BUSHIDO (Kazuya Shiraishi 2023)
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TSUYOSHI KUSANAGI IN BUSHIDO
KAZUYA SHIRAISHI: BUSHIDO (2023)
A shamed samurai regains his honor
We've previously reviewed two other Kazuya Shiraishi films: a Silence of the Lambs- style serial killer tale, Lesson in Murder (NYAFF 2022) and before that a yakuza movie, The Blood of Wolves (NYAFF 2018). This is Shiraishi's first foray into a full-on jidaigeki period samurai drama, and, let Mark Schilling of The Japan Times say it, this is a "lovingly conceived and meticulously executed throwback that revitalizes the genre."
Perhaps not for everyone, because if your memories of the ancient board game of Go, central here, are like mine, you may find its function a little alienating. Or just incomprehensible. I was not good at chess, and when friends in college who were, took up Go, that was even more mystifying. Instead of kings, queens, knights, pawns, rooks, etc., there are just black and white stones, one places on a board covered with a fine network of lines. I could never understand how white stones could be used to trap or "kill" black ones and vice versa. Experts see all the complexities at a glance, which is what happens here.
Except men wear samurai swords here, and losers of a game may get their head chopped off. At a climactic moment (spoiler alert) a magnanimous protagonist chooses to forgive the two men who have lost a wager and, instead of chopping off both their heads, he brings down his sword and chops the Go board in half, a dramatic effect, if a gesture not good for the sword and terrible for the thick, handsome board. In fact the Japanese title "Gobangiri" actually means "Go board cutting, so if this is silly, it's nonetheless important.
This film is about honor, shame, contest, and forgiveness. Go boredom and occasional excesses aside, its image of the period is intense, restrained, and beautiful. Nothing here is not aesthetically pleasing and photogenic; it almost makes one wish Japan had never moved into the modern world, things looked so great back then. The protagonist is a shamed, impoverished samurai, Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), who lives in a tenement with his daughter Kinu (Kaya Kiyohara), who is threatened with resorting to prostitution if 50 ryo gold pieces that disappeared while the hero was playing Go with the aging, amiable businessman Genbei Yorozuya (Jun Kunimura) aren't found again in time. It's a complicated plot, that doesn't matter very much. What counts is the stately pace and the suspense. And there is a very scrappy sword battle toward the end.
"Sir" Yanagida is reduced to working as an appraiser, and is also expert at Go. He's a man who knows how to distinguish genuine objects from sham ones. He doesn't seem to be quite so good at protecting the honor of his daughter. He is not an altogether appealing protagonist and appears a bit of a snob, as well as eaten up by (justifiable) resentment. Watch this, patiently, for the period settings and costumes and the splendid low-light sequences toward the end reminding one, Schilling reminds us, of Kubrick's tour-de-force candlelit images in Barry Lyndon.
After Yanagida has resolved the matter of the lost 50 ryu, he disappears in search of the wrongdoers who ruined his reputation years ago by accusing him of the theft of a manuscript that he did not steal, causing his dishonor and his wife to drown herself in Lake Biwa (we see her gracefully walk out into the lake; typically for this film, Shirashi makes this seem a beautiful way to go). Yanagida finds his sworn enemy (Takumi Saitoh), a fellow clan samurai who made the false accusation, and, as Schilling says, "the swords come out."
Once again Shiraishi has delivered a handsome exercise in genre, the handsomest yet. That this could have been tightened up, by eliminating some of the Go footage and simplifying the plot, is obvious, but it's a splendid looking film.
Bushido 碁盤斬り ("Gobangiri,""Go Board Cutting") , 129 mins., debuted May 1, 2024 at the Far East Festival in Udine, Italy. Screened as part of the 23rd New York Asian Film Festival (Jul 12-28, 2024), showing Tuesday Jul 23, 8:15pm (Beatrice Theatre, SVA Theatre)
Intro and Q&A with director Kazuya Shiraishi
CAREFREE DAYS (Liang Ming 2023)
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LIANG MING: CAREFREE DAYS (2023)
The excitement of burgeoning doom
Many of the admiring things Jessica Kiang says in her Variety review of actor Liang Ming's 2019 directorial debut Wisdom Tooth (not seen by me) could be applied almost equally well to this sophomore feature, this one based on a novel (or novella?) of Ban Yu. (Notice of the debut by Wendy Ide in Screen Daily though briefer is similarly admiring.) Liang Ming's work has the same chaotic energy and packed foregrounds (and backgrounds) you get in Jia Zhang-ke's early movies. This one is almost overwhelming in its richness and complexity and overlapping of one event on another. It is just in its overall trajectory's arc toward numb tragedy that it disappoints, seeming to reflect a better grasp of the parts than of the whole. Can a protagonist's arc be called "tragic" when she can also be considered doomed from the start? Or does this matter?
The focus is Xu Lingling (Lyu Xingchen, also in Wisdom Tooth), who lives in Shenyang, a northeastern Chinese city, usually the setting of Ban Yu's writing, that the film blurbs describe as "decaying" ; this may be mistaken: it just looks busy, crowded and chaotic. Some of the people in the foreground here seem to be going to hell, but doing so with energy and aplomb. Xu is diagnosed with kidney failure. We don't know why, but she will die of uremia without frequent dialysis, and she needs a kidney transplant. Her mother pledges to support, but before you know it, she has gotten suddenly sick and died. Xu's estranged father appears now and offers to help, but he is a serial seducer wrapped up in himself, though he does perform some acts of generosity.
