Tag: Mandarin

I Am What I Am (雄狮少年, Sun Haipeng, 2021)

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A diffident young man learns to unleash the lion inside while battling the fierce inequality of the modern China in Sun Haipeng’s heartfelt family animation, I Am What I Am (雄狮少年, xióngshī shàonián). With its beautifully animated opening and closing sequences inspired by classic ink painting and the enormously detailed, painterly backgrounds, the film is at once a celebration of tradition and advocation for seizing the moment, continuing to believe that miracles really are possible even for ordinary people no matter how hopeless it may seem. 

The hero, Gyun (Li Xin), is a left behind child cared for by his elderly grandfather and it seems regarded as a good for nothing by most of the local community. Relentlessly bullied by a well built neighbour who is also a talented lion dancer, Gyun finds it impossible to stand up for himself but is given fresh hope by a young woman who makes a dramatic entrance into the village’s lion dance competition and later gifts him her lion head telling him to listen to the roar in his heart. 

The young woman is presented as an almost spiritual figure embodying the lion dance itself, yet later reveals that her family were against her practicing the traditional art because she is female exposing the persistent sexism at the heart of the contemporary society. Gyun’s heart is indeed roaring, desperately missing his parents who were forced to travel to the city to find work while leaving him behind in the country hoping to earn enough for his college education. Part of the reason he wants to master the art of the lion dance is so that he can travel to the city where his parents can see him compete, while privately like his friends Kat and Doggie he may despair for his lack of options stuck in his small hometown. 

But even in small towns there are masters of art as the boys discover when directed to a small dried fish store in search of a once famous lion dancer. Perhaps the guy selling grain at the market is a master poet, or the local fisherman a talented calligrapher, genius often lies in unexpected places. Now 45, Qiang (Li Meng) is a henpecked husband who seems to have had the life-force knocked out of him after being forced to give up lion dancing in order to earn money to support his family, but as the film is keen to point out it’s never really too late to chase a dream. After agreeing to coach the boys, Qiang begins to reclaim his sense of confidence and possibility with even his wife reflecting that she’s sorry she made him give up a part of himself all those years ago. 

Then again, Gyun faces a series of setbacks not least when he’s forced to travel to the city himself in search of work to support his family taking his lion mask with him but only as an awkward burden reminding him of all he’s sacrificing. Taking every job that comes, he lives in a series of squalid dorms and gradually begins to lose the sense of hope the lion mask granted him under the crushing impossibility of a life of casual labour.  The final pole on the lion dance course is there, according to the judges, to remind contestants that there are miracles which cannot be achieved and that there will always be an unreachable peak that is simply beyond them. But as Gyun discovers sometimes miracles really do happen though only when it stops being a competition and becomes more of a collective liberation born of mutual support. 

In the end, Gyun can’t exactly overcome the vagaries of the contemporary society, still stuck in a crushing cycle of poverty marked by poor living conditions and exploitative employment, but he has at least learned to listen to himself roar while reconnecting with his family and forming new ones with friends and fellow lion dancers. While most Chinese animation has drawn inspiration from classic tales and legends, I Am What I Am roots itself firmly in the present day yet with its beautifully drawn backgrounds of verdant red forests lends itself a mythic quality while simultaneously insisting that even in the “real” world miracles can happen even for lowly village boys like Gyun when they take charge of their destiny not only standing up for themselves but for others too.

I Am What I Am screens in Chicago on Sept. 10 as the opening movie of Asian Pop-Up Cinema season 15.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Virgin Blue (不要再見啊，魚花塘, Niu Xiaoyu, 2021)

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A young woman becomes lost in a confusingly timeless world of fractured memory in Niu Xiaoyu’s ethereal drama, Virgin Blue (不要再見啊，魚花塘, bùyào zàijiàn ā, yúhuā táng). As realities continue to shift and blur, we begin to wonder if two women are really one as seen through the memories of another and what we are experiencing is the confusion of dementia or perhaps a dying dream in which the heroine tries to put the pieces of her memory back in the right place only to end up at a mythical lake populated by those no longer able to live in the “real” world. 

Nominally Yezi (Ye Zi) is a recently graduated student returned home to stay with the widowed grandmother (Shengzhi Zheng) who raised her after her parents divorce over the summer, yet we often see her taking her grandmother’s place, finishing her knitting, while alternately rebelling against childhood’s end in insisting that she doesn’t want to grow up, has no interest in a relationship, and most of all wants her grandmother to go on knitting sweaters for her. At a hospital appointment, the pregnant nurse who in someways at least stands in for her own mother simultaneously her criticises for being unattached at such a “late” age and cites her celibacy as a possible explanation for her youthful appearance. 

