Tag: New York Asian Film Festival 2021

Babi (Namewee, 2020)

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No stranger to controversy, Namewee’s latest, Babi, saw him once again questioned by the authorities when a complaint was lodged citing the film’s alleged “racist elements” which “tarnished Malaysia’s image” while the producer was also later accused of failing to gain the proper license for the film’s production. In fact, some were convinced that the film itself was fake and Namewee’s claims that it had been shortlisted for major international festivals were just bluster, yet it does really exist even if some really wish that it didn’t considering the rather bleak picture it paints of a society marked by racial discrimination and corrupted authority. 

Namewee opens with a lengthy context sequence outlining major events which occurred in the year 2000 from the Australian Olympics to Bush’s election while claiming that the shocking story he’s about to tell is true but was never reported because, it’s implied, it was covered up by the authorities. A boy dies at an ordinary high school, apparently having gone over one of the balconies and landing in the courtyard below. The school, panicked, want to get this cleared up as soon as possible, preferably before going home time because they’d rather the parents didn’t find out about it and are desperate to keep it out of the papers. For all of these reasons, it’s best for them to call the boy’s death a suicide, yet empathetic and soon to retire police officer Singh insists on a full and proper investigation. 

What follows is a Rashomon-like series of alternative witness statements each of which move silently towards the truth. What’s certain is that a fight broke out between rival gangs in the cafeteria after rich kid Kiet’s coke was knocked over, he assumed deliberately. Kiet is an extremely unpleasant and entitled young man resentful that no one likes him but constantly harping on about his prominent father while showing off his wealth by, among other things, driving a BMW to school. This perhaps plays into an unpleasant stereotype as Kiet is a member of the ethnic Chinese community which, despite being a minority, is resented by some Malays the film suggests for its supposed stranglehold on the national economy. The Chinese minority, meanwhile, continue to suffer degrees of discrimination. The boy who died, Chong, had been turned down when applying for a university scholarship because of his ethnicity despite his Malay friend Yisin attempting to speak up for him with the teachers. 

The teachers are, however, not interested and apparently extremely racist themselves. Arch villain Mr. Nasir quite obviously has it in for anyone not Malay, snapping as the leader of the Indian boys is questioned that “Indians are all liars” which is even more awkward considering the lead policeman is an Indian Sikh. Bullying another Indian student, he likens the necklace he’s wearing to a “dog collar” while branding Chong an “outsider” and an “immigrant” when he dares to ask questions about the procedures for awarding scholarships which Mr. Nasir claims are intended for the indigenous community while continuing to insist that Chong must be rich simply because he is Chinese. 

Mr. Nasir is himself a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the contemporary society and an embodiment of the corrupt authority that provokes the boys’ rebellion. He is actively, even gleefully, racist and routinely abuses his power in the most heinous of ways, while the leaders of the Chinese and Malay gangs also lost fathers to corrupt authority figures. Aside from his racism, Mr. Nasir is also extremely homophobic, taking aside an effeminate Indian student, ripping off his accessories, and later humiliating him. Yet his chief complaint is about the word scrawled on the bathroom wall, “Babi”, meaning pig, which he takes as a mockery of Islam. 

As the closing captions explain, the teachers were later transferred while a number of students were expelled from the school though we cannot know the veracity of Namewee’s claims, no one has apparently ever reported on the case. The incident remains “unreported but not forgotten”. In any case there is genuine poignancy in the frustrated friendship between a Malay boy and his two Chinese friends, eventually corrupted by jealousy and resentment caused by societal conservatism and discrimination. Yet as bleak and nihilistic as the film’s conclusion may seem, it does allow a ray of light in the youngsters’ eventual rebellion against the corruption which so oppresses them, united if only in a moment by their desire to break free of its duplicitous constraints. 

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

Original trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

A Song for You (他与罗耶戴尔, Dukar Tserang, 2020)

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A resentful musician is confronted with the corrupting influences of modernity while trying to make it as a singer in the directorial debut from Dukar Tserang, A Song For You (他与罗耶戴尔, tā yǔ luó ye dài’ ěr) . Guided by the goddess of music, Ngawang travels from his home in the desert to the city and then still further while holding fast to the purity of his traditional art but perhaps begins to discover that evolution is not always betrayal while learning a little something from those he meets along the way even if his elliptical journey ends in its own kind of tragedy. 

The son of a prominent musician in his home community, Ngawang (Damtin Tserang) longs to prove himself as a singer but is also rigid and uncompromising, getting into a fight with a friend of a friend who mocks him for stubbornly playing his traditional Zhanian zither when others have long since moved on to mandolin. Lhagyal sings the praises of popular musician Samdrup who seems to be something of a sore point to Ngawang, kickstarting a rant in which he accuses him of corrupting the art of Amdo singing with his modern evolutions such as drum machines and electronic backing. Lhagyal meanwhile argues that Samdrup has in fact saved their art and without his innovations no one would be at all interested in folk singing to begin with. The two men butt heads, but it’s Ngawang who ends up looking like a prig especially after he fails to place in the singing competition in which he’s come to perform after having arrogantly boasted of his talent. 