Eager for companionship and love and unable to be alone, Xu finds her close friend Tan Na (Li Xueqin) and old classmate Zhao Dongyang (Zhao Bingrui), who help her. With the three of them, Carefree Days becomes a road trip, even as we know that Xu can't go far or for long without dialysis, and during the second half of the trip the symptoms of uremia are there: nausea, lack of appetite, fatigue. She barely makes it back home - or does she? Much of this film is full of the sickly excitement of burgeoning doom, where joy and frivolity always have an edge.
Some of the details of this movie are implausible, or perhaps it's just that though its two-hours-plus length seems overlong, it's not long enough to cram in all the events of an overstuffed novel (or even novella). Xu at one point takes on a job that she can't possibly do. Later she enters a studio and darts back out again: on a platform she has seen her father posing nude for artists.
The analogy with films like Jia's 1998 Platform and 2002 Unknown Pleasures (the ironic title analogous to Carefree Days) is a very imperfect one because Jia is presenting panoramas linked to a time. Even the two young losers of Unknown Pleasures are seen in a national and historical perspective. Carefree Days, on the other hand, is full of intense, intimate moments and big closeups. Only at the end it may draw back a bit from Xu as if to see her finally as an object, helpless and alone. Recently Mike D'Angelo commented on Stephen Frears' The Hit that he likes "almost every individual moment" yet finds that "it fails to coalesce in a satisfying way," and this comes close to my feeling aboutCarefree Days. I feel that Liang Ming has exciting skills as a filmmaker. The ability to create burgeoning life and make people and their every moment seem so natural and real is unusual and to be cherished. But here after a while, as the trip wears on, there start to be a few too many "individual moments" to care in the same way about them as one did early on. And so the skills wind up seeming to be used rather heedlessly. Nonetheless, this is a filmmaker to watch. Carefree Days deserves to be seen and reviewed by Jessica and Wendy, and all the rest. So far it seems to have slipped through the cracks.
Carefree Days 逍遥游 (Xiao yao you, "Carefree Journey"), 122 min., debuted Sept. 22, 2023 at San Sebastián. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Thursday Jul 18, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Sunday Jul 21, 1:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
THE ESCAPING MAN (Wang Yichun 2023)
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WANG YICHUN: THE ESCAPING MAN (2023)
About a boy
Wang Yichun made an outstanding debut with her uncompromisingly dark 2015 small-town procedural, What's in the Darkness, which interwove a grim murder mystery with a girls's coming of age story. This time also she weaves a playful, surreal mix of love and crime, featuring the story of a prisoner, Sheng Li (Jiang Wu, NYAFF 2018 Star Asia Award recipient),now released after serving 20 years on trumped-up rape charges, who quickly gets lured into helping his former girlfriend, his putative victim, to kidnap the little boy whom she's been hired to nanny. She wants to get back at the parentsfortheir condescending way they have been treating her. Sheng Li has sought out his accuser and become her collaborator. This leads to a bizarre mixture of the benevolent and the cruel.
This is a story about personalities and social status, abilities and injustice, and also about excessive bourgeois privilege in modern China. As in her first film, Wang is simultaneously focused on several different subjects, another one being the contradictory ways that adults interact with children and how children behave in the world. Maggie Lee described the earlier film as "Like 'Twin Peaks' with Confucian characteristics." This film's festival blurb calls it a "juxtaposition of cynicism and hopeless romanticism." What emerges is that Wang's cinema is a place to go for unexpected combinations. This will be the friendliest kidnapping you'll ever see. It rings new changes on the Stockholm Syndrome, and is unusually forgiving toward some criminal activities and hard on the new bourgeoisie. The level of whimsy becomes extreme, but Wang enters into her own unique world of fantasy.
The Escaping Man 绑架毛乎乎 ("Kidnapping ...."), 101 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF. For What's in the Darkness the 47-year-old director, who studied French before becoming a filmmaker, won the best director award at the 9th FIRST International festival in Xining, China and it was included in the Berlinale Generation section in 2016. This is The Escaping Man's international debut.
SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 26, 9:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Wang Yichun and producer Zhao Wendi
GOLD BOY (Shusuke Kaneko 2023)
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MASAKI OKADA AND JINSEI HAMURA IN GOLD BOY
SHUSUKE KANEKO: GOLD BOY (2023)
The bad kids
There is certainly a special queasy pleasure in immersing oneself imaginatively in unmitigated evil, people who just kill everyone they don't like (like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley). It's even queasier when the wrongdoers are a trio of young teenagers. These kids are 13, for heaven's sake. (The actors are around that too; Kaneko deserves credit for how at ease they seem.) There's also an adult, Higashi (Masaki Okada) who they catch killing his in-laws by pushing them off a cliff and making it look like an accident. They happen to have been shooting a film by accident when they meant to do a snapshot and caught the double cliff murder in the background. They immediately approach Higashi with extortion in mind. He's not such an easy mark. Eventually Higashi and the kids join up, briefly. Several adults get poisoned - a favorite - using (spoiler alert) Okinawa holiday food treats. Be careful if someone offers you a drink, also.
Masaki Okada is a tall actor with a pallid beauty of visage that is given a sickly look here, and he is effective, but the memorable actor is Jinsei Hamura as the psychopathic Asahi Amuro, a boy who is so smart he won a math prize the year before, but he uses his intelligence and composure entirely to do harm now. Higashi is married to rich, spoiled Shizuka (Rena Matsui), whose aging parents own a huge company. It is they whom he pushes off the cliff. He immediately goes into a big grief act for onlookers and the cops, which succeeds. This may be a bit implausible as is much that follows, but it's all too absorbing for that to matter.
