NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-31, 2022

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FORUM THREAD

Links to the reviews:
Angry Son 世界は僕らに気づかない (Kasho Iizuka, Japan, 2022)
Before Next Spring 如果有一天我将会离开你 (Li Gen, China, 2021)
Big Night!(Jun Robles Lana, Philippines, 2021)
Broken Commandment 破戒 (Kazuo Maeda, Japan, 2022)
Confession 자백 (YOON Jong-seok, South Korea 2022)
Dealing with Dad (Tom Huang, US, 2022)
Finding Bliss: Fire and Ice - The Director's Cut ]尋找極致的喜悅：火與冰 (Kim Chan, Dee Lam, Hong Kong, 2022)
Funeral, The 頭七 (Dan-Guei Shen, Taiwan, 2022)
Girl on the Bulldozer, The 불도저에 탄 소녀 (Park Ri-woong, South Korea, 2022
Grown-Ups わたし達はおとな (Takuya Kato, Japan 2022)
Happy Together 春光乍洩 (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong 1997)
I Am More 모어 (Lee Il-ha, South Korea, 2021)
Intimate Stranger 親密な他人 (Mayu Nakamura, Japan 2021)
Legendary in Action!]大俠 Action！ (Justin Cheung, Li Ho, Hong Kong, 2022)
Lesson in Murder 死刑にいたる病 (Kazuya Shiraishi, Japan, 2022)
Life for Sale 售命 (Tom Teng, Taiwan 2021)
#LookAtMe (Ken Kwek, Singapore, 2022)
Mama Boy 初戀慢半拍 (Arvin Chen, Taiwan 2022)
Manchurian Tiger 东北虎 (Geng Jun 2021)
Nothing Serious 연애 빠진 로맨스 (Jeong Ga-young , South Korea 2021)
Offbeat Cops 異動辞令は音楽隊！(Eiji Uchia, Japan, 2022)
One and Four一个和四个 (Jigme Trinley, China, 2021)
Ox-Head Village 牛首村 (Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2022)
Perhaps Love 장르만 로맨스 (Cho Eun-ji, South Korea, 2022)
Ribbon (Non, Japan, 2022)
Ripples of Life 永安镇故事集 (Wei Shujun China 2021)
Sales Girl, The Худалдагч охин (Janchivdorj Sengedorj, Mongolia, 2021)
Shin Ultraman シン・ウルトラマン(Shinji Higuchi Japan 2022)
Thieves, The 도둑들 (Choi Dong-hoon 2012)

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FILMLEAF reviews begin below:

LI GEN: BEFORE NEXT SPRING / 如果有一天我将会离开你 (2021)

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XIE CHENGZE AND QIU TIAN IN BEFORE NEXT SPRING

People come, people go, nothing ever happens, but we enter many stories in this tale of Chinese emigrants and students in Japan gathered around a Chinese restaurant in a Tokyo suburb.

Events are set in a suburban area near Tokyo, Fuchinobe. The focus is Chinese emigrants and exchange students in Japan taking courses to qualify as students and working at multiple jobs to support themselves and send money home.

Through incidents, a mood accumulates in this first feature by a director who has previously done documentaries. He builds on his own personal experiences as a foreign exchange student in Japan. The young actors are fresh and appealing. The characters have in common working and gathering at a Chinese restaurant, Nankokute.

Perhaps the main character is the one-year resident, tall, sweet, shy young Li Xiaoli (Xie Chengze) who is treated as a doofus, and may be Li Gen's alter ego. After many efforts he gets a job at the restaurant through cute former classmate Qiu Qiu (Qiu Tian), and thus meets Zhao Aoki (Niu Chiau. Early episodes feature Zhao, a bitter young half-Japanese, half-Chinese man. He works at multiple jobs and sends money home but is also stealing money from a bank account with his father's bank card, and through that gets arrested, held in jail, and eventually deported.

When Li Xiaoli visits Zhao in jail, the latter gives him a message for Qiu Qiu, who's very pretty and winds up working like a geisha at a restaurant, and expresses indifference to Zhao. Toughened feelings, hardened hearts: but sentimentality in the film, which weeps over an old man who comes back to the restaurant after his wife has died; and niceness on the part of the innocent Li Xiaoli.

There is parallel thread about cancer. A young women with cancer (Xi Qi) bonds with an old lady at the hospital, also a customer at the restaurant. She is Li Xiaoli's older sister, and lives with another Chinese man she fights with. Li Xiaoli is with his sister at the hospital when she has surgery for uterine cancer. But it is all interconnected; that is the art of this kind of piece. There is even the Nankokute cook, who has longed for many years to bring his family to Japan but one evening admits may now have lost the courage to do so. As for Li Xiaoli, he's only in Japan for a year, and when the time comes to an end, he's off. But at the end he overcomes his native shyness for a while to promote the restaurant, which is losing customers, by boldly promoting it out on the sidewalk. He has become emboldened and he has come to care.

This film is precisely observed and engrossing. I'll echo Maria Castaldo, an Italian reviewer whose description of the film is one of the few I can find, who credits Li Gan here with "tenderness and authenticity," and "without lapsing into pathos," but rather "dosing the sweetness," as is done "for the almond syrup in tofu sweets" as specified in a scene in the film. Besides the sourness and the sweetness, there is also the harshness: the couple who fight and Zhao embittered by a drunken and abusive father. In these scenes there is little that is new, but they draw you in anyway.

A significant flaw in the English subtitling is its failure to distinguish where the dialogue being rendered in any one moment is in Mandarin or Japanese. This matters, for following the action, of course, and it is constantly changing.

Before Next Spring如果有一天我将会离开你, 107 mins., debuted at Udine Far East Film Festival Jul. 1, 2021; also Beijing Sept. 19, 2021. Screened for this review as part of NYAFF 2022. (North American Premiere.)

Friday Jul 29, 9:30pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)

JIGME TRINLEY: ONE AND FOUR 一个和四个 (China [Tibet] 2021)

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KUNDE, WANG ZHENG, AND JINPA, IN ONE AND FOUR

A well-placed young director from Tibet makes a highly entertaining debut

Reviewing One and Four in in Hollywood Reporter, Elizabeth Kerr notes that this double-cross mystery has "shades of Cui Siwei’s snowbound Savage, Lu Chuan’s Kekexili and, of course, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight coloring the proceedings." She's right that though it may not reinvent the wheel, it is "a respectable debut from an industry with few voices - Tibetan cinema, where Trinley's father, Pema Tseden, is the most prominent director." One thinks of Panah Panahi, son of Jafar Panahi, whose recent Hit the Road is a stunningly original and very fun debut. This isn't quite on that level, but it's the work of a worthy offspring, compelling, engrossing, highly atmospheric, and in its way also thoroughly entertaining. Variety has a review headlining this as "a Sly, Sparse Tibetan Snow Western."

"Snow western" is a good identifying label. There is non-stop danger and suspicion and things get very tense toward the end with bad guys being singled out for elimination. Reference toThe Hateful Eight suggests the kind of setting: a big, rough-hewn far north outpost that seems as cold inside as out, though you wouldn't want to linger outside where it's freezing and - of course - a blizzard is on the way. Sense of place is communicated through several trips along snow roads and icy heights, also through an ingenious sound design-cum-score combining outdoors with mechanical noise, and cinematography that is both intimate and austere. The exteriors, following forest police following poachers in a wild snowy ride that ends in two vehicles overturned, one man dead, and everybody scarred and bloody, and going back out to hunt for a poacher's trophy of fox fur and antlers.

The car race is replayed for us as recounted by the remaining cop - if he is that, and not an imposter - to the ranger in the cabin, Sanggye (Jinpa), the central figure and our point of identification - and confusion. He's hungover, starving, and goofy, sad and soulful. As the tale unfolds, three men come to the cabin to visit Sanggye, one after another. They all seem to be lying, and one of them seems likely to be the poacher everybody's talking about - that the cop says disappeared after the crash.

Kunbo (Kunde) is the thin, sleazy dude in the big leather robe who came first with the signed divorce paper from Sanggye's wife, qualifying as a messenger who ought to be killed. We don't see this: it happened early in the morning and Sanggye thinks it was a dream; but he comes back later. Before that man identifying himself as a Regional Forestry Police officer (Wang Zheng) comes with reports of the chase after the poacher in a car, where both overturned and the cop's partner died. He is dead; Sanggye sees him. But is the other guy really the cop or the poacher? And is Kunbo the poacher or the poacher's assistant? Sanggye writes everything in his forest ranger’s logbook and we see many an entry; but how much is that to be trusted, or him?

Then another man (Darggye Tenzin) comes saying he's a cop. Well, Trinley keeps things pretty lively. All these grizzled dudes are birds of a feather, and apparently starving. See Sanggye and the first "cop" devouring, piece-by-piece, a rabbit they catch and cook, one of the great starvation meals in movies like the one in De Sica's Miracle in Milan. No, this doesn't provoke thought like Panah Panahi's Hit the Road. But what it does is take you somewhere rough and austere. I'd really like to see how they did those car wrecks in that location. An actioner that never stops being a puzzler, this is a trim and gnarly piece of work.

One and FourI 一个和四个 (‘Yige he sige’), 88 mins., debuted at Tokyo Nov. 2, 2021. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center. North American Premiere.

Saturday Jul 16, 8:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

KASHO IIZUKA: ANGRY SON/ 世界は僕らに気づかない (Japan 2022)

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GOW AND KAZUKI HORIKE IN ANGRY SON

The coming of age of a beleaguered "Jappino" is a messy but irresistible tale

As hinted in Li Gen's Before Next Spring, also NYAFF 2022, a film about Chinese emigrants living in a Tokyo suburb, there is no such thing as assimilation in Japan, and here we see that's true even when you were born there if you're not pure Japanese. Kasho Iizuka's entertaining, annoying, and heartfelt little film Angry Son focuses on Jungo (Kazuki Horike), a "Jappino" or biracial Japanese-Filiipino teenager. He lives combatively with this reality in a Japanese suburb with his Filipina bar hostess mother Reina (singer and actress GOW, whose acting is too crude and strident), who loves but maddens him and whom he rails at constantly in private, departing from his generally buttoned-down Japanese manner. He obviously speaks native fluency Japanese and would assimilate if they'd let him.

Jungo also happens to be gay, and he has a strong link with the society: a devoted Japanese boyfriend, Yosuke, whose family accepts his sexuality and their relationship. But Jungo and Yosuke become estranged. It seems permanent, and in the wake of this disaster Jungo, academically unmotivated (and not planning to go on to university), hurt by the regular racist and sexist abuse he suffers from present and former classmates and wanting to find shelter away from his annoying mother, becomes obsessed with searching for for the Japanese birth father he has never met - while still constantly fighting with the well-meaning but sometimes obnoxious mother.

This film engages us with its wealth of human experience. It has two weddings and a funeral, tearful reunions, and a presentable and resilient young protagonist, whose perpetually going around with a camera around his neck snapping photos may make him a cliché artist-autobiographer, but we get the point. The film is also technically unimpressive (the rickety handheld cinematography hardly seems intentional), the casting is often dubious and unappealing, and events play out with a jerky pulse more suited to a meandering TV sitcom than a slightly overlong feature film. But eventually its sincerity may grab you.

There are a number of little scenes where Jungo, the protagonist, is teased or humiliated by classmates for being half-Filipino or for being gay. He was born here in Japan and speaks as far as we know only Japanese. He has to live with the fact that while he gets maintenance payments from his father's family, his mother is in thrall to an extended family in the Philippines she tries to send money to even though she never has any and the electricity in their tiny apartment repeatedly gets cut off. She also violates Japanese manners as he would never do, yelling at her boss at a new job, which humiliates him. He can yell sometimes, perhaps to his benefit, but he also has an inbred sense of Japanese politeness and deference and knows when to bow and be silent and humble.

The meandering structure takes Jungo around the world of Filipino hostess bars as he does some surprising detective work tracking down the family of his birth father, who met Reina in one years ago. It also takes us into the relationship of Yosuke, Jun's boyfriend, with his family and the sudden appearance of a self-declared "asexual" young woman who knows of the boys' relationship and wants to form a three-cornered family with them in which Yosuke will enable her to have children the three of them will raise. Scenes with Yosuke's family show their warmth not only toward the boys' relationship but toward their plan - once they reunite and Jungo pledges steadfastness, love, and loyalty - to take advantage of new local regulations allowing legal same-sex partnerships.

Director Iizuka identifies as trans and as having experienced some of the issues of Angry Son first hand. IMDb shows another film by Iizuka this year, The World for Two of Us, depicting a ten-year relationship of a woman with a trans person (Angry Son isn't listed on the site). Angry Son is a well-meaning and heartfelt film. The director has things to say about subjects new to Japanese films.

Reviewed by Hayley Scanlon in Windows on Worlds and with a directorial interview by Marina D. Richter in Asian Movie Pulse, but information is lacking, including an IMDb page.

Angry Son 世界は僕らに気づかない ("The World Doesn't Notice Us"), 111 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival where it is in the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film Competition. It has been shown at several festivals including Osaka and Frankfurt. North American premiere.

NYAFF 2022 SHOWING: Thursday Jul 31, 9:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center).
Director Kasho Iizuka will attend the screening.

KAZUO MAEDA: BROKEN COMMANDMENT 破戒 (Japan 2022)

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ANNA ISHII AND SHOTARO MAMIYA IN BROKEN COMMANDMENT

New adaptation of Shimazaki's 1906 novel about caste in Japan

Full details of this film can be found on an online page for the June 28, 2022 Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan sneak preview. This is the third screen adaptation of Toson Shimazaki's 1906 novel Hakai about caste discrimination in Japan. Previously Keisuke Kinoshita dramatized the book in Apostasy (1948) and Kon Ichikawa did so in The Outcast (1962). The term "eta" or "pariah, we see, was still being applied in Japan in the Russo-Japanese war period. It was used to exclude hisabetsu buraku, Japan's untouchables.

In the story, a young man of noble character, Ushimatsu Segawa (Shotaro Mamiya), struggles with the secret he is hiding: that he has links to this caste. His father's "commandment" was never to reveal this, and by not doing so he has gotten a good basic education and now arrives to become a teacher at a country primary school. But Segawa is very conflicted over his secrecy because he knows openness is necessary to fight the injustice of the caste system - which the Meiji Restoration supposedly removed, but survives in practice and mentality. Segawa is a great admirer of well known writer Rentaro Inoko (Hidekazu Mashima), a burakumin rights activist who has recently published a book in which he confesses that he himself is an "eta." Segawa is shamed by this example. His conflict becomes greater when a fan letter he writes gains him an audience with the distinguished, intensely committed author.