It’s at the concert that he first lays eyes on a mysterious woman, another singer singing of the birth of Amdo music. Ngawang later comes to believe she is some kind of incarnation of the goddess of music, Loyiter, owing to the similarity she bears to an icon revealed once he accidentally breaks open a talisman his father had given him after having a tantrum that it clearly doesn’t work because he didn’t win the competition. The nameless woman advises that the reason Ngawang’s talent was not appreciated was because no one takes you seriously if you don’t have an album which is why he ropes in his feckless friend Pathar to help him get to Xining where it seems records are made.

It’s in the cities where he begins to feel his most severe pangs of culture shock, taken to a bar where he again spots the mysterious woman but this time she’s a rock singer named Yangchen who again begins helping him meet the right people to further his musical ambitions. The contrast between his songs which sing of the beauty of the natural world, and the highly corporatised, technologically advanced world of the music business couldn’t be more stark. Ngawang could not understand the words of Yangchen’s song even though he appreciated the melody because it was in Mandarin, while the design shop he uses for a poster ends up making an embarrassing typo in the Tibetan script which they are unable to read. Ngawang just wants to sing, but finds himself roped in to making a “video album” with an over zealous director who accuses him of having no presence and a lack of expression that make him unfilmable as a performer. 

In any case, it isn’t just in the cities that modernity has begun to seep into the traditional. Stopping off on their road trip to deliver the sister of a man who ambushed them and then gave them a brief musical lesson to a monastery, Ngawang encounters a little boy begging in the street who seems to be homeless and alone. Noting the oversize Zhanian on his back he asks the boy for a song, which he sings in a melancholy rendition of life’s unfairness that some children have wealthy parents, some poor, and some none at all. Ngawang is embarrassed to realise he only has large notes, but the boy cheerfully pulls out a lanyard with a QR code Ngawang could have scanned to pay him via WeChat if only he had his phone. Throughout his wanderings Ngawang comes to a new understanding of the world around him which softens his rigidity while informing his music with a greater sense of openness even as he fails to notice a note of foreshadowing in Yangchen’s troubles only later realising he’s been away from home too long and there is always a price to be paid even if you serve the goddess of music. A light hearted musical odyssey and brief tour of the Tibetan plains, Dukar Tserang’s soulful road movie is an ode to singing for the love of it but also to openness and friendships, no matter how brief, made along the way. 

A Song for You screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sensei, Would You Sit Beside Me? (先生、私の隣に座っていただけませんか？, Takahiro Horie, 2021)

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An under-confident mangaka tries to save her moribund marriage through a passive aggressive attempt at “realism”, but then is that really what she wants? What is she really up to? Takahiro Horie’s anti-rom-com Sensei, Would You Sit Beside me? (先生、私の隣に座っていただけませんか？, Sensei, Watashi no Tonari ni Suwatte Itadakemasenka?) is more complicated than it first seems, a tale of romantic revenge, of a woman’s determination to reclaim her independence, or perhaps even a slightly cynical not to mention sexist story of a betrayed wife’s attempts to rekindle her moody husband’s creative mojo in the hope of reigniting the spark in their marriage. What transpires is however a literary game of cat and mouse as a suddenly alarmed husband attempts to get ahead of the game through the transgressive act of reading his wife’s diary. 

A successful manga artist, Sawako (Haru Kuroki) has just completed a long-running series assisted by her husband of five years, Toshio (Tasuku Emoto) who was once a bestselling mangaka himself but hasn’t worked on anything of his own since they got married. Toshio appears to be prickly on this subject, and is in something of a bad mood while Sawako’s editor Chika (Nao Honda) waits patiently for the completed pages. Seemingly suspecting something, Sawako asks Toshio to escort Chika back to the station with the intention of following them only she’s interrupted by a phone call from the police to the effect that her mother (Jun Fubuki), who lives out in the country, has been in an accident and broken her ankle. Sawako and Toshio decide to go and stay with her while she recovers, though a change of scene seems to do little to relieve the pressures on their marriage. 

Indeed, on their first night there Toshio remarks that it’s been a while since they’ve slept in the same room which might go some way to explaining the distance in their relationship. Aside from that, Toshio superficially seems much more cheerful perhaps putting on a best behaviour act for his mother-in-law who makes a point of telling her daughter how “great” her husband is and how she’s almost glad she broke her leg because it’s brought him to stay. Her gentle hints to Sawako to let her know if there’s something wrong elicit only a characteristic “hmm” while she otherwise makes only passive-aggressive comments which suggest she fears her marriage may be on the way out. Having long been resistant to the idea of learning to drive even though she grew up in the country, Sawako starts taking lessons at a nearby school cryptically explaining to Toshio that perhaps she’d better learn after all because she’ll be stuck when he leaves her. 