We enter a (for most of us) wholly unfamiliar world of violent teern crime, when while his doting mother (Haru Kuroki) is at work, 13-year-old Asahi (Hamura) is gets a visit from by his best bud Hiroshi (Youji Maede), accompanied by Hiroshi’s half-sister Natsuki (Anna Hoshino), who announces she has stabbed her abusive step-father. (As is the custom here a quick flashback spells this out/.) Netsuki thinks he is dead. Asahi shows where he's coming from when he calmly assures Netsuki and Hiroshi the cops can’t arrest her since she’s 14. Hiroshi threatens some uniformed schoolboys next just to get money for them to order some fast food. This is the world we are in.
This takes place on the island of Okinawa, which imposes its own rules starting with poverty, because it is considerably less well off than the Japanese mainland. But this lurid material, a condensation of a serial, comes from the Chinese iQiyi platform, pared down by writer Takehito Minato. It's an embarrassment of riches, if you like, of so much meanness and evil in a short time that it's nauseating. Only in this piece, if someone feels nauseated, they've probably been poisoned and are about to die.
Once again a film has been allowed to run a bit too long. But the extra time allows for a lot of final twists and turns, and after all, the original had 14 episodes.
In a review in The Japan Times, Mark Schilling describes Gold Boy as a "kids-versus-adult story" but points out that this time, our normal inclination to root for the kids is powerfully undermined - by the morally repellang nature of the kids. Schilling describes the film as "a gripping study of evil," and there's nothing to challenge in that - though it would be more gripping if it were less breathlessly plot-intensive and more plausible.
Gold Boyゴールド・ボーイ ("Golden Boy"), 128 min., Japanese theatrical release Mar. 8, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 19, 3:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday Jul 20, 4:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
FOR ALICE (Chow Kam Wing 2023)
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CHOW KAM WING: FOR ALICE (2024)
Some old tunes played again
Some old themes here. No harm in that, and this aging actor and fresh young one go for a ride in atmospheric Hong Kong settings. The themes: recently released jailbird lured into one last job. . . neglectful father spending a few idyllic, secret days with unfamiliar offspring. . . loved one revealed to have a serious illness. A Hong Kong touches: loudmouth, mother whose boyfriend has a history of abuse. . . heavy rain. . . jumbled housing. . . cramped flophouse room. . . many cigarettes. . . noodle shops.
Festival literature tells us For Alice "unfolds" in "the faded opulence of Tsim Sha Tsui's Mirador Mansion." Also that we are to see the main action as "an unlikely bond" between "grizzled veteran Tai Bo" (the jailbird) and "rising star Kuku So" and that we are to see him as "a mysterious rescuer." How mysterious he is and how much of a rescuer he becomes isn't so clear, but thanks to the skill and charisma of the two actors, a believable relationship indeed develops through the short hour and twenty minutes of this slow, moody little film.
Whether For Alice lives up to the festival hype - wielding "colorful yet noirish atmospherics with a maestro's command," making "the dank stairwells and flickering fluorescents" conjur up "palpable peril" and lead to a "cathartic finale" others will have to judge. The ghost of Wong Kar-wai haunts any arthouse Hong Kong film for me: impossible to forget how his visuals sang, how the tawdry became instantly sexy abd mysterious. The writing isn't skillful enough to create real mystery here. The "mystery" comes dangerously close to the obvious, a massaging of clichés. But if this is a kind of neo-noir, we always welcome those. Nice try. But hey, don't try bookending a film with a kid playing Beethoven's "Für Elise" anymore, okay?
This seems old hat, but actually Chow Kam Wing has had most of his film career in advertising, and this is his directorial debut. Thee writer Lam Tsz Ki seems to have had most of their experience as an actor.
For Alice給愛麗絲 ("For Alice"), 82 mins., debuted in New York Jul. 13, 2024, and was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday Jul 13, 3:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Chow Kam Wing, screenwriter Lam Tsz Ki, and cast members Tai Bo and Kuku So
LOVE LIES (Ho Miu-ki 2023)
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CHEUNG TIN-FU,SANDRA NG IN LOVE LIES
HO MIU-KI: LOVE LIES (2023)
The long tease of an online romance becomes a charmingly inverted rom-com
Love Lies is a touching and teasingly suspenseful Hong Kong feature debut starring an energetic and brilliant Sandra Ng (Zero to Hero, NYAFF 2021) as Veronica Yu, a wealthy, widowed gynecologist whose (seemingly) deepening relationship on a dating app is actually, unbeknownst to her, with a charming but rather native online deceiver, who begins having second thoughts abut the well-orchestrated running scam he's become the center of. Is there some affection wafting about amid the deceptions?
The film's costar is K-Pop star Cheung Tin-fu young, as the fledgling con artist, whose nom-de-scam is simply "Boy." "Boy" has just joined a whole office full of pro scammers as a trainee. (These thihgs, sadly, do exist.) Veronica is his first connection, and he is being constantly coached on what to say to her, supervised by the Man in White and given practical minute-by-minute tips by an out-there femme fatale love scam expert buoyantly played by Stephy Tang.