We see that Yezi walks with a limp, she is diagnosed with hypoplasia at the hospital appointment, and that grandma has bad knees which she is later treated for by a buddhist nun in a dream. It’s grandma who keeps fearing that she’s forgetting but Yezi who isn’t clear with her, first of all telling her that grandpa died in 2020 (which is the current year) and then that it’s only 2013. Grandma claims that she always feels out of place, as if she were in someone else’s home and never her own which might in a sense be true. At times, the meta voice of the director can be heard off camera sharing stories of her own such as a traumatic dream in which her grandparents came to rescue her after youthful heartbreak but her grandmother got stabbed by a mystery attacker on the way home leaving her feeling that if only she were stronger and more independent, she would not have needed rescuing and grandma would be alive. Could the director be the “real” Yezi and her film counterpart a search for self in the memories of her grandparents? Perhaps so, as the image of her parents seems to drift into the scene along with potential friends and suitors who may or may not be figments of her imagination.

Even so her eventual destination is a surreal fantasyland peopled by a runaway princess who escaped from the real world after a failed elopement, a man who might once have been a kidnapped boy dressed in a bear suit, and a series of tiny dancers who perform elaborate dance routines for classic Chinese pop songs. The princess, Jingjing, and the bear describe themselves as monsters, marginalised to the lake, while monstrous is also how grandma describes the vision of herself as a dementia sufferer worried that even Yezi would reject her. The pregnant nurse and her colleague discuss the new trend for caesarean births, the colleague advising her to see a fortune teller and choose a good day in order to ensure that the child will not bring bad luck on its parents. 

Through it all, Yezi has visions of herself as a child with her late grandfather as if looking for childhood safety and comfort while trying to reorient herself as an adult. The fantasy world with its larger than life, childlike designs and nostalgic tunes is somewhere between fairytale safety and a kind of limbo from which Yezi is either eventually released or fully condemned as she looks back us, breaking the fourth wall to shake her head as if in warning. Infinitely strange yet also charming even in its confusions, Virgin Blue has a kind of melancholy warmth as Yezi tries to reintegrate this fragmenting world while processing her grief perhaps even for her self along with interrogating her past before ending on a note of joyful celebration as the monsters of Yuhua pond dance in the daylight to an unexpected rendition of Jun Togawa’s 1988 hit Daitenshi no you ni (Like an Angel).

Virgin Blue screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival where it was presented in partnership with CineCina.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Jun Togawa – Daitenshi no you ni (Like an Angel)

Images © Yu Tang Films (Anhui)

Reclaim (一家之主, CJ Wang, 2022)

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An ordinary middle-aged woman begins to wonder what it’s all been for when dealing with her insensitive, authoritarian husband, distant children, and the sacrifices she continually made to make others happy in CJ Wang’s touching family drama, Reclaim (一家之主, yījiāzhīzhǔ). The Chinese title, master of the house, is in its way ironic in the various ways in which Lan-xin (Nina Paw Hee-ching) is expected to shoulder all of the domestic responsibility with none of the control, though she is indeed attempting to reclaim something of herself as a woman and an individual as distinct from being someone’s, wife, mother, friend, or teacher. 

Lan-xin wanted to study art in Paris, but she got married young and started family and ever since then has led a conventional life doing what she thought to be right thing. Now, however, with her husband David (Kou Hsi-Shun) recently retired and both her children grown up she’s wondering a little what it’s all been for especially as David is a chauvinistic throwback who belittles her work as an art teacher while harping on about ways to make money patiently waiting for his collection of antique teapots to rise in value. Now that her mother’s dementia has intensified and she keeps escaping from her nursing home, Lan-xin wants to bring her to live with them but David is both dismissive and disinterested talking about it in the same way one would to a child who wants to get a dog asking if they really have the space and making it clear that looking after her will be Lan-xin’s responsibility. 

While David holds on to a substantial cheque with the intention of investing it in a series of harebrained schemes from luxury tombs to VR cafes, Lan-xin’s desire is essentially to try and repair her fracturing family by buying a larger apartment where they could all live together. David complains that no one tells him anything, but that’s largely because he’s continually dismissive of their dreams and aspirations blowing a hole in his daughter’s new project designing eco-friendly homes that prioritise individual comfort by telling her that she should just extend the living area into the balcony to trick people into thinking they’re getting more for their money. Jia-ning (Ko Chia-yen) in particular is feeling lost in her life unsure of what role it is she’s supposed to be playing while clearly disillusioned with the nature of the relationship between her parents in which her mother is expected to sacrifice her desires in service of her father’s. It’s clear that neither of the children want the kind of futures their parents envisaged for them, their professor son also preparing to return from the US to live a simple life in the Taiwanese countryside. 