Sawako’s “driving phobia” as she first describes it appears to be a facet of her underlying lack of self-confidence. She simply doesn’t trust herself to take the wheel and cannot operate without the safety net of someone sitting next to her. Having not got on with the grumpy old man she was originally assigned, Sawako gains the courage to take her foot off the brake thanks to a handsome young instructor, Shintani (Daichi Kaneko), who makes her feel safe while slowly giving her the confidence to trust in herself. The implication is that Toshio has been unable to do something similar in part because he’s so wrapped up in his own inferiority complex over his creative decline complaining that nothing really moves him anymore. When Chika advises Sawako choose a more “realistic” subject for her next series, she passively aggressively decides to go all in with a clearly autobiographical tale of adultery that suggests she is well aware her husband and editor are having an affair behind her back while the heroine experiences a passionate reawakening thanks to her handsome, sensitive driving instructor. 

Of course, Toshio can’t resist reading her “diary” and obsessing over how much of it is “true”. Perhaps Sawako intended just this effect, driving her husband out of his mind with guilt and jealousy indulging in a little revenge whether in fantasy or reality. The irony is that there are at least three “senseis” floating around including Sawako herself with the eventual decision of who, if anyone, she wants to sit beside her the unanswered question of her “revenge” manga. Her real revenge, however, may lie in her determination to grab the wheel, reclaiming agency over her life along with a new independence born of her ability to drive and therefore decide its further direction while toying with Toshio’s inner insecurity in order to effect a plan which is far more insidious than it might first seem. Filled with twists and turns, Horie’s cynical love farce eventually cedes total control to its seemingly mousy heroine as she gains the confidence to go solo or hand-in-hand as it suits her towards a destination entirely of her own choosing. 

Sensei, Would You Sit Beside Me? screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Old Town Girls (兔子暴力, Shen Yu, 2020)

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The left behind children of decaying industrial China find themselves at the mercy of a corrupted parental legacy in Shen Yu’s neo-noir tragedy The Old Town Girls (兔子暴力, Tùzi Bàolì). Each longing for escape but living in defeat, the three young women at the film’s centre search for signs of possibility in a world they fear has already rejected them but encounter only darkness and futility brokered by the broken adults apparently unable or unwilling to parent or protect them from the world their indifference has forged. 

Beginning at the narrative’s conclusion, Shen introduces us to a frantic woman, Qu Ting (Wan Qian), an anxious man Shui Hao (An Shi), and the confused Ma (Pan Binlong) as they desperately search for their missing daughters apparently kidnapped for a ransom none of them could ever hope to be able to pay. Fed up with the whole thing, Shui Hao determines to go to the police while Qu Ting is reluctant, fearful that the kidnappers will kill their daughter Shui Qing (Li Genxi), Ma simply going along with it. At the police station, however, they receive a call to say the girls are safe and Shui Qing is already at home but there’s more going on here than we first assumed other than Ma’s sudden heart attack on being told that his daughter Yueyue (Zhou Ziyue) has simply gone to visit a friend in another town. 

Flashing back some days before the climactic night, we realise that Shui Hao and Qu Ting are long separated and Shui Qing is living a miserable life rejected by her stepmother who coldly tells her to stay out a little longer because her parents are visiting and they don’t want any “outsiders” at dinner. At an open air noodle stand, she happens to catch sight of the radiant Qu Ting realising her mother has returned but unsure if she recognises her. The two women awkwardly reconnect, Qu Ting making it clear that she will be leaving in a few days and isn’t keen on having a teenage girl cramp her style, but gradually bond as they begin to spend more time together. 

What immediately becomes clear is that Qu Ting is somewhat arrested and emotionally immature, hanging out with Shui Qing’s high school friends Jin Xi (Chai Ye) and Yueyue as if she were a teenager but inappropriately allowing them to drink wine at dinner as if they were on a girls’ night out. Lonely and rejected by her stepmother Shui Qing longs for approval, but also to save her mother who is currently living in an abandoned theatre and seemingly desperate for money she claims is for a “project”, later implying that when it’s over she may start a business and be with her daughter full time but soon enough Shui Qing is pulled into an urban world of gangsters and loansharks governed by rules she is ill-equipped to understand. 

Her friends, meanwhile, have their own problems. Rich kid Jin Xi carries self harm scars on her arms and seems to be the only one at school not wearing a uniform. Her wealthy parents work away in the city and so Jin Xi is largely left alone as abandoned and fearful as Shui Qing but also filled with resentful anger. Yueyue perhaps has the opposite problem in that she feels trapped by her controlling, abusive father, Ma. Raised by wealthy relatives until her father returned, Yueyue longs to be free of him but he refuses to let her go even though the relatives are keen to adopt her and can obviously promise a more comfortable way of life and better opportunities for the future than the impoverished Ma. 

“Everyone’s looking for a carefree paradise” according a mournful pop song heard on the radio and it’s certainly true of the three girls and Qu Ting each looking for something more if unsure exactly of what it is or how to get it. Shui Qing yearns for maternal approval but ends up playing mother while Qu Ting finally accepts her corrupted maternity only in the most tragic of maternal sacrifices in attempting to protect her daughter from the radiating darkness her return has cast over her life. “It doesn’t matter if our dreams sink they’ll just be floating bottles” the girls cheerfully uttered, but each of them find themselves unanchored longing for the security of parental affection and dependability but left largely alone quasi-orphaned by the demands and contradictions of the modern China. Shen’s melancholy neo-noir is a stark coming-of-age tale which finds little place for innocence in the contemporary society relegating it only to the space of memory a casualty of parental disconnection and adolescent futility. 