But Love Lies is above all a two-hander, shifting back and forth mainly between the mutually uncomprehending two points of view of young "Boy" and "Veronica." Both are, from the start, deceivers. She pretends to be merely a young nurse, though her wealth is soon revealed. He pretends to be a middle-aged French engineer, a faux persona carefully calculated by the scam team as most likely to appeal to this Chinese lady of a certain age.
Various things make this movie work well. The eternal appeal of love stories, because this is one of those, though a strange one; the excitement of deceptions; the suspense waiting to see whether the secrets will come out; and ultimately whether this odd "couple" will finally meet. There's also the fascination of the way, while the middle-aged doctor becomes more and more enamored of her French engineer fantasy, as "Boy, thae "K- Pop star (who no doubt has plenty of experience with public images) goes through a metamorphosis from gangly young rube to smooth, well-dressed, fashionably-bespectacled young operator; and from eager trickster to someone with mixed and gentler feelings.
The lady is lonely, a widow, and middle aged, and sometimes this shows. But Sandra Ng sparkles and is stylish. Veronica wears her hair short, blonde-dyed and up to date and her bright, nifty outfits show her to be every inch the accomplished professional woman. In fact she is an ob-gyn doctor who is frequently delivering babies, though we don't see that. But though she is a smart woman, "Boy" and his handlers are skillful in both teasing out her affection and tricking her - as is their basic aim all along - into sending large amounts of money to her "French engineer." Veronica remains adamant that she knows she may be throwing away money, and doesn't care. Part of the con victim wants to be deceived. The giddy pleasure of living with an illusion that a con brings can, for a while anyway, be worth the financial cost: Veronica thinks so.
"Boy" isn't hardened like his handlers, and perhaps he has developed some of the same affection for his victim that she has for his false persona; thus he arranges to give back one of the large sums of money to her. And their online datng game is dangerous, because as they get more intimate, leading to the possibility of talking on the phone, for instance (texting is chosen as more romantic), there is more danger of giving away the game, and ending it.
Ultimately, you may, like me, start to fall in love with the fantasy and begin to wish that the Chinese youth and the middle-aged Chinese doctor - who are communicating in English because they're supposed not to sperak the same language - could actually meet up in person and still, by some miracle, somehow become a couple.
But the screenwriters are too clever for that, and have something more complicated in store. First of all they gradually "open up" the hitherto closet drama by keeping the relationship alive and changing while the doctor and the imaginary "French engineer" are (seemingly, anyway) getting closer. The ultimate tease is a plan to meet in Japan, in the town of Sapporo at a resort hotel. But there is much more teasing than that...
At nearly two hours Love Lies may seem a little long (and note: the English subtitles are faulty), but there is brilliance in this romantic comedy and it leaves us with many happy memories.
This is, as mentioned, director Ho Miu-ki's directorial debut. She started working as a film screenwriter in 2008, and has collaborated on screenplays for films including the 2010 La Comédie humaine, the 2014 Naked Ambition 2, and 2022's The Mermaid . She was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 36th Hong Kong Film Awards for the latter, which had a successful international release.
Love Lies 我談的那場戀愛 ("The Love I Had"), 116 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-20).
SCHEDULE:
Monday July 15, 8:45pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Intro and Q&A with director Ho Miu-ki
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"BOY" AT THE SCAMMER FACTORY
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CHEUNG TIN-FU,SANDRA NG IN LOVE LIES
BE WITH ME (Hwarng Wern-ying 2023)
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HWARNG WERN-YING: BE WITH ME (2023)
Who are we being with?
This film which is indebted to the filmmaker's mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien depicts a woman, working in the movies as a production designer, who returns to her hometown of Chiaiyi to see to her ailing father and in doing so awakens memories of family and grandfather and Taiwan's troubled history and a desire to return. In unfolding her tale the director Hwarng Wern-ying (also known as Huang Wen-Ying) melds flashbacks with scenes from a film-within-the-film, juxtaposing black-and-white footage of Taiwan's long period of Japanese domination.
The father of Faye ("Ma-ya" in the film, Ariel Lin) is stubborn, announcing he won't go back to the hospital for further treatment and insisting on being released home earlier than the doctor wants. Ma-ya is too. She is boarded here by a man, a Mr. Yu (Ethan Juan), who's apparently big in real estate; he drives a spectacular car, a McLaren with flying doors. Flashbacks to 2015 when they first met in Shanghai, apparently, when she spars with him and subtly mocks his pretension to being a man of great taste with a big collection of antiques. Black and white flashbacks to granddad's childhood when the Japanese are taking over Taiwan in 1941, forcing replacement of local gods by Japanese ones. (All this in the first twenty minutes.) Taoism is important in the film, seen as part of the protagonist's search for meaning in life in this grand, if somewhat artificial and predetermined film that tries a little harder than it needs to to impress.
Also in 2015 Faye/Maya meets another man, a Mr. Fu Chunshan (Vic Chou). She wants to hire him as an architect for a film, though he's said to be expensive. She likes him much more than Mr. Yu, he seems to be much more sympathetic, more of the place, into raising and roasting tea. The black and white flashbacks show granddad's house and the inn he runs destroyed in an earthquake, which was rebuilt and then bombed by the Americans, a similar theme to the film Ma-ya is working on now, it turns out. Supervising the production of her current film allows her, in a way, to revisit and reconstruct her family's past. There are also flashbacks, in somewhat heightened color, to Taiwan in the 1980's when men partied in supper clubs with children, including young Maya, but not their wives.