Both of the children, however, take their mother for granted and often treat her poorly. The son orders her to book his plane tickets for him and abruptly hangs up after asking her to clean his room and make his favourite food, while Jia-ning also snaps at her expecting her to handle domestic tasks and locate missing items. Lan-xin forms a quasi-maternal relationship with a former student who has returned from America (Mason Lee) and now works in finance but is faced with the implosion of all her hopes firstly in her daughter’s more immediate needs to claim independence in her working life while avoiding the same compromises she was forced to make, and then by the illusionary nature of her home owning dream buying one home for fragmenting family rather than enduring her dissatisfying living arrangements while investing in separate homes for each of her children. 

There may be a degree of personal myth making in her meditating on the lost opportunity of a Parisian education as implied in an imaginary conversation with her mother, though as her miniature-making hobby implies perhaps she played the role she wanted to play but lost sight of herself somewhere along the way. A voyage into her own memory reunites her with her essential self and allows her to reclaim her name no longer willing to be subservient to her husband’s desires but prioritising her own. As in her dream, all her sacrifices will eventually be repaid while Jia-ning too comes to a better understanding of her mother and grandmother along with her own place in a changing society. Lan-xin is finally a master of herself no longer afraid to take up space in her own home and in full control of her own aspirations and desires. 

Reclaim screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It is also available to stream in many territories via Netflix.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 Rong Gwan Productions ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

My Best Friend’s Breakfast (我吃了那男孩一整年的早餐, Du Zheng Zhe, 2022)

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Teenage romance is always complicated, but it seems wilfully so for the couple at the centre of Du Zheng Zhe’s high school rom-com, My Best Friend’s Breakfast (我吃了那男孩一整年的早餐, wǒ chī le nà nánhái yī zhěng nián de zǎocān). Du’s adaptation of the popular novel by Misa lacks the quirky post-modernism with which Taiwanese romantic comedies have come to be associated save a few fantasy sequences and the heroine’s dialogues with possible versions of her future self, opting instead for a more much more conventional tale of miscommunication and the potential costs of failing to speak one’s true feelings at the right time. 

High schooler Wei-xin (Moon Lee) is in any case sceptical of romance as her parents have recently divorced after years of arguing about money and their conflicting views on success and happiness. Her classmate Yuan-shou (Edison Song Bai-wai), who has an obvious crush on her, convinces Wei-xin to take part in the school concert in exchange for receiving a milk tea every day, while she also makes a habit of eating the breakfasts sent to her best friend, popular girl Qi-ran (Jean Ho), by her various suitors. She then runs into top swimmer You-quan (Eric Chou) who chips in when she’s sort on her pineapple bread snack and starts hanging out with him after witnessing his awkward breakup with an unfaithful girlfriend. 

A brief note of social commentary is introduced as the pair bond over their stigmatised familial circumstances, Wei-xin fearing You-quan will look down on her when she explains her parents are divorced while he reveals he feared the same because his father has passed away and his mother is working in the US while he lives in one of the school dorms. The problem is, however, the central miscommunication in their by-proxy courtship in which You-quan starts sending breakfasts to Qi-ran which are obviously intended for Wei-xin though she remains oblivious both of You-quan’s feelings and those of Yuan-shuo. Assuming that You-quan is interested in Qi-ran she keeps quiet, as does he and everyone else giving rise to a lot of totally unnnecessary emotional suffering for all involved. 

Then again Wei-xin’s romantic predicament pushes her into an intense contemplation of her future, engaging in conversation with possible versions of herself in 15 years’ time firstly as a lonely, overweight woman who lives only to eat, and then as a cool and super-confident musician, each of them helping her figure out her feelings and what to do about them. Meanwhile, her youthful romance is contrasted with her parents’ failed relationship which apparently began when they were both carefree teens with no responsibilities and eventually broke down when faced with the realities of supporting each other as a family. While Wei-xin’s musician father has continued to follow his dreams even if they never payoff, her mother has become an unhappy workaholic desperate to work herself out of debt but also perhaps resentful in having given up on love for the illusion of financial security. 

What Wei-xin learns is that it’s better to be bold and have no regrets than risk becoming the version of her future self who is embittered and resentful that she never told her teenage crush how she felt. These teens do at least seem to have a fairly mature attitude to romantic disappointment, taking rejection with good grace and resolving not to let the awkwardness of a failed romantic confession ruin a friendship. One unexpectedly compassionate teen receives a declaration of love from a same sex crush in the midst of wailing about their own romantic heartbreak and though they do not return their feelings immediately embraces them in empathising with their emotional pain while another reflects on a bad breakup and traumatic incident to work on themselves and gain inner confidence before winning back their former love. 

