Tag: Lee Kang-sheng

Come and Go (COME & GO カム・アンド・ゴー, Lim Kah-Wai, 2020)

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Japanese cinema has not always been willing to contend with contentious social issues such as immigration. More recently, however, indie filmmakers in particular have been keen to critique the nation’s attitudes towards those who’ve come to make their home there. Like Akio Fujimoto’s Along the Sea, Lim Kah Wai’s Come and Go (カム・アンド・ゴー) explores the lives of those who’ve come to Japan, in this case Osaka, in search of a better life but have mostly encountered exploitation and prejudice while marginalised Japanese residents apparently fare little better. 

Lim weaves his disparate tale around the discovery of a skeleton in a rundown part of town which is later found to belong to an elderly woman apparently reported missing six months previously. The comings and goings that we witness are an interconnected series of movements between a quartet of South Korean sex workers apparently trying their luck in Osaka because of an economic downturn at home, a tour group of wealthy Chinese tourists mainly interested in shopping, their guide, a Malaysian businessman in town for a presentation about tourism, a lost Japanese woman failing to make it as a hostess, an Okinawan porn producer literally pulling women off the street and embarrassing them into taking part in his videos, a Taiwanese sex tourist, a Vietnamese man on a “Technical Trainee” scheme but trapped in exploitative factory work, a student from Burma sexually harassed at the second of her part-time jobs, a Nepali refugee dreaming of opening a restaurant of his own, the Japanese teacher he is having an affair with, her husband the policeman, a middle-aged Japanese man embarking on a career as a rent-an-uncle, and a man being exploited while working in a car park who also seems to be mixed up with gangsters.   

Osaka it seems is a busy place. Mr Lee, the man travelling with the Korean sex workers, harps on about the “Osaka dream” as if the city held some special allure but pretty much everyone is struggling, either exploiting or exploited by others. Like the three women of Along the Sea, Nam came to Osaka on the technical trainee programme but is treated badly by his unsympathetic boss who refuses to give him permission to return to Vietnam temporarily to visit his mother who has been taken ill. Nam too attempts to run away, contacting a Vietnamese friend who runs a restaurant for advice where he’s told to convert his technical trainee visa to a student one by enrolling in a language school so he can “come and go” as he pleases. This is the same language school where Yoshiko, the policeman’s wife currently having an affair with Nepali Refugee Musoun, works. We can see that her classes are barely attended, and when she asks her boss about apparently fake names on the roster, she’s told to make her attendance figures look better on paper. It’s clear that not everything is on the level at the school, the headmaster explaining to Nam he needs to pay a hefty fee to enrol but that’s OK because they can help him find a part-time job in return for a hefty part of his salary. Later picked up by the police, Nam runs into another Vietnamese guy who also left his technical trainee programme but now regrets it, claiming he was cheated by false promises and one of his friends even took his own life as a result. 

Working at the same factory but as a part-timer, Burmese student Mimi finds something similar as she’s sexually harassed by the skeevy middle-aged boss at her second part-time job at a supermarket. While the men are forced to deal with labour exploitation and physical violence, the women are also subject to ingrained patriarchal values as evidenced by the preoccupation with sex and pornography among many of the male visitors such as sex tourist Xiao Kang who idly plays with sex toys in a store while lining up for an autograph from an AV actress, or the collection of sleazy Chinese businessmen demanding to be set up with authentic Japanese porn stars. The problem there is that porn producer Ryuji is deep in debt to yakuza loan sharks and has no women on his books, eventually brokering an unconvincing deal with Chinese tour guide Cheung and the South Korean pimp Lee to pass off the Korean sex workers as Japanese porn stars assuming that the Chinese won’t notice the difference because one woman’s as good as another. Meanwhile, conservative Malaysian family man William finds himself extremely uncomfortable when forced to conduct business in a hostess bar which his contact keeps insisting is how business gets done in Japan while unwilling to change his behaviour to accommodate his guest which is in itself ironic as William is there to advise them on boosting tourism from Malaysia through cultural awareness. 

While well-meaning protestors take to the streets to hold an anti-discrimination rally, Kenji fairly points out that they preach acceptance for the international community but ignore mixed-ethnicity citizens like himself, something fully borne out by their rather defensive and somewhat prejudiced conversation when he leaves to use the bathroom. The police conference regarding the skeleton ends with the policeman lamenting that the modern society has become selfish and indifferent to the feelings of others placing wealth and convenience above community which is how an old woman’s body went undiscovered so long and apparently became mixed up in a complicated real estate scam. Even the Japanese rent-an-uncle is forging time-limited, compensated relationships with strangers while his own son ironically tries to convince him to retire to Malaysia so he can get his hands on the house. These people are all connected even if they don’t know it, all victims of the same oppressive system as the city moves all around them increasingly indifferent to their existence.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Blue Sun Palace (藍色太陽宮, Constance Tsang, 2024)

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“It’s funny how  quickly people you love become strangers,” a middle-aged man muses while talking about more than one thing at the same time. Those at the centre of Constance Tsang’s New York-set drama Blue Sun Palace (藍色太陽宮, lánsè tàiyang gōng) are all in a sense displaced and some of them by several levels while they try to accommodate themselves with the lives they’re living now along with their hopes and expectations for the future.