In an article about this film, Charlie Smith on Pancouver (Feb. 2024 ) points out the Taiwanese history presented here is "selective": no mention of the martial law declared by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, which was to last for nearly forty years, and an implication that when the New Taiwan Dollar was introduced that year everything was "hunky-dory," but it was not. Smith feels this can be forgiven because of the interesting structure of the film and performance of the lead. But it's not so easy to overlook big oversights about the history of Taiwan in a film that takes such a grand overview.
The historical parts of the film start to feel a bit like window dressing. A simpler structure might have been a better way to get at the nature of the protagonist who is, already, carefully considered. But in that alternate film the flashbacks and history would have to go, and the concern with Taoism postponed to another movie. However, this is, after all, an autobiographical film about being true to your origins that's also about filmmaking and about debating how a film should be.
Be With Me 車頂上的玄天上帝 ("The God of Heaven on the Roof"), 130 mins., premiered Oct. 20, 2023 at Hawai'i International Film Festival, and was also shown at Taipei Golden Horse Nov. 9 and Taipei Film Festival Jun. 25, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (July 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 1:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
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ARIEL LIN, ETHAN JUAN IN BE WITH ME
SUFFOCATING LOVE (Liao Ming-yi 2023)
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NIKKI HSIEH, AUSTIN LIN IN SUFFOCATING LOVE
LIAO MING-YI: SUFFOCATING LOVE (2023)
A rom-com-style movie that drifts into the surreal
The director's NYAFF 2020 I WeirdDo presented Chen Po-Ching (Austin Lin) and Chen Ching (Nikki Hsieh), a cute couple in the making except they both suffer from OCD, which includes mysophobia, fear of contamination and dirt: it was a defense of oddity. Quirks abound here too, but this film seems to have been less well-received (to go by Letterboxd). Everyone is still cute. As Maggie Lee wrote in Variety apropos of I WeirDo, Lin "who sports a Spock haircut, exudes boyish charm in spades." He still does, and makes a great alter ego or muse.
He, the Austin Lin character, that is, sets up to live with a girlish young woman called Pai Chia-chi, who turns out to be a control freak whose "few principles" will limit his every movement, and he will have to let her read his phone every day and constantly report where he is. She is a vegetarian, expects him to be likewise, and provides odd-sized meals which he must consume all of. She is a total tyrant. He reports on this to his best bud, who provides an additional male point of reference.
Before long he runs into former girlfriend Ai-hsien, who is in a seven-year relationship that is running dry: they're supposed to be getting married. He and Ai-hsien start meeting on the sly, and she gives him an extra phone so they can communicate with out Pai knowing. But then he decides to leave that phone on the table so Pai can see it.
Then, whether it's a dream or a reality, he starts seeing a third woman, whom he knows as Kurosawa. They get close, but he begins spying on her, and also sneaks into her apartment when she's not there. She starts providing him with food and drink, but that begins to seem nefarious, and after she gets pregnant - well, let's not go there. It's at this point that things become quite surreal. There is a dream-devil, a good looking but bald young man dressed in red, with red-painted fingernails and a large silver revolver.
He sees Pai again and she has become repentant, realizing that she was being cruel. She also is ill, as well as sad. And now she starts serving him meals with lots of meat in them.
A late scene shows the protagonist visiting an automobile showroom where Kurosawa has him look at a luxurious car. Isn't it expensive? he asks (the price is a million Taiwan dollars). But we will need a good car now that we are going to have a child, she says, and then leaves to go to the bathroom, suggesting he sit at the driver's seat. At this point she has become so suspect you may fear the seat will be poisoned. Then he looks out and sees Pai with another fellow. He smiles his charming smile; she smiles more wanly back.
One looks forward to further viewings and reviews of Suffocating Love to see what interpretations people come up with. I also await more complete cast information since the final credits are only in Chinese and IMDb doesn't have characters' names linked with actors'. Lin Dayuan and Chloe Xiang reportedly play the other women. It is clear that director LIao remains skillful at filming with an iPhone and likes melding rom-com with thriller and horror elements, also enjoying abrupt plot shifts.
SuffocatingLove 愛的噩夢 ("Loves Nightmare"), 102 mins., debuted at Taipei Jun. 26, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 27, 6:30pm (Silas Theatre, SVA Theatre)
Intro and Q&A with director Liao Ming-yi and cast members Austin Lin and Nikki Hsieh
LET'S GO KARAOKE! (Nobuhiro Yamashita 2023)
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JUN SAITO, GO AYANO IN LET'S GO KARAOKE!
NOBUHIRO YAMASHITA: LET'S GO KARAOKE! (2023)
Choir kid mentors Yakuza mensch
This is a coming of age charmer matching unlikely types: a meek, bespectacled boy soprano from a choir and a Yakuza boss who comes to him for voice coaching. (It's complicated.) Sparks fly and then they bond. The kid, as the boss puts it, "goes ballistic" when he's angry. His speeches when aroused are illustrations of the fire that can hide behind a seemingly quiet Japanese exterior.
The boy is Satomi Oka (Jun Saito), and he's the star boy soprano of his mixed choir, but as the story begins he's worried about the final competition. The secret is that his voice is changing and he may not manage the solo any more. That is pushed aside when he is suddenly approached by a sleek, suited man, Kyoji Narita ("Crazy Kid," Go Ayano), who grabs him and says "Let's go Karaoke!" The leader stages Karaoke contests among the gang. Kyoji is afraid of losing, and the loser gets an ugly, mocking tattoo crudely and painfully etched on him by the boss himself. He knows of Satomi's musical accomplishment and wants help. For all Satomi's musical experience, this unexpected new job will take him far afield. He never expected to have one-on-one sessions with a gangster.