The Old Town Girls streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Last of the Wolves (孤狼の血 LEVEL2, Kazuya Shiraishi, 2021)

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“The Showa era’s over. We don’t use guns now, business is our battlefield.” a recently released foot soldier is told, finding himself in a whole new world emerging from a not so distant past of turf wars and street scuffles into a late bubble wonderland of besuited corporatised gangsters. Set in 1988, Kazuya Shiraishi’s Blood of Wolves had been about the twilight of post-war gangsterdom forever associated with an era that was literally about to pass. Set three years later in the twilight of the bubble economy and an already established Heisei, Last of the Wolves (孤狼の血 LEVEL2, Koro no chi: Level 2) finds no longer rookie cop Hioka (Tori Matsuzaka) taking on the mantle of his late mentor Ogami, attempting to broker peace by getting uncomfortably close to yakuza. 

At the end of the previous film, Hioka had managed to engineer a truce between rival gangs Odani (with whom he is affiliated), and Irako through pushing top Odani guy Ichinose to take out boss Irako. Three years later, the peace has held and in any case Heisei yakuza no longer take violence to the streets. The release of crazed Irako foot soldier Uebayashi (Ryohei Suzuki), however, threatens to destabilise the local balance of power. Despite mournfully declaring that he doesn’t intend to wind up back in prison, Uebayashi’s first call on release is to the sister of one of his guards whom he rapes and kills in quite gruesome fashion. Hioka is put on the case and partnered with a genial veteran, Seshima (Yoshiko Miyazaki), weirdly excited about investigating a murder at this late stage of his career, but quickly realises that Uebayashi’s recklessness is primed to destroy everything he’s built. 

Having started out a straightlaced rookie, Hioka has fully incorporated the Ogami persona dressing in sharp suits and sunshades, driving a sports car, and hanging out with the Odani guys, while also using his girlfriend’s little brother Chinta (Nijiro Murakami) as a mole in rival gangs. As a cynical reporter points out, however, Ogami was essentially “undercover” in that he understood hobnobbing with yakuza was part of his job and something he did solely to keep civilians safe by preventing another street war. Hioka has started to lose his way, enjoying himself a little too much and already way out of his depth as the fragile peace he’d brokered by less than ethical means begins to crumble beneath his feet. 

Having been in prison, Uebayashi is unaware of the various ways in which the world has changed seeking to return to old school rules of gangsterdom, ironically lecturing his superiors on the absence of jingi (honour and humanity) in their new corporate existence. He’s a monster and a sadist, but his violence is also a result of the horrific abuse he suffered as a child which led to an equally heinous act of revenge while as a member of the ethnic Korean Zainichi community, like Chinta and his siblings, he continually faces discrimination and social oppression. His first act on release is of revenge against the guards who relentlessly tortured him in prison, the murdered woman’s brother confessing that they wrote him up as a model prisoner in the hope he’d be released early so they wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.  

Yet what Hioka and Uebayashi have in common is that they’re both pawns in a game they were unaware was being played. As it turns out the police corruption Hioka discovered during the previous film did not go away, and in certain senses they liked things the way they were before. Hioka’s truce is very bad for business for a certain subset at least. They might be minded to let a dangerous killer go loose if it disrupts Hioka’s attempt to suppress the criminal underworld to manageable levels. Mimicking the classic jitsuroku, Shiraishi throws in occasional voiceover from an anonymous narrator along with freeze frame and montage while skewing still darker in the levels of depravity among these desperate men fighting over the scraps of a world already in terminal decline even as the bubble seems fit to burst. Shiraishi ends on a note of change with the institution of the organised crime laws which have contributed to the ongoing decline of the yakuza, a relic of the Showa era unfit and unwelcome in the modern society, but also discovers that for good or ill there may yet be wolves in Japan.

Last of the Wolves screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)

All U Need Is Love (總是有愛在隔離, Vincent Kok Tak-chiu, 2021)

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All things considered, there are worse places to quarantine than a five star hotel especially if it’s free but then again forced proximity with those you love, or those you don’t, can prove emotionally difficult. An old school ensemble comedy, Vincent Kok’s All U Need Is Love (總是有愛在隔離) features a host of A-list stars each providing their talent for free in order to support the struggling Hong Kong film industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic but as its name suggests eventually offers a small ray of hope that the enforced period of reflection may have fostered a spirit of mutual solidarity and personal growth. 

Kok opens, however, with a tense chase sequence as a shifty looking man runs from the authorities at the airport only to be picked up by the PPE-clad Epidemic Task Force who whisk him away to a secret location where he’s placed inside a weird bubble and interrogated by Louis Koo. Several more top HK stars including Gordon Lam fetch up in the bubble each implicating the Grande Hotel as the centre of of a coronavirus cluster at which point an order is given to place it under total lockdown requiring everyone inside to remain for a 14-day quarantine. 