Trouble comes early on when Segawa, newly arrived for his country school job, begins to fall for Shiho (Anna Ishii), a sensitive young woman who comes from the former samurai class and resides at the Renge temple where he also comes to live. Try as he may he can't bring himself to reveal his origins to her, but a rival in love for Shiho sets out to undermine him because he is suspicious. Meanwhile every other scene is rife with casual racism, classism, social brutality, indifference to disability, and enthusiasm for war and power. The icky guys are stuffy oldsters who yell out their opinions like actors in a play and shiny young men in western suits; Segawa's purity is signaled by his traditional garb.

Statements about this new adaptation point out that (like a lot of the world) Japan today is going though a new shift to the right as it did "at the end of the Meiji period, with constitutional reform, revision of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the rise of the opinion that war is inevitable."

The film is glossy, respectable, plodding, and has "well-meaning historical TV drama" written all over it. And in fact director Kazuo Maeda is a veteran of such dramas as well as of promotional and educational films. Reports lead one to suspect that the 1962 film version of the book by Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, The Burmese Harp) has more dash and flair. This release corresponds with the hundredth anniversary of Japan's first human rights declaration, which designated Burakumin, Zainichi Koreans, Ainu and other "disadvantaged minorities" as deserving of full human rights. Broken Commandment is a pretty good watch if your expectations are not set too high. (The farewell speech to the kids is great - but the long dragged out goodbye is tedious.) The film is both relevant today overall, and a vivid sketch of the social and political mood of 1905 Japan.

The book was adapted for this film by Masato Kato and Norio Kida. Also featured in the cast are Yuma Yamoto, Kazuya Takahashi, Ayako Kobayashi, Kou Nanase, Wooyear Yoshitaka, Shunsuke Daitoh, Naoto Takenaka, Hirotaro Honda, Yohji Tanaka, Renji Ishibashi, and Hidekazu Mashima. A Toei production. International Premiere.

The Broken Commandment 破戒, 119 mins., no data about release, was screened for this review as part of the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. Japanese theaatrical release July 8, 2022.
For full promotional material about the film (in Japanese): https://hakai-movie.com

NYAFF: Thursday Jul 28, 2022 at 6:30pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)

TAKUYA KATO: GROWN-UPS わたし達はおとな (Japan 2022)

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FUJIWARA KISETSU, KIRYUU MAI IN GROWN-UPS

The unexpected pregnancy of an art student

The director and playwright Takuya Kato, who presides over the theater company "Tagumi" and has written for some admired Japanese TV including "Heisei Monogatari," helms his first feature film with Grown-Ups, a little drama set deep in the realities of middleclass early adulthood that's engaging and keeps viewers on their toes. By shooting in a chic, streamlined style and shuffling chronology of scenes, he has made a conventional enough sequence of events feel fresh and different: Kato is being a bit experimental with basically simple stuff. Even though there is nothing earth-shaking and new here, there's a natural, unexpected effect, and these feel like real people and a real situation. Certain Japanese twenty-somethings ought to find a lot to debate about here. For international festival viewers, Takuya Kato represents a new Japanese director with a distinctive writing and visual style.

The dirctor's theatrical background shows in his way with loose, vernacular dialogue, especially as the relationship between the principals, Yumi (Kiryuu Mai), an art student already selling some of her designs, and Naoya (Fujiwara Kisetsu), an young theater director who wants to have his own company, slides into more and more impossible states of disagreement over her surprise pregnancy. Also theatrical is that a great deal of the action takes place in Yumi's rather nice apartment, which, with the good looks of all the twenty-somethings, contributes to the casual chic of everything - without conflicting with the serious subject matter.

They all (the couple and her friends and other college students) seem like attractive young slackers, the mood so casual the viewer thinks for a while nothing much is ever going to happen. And Naoya is apparently not living with Yumi. That's part of being noncommittal and Gen X, right? But serious stuff sneaks up on them, and us, when she does an at-home pregnancy test, it's positive, and suddenly everything changes. Then come more complications. She's not sure Naoya is the father. There's someone else it could have been. She won't say who; she won't introduce him to Naoya. He accepts this. It most likely is his child. He loves her.

But everything is fluid, and in successive scenes and conversations Naoya and Yumi go through all sorts of changes. For a while he is very loving and caring. But nobody is very forthcoming, and this is certailly not something he'd planned on in his idealistic fantasy of becoming a theatrical director. Note she won't reveal the other possible father. Her refusal to get a DNA test, Naoya's very reasonable request, is a stumbling block hat won't go away. "No, let's just raise the child as if it is ours," she says. Really? Then, her mother dies and she goes home and there are scenes with her father (Kenta Satoi), but Yumi doesn't seem to tell anybody about this, except one friend on the phone who says nothing.

Then all of a sudden Naoya, who has still nominally been residing elsewhere, won't let her come to visit him there and admits he's still rooming with his ex! Arguments continue, and one day Naoya gives Yumi the keys back and goes off with his light bags. Scenes have gone back to show early meetings and first sex; then back to a decisive fight; he leaves; and she stands at the stove and fries a couple of eggs.

Grown-Ups わたし達はおとな ("We Are Adults"), 108 mins., was screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. International premiere.

NYAFF: Saturday Jul 23, 2022 at 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

MAYU NAKAMURA: INTIMATE STRANGER 親密な他人 (JAPAN 2021)

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FÛJU KAMIO AND ASUKA KUROSAWA IN INTIMATE STRANGER

Spider and fly

Intimate Stranger is a slow burn Japanese suspense horror film built around the rather kinky theme of a middle-aged woman who keeps a pretty young man prisoner in her flat. Look at the movie poster and you will see its teasing eroticism. Framed in various shades of desaturated film color using the bleach bypass technique and with human and home appliance sounds in lieu of score, it begins with a promise of elegant oddity, but it drags on a little too long in the middle passage.

At the periphery is COVID (masks abound) and phone scams on old ladies, lured into turning over tidy sums to guys who come to collect for their "grandsons" who are sick or in trouble. Into this world wanders Megumi (the excellent Asuka Kurosawa), a sad lady who works at a baby clothes store, in whose wares she has a special, excessive interest. Megumi is searching for her son Shinpei (Yuu Uemura), missing for a year. Along comes a homeless waif called Yuji (heartthrob Fûju Kamio) who has several possessions of Shinpei's and says they met at an internet café. Megumi pays Yuji several small sums (starting with $50) for information and, finding he seems to be without fixed abode (though he is immaculate), eventually lures Yuji into her small apartment and keeps him locked in there "for his own safety." And he seems to accept being kept. He has a warm bed and knows where his next meal is coming from. Maybe he is wanted by several parties, or maybe it's just that scamming is a rat race in which he isn't a main cog in. Or maybe Megumi is the mother he never had. But when she trims his pretty bob it's not particularly motherly. And when she gets him in her lap with a straight razor in her hand the consummation threatened is a violent one.

Fûju Kamio isn't altogether convincing casting, at first anyway - not seedy enough. But director Nakamura is a woman (she studied at NYU: Film School, by the way), and the camera lingers teasingly over Kamio's face. As Megumi, Kurosawa fills the screen too. She is seedy, but more importantly despite her age exudes an erotic aura; she has a complexity worthy of a French star like Isabelle Huppert or Juliette Binoche, as director Nakamura noted in the Tokyo Q&A. These two actors wind up being wonderfully well used by the director, who above all wanted to give an older woman an exciting central role and has done so. Yuji and Megumi look and look and look at each other, and their gaze is always interesting and mysterious (Kamio was chosen partly for his eyes - good enough to make him alluring wearing a mask).

This teasing two-hander, though it's great, is stretched out a bit, and it's rather late in the game when things finally start to heat up. But this movie does have some surprises for us at the end. When Yuji opens that box he was not supposed to touch, we don't have to see the contents. This is a tale of scamming the scammers, and it's an endless loop.

Intimate Stranger is low octane slow burn psychological horror with some nice moments. There isn't quite enough here for the whole 95 minutes, but Mayu Nakamura has a good eye and works in the tradition. This is only her second feature; her first was The Summer of Stickleback in 2006; in between she has made documentaries. One can see the enthusiasm for tradition in homages to David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieślowski, John Cassavetes and many others. Mayu Nakamura is a director to watch. Her next project is to shoot a film featuring non-binary actors in the US.

Intimate Stranger 親密な他人, 95 mins., debuted at Tokyo 2021. It was screened for this review as part of the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American premiere.

NYAFF: Thursday Jul 21, 2022 at 7:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Mayu Nakamura will attend the screening.

KAZUYA SHIRAISHI: LESSON IN MURDER 死刑にいたる病 (Japan, 2022)
TRAILER

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KENSHI OKADA, SADAWO ABE IN LESSON IN MURDER

Warning: depicts torture

AS the veteran Tokyo-based film critic Mark Schilling points out in his Japan Times review, this film is one of many offshoots of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. Thus it depicts a gruesome, smart serial killer, Haimura Yamato (Sadawo Abe) who from death row plays with an inexperienced young investigator, Masaya Kakei (Kenshi Okada). This time instead of Jodie Foster's inexperienced but highly motivated FBI agent it's a handsome law student the convicted killer used to know as a young customer at his pastry shop whom he lures into studying his "work," and then teases and manipulates. In the course of this there is a detailed review of the personality and the crimes of the killer and the private affairs of his young "adversary." As Schilling says there are different movies mashed together in Lesson in Murder. Its enthusiastic exploration of meticulous tortures and murders of teenagers ill fits with its family dramas and coming of age tale.

For those who find Silence of the Lambs' fascination wIth its odious champion killer repellant, Lesson in Murder won't have much charm. Demme's film sold lots of tickets, but it was was picketed with good cause for its transphobic and homophobic elements. I couldn't forgive its use of Bach's Goldberg Variations as background music for a gleefully meticulous murder. There was deep perversity in this movie. Demme had a screw loose. The pious, boring AIDS flick Philadelphia didn't make up for the homophobia of Lambs. Lesson in Murder if free of these taints, it simply depicts a twisted killer and has scenes of him torturing his victims that are realistic and nightmarish.

While Jodie Foster's intensity and caring are positive, relatable elements in Demme's film, Schilling points out the weaknesses of the young investigator character in Lesson in Murder. Okada has little acting experience and is simply too handsome to seem plausible as the awkward, friendless, repressed young man Yamada is supposed to be: he seems to be explaining his character rather than embodying him. But of course Okada is easy on the eyes. He makes something pleasant to look at during the scenes of procedural investigation and the prison meetings between Yamada and the killer.

The motival thread for the action, which is based on a novel by Riu Kushiki, is provided by Yamato's insistence that the 24th of the 24 murders he's accused of is one he didn't do, though he admits to all the rest. At Yamato's prompting, Masaya carries out his own personal investigation to verify this claim, energized by the fact that he hates his school, which he considers very inferior. He wants to prove himself, perhaps discover himself. There is a lot to be learned about him. . .

The NYAFF previously included Shiraishi's 2018 yakuza movie The Blood of Wolves. (reviewed here).

Lesson in Murder 死刑にいたる病 ("Sickness Unto Death"), 128 mins., opened in Japan May 6, 2022. Screened for this review at the 2022 NYAFF. North American premiere.

NYAFF SHOWING: Thursday Jul 21, 2022 at 9:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

TAKASHI SHIMAZU: OX-HEAD VILLAGE (JAPAN 2022)

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KEIKO HORIUCHI, RIKU HAGIWARA IN OX-HEAD VILLAGE

A popular horror thriller mystery in a woodsy setting winds up being a slog.

Ox-Head Villageis the work of pop horror auteur Takashi Shimizu, most famous in the West for his Ju-On series (2003, 2003, 2004, 2006; remade in the United States as The Grudge). It seems safe to guess the "Village" series is Shimazu working in a less serious, less adult mode. Perhaps less successfully.

Ox-Head Village is the third in Shimazu's popular "Village" horror trilogy. It is the story of high school senior Kanon (Keiko Horiuchi) and her goofy would-be boyfriend Ren (Riku Hagiwara), who view a strange online video in which a trio of teenage girls, rather hysterical and silly and one of them bleach-blond, explore a supposedly haunted hotel. One of the girls—who looks exactly like Kanon—is apparently attacked by a supernatural force and disappears. Ren and Kanon decide to investigate the site of the disappearance, and—this being a horror film—predictably spooky things ensue. If that is what you're looking for. But this is a thousand miles below the quality of Japanese horror you find in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure or his later Pulse. It is designed for fans of popular genre material who know what they want and are not too discerning.

The festival blurb points out the trilogy features "the eponymous ox head, sinister twinships, murderous curses and three missing high school girls." There always seems to be a young man with nice hair. This is the fourth NYAFF Japanese film in a row with one of those.

But from IMDb user commenter who goes by "BlackMarketScum" comes the following grim report that gibes more closely with this writer's viewing experience:

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I'm sitting here currently forced by my girlfriend to watch this rubbish. This movie suggestion may have just ended our relationship...

The plot is boring, drawn out and utterly unbelievable. The production quality is poor, TV-drama-level at best. There's not a single scare or spine chilling moment, and apparently flesh and bone are tougher than a falling elevator. Add on to that a few cheesy moments of 'comedy' and you get this disaster of a movie.

This is coming from someone who has sat through plenty of other bad movies just for the bizzare moments...but this has to be the most unbearable 2 hours of film I've had to endure.

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It became clear to me early on that the acting quality, most of it anyway, is bad, and I'm not critical about that very often, which also must mean the direction is sloppy. The action seemed trivial and hard to get interested in. What more is there to say? They make bad movies in Japan sometimes. Though there is some found footage use, this is very much not Blair Witch Project quality. There's some pretty natural scenery, which wound up being my only solace in this slog.

Ox-Head Village, 115 mins., opened Feb. 18, 2022 in Japan, later opening in Taiwan and Thailand. Screened for this report for the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival showing, which is he North American premiere.

Tuesday Jul 19, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Takashi Shimizu will attend the screening.

NON: RIBBON (JAPAN 2022)

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MISAYO HIRUKI AND RENA NONEN IN RIBBON

COVID disrupts the life of an art school student

Ribbon is the first feature directed, scripted and starred in by actor Rena Nonen, who goes by the stage name Non. It is one of the rare Japanese films that acknowledges the present issue of the COVID pandemic. This is discussed in an article about COVID and Japanese movies by Mark Schilling in The Japan Times.