Given all that the idealism of the film’s conclusion may sit a little oddly if perfectly positioned to appeal to a teen audience with an archetypal romantic moment, but is to a degree earned in teen’s path towards emotional honesty and the necessity of being brave enough to accept the risk of heartbreak in chasing their romantic destiny. Perhaps free breakfast delivered to your best friend by proxy is as a good a way to say I love you as any other. 

My Best Friend’s Breakfast screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © 2022, SKY FILMS Entertainment Co., Ltd., all rights reserved.

One and Four (一个和四个, Jigme Trinley, 2021)

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A lonely forest ranger nursing a broken heart and an incredible hangover finds himself the accidental arbiter of truth in Jigme Trinley’s frosty psychological drama, One and Four (一个和四个, yī gè hé sì gè). One and four is what each of these men are, individuals pitted one against the other. The atmosphere is one of danger and mistrust coupled with almost supernatural dread in the constant warning of an approaching blizzard with a ruthless maniac on the loose while it’s true enough that the only neutral party may have been quietly going stir crazy for quite some time aside from his recent troubles. 

Troubles do indeed descend on Sanggye in threes with each of his various visitors only complicating an already dangerous situation. As the film opens he’s clearly hungover, grumpy, and tense, going about his quotidian tasks and chopping wood while apparently out of food resorting to sucking old bread and bones. He writes in his diary that he wishes the events of the previous night had been a dream and introduces a note of mistrust regarding village man Kunbo who visited him Sanggye had assumed to borrow money but may have had a different purpose in mind. He’s later startled by another knock at the door from a wounded man carrying a rifle who claims to be a policeman chasing a dangerous poacher but looks to Sanggye like he could well be the poacher himself. 

Then again, Sanggye isn’t entirely honest with him either telling the man that he has no alcohol because forest rangers aren’t supposed to drink yet we’ve already seen bottles littering the cabin and it seems clear he woke with a hangover. “I didn’t know you why should I tell you the truth” he later tells his guest not unreasonably having concealed Kunbo’s visit the night before but now finding himself dragged into a wider drama involving a high speed crash which seems to have caused the death of at least one policeman with the poacher supposedly on the run. Sanggye looks for clues most particularly in the policeman’s badge number though we might wonder if it’s reasonable to assume someone driving a police car or wearing a jacket with a number on it is necessarily a policeman, or if on the other hand someone carrying a hunter’s rifle in the manner of a poacher must be a poacher. He looks for objective facts occasionally asking for verifiable detail such as the name of the man who runs the forest commission and his place of birth but once both Kunbo and another man also claiming to be a policeman turns up the situation only becomes more confusing.

Did Kunbo set him up, drop by deliberately to upset him so he’d be less likely to catch him committing crimes or is he simply in the middle of a bad situation? Are both these men policemen or neither, could they both be poachers after the same kill with Kunbo caught in the middle or is the whole thing some kind of bizarre cosmic coincidence ironically occurring on the “day for heroes to gather” as it says today to be on Sanggye’s wall calendar. As Sanggye points out, if one of these men is a poacher most likely he’d be dead by now but then maybe he’s only waiting to retrieve his missing hoard of antlers cut from a bemused deer left bleeding in the snow. 

“Preventing forest fires is everyone’s responsibility” according to Sanggye’s mug, though it seems unlikely anyone’s going to be able to stamp out this conflagration very speedily. Aligned with nature, Sanggye first refuses to accept a gun perhaps because he does not trust the man who gives it to him fearing that he intends to lull him into a false sense of security but is eventually forced to wield one in a four-way stand off uncertain who to believe in this increasingly complicated piece of game theory thought experiment. Sanggye probably wishes this had all been a dream too though one supposes he’s reason to believe the bad news he received the previous evening may not be true. In any case another cosmic coincidence eventually makes his decision for him as the clock rounds out the day. Tense, frosty, and full of questioning angles, Jigme Trinley’s well designed forest fable suggests the most dangerous beast in the forest is your fellow man though a deer may repay a kindness if you’re mindful enough to show them one. 

One and Four screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Mani Stone Pictures/Tsemdo

Return to Dust (隐入尘烟, Li Ruijun, 2022)

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“You were used by others for most of your life, haven’t you had enough?” a farmer asks on parting with his faithful donkey as it hesitates to leave him, but might as well be asking the question of himself. Set in 2010, Li Ruijun’s peaceful rural drama Return to Dust (隐入尘烟, yǐn rù chén yān) paints a bleak picture of life on the margins of the modern China in which the old ways are literally being eroded while the promised modernity has yet to materialise. 