Didi (Xu Haipeng) and Amy (Wu Ke-xi) are old friends working in a massage parlour which has a large sign on the door stating that they do not provide sexual services. The two women huddle on a stairway, finding a private space of isolation that reduces the world to them alone. Didi and her sort of boyfriend Cheung (Lee Kang-sheng) do something similar as they dine in a restaurant and then retreat to a karaoke booth before Didi takes him back to the massage parlour where Amy absents herself to give them some room until awkwardly spotting Cheung leaving in the morning. It’s clear that the massage parlour is itself an isolated world where Mandarin is the only spoken language inhabited only by the female staff members who are all migrants from China. Didi appears to be the lynchpin of this community, keeping the parlour running and looking after the other women while they all seem to look to her for dependability and solidarity. 

Yet there’s a hovering tension between Didi and Amy who seems wary of Cheung, or perhaps merely jealous in an unspoken attachment to her friend, and also reminds her that they’re not supposed to have guests in their room. The exclusively male clients who are mainly though not exclusively non-Chinese men are also intruders in this space and as Didi tries to warn Amy pose a latent threat to them. A very tall man shortchanges them, but Didi stops Amy when she tries to chase after him. She tells her that it’s not worth it and she’ll just make the money up herself. It’s better to be safe, though it’s advice she doesn’t quite take to heart or perhaps lets her guard down at the wrong moment. The men treat them with thinly veiled contempt, perhaps believing they don’t really deserve to be paid in full or to be treated as fully human beings. A customer of Amy’s bullies her into giving him a happy ending and then refuses to pay, becoming violent when challenged but then apologising before running from the room. 

As an escape from the grimness of the Blue Sun massage parlour, Didi has a dream of moving to Baltimore to open a restaurant with Amy and be closer to her daughter who is currently being raised by her aunt. Cheung hadn’t known about the daughter when he idly fantasised about living in a little house by the sea with Didi and a big dog, though she knew about the wife and daughter who have now become strangers to Cheung. In any case, their fantasy was just that and so perhaps it didn’t really matter if neither of them was telling the whole truth. Baltimore seems to have taken on a mythical quality for each of them as a kind of longed for but unreachable paradise in which they might find happiness if only they could get there. 

But in the end, even these bonds are fragile and the community fractured by tragedy and economic realities. In Didi’s absence, Amy and Cheung develop a surrogate bond in their shared grief and loneliness but also remain at odds with each other, ultimately heading in opposing directions in which it seems as if Amy may be able to find new directions while Cheung is bound only for the blue sun of a shoreline in winter and a solitary cigarette. He says he doesn’t want to go back to Taiwan because he wouldn’t know who to be, though as Amy points out none of them know who they are here either. She at least may have found an answer, or if not, reaccommodated herself to a new reality but for others there’s only sadness and inertia along with the cold comfort of lost love and impossible dreams in a world of constant displacement.

Blue Sun Palace screens April 28 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館, Hiroshi Okuhara, 2021)

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You can check out any time you like, but you can never really leave the titular Hotel Iris (艾莉絲旅館) at the centre of centre of Hiroshi Okuhara’s Taiwan-set erotic mystery drama adapted from the novel by Yoko Ogawa. At least, so it seems to be for heroine Mari (Lucia), a youngish woman stultified by a dull existence and controlling, possessive mother while haunted by the memory of her late father murdered when she was still a child. The goddess Iris, so we’re told, could fly to any place she wanted on her rainbow wings as perhaps does Mari, in a sense, in her circular, sado-masochistic, and largely epistolary romance with a middle-aged Japanese translator of Russian literature (Masatoshi Nagase). 

On an otherwise dull if stormy night, Mari is alerted by the sound of a woman screaming while manning the front desk. On investigation she finds an older gentleman violently beating a sex worker who manages to escape down the stairs while he calmly walks his way out. Despite this violent, dangerous episode Mari is intrigued rather than frightened, handed a crumpled note and drawn to the malevolent presence. Spotting him in the town she follows him to the beach where he explains he lives on a near by island across a makeshift bridge cut off at high tide which he likens to that of Iris’ rainbow connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. 