It is the winter of 2020, and an art school graduation project that had taken a year to complete can no longer be showcased at its planned venue because of COVID-19. Art school is closed down, and Itsuka Asakawa (Rena Nonen) lugs a bunch of wrapped up canvases back to her little apartment (she's got her own apartment), complaining all the way. The apartment is an ungodly mess - and how bad it is to be stuck in a small apartment alone with that: Itsuka's art school friend is tidy and gets up at six a.m. Itsuka's major project, a big painting of a grand girl hung with paper shreds is enshrined at the center of her room. But while this is home in a way, it's also lonely, and nothing quite makes sense anymore.

The strongest and most shocking sequence is the visit of Itsuka's mother (Misayo Haruki) who, while straightening up the apartment, unbeknownst to Itsuka throws the big painting in the trash because she thinks it's junk. And that isn't the end of the humiliating things this ultra-irritating okka-san says about her daughter and her ambitions to her face. Moreover when she learns she made a mistake she won't apologize. It's excruciating.

Dad comes the next day to check up on their daughter and his visit is more purely comical - a "social distancing" device he's brought like a giant Dalinian crutch, which got him stopped by the police, and jars of fruit jelly which are to be consumed at one go. More visits from Itsuka's younger sister and her - dare we say? - more talented art school friend Hirai (Rio Yamashita) follow, and an inexplicable secret invasion by the two young women into the closed art school premises, thereby risking expulsion, where Itsuka and Hiriai partly gleefully, partly tearfully destroy Hirai's big painting project, a surreal landscape, presumably because it's too big to remove from the studio. But still, why?

A charming, if somewhat fey, episode is that of the man (or tall boy) in the park, whom Hirai and Itsuka think is a creepy weirdo, surely vastly overreacting, until gradually he reveals that he is, in a big twist of fate, not only Tanaka (Daichi Watanabe), the middle school classmate whose praise of Itsuka's artwork was decisive, but also a neighbor who lives in her apartment building. This oh-so-tentative rapprochement is a little pathetic - Japanese shyness at its most extreme - but is also sort of heartwarming in a slightly kitsch way, providing all sorts of hitherto missing hope: of art supporters, of a boyfriend, of tentative human company, even under COVID. The way Itsuka runs around and spies on Tanaka trying to see him with his mask off at a distance before she's sure he is who he says he is seems odd and exaggerated but probably makes sense within the culture and may be a natural part of pandemic comedy.

The movie is full of tweeness that makes Non seem very much a Japanese Miranda July and is pretty off-putting, at least for an older male Western viewer (and Miranda July non-fancier), but it's nonetheless impressive, relevant, and perhaps even brave. It shows the strange disruptiveness of the COVID pandemic's early stages and particularly how students' lives have been disrupted, and not only that but examines the fragility of an artistic calling. Maybe Itsuka hasn't the talent or the motivation to continue: but would we take on the odious role of the unsupportive, uncomprehending mother? Some art work - no, nearly all art work - in one way or another requires some kind of community to flourish. So does humanity, pretty much. The "ribbons" seemed a nonessential magic realism element thrown in to elevate Itsuka's experience to a more spiritual level - but they may be a valid representation of the transcendent element that art provides so maybe they're not a bad idea, after all.

Ribbon,, 115 mins., debuted at Shanghai June 2021. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. East Coast Premiere

NYAFF SHOWING: Thur., Jul. 21, 2022, 4:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater.

EIJI UCHIDA: OFFBEAT COPS 異動辞令は音楽隊！(Japan 2022)

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HIROSHI ABE IN OFFBEAT COPS

Never mind crime detection: what the people need is a really great police band.

This slow developer billed as a "joyous comedy caper" is uneven and baggy in the middle but has many pro features and an entertaining musical finale. The protagonist, handsome, macho police officer Tsukasa Naruse (consummate pro Hirochi Abe) is sometimes so chilly and harsh early on that his loose-cannon detective isn't always all that funny. And for a Western viewer Naruse's redemption is a little hard to read. But you're not meant to think too deep here - it's entertainment.

In one of this movie's best scenes, an old lady gets a special sendoff from a police marching band. She'd loved the band, and when she is killed by burglars, the band comes to the morgue and plays a farewell salute, then one by one actually salutes her and backs away. It's a lovely moment, and the band matters, because Naruse has gotten demoted to being a drummer in it for being so aggressive and over-zealous as a police detective he's caused a lot of trouble. In this demotion, Naruse calms down. He becomes a good drummer and the band is inspired to work really hard and become good. Forget crime detection: what people need is a first rate police band!

Another 2022 NYAFF film, Mayu Nakamura's Intimate Stranger, introduces us to a Japanese scam on old ladies. Someone impersonates a friend of their "grandson" over the phone and convinces them to proffer a substantial sum of money to be picked up at the door to help the grandson sick or in trouble. In Offbeat Cops the callers impersonate cops doing a "survey" to make sure the old lady is staying safe, and then casually ask if she keeps much money in her house. If she says yes, they're immediately there with a "parcel delivery,." They walk in, tie her up, tape her mouth, and go off with her money. This is how the old lady who loved the police band dies: the tape accidentally asphyxiates her.

Director Uchida reportedly was inspired to make this movie by seeing a flash mob video of a police band on YouTube. We can see he then wanted to invent a story around a cop who winds up in such a band. Nice try, but the relationship between the overzealous criminal investigator Naruse and the (initially) lackluster police band is a bit tenuous, while the personality of Naruse himself is rather roughly sketched in, despite all the scenes of his macho excesses. It all might arguably have been better told in the course of two or three episodes of a TV series, which would save one from having to expect artistic wholeness, and the Naruse character would simply be a common thread. In that format the uneven pace of Offbeat Cops might have gone unnoticed; but this movie seems long. Such a relatively lightweight story shouldn't require two hours to tell. The important story, though, is the uplifting one of an angry man who achieves inner peace and humility.

But that brass salute to the fallen old lady is classic. And the pro ensemble and competent direction show in what follows, the entrapment of the informer and perp by the band disguised as clown musicians, then the "final" summer fair concert of the band, whose bus makes it through holiday traffic thanks to an emergency lead car. Bam, bam, bam: the action flows superbly in the last twenty minutes. Paring down might have made things move faster earlier on.

Offbeat Cops 異動辞令は音楽隊, 119 mins., debuts in Japan Aug. 26, 2022. NYAFF showing is the world premiere. It was previewed for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York AsianFilm Festival.

NYAFF SHOWING: Friday Jul 22, 6:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Eiji Uchida and Actor Hiroshi Abe will attend the screening.

SHINJI HIGUCHI: SHIN ULTRAMAN シン・ウルトラマン(JAPAN 2022)

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THE IMAGES OF SHIN ULTRAMAN ARE GLORIOUSLY ARTIFICIAL

"Irony" des-ne?

Matt Schley reviews the new Shin Ultraman in The Japan Times. He explains Shin Ultraman is a "gentle silver giant" who invaded Japanese TV screens 56 years ago to slay monsters and delight children. This movie is first of all a deliberately campy re-evocation of that popular favorite. It starts with a shiny new reimagining of the most successful tokusatsu-vs.-kaiju series of all time, with the silver superhero helping earthlings fight off monsters from space. There are some nice new ideas.

Creative duo Hideaki Anno (Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (Attack on Titan). These two titans of otaku cinema and avowed fans of "crashy, stompy" Japanese classics in 2016 already created a revival of the Godzilla franchise. This time they have teamed up to revive another creation from the late special-effects legend Eiji Tsuburaya.

Half this movie consists of fun recreations of the old effects of giants and monsters roaming the earth and terrifying earthlings such as nicely dressed and nice looking young bureaucrats assigned to figure them out and launch opposition to them and largely filmed separately.

But sometimes there's a thought-provoking twist, such as "SELF DEFENSE AGAINST TERRESTRIALS THROUGH HUMAN GIANTFICATION." One of the office team, ASami, comes back as a giant replication of herself that is alive, but absolutely impenetrable, and therefore a powerful weapon. And no radioactivity or chemical damage.

Thereupon, Extraterrestrial #0 arrives in human (well-dressed Japanese male) form, bowing and politely presenting a calling card just like a Japanese businessman. "When in Rome do as the Romans do," he intones; he likes to spout human clichés like this. First of all to establish his bona fides he must display some dramatic special effects to demonstrate to the onlookers that he is, despite appearances, really an extraterrestrial. It seems like he may be an alien arms salesman.

The giant version of Asami, it's announced, is like a mixture of Gulliver's Travels and (since giant Asami falls down into a trance) Sleeping Beauty. The scenes of her (simply combining images of two different sizes) really do remind one of illustrations for Gulliver, and the idea of recreating Jonathan Swift's masterpiece in an ironic homage to Fifties sci-fi is very interesting. And there is always the nice irony of recreating crude early sci-fi movie effects using sophisticated 21st-century CGI.

The attraction of the old effects is still there; it's just a question of finding some way of approaching them. As Phil Tippett's recently-issued Mad God illustrates, there is still something rich and special about DIY techniques like painstakingly handmade as stop-motion animation.

One would assume the best discussions of this film, its predecessors and its successors would be Japanese, but there is a good Italian blog Sonatine: Appunti sul cinema giapponese in which Matteo Boscarol provides a wealth of information about the context. We might also consider that a country with Japan's history of xenophobia might have a continuing affinity for the paranoia reflected in Fifties foreign invasion sci-fi movies.

Extraterrestrial #0 deems Ultraman's earthly aims to be unacceptable, so he assumes similar form and there is a knock-down battle between them to round out the film in spectacular fashion, but it's the dialogue of the well dressed young bureaucrats that makes all the film's points.

Shin Ultraman シン・ウルトラマン, 112 mins., opened in Indonesia and Japan May 13, 2022, and also showed at festivals including Neufchatel and Montreal. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. U.S. Premiere.

Saturday Jul 23, 1:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Shinji Higuchi and Producer Tomoya Nishino will attend the screening.

KIM CHAN, DEE LAM: FINDING BLISS: FIRE AND ICE - THE DIRECTOR'S CUT 尋找極致的喜悅：火與冰 (HONG KONG, 2022)

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Meet Josie Ho, Jim Chim, MC Yan and a bunch of other men and women from Hong Kong, thespians, musicians, and students, who go on a trip for a few days to Iceland to open up and experience things.

TRAILER

In Ron Shelton's Hollywood Homicide (2003), Josh Hartnett plays a good natured doofus of a young cop whose hobby is "finding my "bliss." That is what this group of talented but tense Hongkongers is explicitly doing under the leadership of Josie Ho on their trip to Iceland, where they do workshops to develop physical and emotional trust, a sense of fun, and an ability to feel themselves around wearing blindfolds. It all ends with a big jam session with ten or a dozen Icelandic musicians where they perform a spontaneous version of an Icelandic song with multiple instruments and voices. Along the way there are visits to, and views of, some spectacular and elemental Icelandic landscapes. The contrast with the tiny overpriced flats, crowded streets, and tall buildings of Hong Kong couldn't be greater.

Early on people explain what sadly we know: that in the 25 years since the mainland Chinese takeover of Hong Kong people have become more and more unhappy. Maintaining autonomy has proven to be an impossible dream. Many have left, and still are leaving. Some just can't. Everybody is depressed. Hong Kong was recently listed as the Interestingly, on the trip somebody reports that a couple of decades ago there were a lot of suicides in Iceland. But government authorities took the matter in hand and by establishing a great number of music academies, far out of proportion to the size of the little country, the general mood has been turned around and now Iceland is one of the happiest countries, whereas Hong Kong is low down on the scale. (Of course these things are subjective and change every year.)

Part of the group traveling to Iceland and prominent in the film are Josie Ho and her indie rock group Josie and the Uni Boys, together with Cheung Yee-sik (drummer and sound technician), MC Yan (rapper and street artist), Jimmy Mak (guitarist and BMX cycler), Jan Lo (singer), along with group leader Jim Chim, a theatre actor and comedian. Chim helps the group find a kind of bliss within themselves, via a workshop inspired by the philosophy of Philippe Gaulier, a master clown and theatre performance teacher.

It isn't easy to make a series of exercises interesting. What is going on is clearly more fun to the participants than it is for the viewers of thjs documentary. But we realize something has been going right when we see the Hongkongers, including the shyest of them, joyously busking in the streets of Reykjavik, and then the big successful, galvanizing, joyous jam session at the end, led by Icelandic singers and musicians and Hong Kong ones, including the bearded, Zen MC Yan, said to be the no. 1 rapper of Hong Kong.

One person says "We have been in Iceland for five days and we have learned nothing." But most of the participants appear to be loosening up and having fun right from the beginning. And if the exercises enthusiastically led by Mr. Chim can pall after a while, the final jam session is really fun and reminded me of the way the infectiously blissful young British musical genius Jacob Collier can galvanize an audience and fill them with improvised musical joy.

For this review I have drown on the review from Udine by Greta Elettra Broms published on easternkicks.com.

Finding Bliss: Fire and Ice - The Director's Cut, 80 mins., released Hong Kong 2022. North American premiere. Screened here for review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

Monday Jul 18, 8:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Kim Chan and Actor Josie Ho will attend the screening.

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JIM CHIM (BIG GLASSES) LEADS WORKSHIP IN FINDING BLISS

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THE HONG KONG GROUP ENJOY BUSKING IN ICELAND IN FINDING BLISS

JUSTIN CHEUNG, LI HO: LEGENDARY IN ACTION! 大俠Action！(Hong Kong 2022)

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A SCENE FROM "BATTLE OF THE SEVEN STAR SWORDS" IN LEGENDARY IN ACTION!

A film about movie nostalgia and the rough and ready nature of the Hong Kong film industry

Legendary in Action! was directed by acting star Cheung Kin Sing, here making his first feature film and playing the director in the movie, Cheung Chi-piu. (The actor reportedly put on weight to convey the sense that his character, frequently seen puffing on a cigarette and looking depressed and disheveled, is going to seed.)

Legendary in Action! oscillates between movie dreams and movie realities, the latter exemplified by scenes showing the rough-shod Hong Kong moviemaking process. We see the director as a child watching old fashioned black and white wuxia films on a little TV, ecstatic. That is the dream, or the birth of it. Now, he is washed up even though still young. He was internationally praised at the Busan Festival, but that's forgotten, and one of the main topics here is money and the lack of it - and most of his funding vanishes when big producers run off and a more intimate one, his friend and producer Chuen (Lee Sang-jung) blows his wad gambling.