Middle-aged farmer Fourth Brother Iron (Wu Renlin) is a quiet and soulful man often exploited by his family members being the youngest of four brothers the elder two along with the parents having already passed away. Essentially wanting to be rid of him, his brother arranges a marriage to a local woman, Guiying (Hai Qing), whose family are also keen to offload her as she has a disability which has left her incontinent and unable to bear children. Neither she nor Iron say very much of anything but passively accept the marriage moving in together in one of the abandoned houses in their village. 

As villager had put it, Guiying had lived a horrible life shut up in a shed, beaten, and abused by her brother all her life. She thought Iron would make a good husband after seeing him comfort his donkey after his brother had beaten it and he does indeed begin taking good care of her even while it is clear the other villagers do not always accept Guiying, calling her a “wretched thing” or “useless idler” when she wets herself or is seen riding on Iron’s donkey cart. Slowly bonding through common purpose and mutual compassion, this marriage which could have meant only more misery for each of them becomes one of the few sources of joy in their lives. On moving properties, Iron cheerfully puts up the double happiness wedding character above their bed expressing the warmth which will fill the previously drafty home they will share together. 

But life is hard in rapidly depopulating rural China. Many of the houses in the village are vacant, abandoned by those who’ve either migrated to the city or other rural communities with better opportunities. The government has instituted a policy of countryside renewal in which it will offer generous compensation for demolition or renovation of traditional homes which of course brings many of those who had left back with the intention of claming the free money for demolishing their abandoned properties. But for a man like Iron the policy ironically backfires pushing him into a cycle of continual displacement taking shelter in one abandoned property after another forced to move on when the owners return and ask him to leave. Pained, he asks one to hold off just a few days so a newly hatched swallow nesting under the roof of his home will be strong enough to fly away but the man is unsympathetic, insisting that he has no time to spare and must return to the city as soon as possible. The bulldozer goes in seconds after Iron and Guiying have picked up their cart. 

Patiently baking mud bricks, the couple resolve to build their own home and farm their own land. So long as you do not betray the soil the soil will not betray you, Iron soulfully suggests yet his earthy rationalisation when Guiying sadly holds up a failed sapling that it will be fertiliser for the others sounds like a description of his own life. His status in the village is unbalanced when it turns out he has a rare blood type and is more or less forced to offer blood transfusions to a thuggish local businessman who owes the villagers both rent on the land he’s leased from them and wages which he’s not paying on the grounds that he’s ill and needs to sell the grain before he can settle. Bled dry, Iron receives small gifts from the man’s son such as a coat for Guiying he couldn’t afford to buy and accepts on the condition that it’s a loan, and a fancy dinner neither of them seem very comfortable with eating. 

Because of his new connections, his brother, having not invited him to his son’s wedding banquet, fetches up and tries to intimidate Iron into getting an apartment in the city he clearly intends his son and daughter-in-law to live in. Bemused on looking out on the flat’s view of endless fields, Iron asks what he’s supposed to do with his chickens, the pigs, and the donkey, but the civil servants who are filming him presumably for propaganda purposes to show how people’s lives have been changed through the scheme, just laugh while his brother and sister-in-law mutter about the kitchen considering the suitability for the new couple. Iron signs all his bills with a thumbprint implying that he probably cannot write and perhaps cannot read. As he later puts it, what’s a peasant to do without land? The new future cannot look the same for everyone, and to succeed it will have to do away with the idea that the urban is inherently superior to the rural. 

Continually displaced, Iron and Guiying accept their hardship with quiet dignity, stoically getting on with their lives while others only seek to exploit and misuse them. A brief scene of Iron setting up a box of lights to hatch chickens for Guiying to raise in place of the children they’ll never have adds a sense of wonder to their humble home while the compassion and kindness they show to the natural world would have perhaps repaid them if it had not been for the cruelties and contradictions of the modern China in which the rural has long been sacrificed in favour of increasingly consumerist cities. Iron pays his debts and prepares to move on though even in these vast plains it seems there is little space for him. 

Return to Dust screened as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival and will be released in UK & Ireland on 4th November courtesy of Modern Films.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Before Next Spring (如果有一天我将会离开你, Li Gen, 2021)

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A naive exchange student finds a surrogate family while working at a Tokyo Chinese restaurant in Li Gen’s semi-autobiographical drama, Before Next Spring (如果有一天我将会离开你, rúguǒ yǒu yī tiān wǒ jiānghuì líkāi nǐ). Though it becomes obvious that almost everyone has come to Japan as a means of escape from personal troubles, the disparate collection of migrants eventually find solidarity with each other as they attempt to settle in to life in another culture while bonding with similarly troubled locals themselves excluded from mainstream society. 