Mari may in a sense be chasing death in the figure of the middle-aged man who also obviously recalls the image of her absent father, she taking him on a kind of date to ice cream (which he does not appear to enjoy) by the sea as her father had done when she was a child. Yet the relationship that develops between them is erotic rather than romantic, Mari discovering a sense of empowerment in submission to the older man’s sexualised violence as he strips and binds her, tearing her clothes while watching himself in the mirror.

The presence of mirrors is central to their relationship, or perhaps to Mari’s fantasy as she reflects on the multiplicities of self it offers her along with a sense of endlessness as if she and the middle-aged man had begun to inhabit a world of two behind the glass. When she questions his true identity he replies only “I am You” which she later returns to him, “You are me”, signalling the selflessness which now exists between them if also leading us to question how much of this is happening merely in Mari’s mind bored behind the counter of the Iris and longing for escape. She borrows the name of an absent childhood friend, “Mary”, for her correspondence with the middle-aged man in order to keep her relationship with him secret from her mother while the main character in his book is also co-incidentally named “Mari” giving her at least three mirrored personas in this already complicated relationship one of which actively controlled by the middle-aged man and another by her mother. 

Meanwhile Mari begins to doubt him, witnessing a display of irrational violence and later hearing that the body of another sex worker has been discovered in the town. He told her he had no family since his wife passed away but turns out to have a mute nephew who later claims to be his stepson said to have lost his tongue to cancer though we later wonder if that is really case. In seducing the nephew/stepson she takes on a more dominant, masculinised role while he is later feminised by the middle-aged man if also becoming an embodiment of the triangular griefs that bind them, the boy for his mother, Mari for her father, and the middle-aged man for the wife is rumoured to have killed. 

Okuhara is not so much interested in solving the literal mystery of the middle-aged man’s potential as a covert serial killer as exposing Mari’s inner psychodrama as she attempts to process the unanswered questions of her father’s death, literally haunted by the image of him wondering whether or not she as loved as a child while straining to break free of her mother’s controlling impulses but otherwise trapped within the oppressive atmosphere of the Hotel Iris. Caught between Taiwan and Japan, Mari occupies a liminal state of constant inertia while spreading her rainbow wings in search of danger and excitement. Shot with a moody ethereality, Okuhara’s poetic psychodrama captures an almost gothic sense of intensity as the heroine investigates the mystery of herself through transgressive relationships with the living and the dead on permanently shifting sands. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Stranger Eyes (默視錄, Yeo Siew Hua, 2024)

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In some ways consciously and others not, we behave differently if we have an expectation of being observed than if we are confident we are alone. But the line between actions we think of as private and others public is often thinner than we assume and sometimes broken in moments of heightened emotion. A man sits and cries on a park bench, but he does so because he does not think anyone’s looking and feels himself alone though actually someone is watching. They often are, silently and at a distance that can itself be painful.

But then Yeo Siew Hua’s elliptical drama eventually suggests we are watched most by no stranger eyes than our own. Its “stalker”, Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), remarks that sometimes he feels as if he only watches himself an idea reinforced by the film’s continual doubling that suggests that we are in some ways caught between a series of overlapping timezones or entering a space of interactive memory. With echoes of Rear Window, the police accompany Shuping (Vera Chen), grandmother of a missing child, as she runs a pair of binoculars over the windows of her apartment block as seen from the balcony opposite while putting herself in the shoes of her observer. She stops on a young girl staring sadly from her window before beginning a strange dance that makes us wonder if Shuping is actually observing her younger self or if her own interiority simply colours what she is seeing. 

Shuping, along with her son Juyang (Wu Chien-ho) and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna), is scanning the horizon for traces of their missing child, Little Bo, while closely examining old videos looking for signs of anything untoward. The ubiquitous presence of these cameras reminds us that we are often being observed if accidentally and the use of these images could put us at risk. Shuping wants to put a video of the family at the park online but Peiying objects, insisting Bo should have the right to decide when she’s older though the implication is that someone could have seen Bo there and been minded to take her. In any case, the irony is there’s nothing useful either in the videos or, the family initially thinks, in the vast networks of CCTV cameras that exchange our privacy for supposed safety. 