Cheung Chi-piu tries to rejuvenate his film by recruiting an aging kung fu movie star, Lung Tin, and a real one, Chen Kuan Tai, plays this role. It was he who played the lead in a series called The Seven Star Sword, which Cheung Chi-piu was particularly inspired by as a boy. Here, nostalgia and reality coincide, and the "meta" quality of this film achieves its best moments.

Legendary in Action! is a movie about making a movie (he Battle of the Seven Star Swords). The main action is the ruckus about organizing and funding and the messy shoots, which rarely seem to go right. It often feels as though the film itself is a mess: the action and continuity aren't altogether under control and the tone is inconsistent. But When Lung Tin, i.e. Chen Kuan Tai, is in action, though his over-energetic moves terrorize other cast members and override the confines of the script, his skill, even at his age, is impressive and fun to watch. Chen Kuan Tai really conveys a sense that in the heyday of old-style kung fu movies, as he keeps saying, cast, crew, and production values were all top-notch, and we believe him when he is scornful about the quality of present-day stunt performers and props and the lack of rigor and dedication in the filmmaking process.

But making a movie about making a movie is tricky, and it's not enough that director Justin Cheung (Cheung Kin Sing) is an experienced actor who knows the cinematic process from the inside: sometimes comedy and realism are at war with each other. Characters abruptly shift. A young woman recruited from a restaurant to be Lung Tin's costar starts out being mercenary and cruelly indifferent, then without explanation becomes his sweet, dedicated helpmate. It's suggested that Lung Tin is developing Alzheimer's, but that doesn't quite compute. Cheung Chi-piu's pregnant wife (Yang Sze Min) gets fed up with his lack of attention (cinema is his passion, still, sort of) and goes back to her mother; later she is back, affectionate and happy. Dialogue needed, if possible, to make these transitions smoother and more plausible.

These are factors that make one less than impressed with Legendary in Action!. But the performance of Chen Kuan Tai leaves an impression and arouses an urge to learn more about how wuxia and Hong KOng action filmmaking have diverged today. The director deserves credit just for taking us to the roughshod Hong Kong low bugdet filmmaking process. We know Wong Kar-wai made his films very rapidly, and perhaps chaotically. Only they turned out to be masterpieces and this didn't.

(For details I am indebted to a DeepL-translated version of an article about this film by Ryan in Chinese on hkfilmblog.)

Legendary in Action!/ 大俠Action! (in Cantonese), 92 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere.

Sunday Jul 17, 3:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

JUN ROBLES LANA: BIG NIGHT! (PHILIPPINES 2021)

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CHRISTIAN BABLES IN BIG NIGHT

TRAILER

A young Filipino spends all day struggling to get off a government hit list

Our previous experience of the films of Jun Robles Lana, who evidently is extremely well known in the Philippines, was the 2012 New York Film Festival selection, Bwakaw, for 2012 (a pretty great year for the NYFF), also with a gay main character and also involving locally famous actors. Though maybe local viewers or commenters make Big Night! more overtly political than it is, the terrorism of the dictatorial Duterte regime is the power that hovers over the protagonist, Dharna (the appealing Christian Bables), a young gay hairdresser, and determines all the action. Unlike Bwakaw's elderly gay lead character Dharna is openly gay, and has a boyfriend, Thor (Nico Antonio). The "Big NIght" is an event Thor is competing in that night, and that action is a big part of the celebratory structure that holds poor Filipino life together and one of the sub-climaxes of this busy, funny, disturbing film.

Things open with a casual street assassination, whose calm acceptance by bystanders shows how commonplace it is. Dharna gets an advance look at a new drug "Watch List" that has his name on it. That is, the old name he rejects, Panfilo Macaspac, Jr.; Dharna is his queer identity name that he embraces. He spends the rest of the action frantically seeking through favors and pleading to get it taken off, because being called in for "questioning" as an "addict" is an event that routinely leads to extrajudicial assassination. In the Philippines' surreal, Kafkaesque "war on drugs," it's the addicts who get punished, by the way, not the drug dealers. Dharna is neither; he's just caught up in the web.

The sequence of encounters with people possibly able to help Dharna get taken off the "watch list" leads to some funny, raunchy stuff. There's a little of everything, including a clash with Dharna's father (who accepts that he's gay) and with the spirit of his dead mother, smoking and now foul-mouthed, who turns out to be in hell, appropriately enough, since however ludicrous this action is, it's constantly hellish or at least purgatorial.

Some local authorities come in odd places, like a midwife, and to talk to her Dharna has to assist at a tandem birth event, two pregnant women lying side by side, one giving birth and one about to, both screaming. One viewer has suggested that Dharna's apparent difficulty looking at a vagina is either misogynistic or homophobic or both, but it's not certain anything is to be taken too seriously. There are plenty of dick jokes too. The film is full of grim jests and casual cruelty, especially the latter since the hero is constantly being put off or jerked around by petty authorities whom he is obliged to play up to.

There's an assurance in the completeness of scenes Dharna enters into, busy, messy, colorful collections of often ordinary characters who nonetheless harbor among them somebody who might have life and death power over someone as weak as Dharna, who's simply in no position to be dignified or brave. This is a world of petty power being ruthlessly exercised all the time.

After various petty officials who enjoy pretending to be important there's a former star from Filipino cowboy movies, Donato Rapido (John Arcilla). who comically shows off some of his old tricks. The favor he extracts is some dramatic acting by Dharna and his boyfriend in an ambulance, and it's obvious what's going on, and that in order to clear his name, Dharna has to sully it far more profoundly.

Big Night! has some longeurs: its semi real-time progression of trials has made that hard for director Lana to avoid. The film succeeds n in the details of its moment-to-moment texture more than in its overall structure, but it still manages a rather jaw-dropping finale. Local viewers, hoping for a thread of hope, are displeased with the cynicism of this ending. But despite the way Lana sugars the pill with lightness and camp, this is basically hell. And people see the truth of it.

Big NIght!, 105 mins., premiered at Tallinn Black Nights Nov. 25, 2021 and opened in theaters in the Philippines Dec. 25 2021. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Film Festival. New York premiere.

Wednesday Jul 27, 6:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Director Jun Robles Lana and Actor Christian Bables will attend the screening.

NYAFF revival showing in the NYAFF July 16, 2022. Review originally published in Dec. 2020.

WONG KAR-WAI: HAPPY TOGETHER 春光乍洩 (1997)

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LESLIE CHEUNG AND TONY LEUNG IN HAPPY TOGETHER

Last tango in Buenos Aires - a new direction and new recognition

The earlier Wong Kar-wai films focused on romantic desire, longing, or frustration, loneliness or fleeting relationships. Happy Together shifts to a couple who've been together a while and are having problems, but can't seem to split up for long. For this turbulent gay love story Wong boldly used Leslie Cheung and Tony Chiu-wai Leung, two of the biggest Hong Kong male stars (Leung definitely straight), showing them passionately making out on a little bed in the very first scene. And Wong reportedly shot that first scene first, rubbing the actors' noses in the unaccustomed gay subject matter (unaccustomed at least for Leung). Maybe to get that out of the way, as some have suggested; but it's not the last gay sex glimpsed on screen. In this film, though, the physical side isn't so much the point. It's the emotional involvement of Po-wing (Cheung) and Yiu-fai (Leung) that counts. It's over but it's not over. It may have turned into nothing but care-taking and fighting, but the hold is as strong as ever.

The painfully back-and-forth of the relationship between sensuous, promiscuous Po-wing (Cheung) and responsible Yiu-fai (Leung) is underlined by the way Christopher Doyle's images shift back and forth between black and white and color. The scene-shifts are jerky; they jerk us around.

Wong Kar-wai temporarily avoided the issue of the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule by shooting his 1997 feature abroad, in Buenos Aires, a location the director comfortably makes his own, even if his characters are aliens in it. The relentless, melancholy tango music of Astor Piazolla resounds throughout (and indeed, we get to see the principals tango together) - as does, later on, a Hong Kong rendition of the Turtles' song "Happy Together." Wong knew homosexuality would not fare well under the new regime so he took this last chance to make a film about that theme, treating gay love as a relentless "can't live with you, can't live without you" relationship that makes that title ironic.

Another irony is that Wong tones down his relationship with the brilliant, bold dp Christopher Doyle with a film of more straightforward (if still often gorgeous) images, and drops the fanciful double plot structures of his last two films in favor of the simple, linear one of the life abroad of three men (and no women). Yet somehow it's perhaps even harder for the viewer to get a foothold in this world that's so concretely depicted, in these scenes that are so simple, even as they evoke every turbulent relationship you may have ever had.

Yet the world is a concrete one of little shabby rooms. Wong's films have reveled in such rooms from the start, but never more tiny and shabby than the one Yiu-fai occupies after he and Po-wing break up - where Po-wing joins him after one brawl too many when he's helpless, with bandaged hands, jammed with a ghetto style crowd in the hallway below where people cook and there is the only phone. The lived-in quality of this setting reflects the extended time spent filming in Argentina, which was supposed to be brief but extended to four months.

Vivid also is the tiny tango bar where Yiu-fai works as a doorman in evening clothes, munching sandwiches or quaffing from flasks of liquor as he stands outside in the cold. It's here that Po-wing reappears by chance, arriving in cars with new male conquests or clients. As before, Leslie Cheung effortlessly exudes sensuousness and profligacy. Tony Leung is the orderly, hard-working one, but also a man who drinks and has a temper. We don't see what he does to end his employment at the bar, but it's violent.

One thing that threads the repetitious, believably going-nowhere narrative together is the couple's project, failed at the start, never abandoned, to visit a famous location, the Iguazu Falls, depicted on a cheap revolving lamp they had in the first tiny Argentine room, which Yiu-fai keeps. It's the objective correlative of the longing for a happy moment that can never be. But the real thread is the little room with the bed on one side and sofa on the other. When Yiu-fai is caring for Po-wing with the bandaged hands, they fight over who'll sleep on which. The secret is Yiu-fai never wants Po-wing to leave. All this is mostly from Yiu-fai's point of view. He thinks this is their happiest time. He hides Po-wing's passport.

After the tango bar Yiu-fai works in a kitchen. He becomes the only friend of a young twentyish Taiwanese guy, Chang (Chen Chang, who starred in Edward Yang's autobiographical A Brighter Summer Day at fifteen). They drink together and the intuitive kid hears in his voice the sadness Yiu-fai denies. They seem happy playing ball with other Chinese kitchen staff outside the restaurant and it's Decenber, therefore summertime, which Yiu-fai says passes quickly. But not quickly enough: he takes another night job at a slaughterhouse to save money and avoid the now lonely room, for Po-wing has escaped. Apparently Yiu-fai and Po-wing are not going to meet again. Yiu-fai goes to see Iguazu and views the falls alone. Chang has left to visit an extreme southernmost point where he's promised to leave Yiu-fai's sadness. Po-wing enters the old room, empty of his lover now, and weeps. Lots of touching little details here. The friendship of Chang and Yiu-fai is heartbreaking.

This first Wong film about an established relationship is the loneliest and saddest but the most touching so far. This film brought Wong the greatest international recognition he'd yet had. Yet some Anglo critics dismissed it as too plotless. It arouses mixed reactions in me. It's not as fun as the earlier films, or as glorious visually - despite Doyle's ability to make the most ordinary locations evocative and fresh.

On the other hand, this is more about grown-up experience than what has come before. But I feel dissatisfied, as is Mike D'Angelo, who has said Happy Together has all the elements he loves in Wong, the moody characters, lovely images, free structure, but irritates him by substituting the romantic yearning with endless squabbling. It's not quite that simple but that's kind of true nonetheless. As a gay person I have to be grateful for this movie from my cinematic idol, but I find Leslie Cheung more interesting in Days of Being Wild, where he's central, than Tony Leung, who's the lonely, reliable guy who dominates here.

Happy Together 春光乍洩 (Chun gwong cha sit, "Bright spring," the Chinese title reportedly an allusion - ironic? - to the Handover), 98mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 1997, winning Wong the directing prize. Viewed on a screener of the 4K restoration "undertaken from the original 35mm camera negative by the Criterion Collection, in collaboration with Jet Tone Films, with l'Immagine Ritrovata and One Cool," approved by Wong Kar-wai. To be shown in a series of six 4K restorations of Wong Kar-wai films in virtual theater from Dec. 11 2020 by Roxie Theater and BAM/PFA. In the NYAFF July 2022 it is included in the HKETO, Classic Marathon.

July 16, 2022 NYAFF showing:
Saturday Jul 16, 2022, 9:00pm (Hearst Plaza)

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LESLIE CHEUNG AND TONY LEUNG IN HAPPY TOGETHER

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LESLIE CHEUNG AND TONY LEUNG IN HAPPY TOGETHER

KEN KWEK: #LOOKATME (2022)

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SHU YI CHING AND THOMAS PANG/AKA/YAO IN #LOOKATME

A lurid look at free speech, social media, and homophobia in Singapore.

The Singapore film #LookAtMe starts as jokey and turns shocking. It is urgent, violent, disturbing, lurid, and so campy it may wind up squandering many of its possibilities as social commentary, though it never ceases to be entertaining, or at least gripping.

The main action begins when Sean Marzuki (Thomas Pang/Yao), an ambitious but unsuccessful young Singapore YouTuber, goes viral for attacking and mocking a homophobic preacher. Sean has a gay identical twin called Ricky (both are played by Thomas Pang/aka yao, who's now finishing a masters at Yale Drama School).

It happens like this: Sean's girlfriend Mia (Shu Yi Ching) persuades the twins to attend a service of her parents' televangelist Baptist megachurch with her parents to show his, Sean's, bona fides. The service, after the pop music segment, morphs into a virulent homophobic sermon by Pastor Josiah Long (Adrian Pang), which we see in full. It is shocking, glib and hate-filled and seems all too real. (Later, in retrospect it doesn't seem real, but that's the way this movie works.) Something this retro-hateful would be likely not so fully spelled out in an American movie. This is all in English, by the way. The twins, horrified, stomp out of the megachurch, Sean's girlfriend with them. She acknowledges she made a big mistake, but in the event, her loyalty fades, since her parents are angered, not mollified.

Things have been stirred up, but it gets worse. Sean posts a powerful YouTube squib against the pastor, editing the TV footage of his sermon to make it look like he's hyping bestiality. This leads to multiple complaints to the police by members of the megachurch, and Sean is held on $30,000 bail. At last he's a YouTube hit - only he's now barred from future postings and must take down the provocative video.