What follows is quite hilarious and unexpected, revealing the human and vulnerable side of Japan's most menacing gangsters and the courageous and macho side of apparently meek types like the boy soprano. At one point Satomi is called on to assess the singing abilities of each member of the whole gang, and with his brutal and specific comments, he astonishes. Frequenting Kyoji and oddly bonding with him leads Satomi to Tokyo's colorful Minami Ginza district. The boy and the gangster start exchanging text messages, and however often Satomi tells Kyoji to go away and stay away, the communication continues and the bond keeps growing.
Kyoji's hidden paternal instincts obviously are aroused and so is Satomi's need to expand his horizons, and show he can not only use that changing voice to sing sweetly, but to yell authoritatively. Our own desire to root for the underdog is aroused along with our need to see the good in bad guys. Perhaps director Yamashita wants to avoid the obvious, but I would have liked the Yakuza to be played by an actor a little more conventionally tough looking than Go Ayano. But in the heat of the moment that can be overlooked and the film, though slight, goes down easy.
Let's Go Karaoke!, 108 mins., debuted Taipei Nov. 2023; released Jan. and Feb. Japan and Taipei. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Wednesday July 24, 6:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Nobuhiro Yamashita
THE MISSING (Carl Joseph E. Papa 2023)
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CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING
CARL JOSEPH E. PAPA: THE MISSING (2023)
Through delusion to healing
In this unusual animated film, which was the Philippines' Best International Feature Oscar entry for its year, an alien about to abduct a child speaks to him in Tagalog. Wny not? The influence of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin seems obvious here, though the abduction is the clearest part of it, and how the film feels about events is different.
Araki's film begins with a man's sexual abuse of two young boys, Brian and Neil. Fast forward to years later when they're young men who react dramatically differently to this traumatic event. Neil, now played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a gay hustler. Brian, played by Brady Corbet, blocks out the childhood abuse with the belief that he was abducted by aliens. So there is something of Brian in Eric (Carlo Aquino). Eric and the present-time part of the film is rotoscoped. In using this process Papa has said he was influenced by Richard Linklater's Waking Life.
Eric is closely in touch with his mom but lives alone in an apartment and works as an animator, and his colleague, the one we see, is Carlo (Gio Gahol). They seem attracted but communication may be impeded by lots of things, first of all that Eric is mute. Not only that, he has no mouth. The animation omits it, and later he loses an eye, and other parts. Eric's traumas as a child are gradually indicated by flashbacks in a more childlike and naive kind of animation. These short, staccato, more stylized passages are rather opaque at first. When the chatty Tagalog-speaking alien comes for Eric it's clear enough. In these childlike animations we see Eric, aged nine, when he was still able to speak (voiced by Jeremy F. Mendoza. And eventually we'll find out the secret that has been imposed on him and we guess why.
It seemed a good choice on Araki's part not to show us Brian's fantasy memories of alien abduction. But Papa has a wholly different approach to childhood sexual trauma. While in Mysterious Skin Neil, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, gets most of the attention, this is as if from the point of view of Brian, who in Araki's film seems beyond help but here finds healing. Maybe Araki would have shown the aliens if he'd been making an animated film. The beauty of Mysterious Skin in how grounded it is in the real. The beauty of The Missing is that it takes us emotionally through its protagonist's trauma and out into healing.
A folksy Filipino flavor comes with Rosalinda, Eric's caring mom, who turns out to be open to Eric's gayness and his nascent "thing" with Carlo. Rosalinda is played, rotoscoped, by Dolly De Leon, the actress playing the shipboard cleaning lady who takes over the second half of Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness.
The action of The Missing is slow to get started at first. Eric is tormented and blocked. He has a lot to deal with and what really troubles him isn't made clear, through the primitive flashback animation, until an hour into this ninety-minute film. Earlier, Rosalinda sends Eric (he goes with Carlo) to look for his uncle Rogelio (voiced by Joshua Cabiladas, who also does the Blurry Man and the Alien), who's been unresponsive, and they have to break into his apartment, and find him dead in his bed - and not recently, which is scary and disturbing. Now Rogelio’s daughter Precy (Christela Marquez) appears, and she has become as mute and mouthless as Eric.
In a car trip Carlo sensitively plays along with Eric's irrational fears of aliens, which seem very real and emotionally disturbing, and by sharing helps him work through them. Eric's battle with the burden of trauma embedded in aliens, helped by Carlo and a little by his mother Rosalinda, leads him to a dramatic ritual of healing and he gets back all he has lost, his eye, his ear, his penis, his hand, and finally his mouth. He can throw away the whiteboard he has been wearing around his neck to communicate with. Sitting symbolically near Rogelio's grave, Eric speaks to Carlo and Rosalinda, and the first thing he says is that he has something to tell them.
The film is another example of how animation can be used to delve into imagination and find shorthands to complex emotional truth. It seems laborious at times, but that emotional message is powerful enough to explain the Oscar submission. Papa uses his sources in a new way. The Missing is a touching, heartfelt film.