Wu relies firstly on his naked eyes, but then starts sending the family DVDs of videos he’s taken of them for unclear reasons but confronting Juyang and Peiying with the cracks in the foundations of their marriage along with the implication they are unfit parents. Juyang at one point simply walks off and leaves Bo sitting in a supermarket trolley while she cries her head off as if he were half hoping to be free of her. He in turn stalks another woman with a baby in a pushchair who turns to the side for a moment to help a man whose baby is crying, taking her eyes off her daughter long enough for Juyang to pick her up without her noticing. He could have easily have walked off with her, though you could hardly criticise this woman for simply having a chat with her daughter sitting just off to the side technically but perhaps not emotionally out of sight. Peiying meanwhile frets that Bo has been taken from her by some cosmic force because she didn’t love her enough and had considered an abortion before she was born again hinting at the fragility of the relationship between the parents who rarely occupy the same space and seem to live very parallel lives. 

Ironically Peiying feels as if it is only Wu who has truly seen her for everything she is rather than solely as a mother or the persona she adopts as a live-streaming DJ. She says she feels as if Juyang only sees her as air, as if he looks right through her while he looks at other women and seems to feel trapped by domesticity or perhaps by Shuping whose obsessive love for Bo and occasionally overbearing grandmothering seems to annoy both parents in overstepping their boundaries. We observe them just as Wu does, making our judgements in our silence though in this case confident they do not see us and that we are not ourselves currently being observed. But this confidence may also be painful to an observer such as Wu who wants to penetrate the screen while also interacting with his own sense of regret and is unable to make himself visible or express what he feels outside outside of the ghostly act of observation. The watchful soul observes itself as reflected in others who exist only in a world lost to them.

Stranger Eyes screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒, Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992)

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Towards the end of Tsai Ming-liangs’s Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒, Qīngshàonián Nézhā), a young man exasperatingly stuffs a series of rags into the busted drain in his kitchen which has been relentlessly leaking water all over the apartment. In many ways it’s a kind of metaphor for his life as he attempts to staunch the flow of “bad luck” he’s been experiencing over the last few days, but like so many things for him it does not quite go to plan. 

As to why, it’s not exactly clear except that A-tze (Chen Chao-jung) is a kind of outcast beneath the neon skies of a changing Taipei. He and his friend A-ping (Jen Chang-bin) earn their money breaking into telephone boxes and vending machines for loose change before at one point stealing the motherboards from arcade consoles and unsuccessfully trying to sell them back to the person they stole them from. All they get for their pain is a literal battering while A-tze’s frustrated romance with sometime girlfriend Mei-kuei (Wang Yu-wen) similarly flounders in the wake of his ennui. 

The karmic debt he bears is however mainly down to a random act of pointless violence in knocking the wing mirror off a taxi driver’s car for no real reason save momentary impulse. Even so, the taxi driver’s son Xiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) had already been watching him and soon discovers a fascination with the rebellious young man that is ambiguous in quality. What becomes obvious is that Hsiao-kang is at odds with the world in which he lives. His mother (Lu Yi-ching) reveals that a fortune teller told her he is the reincarnation of “Neon God” Nezha, a chaotic child who later killed the authoritarian father with whom he could not get along. Hsiao-kang’s mother tells this to her husband (Miao Tien) as a kind of warning, advising that his authoritarian parenting style is doing his son no good, but Mr. Lee isn’t minded to listen. Finding out that Hsiao-kang has dropped out of cram school and kept the refunded tuition money for himself, Mr. Lee throws him out which of course leaves him free to follow A-tze all around Taipei day and night before childishly damaging his motorcycle. 

In disabling the bike, Hsiao-kang perhaps hoped to ruin A-tze’s freedom, symbolically taking from him independence and a sense of possibility. Then again, perhaps in another way he hoped to engineer a friendship. Riding around on his own scooter, he draws up behind A-tze pushing his to a garage and offers help but A-tze tells him to buzz off. In fact, A-tze never acknowledges Hsiao-kang. He never recognises him or realises that he’s being followed though he does later remember Mr. Lee and is struck by guilty futility not really knowing why he decided to arbitrarily ruin someone’s day while reflecting that all his days are ruined. The water in his apartment continues to rise all around him as if emphasising his mounting sense of despair. Mei-kuei tries to break up with A-tze before asking him to go away with her. They ask each other where they would go, but neither has any answer. 

A remorseful Mr. Lee later comes home and makes the point of leaving the front door ajar, symbolically open to his son’s return while Hsiao-kang remains lost. He visits a telephone dating service having heard Mei-kuei moonlight by answering one while working at the ice rink, but in the end cannot even pick up the phone. Staring at a picture of James Dean, he longs for the sense of rebellion he is drawn to in A-tze but is still the chaotic boy, dancing wildly like a wheelless Nezha and seemingly with no further sense of direction. In the end, it’s the city of Taipei which is the “neon god” of the title, arbitrarily ruling over each of the boy’s lives even as it ironically emerges from the authoritarian past into hypermodern urbanity. Hsiao-kang is little better off than the cockroach he ironically skewers on the point of his compass, and A-tze little than that which circles his overflowing drain carried inexorably on the current on a circular journey towards nowhere in particular. Many of Tsai’s key themes are already here, urban alienation, loneliness, futility, and the crushing sense of emptiness of life in the contemporary era even as he turns his gaze to the overcast skies of a city lit only by despair.