It gets still worse - much worse. Sean winds up doing prison time in a large empty cell with some hardcore prisoners - an experience vividly, if rather stagily, depicted and worthy of a Samuel Fuller film. It's at this point that it becomes clear, if it wasn't before, that this movie is not realistic. The prison section seems something of a lost opportunity. It's here that movie had a chance of becoming more complex here, less blindly theme-driven. But the director is a little better at provocation and attention-grabbing than focused storytelling. His love of shock leads to simplistic effects. The film becomes so campy in exploring the horrors of prison life we may forget it's about real issues.

While Sean is in prison, Ricky becomes much more angry. He decides to use the old fashioned methods of public appearances, street demonstrations, and TV interviews to protest Singapore's anti-gay law, to make of his and the family's experience a cause. The failed gay lawyer who comes to defend Sean says fighting the megachurch "is not a case but a cause."

Eventually when he is released and learns how the megachurch's multiple suits have broken his now out of work and penniless mother (Pam Oei) and, worse, if possible, the grievous bodily harm that has been done to his brother Ricky by violent homophobes, Sean adopts a dictum of one of his cellmates and turns to violence and revenge. What seemed to start out being at least partly about earnestness and issues has lost its way in surreal fantasies. But then the film cleverly sidetracks Sean's attempt at becoming a revenge ninja. In the dramatic final minutes, Sean may be about to secure a role as an internet crusader. Only he'd better get the hell out of Singapore.

#LookAtMe is repellant more than once, boldly so. We're tempted to condemn it, but it's sure of itself in an all-over-the-place sort of way that makes one think maybe after all Ken Kwek has something and must have some cinematic chops, after all. There are serious flaws here. Plausibility goes out the window early. But he knows how to grab you.

Kwek's two previous features are Sex.Violence.FamilyValues. (2013) and Unlucky Plaza (2014).

#LookAtMe, 108 mins., in English, Mandarin, and Malay with English subtitles, has its world premiere at the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival, where it is in the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film Competition.

NYAFF SHOWING: Sat. Jul. 23, 2022, 4pm, Walter Read Theater. World Premiere | Q&A with Ken Kwek, Yao, Pam Oei.

PARK RI-WOONG: THE GIRL ON A BULLDOZER 불도저에 탄 소녀 (SOUTH KOREA, 2022)

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KIM HYE-YOON IN THE GIRL ON THE BULLDOZER

Korean super-girl

The feisty teenage girl in this movie is nearly indestructible. She has a mean look and a badass armful of tattoos. She also has little impulse control, but that can also be how you deal with problems fearlessly as they arise. And while her choice of violence seems wrong, she makes the wrongdoers against her no-count dad pay for their self-indulgence. In the end, she has served a term of forced education/community service and then after far worse misdeeds an eighteen-month jail sentence, and she comes out of it all apparently living a good life with her little brother. Perhaps her wild energy in future will be channeled into artistic endeavors. Whether all this makes any sense isn't altogether clear. But The Girl on a Bulldozer comes that close to being a very original movie and the actress an emerging star.

The teenage hothead is Goo Hye-young (Kim Hye-yoon). The film opens in a courtroom where the (lady) judge notes that in a restaurant brawl she protected three people, but she also began by striking them, and for that she gets a required course of public instruction in a trade. This is how she learns to drive a bulldozer, an odd choice since she's the first female ever to enter, but later she demonstrates that she (and actress Kim Hye-yoon) has learned to operate it effectively.

Hye-young's hard-nosed manner makes sense as a survival strategy. Her mother has been dead for years and her father (Hyuk-kwon Park) is unreliable and incompetent and can't pay the bills, which include multiple insurance premiums. At present he is in hospital following an accident. It turns out he hit several people, had been drinking, and was driving a vehicle stolen from his former boss. His condition worsens and he is declared brain-dead. This leaves Hye-young to care for her little brother. But that was true already.

The situation is too complicated to go into here. The former boss has turned over property to dad where he has set up a small restaurant. It turns out this man, who is a candidate for local government office glad-handing everyone now, is a slimy individual who has exploited Hye-young's father and misled him. Hye-young's dad had gone to confront him about this, leading to the stolen vehicle. The accident claims of the two dad hit turn out to be fraudulent. Dad isn't at fault, and the two "victims" may even be scammers. Hye-young sets out to expose him and in the course of her investigations, which happen all in the course of a single, impressive, madly determined day, she finds proof. When the boss sends money to pay her off, she takes it, dumps it on the floor of his posh flat, and attempts to douse it with gasoline and set fire to it. There's incorruptibility for you. That measure fails, so she commandeers the training bulldozer and goes on a rampage and does some serious damage, not only to the property the boss is planning to steal back, but to the posh flat.

After Hye-youn is out of jail and working at a restaurant, she gets wonderful news from the series of insurance companies. Several years later they have reversed their judgment and validated her dad's policies and each one is making a payment to her as the next of kin.

Clearly the filmmakers are out to show us the intricacies of petty local corruption most of all and thumb their noses at them with Hye-young as a kind of objective correlative of their righteous indignation, though they ignore the rule that two wrongs don't make a right. But when we think about it, righteous heroes or heroines - Supermen - do a lot of property damage. There is a part of us that relishes such displays.

Kim Hye-yoon gives a rousing and convincing performance as Hye-young. Look for her in future high profile films.

The Girl on the Bulldozer 불도저에 탄 소녀, 112 mins., opened in Korea 7 April 2022. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival, where Kim Hye-yoon receives the Screen International Rising Star Asia Award. New York Premiere

NYAFF SHOWING: July 25, 2022, 8:30 pm at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.

The only English language review is an enthusiastic one on the Korean blog site Society Reviews.

LEE IL-HA: I AM MORE 모어 (South Korea, 2021)

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INTERVIEW

Documentary portrait of an elegant Korean trans dancer and drag queen

A New York ASian Film Festival blurb for this film describes it as "A compassionate, colorful documentary about Korean transgender trailblazer and fabulous drag queen 'MOre,' whose years of rigorous training as a ballerina culminate in an invitation to dance in New York." You can call MOre a "transgender trailblazer," but I'd say Mo-Jimin is the classiest drag queen you've ever seen. Mo-Jimin gets cast in a show in New York in June 2019, 13 Fruitcakes at Theater La MaMa, to commemorate the the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and this important event in the life of the well-known Korean drag performer is the pretext for this documentary.

Should one refer to MOre (or is it simply "More"?) as "he" or "she" or something else? In an online interview with MOre in Korean, MOre says he is "Not a woman or a man, but a person who lives in pursuit of beauty." His boyfriend calls him "him," so we'll do that, but we may slip into "she" and that's natural, MOre is gender-fluid. David Cameron Mitchell, Wikipedia tells us, in 2022 "came out as non-binary, but still chooses to be addressed by he/him pronouns."

We don't wind up seeing much of the New York 13 Fruitcakes show; the main focus is on MOre. We see dozens of clips of MOre in heavy makeup, with the longest fake eyelashes you've ever seen, nearly as long as Salvador Dali's mustaches sometimes, wearing fantastic costumes, twirling and posing in beautiful settings, including dancing quite convincingly on her toes in preparation for the Fruitcakes show, in a brand new pair of ballet pointe shoes. (Her gymnastic skill shows in her incredible balance.)

We learn MOre may have been barred from full ballet studies in Korea. However, some details remain a bit vague in I Am MOre. The film mainly blends clips of MOre's drag performances (or posing in magnificent drag, or naked, in outdoor settings) with footage of him in the present moment. We don't learn much about 13 Fruitcakes or the Korean company involved in it. Its website shows it is a celebration through vignettes of thirteen significant LGBTQ figures, including several Korean ones and Virginia Woolf, author of the gender-shifting novel Orlando. MOre says he is going to play Orlando. But he played multiple roles, and must have beenthe main or one of the main performers, though the film doesn't make that clear.

We regularly encounter MOre's big bearish longtime (Russian? 20-year?) boyfriend Zhenya, a Pokemon devotee, who plans to perfect his Korean while on an 18-month job-seeking visa and apply for citizenship but is currently out of work. In an earlier clip he doesn't look so big and bearish; they look more alike and more like a regular affectionate gay couple in speedos at the beach. MOre, petite, wafer-thin and disciplined, is a convincing ballerina, a small, light classical dancer. By the way, classical ballerinas tend to have flat chests, though MOre seems to pad his when in ballet garb sometimes.

We meet MOre's friendly parents and her sister. Growing up in the country, she may have experienced less bullying than - but not none. He went to study ballet at the Korean National University in Seoul, where right away, he says, a male ballet student knocked him down and said "get rid of the femininity." Homophobia was and is strong in Korea, and to illustrate that, "eradicate Queer" festival and several other overtly homophobic street events are glimpsed.

MOre meets up with a famous American gay icon, John Cameron Mitchell of the 1998 trans musical classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch, whom he had met in Korea years earlier. He recounts trying suicide in school before a test but throwing up the 50 pills and going in and taking the test. Later, in the army, she came out and as a result was classified as insane and sent to a mental hospital. At that time (many clips are shown) MOre discovered Itaewon, Seoul's "party" and gay and drag district, and began dancing like crazy, and crazily, dancing all night, sometimes till he foamed at the mouth. She found joy, an escape from a life she saw as miserable. These moments are helter-skelter in the film's somewhat jerky progression that is held together by MOre and his serene, elegant, disciplined face.

Unfortunately when MOre sees Mitchell at his apartment in Manhattan it turns out he can't see 13 Fruitcakes; he has to be away that weekend to receive an award and perform in Provincetown. A sad letdown, but they hug and exchange gifts.

Though he says his being born with balls was a big mistake and he knew this from the beginning of his life, in a a revealing conversation with a prizewinning Korean transgender beauty MOre reveals he has given up the idea of surgery because it was always "too scary" and he has no regrets about that anymore, for one important reason because he knows that he has Zhenya's fully accepting love as he is. The film ends with a focus on the couple celebrating with sparklers at night, laughing and happy. The image that remains from this film is of MOre in a magnificent black costume posing in front of a grand building in the snow, but there is no still of this scene available, alas.

I Am More 모어 ("Mo-eo"), 121 mins., debuted Sept. 11, 2021 at DMZ Doc Fest, showing also at Busan Oct. 9, 2021. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere

NYAFF SHOWTIMES: Sun., Jul. 24, 2022, 7pm at the Walter Reade Theater.

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CHO EUN-JI: PERHAPS LOVE 장르만 로맨스 (SOUTH KOREA, 2022)

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RYU SEUNG-NYONG, MIN JIN-SUNG IN PERHAPS LOVE

Amorous confusion and literary inspiration

The Korean title of this this amusing and well made romantic comedy means "Genre Only Romance" and you should not confuse it with the glamorous 2005 Chinese mainland-set musical, English title also Perhaps Love (Chinese title 如果·愛), directed by Hong Kong's Peter Ho-Sun Chan and starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Xun Zhou and Jacky Cheung, which concluded the Venice film festival. This lower profile new film, a bold farce about love and writing with partner-switching and gayness, may really be more successful at what it sets out to do than Peter Chan's overblown musical. It may depart a lot from reality, especially with its gay-friendliness (word has it that mainstream Korean attitudes and practices remain pretty homophobic). But romantic comedies don't have to be realistic, and the gay element may soften Korean prejudices a little. The well-written screenplay by writer Kim Na-Deul makes things complicated but keeps them easy to follow - even for one who finds Korean names difficult.

The action starts with Hyeon (Ryu Seung-nyong), a best-selling writer who has been creatively blocked and written nothing in the seven years that have passed since the publication of his wildly successful first novel. His best friend is his publisher Soon-mo (Kim Hee-won), who is dating his ex-wife Mi-ae (Oh Na-ra). Things get complicated when Hyeon sees Mi-ae and they have wild sex. Mi-ae and Hyeon have a problematic adolescent son Seong-kyeong (Sung Yoo-bin), the reason why they're still in touch- who is witness to their sexual re-encounter and is very disturbed and confused by it.

While visiting a gay writer friend, Hyeon meets Yoo-jin (Mu Jin-sung), a young, also gay, aspiring writer who's been living with the friend. Yoo-jin follows up by visiting Hyeon, revealing that he's had a huge gay crush on the blocked older writer for a while - and leaves the manuscript of a novel he's written for Hyeon to read. Hyeon politely deflects the come-on, since he's totally straight, and at first, of course, ignores the MS. But when he gets to it, the MS turns out to be brimming with talent. Hyeon shows it to Soon-mo. They arrange to have Yoo-jin live with Hyeon and collaborate on a writing project incorporating Yoo-jin's novel. Awkward for Hyeon, but lovely for Yoo-jin, though he maintains a safe and unthreatening distance, writing up a storm and seeting with well-repressed desire, though also haunting Hyeon by attending his writing classes now. Hyeon is inspired to write again, but things get complicated, and funny, because he's sleeping in the same room with a young man who's wildly in love with him. I'm not sure how the Korean audience reacts to this, but it can't help but be titillating, at least for the gay audience, especially since Mu Jin-sung, who plays Yoo-jin, is very cute. So is Sung Yoo-bin, who plays the hilariously emotionally unstable young Seong-kyeong.

A funny thing in itself is the filmmakers' attempt - which doesn't have to be realistic, of course - to depict what the duo writing project would be like, with multiple media - pencil, computer and split screens. A major focus of Perhaps Love obviously is confused, misguided, or misdirected desire, but another big interest is the male ego. Hyeon's is constantly under attack, though he's stable - or depressed, not a prima donna or worthy of being one. To keep him in his place, in the background there' also a woman writer on the scene - though never honored by being given on-screen dialogue - who's shortlisted for the Booker Prize. If she wins the award (which she does, at the worst possible moment for Hyeon), Hyeon is going to be even further eclipsed.

There's also a whole slow-burning romance between Hyeon's adolescent son Seong-kyeong, who''s got plenty of time, since he uses his confusion over his parents' illicit sexual encounter as an excuse, not for the first time, to quit going to school or showing up for tutoring. A quirky young neighbor, Jeong-won (Lee Yoo-young), who says she's an actress, starts following Seong around. It's a big tease, and Seong is lonely, having just lost a girlfriend who dumped him when she got pregnant by someone else.

Except for the intense moment of ex-sex, there is no sex in this movie. What there is, is a lot of hilarity and confusion revolving around writers and writing and misplaced desire. Hyeohn and Yoo-jin are joint celebrities now, Yoo-jin is under contract to the publisher for future work, and all the mess has led to Hyeon being in the running again as an important author thanks to the jointly authored book, Two Men. He acknowledges publicly that Yoo-jin is a greater talent. But he has met the deadline and hasn't had to pay the huge penalty to the publishers and investors he was looking at if he didn't turn in another book.