Essentially a series of intersecting skits, Kok’s ramshackle drama nevertheless has its moments of satire as the hotel chief takes to the stairs for an inspirational speech in which he frequently slips into English and bizarrely likens himself to the captain of the Titanic because we all know how well that went. He spends the rest of the picture trying to escape without anyone noticing while his dejected security guard/brother tries to bump him off. Meanwhile, two gangsters develop a homoerotic bromance while plotting how best to profiteer off the pandemic through smuggling anti-COVID paraphernalia just as panic buying takes hold on the outside. 

Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that All U Need Is Love is also guilty of some rather old fashioned, sexist humour particularly in the antics of a pair of old men (Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Eric Tsang reprising their roles from Men Suddenly in Black) and their minions who misled their wives in order to embark on a sexual odyssey only to have their plans both improved and then ruined by the quarantine order. Meanwhile, a young couple who were in the hotel preparing for their wedding banquet ironically scheduled for the last day of the quarantine find themselves at loggerheads as the man gets cold feet over his fiancée’s bridezilla micromanaging, and her father undergoes a total makeover while continuously watching Japanese pornography in his room. 

Watching it all, a little girl, Cici, becomes the moral voice of the pandemic innocently hoping that nature will continue to heal itself even after the sickness ends. It’s she who shows the gangsters the error of their ways in pointing out that if they steal all the anti-COVID equipment then they will end up being more at risk because no one else is protected, while she also softens the heart of the hotel’s cynical manager to the point that he too makes a lengthy speech about becoming a better person thanks to his experiences during in the pandemic. 

During their enforced proximity friends and strangers have indeed needed to rediscover their love for their fellow man as they band together in mutual solidarity waiting for their freedom. Culminating in an oddly uplifting wedding decked out with balloons and messages from friends and family played via iPad, Kok’s anarchic ensemble farce does its best to discover a silver lining among the fear and anxiety of the pandemic as it ironically brings people together through driving them apart. Along with his A-list cast, Kok throws in a series of movie parodies and pop culture references from an impromptu rendition of Baby Shark to a surprise appearance from the Landlady from Kung Fu Hustle as well as a suitably random cameo from Jackie Chan. Repurposing the traditional Lunar New Year movie, All U Need is Love is a classic nonsense comedy designed to lighten the mood in these trying times while celebrating the essence of Hong Kong cinema through, arguably, its most idiosyncratic of genres. 

All U Need Is Love streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese/English subtitles)

Ten Months (십개월의 미래, Sun Namkoong, 2020)

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“I’m still the same person, exactly the same one as a few months ago, and everyone’s suddenly mad at me like something’s wrong” the heroine of Sun Namkoong’s Ten Months (십개월의 미래, Sib Gaewolui Milae) complains as an unexpected pregnancy sees fit to cause untold “chaos” in her personal and professional lives. Mirae’s (Choi Sung-eun) predicament exposes a host of double standards in a still conservative, patriarchal society in which both giving birth and not is somehow “selfish” while a pregnant woman, especially an unmarried one, is almost a taboo expected to hide herself away until she emerges from her chrysalis as a “mother” having entirely shed her old identity. 

The reason Mirae’s pregnancy comes as such a surprise to her is that, presumably in part in order to avoid exactly this sort of situation, she can’t remember having been intimate with her diffident boyfriend Yoonho (Seo Young-joo) for the past few months. After a little thinking he realises it probably happened during a drunken fumble after a friend’s birthday party Mirae had clean forgotten. In any case, Mirae is not the sort of woman who’d ever harboured an intense desire to become a mother, it just wasn’t something particularly on her radar, and in many ways it couldn’t have come at worse time. While Yoonho is unexpectedly excited by the news of his impending fatherhood and immediately proposes, Mirae isn’t so sure. 

The problem is, in the Korea of 2018, she doesn’t have a lot of options. In shock at the doctor’s office she asks about an abortion but is reminded it’s illegal outside of a few mitigating circumstances such as rape or incest (abortion was finally decriminalised only in 2021), and while there are apparently “safe” places where it’s possible to have the procedure done illicitly they are extortionately expensive not to mention carrying a hefty fine if you get caught. Mirae is unconvinced she wants to keep the baby, but she’s not the sort of person who finds it easy to contemplate breaking the law and continues to vacillate even while reminded that even the illegal clinics have a cut off point at which it would become unethical to perform a termination. 

Meanwhile, she’s also worrying what effect her pregnancy may have on her career. Her father, who somewhat stereotypically opened a friend chicken shop after retiring, didn’t approve of her decision to leave a well-paying job at a major company to join a start up even if Mirae believes they’re “going to change the world”. It doesn’t help that Yoonho is technically unemployed as an aspiring entrepreneur trying to sell his prototype handsfree smartphone accessory in the shape of a cute dragon meaning her income is all they have to live on. When she’s told the company is relocating to Shanghai it throws her dilemma into stark relief while also exposing Yoonho’s latent conservatism as he reacts with extreme negativity to the idea of going with her, pathetically attacking Mirae for not supporting his project while eventually reminding her she’s about to be a “mother” as if implying she no longer has the right to make such subjective decisions. By the look on his face he knows he’s gone too far and said the wrong thing, but it’s too late. 

