as a surrogate son is also a weakness. Kib may be deciding that being a migrant worker’s not as bad as becoming the heir of a man like Purna, but once you’re in it’s hard to get out as the ambivalent closing scene implies catching him dumbstruck once again only now like a general overseeing his troops and in one way or another a prisoner of his father’s house, a servant inheriting the mansion whether he wants it or not. In many ways a tale of seduction, Autobiography paints a fairly bleak picture of the contemporary society ruled by violent masculinity and fragile authority figures who quite literally visit their sins on their sons. 

Autobiography screens 15th/16th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)