The story winds up with the two collaborative authors, Hyeon and Yoo-jin. They plan to go their separate ways, but they reunite by unexpectedly meeting April 1 in Užupis, the town in Lithuania, actually a neighborhood of Vilnius, that every April 1 becomes an independent country for that one day, a place that Yoo-jin had long fantasized about and once described to Hyeon. This leaves a lot of other threads a bit dangling, but is a sweet, colorful change of location for an ending.

Perhaps Love 장르만 로맨스, 113 mins., debuted in Korea Nov. 17, 2021 on the internet; IMDb also lists it as opening in Mongolia Jan. 28, 2022. Cho Euon-ji won best director at the BaekSang Arts Awards. At the NYAFF Ryu Seung-ryong receives the inaugural Best from the East Award, which honors "a singularly outstanding performance in a film" and the film is included in the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film Competition. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere. On a official Korean website for Perhaps Love there are more stills than I've ever encountered for a movie - 106, an embarrassment of riches indeed. The glossy website makes this seem like an important production. I wonder if it was really only opened on the internet. Perhaps Netflix Korea?

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Tuesday Jul 26, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Cho Eun-ji and Actor Ryu Seung-ryong will attend the screening.

JEONG GA-YOUNG: NOTHING SERIOUS 연애 빠진 로맨(SOUTH KOREA 2021)

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SON SUKKU AND JEON JONG-SEO IN NOTHING SERIOUS

TRAILER

Asian Wiki

A Korean rom-com, risqué, blasé and sweet

Here we have a fairly conventional, and fun, Korean rom-com, with risky bits, a journalistic angle, and a sweet finale, with two very watchable actors in the leads.

Ham [or Mak] Ja-young (Jeon Jong-seo), on the brink of thirty, is a young woman who's just lost her boyfriend and her job and owes a lot of money. She's feisty and fresh ("has a daring personality," a site says). Park Woori (Son Sukku), four years older, wants to be a novelist, but is working on an online magazine. His editor (Kim Jae-Hwa), a ferocious, bossy, but elegant and sexy lady, shaking up the mag to save it,
insists Woori has to write a sex column now, forget the sports one. He's lost his girlfriend too, and both Ja-young and Woori, after the manner of rom-coms, want to have a safe, unromantic affair and not get their hearts broken. And of course that doesn't quite work.

Ja-young (Jeon Jong-seo) and Woori meet with no previous experimentation on the dating app Love Bridge." His moniker is "Tweety Bird". Her's is "Sleeps Around." Upon meeting, they exchange their real names. Hers sounds-like "sleeps Once" and his sounds-like "the act of fucking."

The not-quite meet cute is well enough done to make one wish some of the preceding 25 minutes of chitchat with secondary characters had been skipped, but the Ja-young/Woori affair isn't meant to go too deep. And we needed to set up Woori's situation and meet Ja-young's girlfriends, especially her best friend, Sun-bin, a divorce lawyer, and her wise and elegant grandmother (Kim Young-Ok), important because her mother died shortly after her birth.

The meetup takes place, memorably, on New Year's Day. Ja-young got there early and seeing a blood donation truck, gave some as her New Year's good deed. This makes her hungry, which leads to a sit-down noodle meal. After a disagreement over buckwheat noodles, Ja-young suggests soju. They drink. She says she picked him on Love Bridge, since he asks, because he looked the least likely to have an STD. He blanches. "Even if a Prince Charming comes along," she adds, "he's no use if his dick is small." He chokes. "You're something else," he laughs.

They go to a hotel and have sex (not seen). Will there be more? He's interested, but she's non-committal. After all, she had wanted "nothing serious." She tells him so. But when Ja-young reports to her girlfriends, Sun-bin says she has a "FWB" now, and she doesn't deny it. (See my review of Will Gluck's 2011 Friends with Benefits with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake and a comparison with the, I thought, more intriguing Natalie Portman-Ashton Kutcher vehicle No Strings Attached.)

For meetup no. 2, the app pair start out with a really lengthy, drunken soju session this time, with mutual interrotations and opening-up. The setting and the activity are totally Hong Sang-soo, but the style and bright cinematography are Hollywood. This is not a European-festival-style movie; it's an entertainment, with jaunty music to accompany the drinking and the revelations to keep them light. They awaken in each other's arms and bed the next morning in another hotel, but they didn't have sex.

As this continues, with plenty of sex now, Woori is using the encounters for work in his "sex column." He doesn't describe the sex; he talks about the surprises and the feelings. There's a Situation here: he's mining a relationship - even if it's not one, yet - for titillating literary material. More and more people are reading the column. The editor is ecstatic when it gets over 500,000 hits, and takes the entire staff out to eat beef, promising them bonuses and a free trip. And this success is plausible partly because Ja-young is made to seem to us a truly original character, someone whose individuality young women would identify with and young men would find sexy.

But the more involved the soju and sex sessions become, the more attracted Woori is - on the verge of saying "I love you," the more uncomfortable he becomes with his column's success. Rising to over 700,000 hits doesn't help; it makes it worse. More pressure, more embarrassment, more shame. Though shame is not mentioned. When he is about to tell Ja-young it's over she drags him to her ex's wedding, which he willingly sabotages, though what he does is hidden and more malicious than criminal, and she realizes her plan of destroying the wedding was absurd and drags them away. With this act of complicity their mutual vibe is just too good for him to fess up now, and when she suggests they go to a fair next time they do. It's there, after a fun, romantic montage of rides, that he misplaces his smartphone and she finds it while he's in the loo, and the jig is up.

But what will happen next? You have to see and find out.

Both of these are interesting, much admired actors: people will watch this movie for them, and to a lesser extent because Jeong Ga-young has shown herself in her previous three films to be a bold and distinctive woman director whose work is also entertaining. Son Sukku spent a lot of time in the US and Canada studying and speaks good English. He majored in visual arts and film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been the CEO of a company, and in his military service volunteered for the "Zaytun Division" serving in war-torn Iraq. He has been in a popular Netflix series and been a director. He is quite famous and one can see why. With a few words exchanged with a woman met on a dating app he becomes immediately interesting. He has gravitas, an attractive, mysterious inwardness, and a wicked smile. As for Jeon Jong-seo (it was Jun Jong-seo before: so it goes with transliterations of Korean names), she came to wide attention through playing one of the lead roles in Lee Chang-dong's superb 2018 thriller Burning, one of the best films of that year's New York Film Festival. And that was only the beginning. She currently stars in the international Netflix series, "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area."

Not pretentious, not earth-shaking, Nothing Serious is nonetheless full of scenes, mainly but not only the ones between Jeon Jong-seo and Son Sukku, that I'd be happy to watch again some day. These are characters you'd like to hang out with.

Nothing Serious 연애 빠진 로맨 ("Romance Without Love"), 94 mins., opened in Korea Nov. 24, 2021, and in Japan Jul. 8, 2022. It was screened for this review on a screener provided by the co-sponsors of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. New York premiere.

NYAFF SHOWINGS:
Sunday Jul 31, 3:45pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)

YOON JONG-SEOK: CONFESSION 자백 (SOUTH KOREA 2022)

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SO JI-SUB AND KIM HUN-JIN IN CONFESSION

Tangled web of a powerful murder suspect and his ace defense lawyer, from a Spanish original

A remake of the twisty, convoluted 2016 Spanish thriller Contratiempo /The Invisible Guest, written and directed by Oriol Paulo. Italian, Bolllywood, and Indian Telugu language remakes also exist. This is a skillful mystery murder thriller with a posh dark sleek look. It is the purest hokum, but it done very well. The actors are good, the music restrained but effective. The focus is the long interview, with many illustrative flashbacks or filmed possible versions, as a rich corporate IT CEO talks to a woman defense lawyer who has never lost a case. He is accused of murder, she is to get him off. It all feels made up to hold us, but despite ourselves we are, indeed, held, right to the end. Nonetheless this is a construct of immense artificiality, a conversation filled with lies on both sides formed out of filmed possibilities and flashbacks can't seem very real, even though it pushes our cinematic buttons.

We can't go into all the details because that would spoil the surprises, even if we could remember them all. Yoo Min-ho (suave, convincingly despicable So Ji-sub) awakens, dazzed from a blow and a fall, found in a locked hotel room with his dead mistress Kim Se-hee (Im Jin-ah, known as Nana). He insists he didn't do it. But there was nobody else there. As he talks to attorney Yang Shin-ae (Kim Yunjin of "Lost") his story changes. For her to be able to defend him he must tell her everything, she insists. She also informs him that his confession isn't convincing, and, not that he must tell the truth, but that he must make up a better story. A good defense, she says, is made up of convincing fabrications.

Then, Mr. Yoo starts to tell a whole different story, not about the murder of his mistress, though he will get to that later, but about a crime that he and she committed a while ago - their coverup of the accidental death of a young driver when they were on a winding road and swerved to avoid an elk, and the other car hit a boulder. You see, they didn't want it to be known that they were on the road together because their affair was secret. An intricate series of eventS unfolds involving a strange coincidence and a lake - events that will double back toward the end of the film.

This suspenseful and smartly constructed film was deemed a worthy closing for the Udine Far East Film Festival. And it is wonderfully slick. But despite its success the critics didn't like the Oriol Paulo original and there is no reason why we can admire the same kind of construct made in South Korea. It is too self evidently more delighted in its own narrative ingenuity than anything else. But there is something addictive about it and the acting and filmmaking here are polished.

Confession 자백, 105 mins., debuted at 36th Fribourg International Film Festival Mar. 20, 2022,[1][2] and its Italian debut at the 24th Udine Far East Film Festival Apr. 30, 2022 as closing film of the festival. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Saturday Jul 23, 8:30pm
Asia Society
Director Yoon Jong-seok will attend the screening

DAN-GUEI SHEN: THE FUNERAL 頭七 (TAIWAN, 2022)

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WU YIHAN IN THE FUNERAL

Bad reception

The visuals are generally elegant in this slow-burner horror film from Taiwan, which blends family conflict with folk evil spirits and explodes into traditional intensified scares and excitement in the last twenty minutes of its 103-minute run-time. An uncomfortable mood is definitely created, though some moments are just too conventional and a perceivable disconnect between the opening and later sections reveals a certain weakness in a screenplay that has some inconsistencies.

The family conflict, and the elaborate focus on funerary ritual, makes one wonder if this couldn't just have been a straight socio-psychological drama. On the other hand, for horror genre fans, all the delving into personal issues may seem to get in the way. Central is a mother, Chun-hua (Selina Jen Chia-Hsuan) and her teenage daughter Qin Xuan (Wu Yihan), who live in Taipei. The daughter suffers from kidney disease and is delicate, needing a transplant. The pic opens with a long sequence where mom, working in a large convenience store at night, walks around continually spooked by odd noises, then a power outage. Later, she and her daughter go out to the family seat in the country - a Chinese language site, Movies and Culture calls it "a dimly lit old mansion" - for the funeral and seven-day wake of mom's grandfather where they are met first by an unfriendly reception from relatives, then by the hostile pursuit of unfriendly spirits. The daughter meets family members she's never known. They are just as unfriendly as the spirits. This world is both familiar and unfamiliar for the mother now.

It turns out Chun-hua hasn't been back in a decade because there was a falling out when she became pregnant out of wedlock refusing to reveal the father's identity or to end the pregnancy as her parents, especially her father (Chen Yi-Wen) wanted, and went to Taipei to raise the child on her own. Her parents have not forgiven her for this. Her father, the most convincingly disagreeable, walks up and simply says, "You are not welcome here." That's about as malevolent as family relations can get, and no folk evil spirits are needed to reinforce it. Mom is nearly as unpleasant. More comes to show Chun-hua's mistreatment in early life, but this is never resolved or explained.

A "large mourning hall built in the countryside" (the Chinese site again) is an impressive reference point of the film that is both grand and scary, a place where "The hanging couplets and yellow curtains make people feel chills down their spines." The daughter is afraid to go to the funeral, so mom goes alone, and while separated from the girl is attacked by a peripheral family member (Na-Do) who, lacking legitimacy, has been excluded from the will and is enraged by this.

While her parents have told her to leave, Chun-hua is determined to remain for the traditional seven days of ritual surrounding a funeral, with the soul wandering on preceding days and set free on the seventh (and sometimes multiple seven-day rituals thereafter). There is a Taoist priest on hand played by Chen Jiakui. We don't quite get to the full ritual, because in the last quarter hour of the film all hell breaks loose, with some possessed by malevolent spirits and violence entering the mourning hall for a dramatic and surprising finale. The site I've cited says this is the best horror movie ever made in Taiwan. Maybe, maybe not; horror fans may like only the last part, but tech features are good throughout and the late scenes have good visuals.

(For more about the plot complications I defer to Don Aneli on Letterboxd who has the only lengthy discussion at present, in English at least.)

The Funeral 頭七 ("The First Seven"), 103 mins. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival, the film's international premiere. It debuted in Apr.1, 2022 at the Quingming Festival in Taiwan.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Wednesday Jul 20, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

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THE "LARGE MOURNING HALL BULIT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE"

TOM TENG: LIFE FOR SALE 售命 (TAIWAN 2021)

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FU MENG-PO, JOANNE TENG IN LIFE FOR SALE

No time to die

This movie from Taiwan about a failed young insurance salesman Liang (Fu Meng-po) makes desperation fun. There's a daft, ironic nihilism about it that recalls early writings of William Burroughs and might have been directed by the Cronenberg of Naked Lunch.We're in a kooky urban purely cinematic world. With its candy-colored noir style, its desperados in the subway, it's elaborate failed suicide attempts (by attempting to consume fatal amounts of cinnamon, chewing gum and carrots), its cockroaches and the loosely-slung young female neighbor Yu-jen (Joanne Tseng) with a teenage son needing a heart transplant who comes over to drink, this is a sprightly and fast-moving tragicomedy full of youthful bravado. As time goes on the movie drifts into genre violence which is over-the-top fun but drifts from earlier promise.

After he gets fired from the insurance job for socking a high-earning stiff - since the income hs's bringing in, a bespectacled female accountant totes up, is less than they are paying him, Liang sets out to follow the theme of the eponymous Yishima novel he picked up on the subway, Life for Sale. (A nice detail is the lingering smell of vomit on the book cover from Yu-jen throwing up on it one night.) He decides to sell his life for real, on the internet. But once he makes known how little he values it, the more others seem to value his existence: e.g., a mysterious woman (Janel Tsa) who urgently seeks a test subject for a high-stakes experiment. Interesting and well costumed characters turn up: a medical experiment, and shady old Mr. Wang (Tsai Ming-shiou), who wants someone to perform dangerous tasks, including getting back a stolen dog from a vicious rival crime boss. Liang spends the rest of the film fighting off unsavory characters out to get him.