The Missing/Iti Mapukpukaw, 90 mins., debuted the Philippines (Cinemalaya) Aug. 5, 2023; also shown at Rotterdam, Palm Springs, Jeonju, Netherlands. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 4:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
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GIO GANOL, CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING
WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER (Kevin Mayuga 2023)
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JUAN KARLOS LABAJO IN WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER
KEVIN MAYUGA: WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER (2023)
Rampant covid self indulgence, self-questioning, and class disparities in a Manila condo highrise
Kevin Mayuga's playful examination of full-on covid self indulgence in a Manila condo high rise may owe something to the HBO anthology series "High Maintenance" of six years ago with its linking personality, a Brooklyn pot dealer known only as the Guy. That's what the protagonist (Juan Karlos Labajo) is called and does here, except he's more involved not only in drug purchases, which range freely over the psychedelic panorama, but in every scene, especially arranging a big rooftop party hosted by a quartet of privileged young misfits. But the working class maintenance staff are not much better, breaking the rules, getting high, giving a crowded little "surprise" birthday for one of their own, which they think is a necessity. Isn't he the senior member of the group?
Tanya (Nourijune Hooshmand) and Taylor (Chaye Mogg), originally call the Guy toget an order of weed edibles. But they keep talking.The rooftop party arrangement comes when he learns Taylor's father can arrange him to get the US visa he wants. When he geets it and he tells his mom in the US he plans on coming, things start to look different. The Guy keeps getting asked to take the drugs to prove they're legit, so the movie is full of trips. The biggest one is when Guy is being evicted from the condo and his mother's rejection causes him to question everything, and he takes a life-changing dose of psychedelics. It's a cinematic acid trip that compares with the best ones.
The Guy is a link, not really privileged or snooty like the party-givers, but white, and big, and not forced to work. This is unlike Rosemarie (Jorrybell Agoto), whom he connects with when she hounds him to get off the roof, and then bonds with by blackmailing her to get the upstairs keys for the party. She is little, harried, and works at three jobs. When the Guy says they'r alike, she can't accept it. "The thing you have that I don't," says Rosemarie, "is luck." And you just look at his big white face and his unruly curly hair and you see why she thinks this. This is a world of class, of snobbism, of obsequiousness. And i't a retro world, further frozen by the pandemic. The pandemic, however, is something everyone is working hard to ignore here. Meanwhile we know the Guy may be higher up on the social ladder than Rosemarie, for sure, but he's not anywhere. His main project is to get a visa and come to the US.
But this isn't unadulterated social commentary. It is primarily the Guy's journey toward self knowledge. It also comes generously packaged in a wild stoner comedy filled with both old fashioned and new getting high scenes and noisy psychedelic party sequences sleekly lensed by cinematographer Martika Ramirez Escobar. The opening titles already announce that, though this is familiar material, its approach is sleek and up to date. Partly exasperating and partly fun, When All This Is Over is a snapshot of Filipino urban society's concerns about class and need to escape from oppressive situtions.
When This Is All Over, 87 mins., debuted at Pasay, Philippines (Cinemalaya) Aug. 5, 2023, also showing at Udine May 1, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Thursday July 18, 8:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Kevin Mayuga
SALLI (Lien Chien-Hung 2023)
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JUSTIN LIN, YANG LI-YIN, ESTHER LIU, A SETTER, AND A WHITE COCKREL IN SALLI
LIEN CHIEN-HUNG: SALLI (2023)
Chicken farmer in rural Taiwan is lured to Paris by a dating app, learns independence
In this unusual and various movie from Taiwan, Hui-chun (Esther Liu), a vibrant, relaxed country chicken farmer in her late thirties, goes onto a dating app using the name Salli looking for onscreen romance. Everyone around warns her she's just going to get scammed but she persists. She has been joined on the farm from Shanghai by Lin Xin-Ru, her niece, who is a little like her daughter. Her busybody aunt (Yang Li-yin) is also urging Hui-chun to find a mate. The wedding of Hui-Chun's younger brother Wei-hong (Justin Lin) is coming. Fortune tellers and feng-shi experts have declared Hui-Chun's bedroom the best one for the newlyweds, and also declared it would be bad luck for her to attend the wedding. Via the app Xin-Ru sets up for her, Hui-chun seeks to remedy her single status, and she finds, or thinks she does, a French man called Martin, supposedly a gallerist in Paris, who's instantly interested in her and starts wooing her and calling her "mon poussin" (my chick, my sweetheart). The secret is (spoiler alert!) that there really is a French guy the other end of the line.
This plotline recalls, but winds up quite different from, the similarly dating app-focused NYAFF feature from Hong Kong, Love Lies, where an accomplished, but single, middle-aged Chinese lady obstetrician falls for a dating app Frenchman who isn't. The first section of Salli is marked by its loose, romanticized depiction of farm life, with people running around grabbing chickens for soup, occasionally throwing them some feed, and chased by their friendly dog. One would not want to stay on a farm where the farmers walk around the barnyard in flip-flops, but it looks like great fun, and the acting of Liu, Lin, and the others (including the dog and a handsome white rooster, which Hui-Chun treats like a pet) is relaxed and charming in this setting and the farmhouse life freshly and amusingly used. I rather wish the film had stayed here. But the filmmakers have other things in mind.
We may be wondering how this rural chicken farm is going to be the setting for a rom-com, however. Well, it's not, because, propelled by a somewhat gratuitous disaster on the chicken farm, Hui-Chun is going to spend her savings not on the app "boyfriend's" scam but to take a tour to France ostensibly, to meet "Martin," and prove to her family that he's real.