Li Xiaoli seems to have chosen to come to Japan to find some release from a difficult family situation caused by his father’s illness. His mother had to give up work to look after him so the family have little money but Xiaoli is determined to make the most of his year abroad. When a stint in a supermarket doesn’t work out, his classmate Chiu (Qiu Tian) gets him a job at a Chinese restaurant where her friend/colleague Zhao (Niu Chao) also works. Though Zhao immediately takes against him perhaps out of jealousy, Xiaoli is taken under the wing of the restaurant’s manager, Wei (Qi Xi), who has been in Tokyo for some time but has recently had her application for permanent residence turned down in part because she is not married and has no children meaning the authorities are not satisfied about her longterm ties to Japan. 

Wei’s situation perhaps bears out the precarity of her life in Tokyo and the inability to fully feel at home experienced by many of the restaurant workers. Later it turns out that she is in need of an operation for uterine fibroids in part hoping to improve her chances of conceiving a child thought it’s unclear if her desire is solely to start a family or to give herself a better footing for getting her permanent resident card. Meanwhile the uncertainly undermines her relationship with chef Song (Song Ningfeng) who is undocumented and apparently in frequent contact with another woman who has her residence card already. The restaurant is frequently raided by police on the look out for anyone who might be working illegally, forcing Song to hide behind a fishtank in the basement like a criminal and giving rise to an atmosphere for persecution and anxiety. While the the pair are walking home one evening, they are hassled by a drunk man in the street who bumps into them and then demands they apologise. Song is visibility irritated by the humiliation of being forced to apologise to belligerent xenophobe and struggles to avoid losing his temper. Something similar occurs when a neighbour complains about the noise and then rings the police after hearing Song and Wei arguing, Xiaoli who was present at the time having to pose as Wei’s boyfriend flashing his legitimate student ID for the detectives. 

Xiaoli also makes a friend of the middle-aged Chinese teacher at their school, played in an extended cameo from Sylvia Chang, who hints that in some ways the experience hasn’t changed since she arrived at the tail end of the Bubble era. She recounts working three jobs but being delighted on buying everything she ever could want during department store sales. Only now she’s as rootless and dejected as Xiaoli. Her husband has returned to China, and now she’s living alone trying to redefine her reasons for coming to and staying in Japan. Middle-aged Chef Wan (Chen Yongzhong), who also experiences a unpleasant incident of being accused of groping a woman on a train because he was holding his aching stomach on the way to a hospital appointment, is feeling something similar having dreamed of bringing his family to join him only to now wonder if there’s really any point after so many years apart. 

The moody Zhao, meanwhile, is half-Japanese but has been all but abandoned by his parents and feels nothing for them other than resentment. Caught between two cultures, he insists on being called by the Japanese reading of his first name, Aoki, rather than the Chinese, Qingmu, and makes a point of talking to Xiaoli in Japanese rather than Mandarin despite being aware that his language skills are still undeveloped. He is in deep love with Xiaoli’s schoolfriend Chiu who works as a hostess in addition to her gig at the supermarket but is too diffident to say anything and though she seems to care for him she makes it clear she does not intend to wait.  

The sense of loneliness each of them feel is echoed in the melancholy tale of an older couple who run a hairdresser’s and had no children of their own, finding themselves unanchored in their old age but discovering a place for themselves at the Chinese restaurant. The only Japanese worker, Watanabe who develops a maternal relationship with Zhao, finds something similar while working a second job at a supermarket raising her children and trying to care for her elderly mother. Told over the course of a year with Xiaoli’s departure date already set, Li Gen’s lowkey drama is content with a lack of resolution that suggests time in motion marked by a series of partings some of which may be more permanent than others but each in their own way meaningful.

Before Next Spring screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © Huace Film & TV (Tianjin) Co., Ltd.

The Funeral (頭七, Shen Dan-Quei, 2022) 

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“They’re your family, they won’t hurt you anyway” a little girl is consoled on suggesting that her relatives’ home may be haunted but it’s a statement which seems remarkably naive given the toxic situation at the centre of Shen Dan-Quei’s gothic drama, The Funeral (頭七, tóuqī). There may well be supernatural goings on, but the root of the problem remains familial exile and the outdated social codes which lead to it causing nothing but misery and loneliness for all concerned. 

Single mother Chun-hua (Selina Jen Chia-hsüan) hasn’t seen her family in a decade. She works several jobs trying to support herself and her daughter Qin-xuan (Bella Wu) who is seriously ill and on the list for a kidney transplant. When in the opening scene she begins to suspect a ghost has entered the convenience store where she works nights, it’s impossible to tell if she’s actually being haunted or is just tired and anxious. In any case, she’s later let go from that job after a co-worker complains about her falling asleep on shift which is right about when she gets a call from her estranged uncle (Nadow Lin) to let her know her grandfather, whom she had been very close to as a child, has passed away and she should come home for the funeral. Chun-hua is however reluctant because she evidently fell out with her authoritarian father (Chen Yi-Wen) when she left home and returning now is awkward in the extreme. 