Things may begin to seem a little random by halfway into the 105-minute runtime. While the outcome is uncertain, the irony of the situation is clear, how Liang's death instinct has made him desirable material for various oddballs with missions. We could have used a pause for breath or a change of tone: this is a film where a completely new chapter, like in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, would have been welcome. But producer now first feature director Tom Teng in his enthusiasm misses, as feature debut helmers often do, the need to pause for air. The temptation of stylish pop genre violence has been too great. It's fun, but it swallows up the film's earlier promise.

However the first twenty-five minutes of so are among the freshest and most stylish footage the NYAFF has to offer this year, and we must be grateful for that. Better luck next time, Mr. Teng.

Life for Sale 售命, 106 mins., Mandarin and Taiwanese, English subtitles, debuted in Taipei in early May 2022. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. International Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES: Showtimes
July 24
9:30 PM
Q&A with Tom Teng
Walter Reade Theater LincolnCenter

GENG JUN: MANCHURIAN TIGER 东北虎 (2021)

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ZHANG YU AND XU GANG IN MANCHURIAN TIGER

Cold laughter in China's far north

A review in Sino-Cinema by veteran Asian film specialist Derek Elley says of this extremely dry, off beat comedy that it "overstays its initial welcome." He describes in detail how the director shows off an indie style of longueurs and eccentric provocations. Though this effort is more commercial than previous ones, it did not do well at the box office.

A coal-mining city in set in Heilongjiang province, located in China’s northeastern corner, closer to Russia than to Beijing, the present day, winter. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu of An Elephant Sitting Still) operates his own bulldozer loading coal at a mine. He’s broke, is married to the heavily pregnant Meiling (Ma Li), and has a young mistress, Xiaowei (Guo Yue).

Before this "deadpan dramedy" takes shape, we see a few sketches introducing the characters. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu) is an excavator machine operator in a mine of this constantly cold Chinese Northeast, and between a cigarette and an excavation, he enjoys the regular visits of his mistress Xiaowei (Guo Yue), not the first, we learn. Despite her insistence, he is firmly and melancholically convinced that his marriage is the only thing he has left in his life. On the other hand, it's his wife who keeps the marriage together. With the same determination she instructs Xu Dong to get rid of their handsome German Shepherd, Ruyi, to prepare for the baby. He struggles to find someone who will buy the animal as a pet and not for the meat. As a last resort, he leaves it to builder Ma Qianli (Zhang Zhiyong), who has a spacious courtyard and a reputation as a successful businessman. Xu Dong also tries to help Luo (Xu Gang), a friend who has mental illness and considers himself a poet, by getting him a job as a schoolteacher, but this is not successful. And Ruyi winds up eaten.

The themes of Geng Jun's film are various: family and the attachment to money; desolation and the lack of a social structure of assistance for the disabled; betrayal, viewed fatalistically, at the expense of respect for women. The protagonist never really pays the price, except through awkward and clumsy triangular situations, which are as worthy of our scorn as of our forgiveness.

The film won the top prize, the Golden Goblet, at the 24th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival, June 2021, Variety reports. Geng’s previous film, Free + Easy, won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Manchurian Tiger is his fourth feature.

Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday, July 17 at 1pm, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center

WEI SHUJUN: RIPPLES OF LIFE 永安镇故事集 (CHINA 2021)

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TRAILER

Tumultuous three chapter filmmaking sort-of documentary evokes Jia Zhang-ke and other role models

Wei Shujun, the young director of the semi-autobiographical (and wholly indulgent) Striding into the Wind shown in Competition at the abortive 2020 Cannes Festival, depicted himself as a dissolute, slightly jokey sound man driving a beat-up jeep Cherokee. But he has been a Cannes protégé since his short film On the Border 延边少年, was awarded Special Jury Distinction in 2018. This time he reveals the extent of his ambition (and his enthusiasm for cinema) in this ironic, but rich and beautiful mocumentary about the cast and crew of a pretentious indie film about to be made in rural China about "authentic" people.

The film is divided into three interlocking chapters. The first one, entitled Waiting Alone, in particular is gorgeous (thanks a lot to dp Wang Jiehong), and at points evokes Jia Zhang-ke's exciting early work. Every shot is complicated and fascinating and fun, full of people and junk. The color is like you've never quite seen before and a delight to the eye. The plot again is very meandering but focuses on certain crew members and on a squabbling local couple, the vibrant, pretty young wife, Xiao Gu (Huang Miyi), with a year-old baby, also running her in-law's little restaurant which now finds itself catering for the film crew. She and her husband argue about whether she should breast feed; the husband quotes edicts from his mother to countermand his wife's wishes. Meanwhile the crew members turn their cameras on her and like what they find.

Wei Shujun's previous feature seemed so meandering, disorganized and indulgent I didn't review it. Derek Elley's description of it in his Sino Cinema review (after one of his typically meticulous summaries) was "a pointless two hours spent in the company of uninteresting people," and that did not seem too wide of the mark. But something about the detail of scenes, and the lack of self-centeredness about this, second feature by most counts, fourth by Elley's more inclusive reckoning, makes one feel forced to take notice. But it's still not easy to describe or to do justice to all the often chaotic details.

The film overall concerns a big female star who after 20 years away brings a film crew to her remote hometown for a shoot. The Chinese title means "Yong'an Town Story Collection" and the film was shot at Zixing City, Hunan Province. The production is afflicted by disagreements among crew members while as mentioned, Xiao Gu, the bored local restaurant operator, is excited at the prospect of becoming a stand-in for the star and the star suffers from being too famous.

The first chapter belongs to Gu; the second one, called It Looks Beautiful, begins with the arrival of the film’s leading lady Chen Chen (Yang Zishan). Chen Chen's desire to return to the simpler life of her youth is deceived by her realization that now that she's a star, of course nobody treats her as a normal person in Yong'an Town any more and they celebrate her in endless cumbrous ways she must smile and endure while old friends and acquaintances turn away from her, try to gain favors from her, or are sadly changed. This is a combined study of the disenchantments of "success" and the disillusionment of a simpler past that's forever lost. It's a chapter rich in colorful celebratory scenes, fireworks and costumed dragons and crowded reception parties, chaotic material still sometimes suggestive of Jia Zhang-ke.

The third chapter, perhaps more in a Hong Sang-soo mode, focuses on the director (Liu Yang) and the screenwriter (actual film screenwriter Kang Chunlei), who argue over the philosophy behind the film and what it should feel like. This chapter is entitled Pluto Moment, referring (I gather) to the 2018 Zhang Ming film about a film crew who get lost in the mountains and never complete their film. This title signifies a creative impasse experienced by the script writer and the artistic differences between him and the film director. The scriptwriter is a melancholic romantic and a fan of classic rock; the director is a sanguine pragmatic ex rapper (a Wei standin?). They appear incompatible and it doesn't look like the script is going to be completed. And it will never be authentic even if it is, because the crew realize it ought to be made in Hunan dialect, which they can't do.

Screen Daily compliments Wei for "Swiftly delivering on the promise of his freewheeling, semi-autobiographical debut feature" and calls the film " a dexterous rumination on the pursuit of authenticity" The reviewer, John Berra, suggests Wei this time "courts comparison with the meta-comedies of Hong Sang-soo" because the film's local ingenue is complimented for resembling Hong's muse Kim Min-hee - whom she has never heard of, of course. Hong may come to mind in the third chapter, while obviously the first evokes Jia, and the second could bring to mind The busy, crammed early segment is nothing like Hong's minimalist dramas, but early Jia Zhang-ke can't help but seem real influence and not an unsuccessful one.

Ripples of Life is inconclusive, by intent, but begins to live up to Wei's extravagance and promise. This is one to savor and rewatch.

Ripples of Life 永安镇故事集 ("A collection of stories from Yongan Town"), 123 mins., in Mandarin and Hunan dialect with English subtitles, premiered at Pingyao in Oct. 2021, and also debuted at Cannes 2022 in Directors' Fortnight, showing later at London, Busan, and Brussels and other international festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Monday, July 18
6:00 PM AT THE Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center

ARVIN CHEN: MAMA BOY 初戀慢半拍 (TAIWAN 2022) |

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VIVIAN HSU, KAO KO IN MAMA BOY

TRAILER

A sheltered son breaks away

The situation of Mama Boy brought back memories of the classic 2001 French comedy by Étienne Chatiliez, Tanguy. Xiao-hong (Kao Ko) is a sheltered young man, nearly thirty, who lives at home - but only with his mother, who is very bossy. And this is not like the posh bourgeois Parisian world of Tanguy. Meiling (Yu Ziyu), Xiao-hong's mother, works in retail. And rather than perpetually at university, Xiao-hong works in his uncle's tropical fish store. Xiao-hong is a strange, touching character who finds a unique way out. Director Arvin Chen has a fresh approach, but it is the performance, and the presence, of heartthrob Kao Ko that makes this film especially memorable.

Xiao-hong is a peculiar young man. He is tall and almost silent, and appears glum. In the trajectory of the film he will gradually open up and start to smile. He has been completely under Meiling's thumb. She is trying to find him a girlfriend, but when she sets him up on a dinner date, mom intrudes via smartphone and becomes an obtrusive third party present at the table and the girl flees from the restaurant with dinner untouched. As Meiling, Yu Ziyu risks being shrill and sometimes is, but the secret of Chen's comedy is that it stays human.

In Kao Ko's wonderfully restrained and surprising performance Xiao-hong is strange, mysterious, sad, but also very sweet. In his quiet containment there is a world of potential waiting to be let out. Yes, he's an odd creature, but he's presentable too, tall, poised, on the edge of "handsome guy."

It's Xiao-hong's cousin at the fish store who drives a wedge into the young man's isolation by dragging him to a "love hotel" to lose his virginity. Against his will he's pushed into a room with one of the girls, known as Apple, a specialist in virgins. When she starts to service him he immediately flees. But it's at once clear that he has liked the madam, Sister Lele (actor and pop star Vivian Hsu). And for obvious reasons. He's not awkward with her as he is with the restaurant date or the cute young woman who comes to buy fish because she's been told it will cure her insomnia. Sister Lele is a mature woman and also beautiful. In Vivian Hsu's excellent performance the audience finds Sister Lele attractive too, at ease and casually elegant.

And sad and problematic. But that comes later. Xiao-hong starts coming to the brothel all the time. He just sits in the room with Apple and then leaves on his motorcycle. Sister Lele of course hears what's going on, but she tolerates it, and Apple likes having such an easy customer. We know that he is living for the glimpses of Sister Lele.

As the world of Sister Lele's problematic son Weijie (Fan Shaoxun) comes into play it's jarring, a break in the gentle social comedy and a hint of danger and violence. Weijie is slick, handsome, confident, a con man whose unwise scheme selling knockoff wine is going to get him into serious trouble with dangerous loan sharks and with the law. He only sees his mother when he desperately needs to borrow money from her. The film seems to slip into a different, gangster genre. Weijie is a liar, a trickster, an angry man. Weijie and his mother make the relationship of Xiao-hong and his mother seem not so bad after all. When Weijie glimpses Xiao-hong's relationship with his mother he is angry and there is going to be trouble.

Chen avoids sentimentality in the relationship that develops between Xiao-hong and Sister Lele when he starts accompanying her to a dance bar, an old hangout of hers and learns a little about her past. But when he starts dancing around in the fish store - a memorable image of the tall young man and the sweeping, graceful movements - it tells us he's in love, a little delirious, transformed. She's a lonely woman and divorced her husband immediately after Weilie was born. Her trials with him make her time with Xiao-hong a comfort.

Xiao-hong starts haltingly dancing with Lele, staying out at night. His mother is not happy. He won't tell her what he's doing or introduce her to his new "friend." By now he is all focused on Sister Lele - he still calls her that, treating her with great respect and almost awe, which she cannot help to especially like. The movement of the film is that as Xiao-hong grows more confident and happy, but always restrained, with Lele and they have a great time dancing and he takes her home on his motorcycle, the trouble Weilie is in is correspondingly getting worse while Meiling is getting more angry at Xiao-hong's suspicious new independence. There is a subplot of Meiling's chorus and a male singer of the group who's interested in her, a retired police academy professor. This connection will lead to big trouble for Sister Lele when Meiling finds out who her son has been seeing all this time.

It is inevitable that this sweet comedy will move into disaster and some violence and end with disenchantment. It will end with Meiling's statement that she and her son have both learned important lessons. It would seem that Arvin Chen hasn't a mean bone in his body. the lack of irony of Mama Boy is essential to the unique quality that Kao Ko's subtly nuanced performance embodies as the lead.

This is the his third feature set in Taiwan and in mandarin for forty-four-year-old writer-director of Mama Boy Arvin Chen, who was born in Boston of Taiwanese immigrant parents and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from UC Berkeley and USC School of Cinematic Arts. After college in 2001 he moved to Taiwan and worked for Edward Yang, an interlude that had a decisive effect. He returned for film school at USC. His short made there, "Mei," won a Silver Bear at Berlin 2007, and his debut film Au Revoir Taipei won awards at Berlin, Deauville, and San Francisco. It will be interesting to see if in future he incorporates his American background into his films. A story in Taiwan News[/i] about Mama Boyreports that he has lived in Taiwan for the past decade. He is completing two other films and says that he plans "to focus on international co-productions."

Mama Boy, 94 mins., debuted at the Udine Far East Film Festival, and it opened in Taipei. It was screened for this review as part of the July. 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center. North American Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Showtimes
Saturday, July 16
3:15 PM
Walter Reade Theater

TOM HUANG: DEALING WITH DAD (2022)

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PETER S. KIM, ALLY MAKI, HAYDEN SZETO IN DEALING WITH DAD

A Chinese American family faces a depressed dad

With an uneven start, and some glitches along the way - Tom Huang brings in too much and leaves some threads dangling including several unnecessary relatives and a young Taiwanese immigrant (Anthony Ma) - Dealing with Dad winds up being a touching and astonishingly bold portrait of the problems, hopes, dreams, and ordinary satisfactions of a first-generation Chinese American family living in California. It's also a very welcome addition to the New York Asian Film Festival. New York is, after all, in America, but Asian Americans are woefully underrepresented in mainstream American movies and in this festival.