Rebels of the Neon God screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Lost in Forest (山中森林, Johnny Chiang, 2022)

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History repeats itself for a former gangster recently released from prison in Johnny Chiang’s melancholy neo-noir, Lost in Forest (山中森林, Shān Zhōng Senlín). Set in a neon-lit Taipei, Chiang’s moody crime drama finds its hero displaced in the modern society unable to look either forward or back while meditating on all he’s lost and another less corrupt vision of his home city as symbolised by his late father’s missing sausage bike and the changing back streets where it was once parked.

This Taipei is however a less wholesome place as suggested by Chiang’s frequent cuts to Christian churches and the giant neon crosses that sit above them as if looming in judgement on the chaos below. 12 years previously, Sheng (Lee Kang-sheng) opened fire on rival gang members who’d kidnapped his best friend and comrade Seagull (Angus Hsieh) who has now taken over the outfit while he’s been inside. Customarily, Seagull should have had someone come to meet him on his release, but Sheng exits the prison alone and is given a lift back into the city by the entourage collecting his prison buddy Ji despite the fact they are headed to an entirely different part of the country. Without a phone and not knowing where the gang even is anymore, all Sheng can do is hole up in a hotel until he finds out what’s going on. All of which suggests that despite his sacrifice, Seagull may not be particularly glad to reunite with him.

The conflict exists on three levels. Sheng must necessarily doubt his old friend Seagull, especially on realising that his new business model involves exploiting vulnerable women by pressing them into debt via high interest loans and then forcing them into sex work, while simultaneously worried about his guys who claim they have not been well treated while Sheng was away. But then it also becomes clear that much like many contemporary Taiwanese crime dramas, the real villain is institutional corruption as Seagull’s alliances with corrupt politicians and shady businessmen continue to destabilise the underground society thanks to the machinations of anarchic street punk Monkey (Sean Huang) who engineers a gang war by giving the businessman’s son a kicking as leverage in a dodgy land deal. 

On the one hand, Sheng watches history repeat itself as a handsome foot soldier, Chenghao (Prince Chiu), vacillates over leaving the gang for his respectable girlfriend Alice (Puff Kuo), while on the other Sheng becomes attached to sex worker Jing (Lee Chien-na), one of Seagull’s exploited women working for him to pay for her father’s medical bills. Sheng’s former lover tells him that if he really cared about her, he shouldn’t have sacrificed himself for Seagull just as Chenghao shouldn’t put himself in harm’s way out of a pointless sense of loyalty for a gang that has no real loyalty to him. Before his release, the prison warden had advised Sheng not to let his sense of loyalty get the best of him, but as he says Sheng no longer has much of anything else. His parents died while he was inside, the woman he loved married someone else, and Seagull can’t even remember what he did with Sheng’s dad’s sausage bike which is his only path back to a more wholesome existence. 

In a certain sense he’s powerless, unable to escape the inexorable pull of gangland karma until finally forced to reckon with the destabilising force that is Monkey to restore some kind of order and undermine the system of corruption that has arisen between underworld thuggery, local politics, and big business. The warden had also pointed at the fish in his tank and asked Sheng if it was happier in there or back in the sea but Sheng had merely said that it’s up to the fish to decide, hinting that in a certain sense it’s all the same and it’s just that one prison is bigger than another. At least the fish gets fed and is kept safe from predators even in its lonely isolation, which might be more than can be said for Sheng who can never truly escape his past even as he tries to free Chenghao and Jing from a similar fate. A melancholy mood piece, Chiang shoots night-time Taipei as a land of neon emptiness set against a classic jazz score that echoes Sheng’s deadpan ennui in a modern world of electronic smoke and rueful nihilism in which there is no escape from karmic retribution. 

Lost in Forest screens in Chicago April 16 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Grit (鱷魚, Chen Ta-Pu, 2021)

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A former gangster just released from prison finds his loyalties conflicted while working for a corrupt local official in Chen Ta-pu’s quirky romantic crime drama, Grit (鱷魚, èyú). According to a not particularly interested policeman, no one really cares about things like loyalty or morality anymore but like the best of noble gangster heroes, Yu Da-Wei (Kai Ko Chen-tung), otherwise known as Croc because of an incomplete tattoo of a dragon on his back, really does yet his nobility only makes him vulnerable to the machinations of those around him even as he does his best to stand up to thuggish intimidation masquerading as local government. 