Having set the scene with Chun-hua haunted in the city, Shen moves the action to the creepy gothic mansion where she grew up which does indeed seem to be a spooky place defined by its hostile atmosphere. Her father wastes no time telling her that she’s not welcome, but Chun-hua holds her ground and insists on being allowed to pay her respects to the only member of the family who seems to have shown her any affection. Later flashbacks suggest a concrete cause of the family’s disintegration, but then Chun-hua’s father seems to have taken against her even in childhood apparently refusing to allow her to celebrate her birthday with her sister seemingly also resentful of her for no clear reason. Though her mother clearly loves her, she cannot defy her husband and is unable to defend her daughter. The only one of the family privately happy to see Chun-hua, even her mother eventually tells her it would be better if she returned to Taipei as soon as possible given the awkwardness of the situation. 

Then again, as we later learn, she may have another reason in mind though this attempt to reframe the family’s animosity towards Chun-hua is a little problematic in suggesting they are cruel because they love her and want to her leave the toxic environment of the house to save her from its poisonous legacy. The grandfather may have been the only one to show her love, but it is his failings that have created division within the family causing some to feel rejected, excluded from the circle for no fault of their own. Her father’s rejection of her is in its own way similar, even if we later see him remorseful realising that his authoritarian parenting has cost him his daughter.

There may be a lot of supernatural action with the taoist priest permanently engaged in rituals over the grandfather’s body, but the darkness and resentment is purely human, born of loneliness and rejection in a lack of love and respect between those who are related by blood. Qin-xuan is at a disadvantage in knowing nothing of her extended family or mother’s relationship to them, she also rejected on arriving for the funeral. The place is indeed haunted beyond the scuttling figures that seem to catch their eyes and laden with the heavy atmosphere of the family’s inherent toxicity. But then through this extremely dark event, the relationship between mother and daughter is in its own way strengthened not least in Chuan-hua’s selfless determination to save her daughter from her own familial curse not to mention her medical precarity. Even so, the melancholy conclusion may hint that the toxic familial curse cannot be completely cured and is destined only to repeat itself in a perpetual cycle of hauntings. 

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

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese/English subtitles)

Images: © PINOCCHIO FILM CO. LTD

Mama Boy (初戀慢半拍, Arvin Chen, 2022)

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A diffident young man gets a few lessons in love after falling for a middle-aged madam in Arvin Chen’s charming romantic dramedy, Mama Boy (初戀慢半拍, chūliàn mànbànpāi). The English-language title at least is a kind of pun, the awkward hero both described as a mother’s boy and falling for the mama of a hotel providing sexual services, but also hints at the awkwardness involved in his attempt to assert his independence at the comparatively late age of 30 by choosing to spend time with a mother the polar opposite of his own. 

Xiao-hong’s (Kai Ko) mother Meiling (Yu Tzu-yu) describes him as “shy”, though the mother of one of the girls she attempts to set him up with less charitably brands him “not normal”. Not normal is closer to the way Xiao-hong thinks of himself, wishing his mother would stop with the blind dates knowing that in his awkwardness he ends up making women feel uncomfortable and has no idea how to talk to them. His sleazy cousin/boss at the tropical fish shop where he works, insists on taking him to an exclusive brothel where he is instantly captivated by the middle-aged madam, Sister Lele (Vivian Hsu). Too shy to say anything, he continues returning to the hotel and hiring a sex worker to sit blankly in the room solely for the opportunity of exchanging a few words with her. 

The two of them are in a sense in similar positions, a mother frustrated by a wayward son, and a son frustrated by his possessive mother. Some of Xiao-hong’s attraction at least is maternal in seeking a freer parental hand. Unlike his mother, Lele boosts his confidence by making him believe that he’s alright and girls are going to like him, while taking him to cosy nightspots and teaching him the basics of romance. She meanwhile admires him as an ideal son the polar opposite of her own. Weijie (Fandy Fan) only contacts her to ask for money (his father no longer answers his calls) and seems to be involved in several dodgy get rich quick schemes the latest of which is selling knock off wine while he’s also got himself in trouble with loansharks. 

There is something a little uncomfortable in the contrast presented between the two women, the prim and proper mum Meiling raising a sweet, polite child like Xiao-hong who nevertheless lacks several important life skills because of her overparenting, while the child raised by former sex worker Lele is a no good two bit wise guy. Lele certainly seems to see Xiao-hong as a symbol of her failed maternity believing that his mother must have raised him well while she blames herself for her son’s failings feeling as if she couldn’t give Weijie the attention he deserved because she was a single mother who had to work to support him. 