As the title implies, there is humor in Dealing with Dad, in which director Huang has a strong background, but it's built around very real issues, particularly one Huang dealt with in his own family and one that's shirked by many, particularly in the Asian-American community: depression. The Taiwan-born father (Dana Lee) who is not young, has lost his job and that has triggered a bad one: he spends all day in bed lifeless, debilitated, staring at the television in a daughter's cluttered former bedroom, having already turned his own into a dump. He won't acknowledge anything is wrong, nor will his wife.

The comedy - maybe not so much - is that in this very reduced state Dad is not a little, but much nicer, too weakened to be the loud, violent, overcritical, overbearing asshole brute he normally is. Do the adult children really want him back like that, the way he was abusing them as kids and adults?

The action begins with the parents' most accomplished of their American-born offspring. Their daughter, Margaret (Ally Maki), is a hotshot, with a job on a startup, taking charge of her kid Nikky's school bake sale, and married to a nice African American husband, Jeff Atlas (Echo Kellum). But she has stress dreams, something like the trailer of The Shining. She keeps working a Rubik Cube and reciting a mantra, "I can choose how I feel, and I feel peace," to calm down.

Jeff tells Margaret she has to go to deal with the Dad problem. Against her will she goes and against his will she gathers her banker older brother Roy (Peter S. Kim), who's overweight from stress eating due to his broken marriage, and they hop a plane and go north to Milpitas, where their old rooms await them, except Margaret's is occupied by Dad. Their mother (Page Leong), with her blunt, comical English, is kooky, racist, and dramatically stingy, and forever misunderstanding and pushing to get the kids married. She loves Nikky but forgets and calls him a mongrel. She's not much help here. Roy's a bit of a mess: he's having to face being served with divorce papers - another thing that's funny, but not exactly.

Younger brother Larry (Hayden Szeto), who's 33, is already there. He's a case of arrested development, still living at with Mom and Dad and seeming more a boyish hobbyist than an adult. There are some good scenes of him and Aaron (Ari Stidham), the large, bulbous, bearded manager of a hobby store, bargaining for the sale of some of his choice action figures. His character is very specific. Cash poor, he likes that Dad gives him money unquestioningly now, and, living at home, he likes having Dad be quiet and out of their hair.

On the way to the house in the rental car Roy and Margaret talk and we see several flashback glimpses of Dad's truly horrific meanness and sometimes violence.

A lot of interesting stuff happens that show off the family's interactions, which can be hot tempered, but have an underlying love behind them. After a visit from a nice young Indian psychiatrist they know (Karan Soni) who confirms the depression diagnosis and prescribes Zoloft, Margaret eventually persuades Dad to take the pills and start seeing a therapist who (improbably?) makes house calls.

And then, Dad is an asshole again, as bad as ever. But that has taken quite a while, and by that time Roy's and Larry's fortunes have improved immeasurably, Larry has a place of his own with Sarah (Megan Gailey) and a job at Aaron's store, and Margaret is doing as well as ever. They have learned things about Dad's life in Taiwan and things given up in America that make them understand his sacrifices for him.

The point has been made: Asian immigrant parents can be clueless and cruel, but they care, and the families are tight, for life. Depression is a disease people have trouble dealing with, but it can be cured. And director Tom Huang has done a remarkable job of talking about his own experience in a way that's humorous, but also truthful (including references to the pandemic, by the way). Audiences like that. It's what blurbs call a "bittersweet comedy," but it feels more unique than that label. This reviewer didn't want it to end.

The multi-ethnic cast members aren't exactly mated with each of the characters they play but are all the more fascinating as a picture of the complexity of Asian American life - maybe, except that only English is poken here other than a few words between mom and Shiao Li.

Dealing with Dad, 106 mins., debuted at Cleveland Apr. 3, 2022, showing at other festivals including Alabama, Oxford MI, Phoenix, Tucson, San Francisco's CAAMfest and LA Asian Pacific. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, July 15-31m 2022, It showed July 15.

C.J. WANG: RECLAIM 一家之主 (TAIWAN, 2022)

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BAO QIJING AND YU JIAAN IN RECLAIM

Portrait of a retiring woman lacks shape

CJ Wang's feature debut revolves around a woman who's life revolves around others. She is Mrs. Yeh or Ye Lanxin (Bao Qijing), who once wanted to see the world and be an artist, and now is a soon-to-retire children's art teacher whose husband (Kou Shixung) and children order her around like a servant and she humbly obeys. Her placid nature keeps this situation from feeling as ugly as it is. Much of the film gets lost in financial speculations whose outcome isn't altogether clear, and so the film doesn't quite go anywhere. It has made its point, which is to show a glimpse of the complicated life of a middle class Taiwanese woman, but the result is not an altogether successful film, at least for non-Taiwanese viewers.

This is a film rich in details but also lost in them. It seems to want to be a gentle chronicle of domestic life à la Ozu (but with an ironic twist?) but that doesn't come off, and there are dangling threads, in particular one about a young man who shows Mrs Yeh properties for sale and offers her off-the-cuff investment opportunities who may or may not have swindled her. The property-viewing scenes are repetitious.

There are interesting scenes with Mrs. Yeh's elderly mother (Yu Jiaan) who is elegant but has Alzheimer's. (Isn't she a bit too well turned out for one so out of control mentally?) She gets into trouble at the nursing home and so Mrs. Yeh wants to bring her home. To this end and also because of the value Taiwanese attach to property investment, she starts searching for a larger house to buy. (Her husband takes little interest in this. Isn't that odd??) Her relations with her mother lead up to a dream sequence which is supposed to lead to a sense of fulfillment and understanding, but this passage is overlong and doesn't come off. And all the property-viewing scenes: where are they going, exactly?

It feels, from a western point of view at least, as though Wang is a bit, sometimes a lot, too forgiving, or at best just ambivalent. The husband whom a festival blurb calls "mansplaining" is worse than that. He's really just an a-hole, inexcusably exploitative and condescending. He is a blunt illustration of Taiwanese society's lingering, deeply inbred misogyny, which allows women still today to be assumed to be responsible for all the trivial duties around the house, and as mothers likewise obliged even toward adult children. Mrs. Yeh makes a few gestures of independence, equivalent to saying "Do it yourself," but the screenplay doesn't make clear if these are changes or anomalies. One mild gesture of change comes when Mrs. Yeh doesn't answer a phone call from their son, who, after they have spent so much on his education for so many years, now suddenly tells them that instead of taking a local teaching job, he is going to go to the country with his wife and take up farming. This is news so devastating that she doesn't dare tell her husband.

The key element is the relationship with the mother, because the point is that Mrs. Yeh used to be a daughter herself, who had hopes and dreams long now lost in duty; the mother now is set free in her meandering world of dementia. And what will become of Mrs Yeh? But it's difficult to deal with a character with dementia because she is cut off and opaque.

Reclaim provides a great deal of detail of everyday life from the point of view of a sixty-something woman, including those all-important scenes in Chinese films of food preparation and eating. But the detail pours out unheeded; the screenplay needed refinement. The film and especially the latter part with its confused dream sequence need paring down and reshaping, with tweaks in the house-hunting segments as well. CJ Wang is nonetheless a promising young director with a gift for the mundane who may provide more shapely depictions of domestic life in future.

Reclaim 家之主 ("Lord of the House") , 123 mins., debuted in Taiwan June 11, 2021. A review by Daniel Ku in Vogue(which can be viewed in English translation) can be found here reveals that Bao Qijing won numerous acting awards. International Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Friday Jul 29, 6:00pm
Asia Society

JANCHIVDORJ SENGEDORJ: THE SALES GIRL Худалдагч охин (MONGOLIA 2021)

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BAYARTSETSEQ BAYANGEREL AND DULGUUN BAYASQALAN IN THE SALES GIRL

TRAILER [without subtitles]

Odd job

From the look of The Sales Girl the director Janchivdorj Sengedorj has much wit, even if slipping on a banana peel is an obvious visual joke to open with. The camera plants itself square in front of a path and watches till somebody falls on the banana peel, and it's a student called Namuuna, who breaks her leg. She seeks out the protagonist, Saruul (Bayartsetseg Bayangerel), to fill in her afternoon job. Saruul is shy and withdrawn, sure to be discreet, needed because the job is in a sex shop.

Bayangerel, who plays this role, goes through a transformation from drab girl to sleek, confident beauty very convincingly and very fetchingly. She is a glory of this tale. But so also is the owner of the sex shop, the owner's house, the market place where Saruul's parents work, the differently ornamented felt slippers they make to sell there, and the sounds we hear all around us. Sengedorj's way with sound is a special delight. We prick up our ears to hear the great variety of ambient sounds and the way they meld into the score - because the music is at all times diegetic, part of the local environment, performed by a small band, singer Dulguun Bayasgalan and the popular indie group Magnolian.

Saruul is often hearing the band, and us with her, through the big headphones she likes to wear. Once on a bus as she sings along a young man sitting in the back is singing along too: he happens to be the leader of the band. At the end before the credits and through them the whole band appears, drums, three guitars, and a violin, playing on the wide promenade Saruul walks along, strutting her stuff now.

Every day Saruuj, a student of nuclear engineering to please her parents who wants to be an artist, has to take the day's cash from the sex shop to the store owner, Katya (Enkhtuul Oidovjamts). Oidovjamts is the other glory of the movie and almost seems to dominate it, were Saruuj's (i.e. Bayangerel's) transformation not so vivid and so attractive to watch. Katya has had many lives and many husbands and is a little bit famous. She is sophisticated, so is her apartment, and she speaks Russian. But now she lives alone with the alcohol she tipples, the cigarettes she smokes, and a cat called The Boy. Saruuj starts spending more and more time with her. She is learning a great deal, and having fun. Katya also obviously needs her; she's lonely. Sometimes Katya's pronouncements on life are a bit tiresome or irrelevant. But the point is, she is teaching Saruuj to pay attention, to care.

There is also a young man, terribly bored and wanting to become an actor, who has a huge dog. He and Saruuj sit in front of her apartment building talking of nothing much. But like the pistol in the play, he will be used later on.

Not everything makes sense or fits and there may even be some continuity trip-ups, but Sengedorj gives pleasure because he's confident and has panache. Scenes follow one another unexpectedly but inevitably and while sometimes things heat up, he knows when to take a break.

The sex shop has its moments too of course, and it's a lovely one, red walls, glowing light, dildoes and inflated dolls attractively arranged as if there were a place to have sex, not just shop for it. The shop is part of Katya's mystery: why? She doesn't seem to need the money. But she believes in sex shops, and also in horoscopes and fortunes and good and bad luck. Around her hovers a hint of spirituality and magic realism. To Katya Saruug brings openness and laughter.

Somehow as a result of spending time with Katya, Saruug's fuzzy, drab looking face starts to be smooth and glow and her hairdo gets better. And then she sleeps with a boy and that leads to a talk with her parents. It's not about the boy. It's about her major. She begins wearing skirts, sometimes red, and painting in an art class; physics has been dropped: her life begins.

The Sales Girl is the kind of festival experience that makes one wish small movies from obscure countries could find a wider audience. A delightful, richly accomplished film.

The Sales Girl Худалдагч охин, 123 mins., debuted at Osaka. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere. This film won the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film at the festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Thursday, July 28
6:30 PM at the Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with Janchivdorj Sengedorj

CHOI DONG-HOON: THE THIEVES 도둑들 (2012)

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This flashy 2012 caper flick, Korea's biggest homemade hit, is still a great watch

This high-speed, jokey Korean caper film from 2012 is the country's biggest box office ever. Hollywood Reporter's original review threads its way through most of the complicated plot, though leaving details vague for the climactic action, the Ocean's Eleven-style collective Chinese+Korean gang effort to steal a diamond worth twenty or thirty million from the vault of a casino. There are other appreciative reviews, like Steve Macfarlane's for Slant and Jonathan Kiefer's for The Village Voice. Extra detail and a woman's point of view can be found in Maggie Lee's contemporary review for Variety.

What sands out is the collective action, notably a babe who cooperates with her crude, down-to earth "mom" in the opening credits sequence to rob rare collectible valuables from a rich guy the young lady has been wooing for five months and is apparently thinking of marrying. While mom is questioning the guy about his collection, she is using chewing gum to block the alarm while her "daughter" rips off her Chanel outfit around a corner down to a black leotard and uses wires and electronic pulleys to skip down a building with loot. It's the effect of several things going on at once that makes it fun to watch.

Later, when Korean and Macau gang members meet up the Macau ones bad-mouth the Koreans in Cantonese, but one of them knows Cantonese and insults them back. It's all a tad crude but it's all in jest. Listen for the click and ring of the Zippos - lighting cigarettes is always dramatic, and there are also lighters that don't click and ring, and matches that strike, dramatic also. Wire is another theme - very important. As well as an exciting and fun movie, it's also sensuous. There is a lot of kissing; there are romances, attractions, flirtations, couples. When it comes to the caper of course conflicts arise, and a mysterious person joins the effort that nobody knows about. There isn't just safe cracking: there are two rival schools, and multiple safes, and they don't know which one contains the treasure. When it's found, it's the mysterious man who who runs off with it, the film's most durable bad guy (Kim Yoon-seok).

That of course is only the beginning. Who will steal it again? Who will sell it? Who'll get caught, and who'll escape? When the cops attack full-on a virtual war breaks out. There's hand-to-hand fighting, of course; this movie richly draws on Hong Kong action traditions. One of the film's distinctive aspects is its tremendous use of jumping and leaping and diving between buildings, parcour-style, some of the most dynamic of it performed by women.

The Thieves may seem overcomplicated. But these are arguably necessary embroideries to amuse those already familiar with the pattern of the casino caper film represented by the links of Bob le Flambeur, Casino Royale, and Ocean's Eleven, and the complicated heist film, whose archetype may be Jules Dassin's classic Rififi. But with the multiple stars, the clarity of the editing the sensuality and humor, the important roles played by women, and the dazzling action, this is a pan-Asian crime film that establishes its own special place in that historic company.

The Thieves 도둑들, 135 mins., first opened in Korea Jul. 25, 2012, and showed at Toronto, Busan, Sitges, and many other international festivals and received numerous nominations and awards. It still shows at specialized festivals today and was screened for this review at one, the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival (which also included a presentation of Wong Kar-wai's 1997 classic Happy Days 春光乍洩). Metacritic rating: 75%. It was shown at the AMC Empire in Manhattan when released and the New York Times, though their review was brief, made it a "NYT Critic's Pick."

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday Jul 31, 1:00pm
Asia Society
Director Choi Dong-hoon will attend the screening.