At 17 years old, Yu was convicted of a gangland murder though it was rumoured at the time that petty gang boss Liu (Lee Kang-sheng) may have orchestrated the hit and set the young man up as a scapegoat promising him riches on release and that the grandfather who raised him would be looked after. Now a local councillor, Liu at least keeps his promise handing over twice the agreed amount of money along with a folder detailing where his grandfather’s ashes have been interred, but is otherwise unsupportive while later reluctantly agreeing to give Yu a job in his office during which he runs in to stubborn farmer Chen (Angelica Lee Sinje) whose father has recently passed away after a drunken accident. Chen has being trying to ring the council for weeks because someone’s cut off the water supply to her rice paddy but no one is willing to help her get it turned back on. Over earnest in his new occupation, Yu throws himself into action but is largely unaware of the vagaries of local politics and the likely reasons behind Miss Chen’s sudden inability to earn her living. 

Chen is quick to denigrate local government, complaining that they always turn up for weddings and funerals but when you really need them they’re nowhere to be found. That’s one reason she’s so surprised by Yu’s genuine attempts to help but conversely disappointed when nothing is really done. For his part, Yu is disappointed too because he really thought they were there to serve the people so he rolls up his sleeves and unblocks the irrigation channel himself but thereafter finds himself on the receiving end of the harassment Chen has been facing for months because she refuses to sell her land to developers. Liu is only motivated to help on discovering that the thugs at Chen’s farm may have been sent by a political rival but thereafter resorts to typical gangster tactics. Rather than try to help Chen, he blackmails his way onto the deal and then tells Yu to do whatever it takes to get her off her land so they can all profit as part of a dodgy real estate scam.  

An old school gangster, Yu is torn between loyalty to his old boss for whom he’s already been to prison and doing the right thing especially as he begins to bond with Chen as she continues to care for him after he is badly injured by thugs. He naively gives Liu opportunities to change, tries to convince Chen her land’s not worth dying for, and searches for another solution but eventually finds himself hamstrung by the contradictions of the world in which he lives where former gangsters are now in legitimate power and the state continues to behave like a low level street gang. It might be tempting to read a wider political message into Chen’s determination to hang on to her land which as her father was fond of saying is the only thing you can’t import as she alone refuses to give in to intimidation asking why it is they’re telling her to leave when there seems to be no good reason while Yu is eventually pushed towards resistance if only in her defence because of the mutual kindness that has arisen between them, two people otherwise alone in the world. 

“We all have our own worth” Liu snarls, but Yu is perhaps beginning to realise his, no longer the naive kid but turning the boss’ weapons back on him willing to sacrifice himself in order to save Chen even if he retains an unrealistic belief that Liu will honour his promises. Quirky in tone and somehow earnest, Chen Ta-pu’s charming crime drama is at once an innocent romance in which a lonely woman and a morally compromised man find love while battling institutional corruption, and a tale of personal redemption as the hero discovers “something more important” than loyalty to an oppressive social system and exploitative mentor.  

Grit screens in Chicago April 10 as part of the 14th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Days (日子, Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)

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It’s not so much time that makes you feel old as the weight of all the days. Returning with his first narrative feature since 2013’s Stray Dogs, Tsai Ming-liang’s Days (日子, Rìzi) spins a tale of twinned loneliness in which two men, one young one older, one rich the other poor, embody two kinds of sadness as they live out their days of detachment as living ghosts in world which seems to have no place for them. 

Tsai opens with the face of his muse, Lee Kang-sheng billed only in the credits as Kang a wealthy man living in a spacious home surrounded by the beauty of nature. The lengthy, unbroken scene finds him staring impassively out of a window while a storm rages outside, the sound of rain falling while the reflection of trees blown by the wind is eerily reflected behind him. We can see that Kang is a man in great pain, his eyes filled with a melancholy desperation. He stretches and rubs his neck, his physical discomfort perhaps a manifestation of the emotional suffering which he tries to heal by fire, enduring painful moxibustion in search of relief.

Meanwhile, in Bangokok, Laotian migrant Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) is quietly tending fires of his own, firstly those of ritual offering and secondly of sustenance as he stokes the embers to cook the old fashioned way in his tiny, spartan apartment. While Kang is a resolutely passive presence, Non fills his lonely days with industry, constantly at work as we witness him laboriously prepare his dinner with documentary realism. Non is at home with solitude in the private space, but forever alone outside of it. He stands to one side at the market where he works as customers mingle around him, always out of place and unseen like a ghost hovering in the corner of the frame. 