When she tells her boss that she’d like to take the job but also needs him to be aware she’s pregnant, he too becomes indignant. Firstly confused because Mirae is not married, her boss then withdraws the offer and declares himself hurt, “betrayed”, seemingly annoyed that Mirae doesn’t even seem “sorry” for all the inconvenience she’s causing him. When she calls him on his sexism, he blames her for making him out to be the bad guy when he’s doing nothing illegal because shockingly it’s not illegal in Korea to fire someone for being pregnant even if he seems to know it’s not a good look. She begins to feel foolish that she invested so much emotionally in what she saw as a shared endeavour only to be pushed out as if she’s being punished for some kind of transgression just for the audacity of having a child sending a clear signal that motherhood is still deemed incompatible with the workplace.  

Yoonho’s overbearing father seems to be of much the same opinion, her soon-to-be mother-in-law unironically gifting her a frumpy apron while the conservative couple begin to pressure her to move in with them at their pig farm where they’ve already managed to pressgang the largely emasculated and previously vegetarian Yoonho into working. Unsure about the baby, Mirae was even less convinced by the necessity of a shotgun marriage especially as the emotionally immature Yoonho for all of his latching on to the idea of fatherhood to escape the reach of his own father grows ever more resentful towards his overbearing parents while entirely unable to stand up to them. 

And then, there’s all the other stuff that no one really wants to talk about like the possibility of dying in childbirth which is not so much a thing of the past as most people assume even if much less likely, while Mirae’s previously 100% together friend seems to be displaying the signs of post-natal depression or at least infinite exhaustion with her husband apparently having skipped town on a business trip leaving her all alone with their newborn baby. Mirae couldn’t see why some people were so desperate to have children, but gradually comes round to the idea transgressively choosing to raise her child alone no matter the “chaos” the unplanned pregnancy has caused to her life as she knew it. She may have feared being “erased”, instructed by Yoonho’s father that her life is no longer her own and she now exists solely in service of her child, but chooses to see the birth as a new beginning not least for herself as she embarks on this new phase of her life very much on her own terms and of her own free will. 

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Zokki (ゾッキ, Naoto Takenaka, Takayuki Yamada, & Takumi Saitoh, 2020)

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“Thanks to secrets carefully kept by people the world keeps turning” according to one of the many heroes of Zokki (ゾッキ), a series of intersecting vignettes adapted from the cult manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge and directed by three of Japan’s most prominent actor-directors, Naoto Takenaka (whose Nowhere Man also adapted Tsuge), Takayuki Yamada and Takumi Saitoh. According to the philosophical grandpa who opens the series of elliptical tales everyone has their secrets and without them you may die though each of the protagonists will in fact share their secrets with us if by accident or design. 

Seamlessly blended, the various segments slide into and around each other each taking place in a small rural town and primarily it seems around 2001 though as we’ll discover the timelines seem curiously out of joint as motifs from one story, a broken school window, an awkward moment in a convenience store, the retirement of a popular gravure model/AV actress etc, randomly appear in another. This is however all part of the overarching thesis that life is an endless cycle of joy and despair in which the intervals between the two gradually shrink as you age before ceasing to exist entirely. 

Or so says our first protagonist, Fujimura (Ryuhei Matsuda), a socially awkward man heading off on a random bicycling road trip in which he has no particular destination other than “south” or maybe “west” as he later tells a potential friend he accidentally alienates. Fujimura’s unspoken secret seems to link back to a moment of high school trauma in which he betrayed one burgeoning friendship in order to forge another by joining in with bullying gossip and eventually got his comeuppance. Meanwhile the reverse is almost true for Makita (Yusaku Mori) who relates another high school tale in which he overcame his loneliness by befriending Ban (Joe Kujo), another odd young man rejected by teachers and the other pupils for his often strange behaviour such as his tendency to shout “I want to die”. Ban claims to have heard a rumour that Makita has a pretty sister and Makita goes along with it, eventually having to fake his sister’s death in order to seal the lie only for Ban to find happiness in his adult life largely thanks to Makita’s act of deception. 

The broken window which brought them together turns up in another tale, that of Masaru (Yunho) whose adulterous father Kouta (Takehara Pistol) took him on a midnight mission to steal a punching bag (and some adult DVDs) from the local high school only to encounter a sentient mannequin/ghost who is later likened to the young woman from Fujimura’s past. Bar some minor embarrassment there’s no real reason the ghost sighting would need to be kept secret, the deception in this case more to do with Kouta’s affair and his subsequent departure from his son’s life only to make an unexpected return a decade later. The affair also makes him a target for fisherman Tsunehiko, the betrayed husband and one of the fisherman celebrating the birthday of a colleague along with an existentially confused Fujimura. Meanwhile, Fujimura’s fed up neighbour secretly writes a rude word on a note to himself instead of the usual “good morning” only to realise it’s been moved when he opens the local video store the next morning. 