Meanwhile they are also each lonely, Xiao-hong shy and isolated and Lele spending her nights drinking alone in bars being chatted up by sleazy men. Spending time together they develop a tentative bond of love and affection only to find their connection interrupted by Weijie and Meiling each of whom obviously disapprove. Meiling has a suitor of her own in a retired police academy professor she rejects out of a sense of repressive properness but eventually warms to after feeling she needs police assistance to reclaim her son from Lele realising that he’s stopped picking her up from work in order to give Lele lifts instead. 

Despite the romantic themes, both women are essentially reduced to the maternal through their experiences with good son Xiao-hong, Lele trying to patch things up with the wayward Weijie while Meiling realises that she’s overstepped the mark and and will have to let go a little to let Xiao-hong live his life or risk turning him into a perpetual mother’s boy who’ll be all alone once she’s gone. Xiao-hong meanwhile begins to gain confidence, asserting himself as an individual free of his mother’s control now no longer so diffident in talking to women thanks to the patient ministrations of Lele. With its quirky production design and fairytale atmosphere Chen’s tale of first love delayed is also one of unexpected connection and mutual acceptance that perhaps missteps in effectively negating the relationship at its centre but nevertheless has only sympathy for its lovelorn hero. 

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 Filmagic Pictures Co.

Life For Sale (售命, Tom Teng, 2021)

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A nihilistic insurance broker chases existential validation in Tom Teng’s darkly comic crime drama, Life for Sale (售命, shòu mìng). Drawing inspiration from the novel by Yukio Mishima by the same name, the film takes aim at the commodification of life under a relentlessly capitalist society while its hero gradually discovers liberation in reaching an accommodation with death that begins to give meaning to his existence. Sucked not only into local gangster intrigue but shady international conspiracy, he finds himself forming a tentative relationship with an equally depressed neighbour who has troubles of her own. 

Ironically enough, Liang (Fu Meng-po) is a life insurance broker which quite literally means it’s his job to figure out exactly how much a life is worth. As for himself, he’s convinced his life is worthless and is obsessed with the idea of suicide while seemingly reluctant to actually die. He looks up banal ways to end his life on the internet and discovers that almost everything including carrots, cinnamon, and chewing gum, becomes poison if you consume enough of it. When he’s called into his boss’ office shortly after punching an irritating colleague in the face, he’s given a good idea of what his own life is worth when she tells him that the company bought a year of it with his salary but he’s been a poor investment and has actually cost them money through this rubbish sales record. It’s at this point he decides to call the corporate life quits and, taking inspiration from a copy of Life for Sale he found on the bus, decides that he should try monetising his life by selling it on the internet. 

His first offer is from creepy gangster Wang who repeatedly claims there’s nothing in the world his money can’t buy. He wants to send Liang on a dangerous mission to retrieve his wife’s dog from a rival gangster who’s kidnapped it, while a mysterious woman is also trying to recruit him for some kind of experimental research programme. Perversely he continues to think of his life as his own even having sold it resenting those who now think they own him and contemplates suicide as an expression of his autonomy. He comes to realise that his life is the one thing he has while simultaneously accepting that having lost it he is effectively dead already and has nothing left to lose. The realisation is liberating, his nihilism intensified as he resolves to do whatever he can to survive in part so that he might save others. 

Having begun with a darkly humorous take on the dehumanising nature of modern capitalism in which there is a price tag on each and every life, the film slides towards existential contemplation as Liang finds himself caught in the crosshairs not only of internecine gangland drama between the sinister wang and flamboyant Liao mediated though a chaotic hit on a dodgy policeman, but of an international conspiracy which is intent on doing something not entirely ethical to his body. Despite his newfound ruthlessness he is effectively emasculated firstly by the mysterious woman who tells him that he is a coward who does not deserve to be called a man and then by his neighbour who having lost faith in him declares that she will have to save her son herself thereby defining the value of her own life. 

All the while, Liang is plagued by a little bug that follows him around and seems to lead to trouble while perhaps echoing his capacity to survive. When he asks someone why they continue to smoke despite knowing the risks, he is ironically told that everyone has a little bit of a death wish and continues to leverage his own in a determination to at least make his death if not his life mean something. Then again, even post transformation he can’t seem to escape from the world in which everything is for sale agreeing to sell his life but drawing the line at his soul. On the run though perhaps no longer from himself, Liang has at least gained a new appreciation of the value he places on his own life and those which define the lives of others if strangely unaffected by failure or tragedy. Quirky production design and comic book-esque absurdity hint at the underlying satire but also contribute to a kind of origin story for a superhero escapologist looking for agency in a continually exploitative existence. 

Life For Sale screens at Lincoln Center 24th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)