Parallel lines who meet, the two men eventually share a poignant, nominally transactional encounter in a nebulous third space of a neutral hotel room to which Kang has called Non for a sensual massage, presumably how he makes ends meet in Bangkok. Once again the young man does all the work while Kang lies impassive, Non oiling his fingers as he runs his hands over the older man’s body easing his pain through physical contact before he retreats off screen and we hear fabric falling, his Calvin Kleins hitting the floor as the two men briefly connect through an intense act of lovemaking, later proceeding to the shower where Non, still in the role of caregiver, tenderly washes the dejected Kang. Before he leaves, Kang idly hands the younger man the gift of a music box, a spontaneous decision that sparks a moment of melancholy emotional release. They struggle to say goodbye. Non leaves and Kang chases after him, Tsai lingering in the empty space of the hotel room while the two men head for dinner before returning to their respective days in someways changed and others not. 

His pain perhaps temporarily eased, Kang is not quite so passive as before, doing something or other with a fish and going for late night walks, but still finds himself lying awake while the sounds of outside wash over him, his eyes wide with fear and sadness. Non, meanwhile, returns to his routine but even more of a ghost than before, sadly cradling the music box as if in memory of his momentary connection its sound drowned out by the noise of anonymous modernity while the world goes on all around him, an invisible figure ignored by passersby walking alone into the night. 

A opening title card warns us that this is a film intentionally unsubtitled, much like life left to our own shallow grasp of meaning in thought or action, but what little dialogue there is hardly requires interpretation we feel it all the same. Tsai conjures an almost Antonionian sense of emptiness in place, a lengthy still shot of a “haunted” building peeling at the facade suddenly brought to life by the brief shadow of a cat in a window, while abruptly shifting to handheld to follow Kang, somehow alone and clutching his neck in pain in the chaotic streets. Both men exist at angles to the world, as if in some kind of secondary plane, meeting only for an instant and then returning to their solitary existences with only the brief memory of connection perhaps more painful than its absence. Tsai charts competing reactions to existential loneliness, the listless ennui of the wealthy Kang and the ceaseless industry of migrant worker Non, but finds them both equally displaced, searching for connection in an increasingly disconnected world. 

Days streams in the UK until 11th October, 6.30pm as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散, Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)

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Goodbye, Dragon Inn poster“So much of the past lingers in my heart” laments the melancholy song which closes Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, (不散, bù sǎn) “I’ll remember with longing forever”. What is cinema if not an expression of irresolvable nostalgia, a kind of visual hiraeth for something that probably never quite existed but is so painfully missed. Everything in here stayed the same, but everything outside changed and now the present seems to be literally raining in leaving the last few fugitives from reality lost in halls of memory like lonely ghosts trapped on the wrong side of the screen.

On the wrong side of the screen is where we find ourselves. We begin in darkness with the opening narration from King Hu’s 1967 wuxia masterpiece Dragon Inn before the curtain in front of us begins to flicker and reveal an entire theatre filled with people. We pull back, and eventually the people are gone leaving just a few desperate souls returning to watch this now classic picture on what could be its very last evening as this theatre – now so unsuitable for the modern cinema environment, will be closing “temporarily” as soon as the reels stop turning.

Truth be told, no one much is even very interested in the movie. Some have merely come in to shelter from the rain, but unfortunately for them not even here is safe thanks to a leaky roof. The dazzling labyrinths of the backstage environment seem to have been co-opted by the local cruising community, men brushing past each other looking for another like them but needing to be sure their desires will be returned. Meanwhile they gaze at each other in the dim half light of the cinema screen, aching with unspeakable longing.

Longing is also something on the mind of an older gentlemen, seemingly the only one actually watching the film, who turns out to be one of its actors shedding a silent, solitary tear for time passed. Running into a friend much like himself outside he laments that “No one comes to the movies anymore”. Everyone has forgotten them, turning them into ghosts of cinema, immortal but unremembered. They have, in a sense, been attending their own funeral, entombed inside a moribund building lit only by spectres of the past.

All this is, however, secondary to the backstage drama of the lonely box office cashier (Chen Shiang-chyi) and her inexpressible crush on the projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng) who never seems to be around when she needs him. Sadly cutting into a celebratory bun, she saves half of it for him – the least ambiguous expression of love which seems to be possible within this space. Slowly climbing the stairs with a lame leg, she gazes fondly at the screen while the heroine fearlessly dispatches a series of bad guys, but the light cast on her face seems only to emphasise her lack of courage before she sadly retreats back to the ticket booth where no customers require her services.