Eventually coming full circle, Zokki insists what goes around comes around, everything really is “an endless cycle”, and that in the grand scheme of things secrets aren’t always such a bad thing. They keep the world turning and perhaps give the individual a sense of control in the necessity of keeping them if running with a concurrent sense of anxiety. The criss-crossing of various stories sometimes defying temporal logic hints at the mutability of memory while allowing the creation of a zany Zokki universe set in this infinitely ordinary small town in rural northern Japan. As the various protagonists each look for an escape from their loneliness, unwittingly spilling their secrets to an unseen audience, the endless cycle continues bringing with it both joy and sorrow in equal measure but also a kind of warmth in resignation. Beautifully brought together by its three directors working in tandem towards a single unified aesthetic, Zokki defies definition but rejoices in the strange wonder of the everyday in this “obscure corner of the world”.

Zokki streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It will also screen in London on 24th October as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

NYAFF intro

The Prayer (간호중, Min Kyu-dong, 2020)

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“I’m just wondering if they all live with nothing to live for and whether it has any meaning to live like that. And if I am no different.” a beleaguered daughter muses contemplating her own future while caring for her mother (Moon Sook) who has been bedridden in a coma for the last decade. A perhaps controversial advocation for euthanasia, Min Kyu-dong’s expansion of his entry into the SF8 series The Prayer (간호중, Ganhojung) offers a timely exploration of the nature of empathy, the limits of AI technology, the ageing society, and the destructive effects of inequality as mankind’s children find themselves wracked by the existential pain of human suffering. 

Set in the near future in which high schools are bulldozed to build additional care centres, The Prayer revolves around the relationship between the melancholy Jung-in (Lee Yoo-young) worrying if prolonging her mother’s life in this way is really what she’d want, and the robotic care nurse she’s hired to look after her, Ho-joong (also Lee Yoo-young). As we discover, Jung-in has taken advantage of the offer to have herself listed alongside her mother as a target for care leaving Ho-joong with an ironic conflict torn between her duty to look after Jung-in’s mother and witnessing the toll caring for her is taking on Jung-in who frequently expresses depressive thoughts and potentially suicidal ideations. 

In order to provide comfort to patients, the androids are designed with the same face as the primary guardian, meaning Jung-in is in someways in dialogue with herself while Ho-joong becomes increasingly confused in her imperfect, in some ways childish, application of human empathy. Fixated on Jung-in with a devotion which turns towards the romantic, she comes to the logical conclusion that in order to save her secondary patient the obvious choice is to sacrifice the first but has seemingly no understanding of the effect that may have on Jung-in who may be worn out and emotionally drained but would obviously feel responsible should anything happen to her mother at the hands of the robot nurse she hired because she has developed unintended feelings towards her. 

The extent of Ho-joong’s “feelings” are indeed at the heart of the matter as evidenced by her strange conversations with a well-meaning nun, Sister Sabina (Ye Soo-Jung), who is originally dismissive unwilling to recognise that a manmade creation may also desire access to God. As incongruous as it sounds, Ho-joong’s awakening spirituality positions her as uniquely human and as trapped as one of her patients, tormented by the pain of being alive and finally confined to table on which she claims to be experiencing near torture at the hands of those seeking to understand her “malfunction”. Her German manufacturers locate the fault in her advanced language processing unit, as if the problem were that she understands too well when perhaps it’s more that her empathy is based in a different metric and prone to misunderstand the irrationality of human impulses towards guilt and love. 

That’s also the problem with the unit next door owned by Mrs. Choi (Yum Hye-ran) whose husband (Yoon Kyung-ho) seems to be suffering from advanced dementia which often causes him to become violent or unpredictable. Unlike Jung-in, however, Mrs. Choi could only afford a basic model which offers little in the way of empathy nor will it care for her. Consequently, she appears to be overburdened with her husband’s care, doing laundry and tidying up after his frustrations cause him to trash his hospital room. The machine offers her only censure while the duty of care ironically prevents her from attending to her own health. Seeking help she turns to the manufacturer who bluntly tells her she doesn’t understand how to operate the machine and advises she ask her kids to teach her, only it appears that Mrs. Choi may have had a child in the past from whom she has become estranged and is otherwise all alone. Older than Jung-in, she despairs for the quality of her life and has no one to protect or care for her, pushing her towards a dark decision. 

Both women wonder if life is worth living if it means living like this, but have very different options open to them given their economic disparity. Having learned to feel pain, Ho-joong begs to be freed of it, positions now reversed as Sister Sabina becomes her caregiver. She accuses the nun of hypocrisy, that she allows her suffer by refusing to end her pain in order to preserve her own conscience in insisting to do so would be a “sin”. “What do I go through this pain for!” Ho-joong cries as if throwing herself into a fiery pit of existential torment while a cold authority insists she must continue to suffer. Min makes a powerful if perhaps controversial argument for the right to end one’s own suffering at a time of one’s own choosing if also leaning uncomfortably into the burdens of care as Mrs Choi and Jung-in too struggle with themselves while trying to do what’s best for those they love, but ultimately discovers a kind of serenity as his robot nurse encounters the spiritual and with it a release form the pain of living. 