Meanwhile, in the auditorium, a young woman (Yang Kuei-mei) munches peanuts and throws her legs over the backs of the seats in front much to the chagrin of the confused tourist whose confusion seems only to deepen when the crushing noise stops and the woman disappears (unbeknownst to him she’s on a mission to retrieve a lost shoe, or perhaps has evaporated into thin air). The first words spoken, which occur at the 45 minute mark, are to state that this theatre is haunted. Departed spirits all, the lonely denizens are indeed haunting the room and themselves as they attempt to escape the relentless march of the modern world through self-internment in a damp and crumbling mausoleum of cinema.

A lament for a dying world stripped bare by the passage of time, Tsai’s exploration of urban loneliness is a nostalgic elegy for a simpler age, filled with unresolvable longing and the ironic misconnection of an individualised communal activity. Stillness and solitude define all for these lonely, disconnected souls chasing oblivion. The past can never return, nor can the missed opportunities and brief moments spent bathed in celluloid splendour, but then perhaps you wouldn’t want it to anyway because then you couldn’t miss it. “I’ll remember with longing forever” – romanticism at its finest, but it’s a trap that’s difficult to resist.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn screened at Tate Modern as part of the Taiwan Film Festival UK 2019 and The Deserted film series.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Liu Lian by Yao Lee – the poignant song playing over the end credits.

Your Face (你的臉, Tsai Ming-Liang, 2018)

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Your Face posterThe act of looking is an oddly intimate experience, which is perhaps why it becomes so uncomfortable to be looked at. The 13 souls who brave the camera for director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Your Face (你的臉, Nǐ de Liǎn) have all, obviously, given their consent to to become a subject for contemplation and are fully aware of being observed but still suffer the self-conscious embarrassment of being on show. That embarrassment is perhaps the point, pointing to a different kind of truth than the one we might have thought ourselves to be looking for but it’s also true that the camera becomes a kind of veil shielding us from our own anxiety safe in the knowledge that we can look all we please because we will never be seen.

Tsai’s subjects, aside from one or two, are mostly elderly residents of Taipei spotted by chance in the street and selected for their interesting faces. These faces, perhaps in contrast to those most often seen in cinema, are lined and worn. They wear their stories rather than tell them. Tsai gave few instructions, solely asking for an hour of time – 30 minutes spent in silence and 30 in conversation. The results are varied. Old men fall asleep, one plays a harmonica, a woman boils her life philosophy down to a love of making money, and a man laments a life wasted on pachinko and romantic disappointment.

Flickers of a smile erupt around a woman’s lips until she can’t contain her amusement any longer, finally breaking into a laugh in noting the strange incongruity of her position. It all looks so different on the screen than it looks at the scene. Tsai shoots in the same location as his earlier short Light, Zhongshan Hall – a public auditorium completed in 1936 when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (and therefore coincidentally close in age to many of Tsai’s subjects), but from different angles which almost obscure a sense of space until the hall itself gains its own portrait in the final shot, empty of life but somehow no longer passive.

Tsai encourages us to look deeply into the faces of others in manner which would be inappropriate in any other context. Yet the faces themselves react to Tsai’s camera and the people standing behind it. They do not and cannot react to us, except in an abstract sense, while we lurk behind a two way mirror protecting our own fragile senses of self from the same kind of scrutiny. Yet there is a kind of commonality in the way in which those on each side of the screen reach a point of mutual vacancy during which something else begins to emerge. The subjects fall into a kind of reverie, be it a literal sleep or motion towards activity such that of as one lady who decides to show off some of her “exercises” designed to stave off the effects of old age.

Those moments of activity, however, in breaking the stillness rupture the sense of contemplation in simply beholding an unfamiliar face. The ordinary had become uncanny, but now we have other concerns, narrative concerns with which to engage on an intellectual rather than instinctive level. On hearing the story, we forget about the face and concentrate on words while also forgetting that these stories are not really being told to us but to whoever is behind the camera and that the subject may also have lost consciousness of the camera itself while concentrating on relating their truth.

Then again, Tsai rejects the medium of documentary and we have only our own assumption that what we’re told is authentic and offered in the natural feeling of the moment. This is particularly true of the final subject who happens to be Tsai’s longterm muse Lee Kang-sheng (whose mother also appears in the film). Lee too muses on his family history, offering a meta comment on his face and its transitory likeness to that of his father, lamenting that though they say Lee’s father looked like him when he was young Lee knows that in “reality” he no longer is. Tsai’s camera turns its lens on ageing, on changes superficial and spiritual while remaining rooted to the spot as if fighting for an impossible objectivity. Closing in an empty room, Tsai nevertheless finds the light and the soul in the stonework as if to suggest that perhaps it wasn’t faces that were so important after all.

Your Face screened at Tate Modern as part of the Taiwan Film Festival UK 2019 and The Deserted film series.

Festival trailer (English captions)