The Prayer streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It will also screen in London on 22nd October as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

The Book of Fish (자산어보, Lee Joon-ik, 2021)

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An “evil learning sinner” and a young man fixated on Neo-Buddhist thought develop an unlikely friendship while compiling an encyclopaedia about sea life in Lee Joon-ik’s contemplative period drama, The Book of Fish (자산어보, Jasaneobo). Like those of Hur Jin-ho’s Forbidden Dream, the hero of Lee’s historical tale of competing ideologies dreams of a classless future but is exiled from mainstream society not for his revolutionary rejection of a Confucianist hierarchal society but for his embrace of Western learning and religion. 

Like his two brothers, Chung Yak-jeon (Sol Kyung-gu) reluctantly joins the imperial court but later falls foul of intrigue when the progressive king falls only to be replaced by his underage son controlled by the more conservative dowager empress. Having converted to Christianity, Yak-jeon and his brothers are faced with execution but unexpectedly reprieved when the oldest agrees to renounce Catholicism and root out other secret Christians. Yak-jeon is then exiled to a remote island while his better known brother, the poet Yak-yong (Ryu Seung-ryong), is sent to the mountains. On his arrival, the local governor introduces Yak-jeon as a “traitor” and instructs the islanders not to be too friendly with him but island people do not have it in them to be unjustly unkind and so Yak-jeon is, if warily, welcomed into their community. “He maybe be a traitor, but he’s still a guest” his new landlady (Lee Jung-eun) explains as she prepares him some of the local seafood. 

Yet Yak-jeon encounters resistance from an unexpected source, intellectual fisherman Chang-dae (Byun Yo-han) who goes to great lengths to acquire scholarly books despite his otherwise low level of education. Somewhat patronisingly, Yak-jeong offers to tutor him, but Chang-dae is a rigid thinker who believes the world is going to hell because people have forgotten their Confucian ideals so he’s no desire to be taught by a treacherous “evil learner” or be sucked in to his dangerous Catholicism. Surprisingly, however, for a man who risked death rather than renounce his religion, Yak-jeong is no fanatic and in fact does not appear to practice Christianity at any point while living on the island. What he professes is that Eastern and Western thought need not be enemies but can go hand in hand while a rigid adherence to any particular doctrine is what constitutes danger. 

Chang-dae had insisted that he studied “to become a better human” but he also has a large class chip on his shoulder as the illegitimate son of a nobleman who refuses to acknowledge him, fully aware that as a “lowborn” man he is not allowed to take the civil service exam and in any case would not have the money to buy his way in to the court. Despite later professing egalitarianism, Yak-jeong treats the islanders, and particular Chang-dae, with a degree of superiority extremely irritated by Chang-dae’s refusal to become his pupil in the slight of his elite status often making reference to his “low birth”. Confessing his desire for a classless society with no emperor, however, Yak-jeong encounters unexpected resistance as the young man finds it impossible to envisage a world free of social hierarchy based on rights of birth and swings back towards desiring the approval of his elite father in the determination to climb the ladder rather than pull it down. 

Chang-dae finds himself caught between two fathers who embody two differing ways of being, Yak-jeong advising him to think for himself rather than blindly follow Confucianist thought, while his father encourages him to towards the court and the infinite corruptions of the feudal order. Chang-dae does begin to interrogate some of the more persistently problematic elements of Confucian teaching including its views on women and entrenched social hierarchy but also feels insecure and desperately desires conventional success and entrance into a world he thinks unfairly denied to him. Once there, however, he discovers he cannot submit himself to duplicities of feudalism. The islanders are being taxed to into oblivion, not only is there a random counter-intuitive tax on pine trees but the government is also extracting taxes from the family members of the deceased as well as newborn babies while cutting sand into the rice rations it promises in return. His father and superiors laugh at him for his squeamishness, seeing nothing at all wrong in the right of the elite to exploit the poor. Trying to blow a whistle, Chang-dae is reminded that the courtly system is an extension of the monarchy, and so criticising a lord is the same as criticising the king which is to say an act of treason. 

Having been accused of treason himself, Yak-jeong declines to enact his revolutionary ideas penning only a couple of books during his time in exile in contrast to his brother who published many treatises on effective government. Yak-jeong explains he dare not risk writing his real views which is why he’s immersed himself in the beauty of the natural world, exercising his curiosity writing about fish while making use of Chang-dae’s vast knowledge of the sea. The two men develop a loose paternal bond but are later separated by conflicting desires, Chang-dae eventually choosing conventional success over personal integrity only to regret his decision on being confronted with the duplicities of the feudal order. Shot in a crisp black and white save for two brief flashes of colour and inspired by traditional ink painting, Lee’s contemplative drama finds itself at a fracture point of enlightenment as two men debate the relative limits of knowledge along with the most effective way to resist a cruel and oppressive social order but eventually discover only wilful self exile as Chang-dae learns to re-embrace his roots as an islander along with the openminded simplicity of Yak-jeong’s doctrine of catholicity in learning. 

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

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)