Bear in mind that this film is a Taiwanese-French co-production. So once Salli abandons her quick Taiwanese tour of Paris, what happens is, well, French, filtered through the rose-colored glasses of a Taiwanese picture of French life.It's an adventure that entertains Hui-Chun, but she's content to walk away from it. In this new Paris section of the film she undergoes a transformation into someone more sophisticated and polished but also content to be who she always was. She is less naive than she was when the film began, and from an older female member of the tour with much experience of men she has received a message: it's okay for a woman to be single. Really good, in fact.
Then comes the third section of the film, Hui-Chun back in Taiwan, where her life is again transformed through brother Wei-hong's wedding, which after all she is invited to and becomes a big part of. Afterwards, he has decided to open a chicken restaurant in Taipei. Hui-Chun will continue to be herself, but in a new framework, raising chickens on the farm for the restaurant.
The critique of dating app scams again, as in Love Lies, has obviously been abandoned in favor of something else, this time the idea that it's okay for a woman of a certain age to choose to live independently. This film doesn't altogether make sense, but its combination of rural Taiwan segments and Parisian ones is unusual and interesitng. More importantly, it's an original character study, for which Esther Liu makes an excellent tabula rasa, a blank slate in whom we can read all sorts of new possibilities. She goes from naivete to a kind ofd worldly wisdom. She embodies not only beauty and glamor but also plainness; a woman just being real, being herself. Salli, her app persona, turns out to be someone fabulous and cool.
Salli 莎莉, 106 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 5, 2023., and was also featured at Taipei Golden Horse, Göteborg, Osaka, Singapore, LA (Asian Pacific) and Taipei. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 28, 4:30pm
SVA Theatre
Intro with actor Austin Lin
OLD FOX (Hsiao Ya-Chuan 2023)
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BAI RUN MIN, AKIO CHEN IN OLD FOX
HSIAO YA-CHUAN: OLD FOX (2023)
Boy learns about inequality from sly local boss in a Dickensian coming of age focused on real estate
With Old Fox director Hsiao Ya-Chuan has made an old-fashioned but highly accomplished and thought-provoking movie about the basic moral conflict between justice and power. The ruthless and cruel local factory and property owner Boss Xie (Akio Chen), who is like a well-dressed lizard tooling around in beautiful cars, befriends the 11-year-old Liao Jie (Bai Run-yin) because he feels the boy is a kindred spirit, the mirror image of himself at that age. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) ,Xie thinks, is like Xie's own late mother, a "loser," softhearted, not tough. "Inequality," Boss Xie repeats to the boy, "inequality." There is a power structure, he teaches the boy, and you must learn to be ruthless to get to the top of it. He remembers that he began himself very poor, his mother a street cleaner who died of blood poisoning
The boy is tempted by Boss Xie's lessons and some of his power wears off on him simply by visibility, by his riding back and forth in Xie's big black chauffeured Mercedes and expensive new red sports car, which intimidates bully boys who lingered around and menaced the boy earlier. He gets dirt against the bully boy's mother that he wields to threaten the boys and make them run away. Jie has been called a "snitch" and doesn't even know why. His new skill at menacing the bullies is as satisfying to him as it is infuriating to him when his father in a gesture of kindness gives up the possibility of a cheap store space he had gained from Boss Xie. Jie really has come to identify with Boss Xie. . . but then he begins to feel the man's cruelty and brutality and rejects him.
The movie is complicated, despite its schematic ideas, and I am not sure I follow it after one viewing. It also gives us glimpses of other possibilities. There is, for example, a brief stream of black and white images of penniless boys begging for help, like many generations of Liao Jie, shot like clips from Italian Neorealist films. There are several women who come and go, without explanation. And, at the end, there is a present-day scene of an adult Jie, now a sophisticated and accomplished architect. In his work and Zoom consultation on the design for a glamorous but understated house it doesn't seem the contrasts between justice and power really apply.
The time of the main action, 11-year-old Jie, is 1989, a moment of rapid economic growth and insecurity in Taiwan, when some made a killing and others lost everything. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai, is a waiter dreaming of owning a small space where he can open a beauty shop in memory of his late wife, the boy's mother. But his savings aren't enough when property prices suddenly double. The boy repeatedly tries to persuade Xie to sell his father a property at a price he can afford, but what Xie wants to do is teach the boy to be tough and self-interested, indifferent to morality and to human feelings, like him. Drink cold water, he says in a memorable moment, close your eyes, and say "None of my damn business!"
There are other characters, notably Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), the young woman people refer to as "Miss Pretty," who is Xie's rent-collector. (It's all collected in person in cash every month.) She is an agent of the cruel boss but herself a kindly person with the renters, and she knows Liao père, who serves lonely and sumptuous meals to her at the restaurant. She seems a somewhat mysterious character. In fact we don't go deep into any character. We often see Liao père and his son meeting at their little home and we see the boy in school uniform, but school we don't see. We see the father play the saxophone and take in tailoring, but this hardly makes us know him. We are instead restricted to a stylized world of power and weakness, haves and have-nots, the soft-hearted and the hard-hearted. We know the boy has talent because he solves a Rubik's cube. This is an old-fashioned world as well as an old-fashioned movie. The characters are conceived in rather Dickensian terms, but the stark contrasts still work. As the boy, Run-yin Bai is the best in the cast, his performance a marvel of restraint. He presents a whole panorama of stoney expressions. When he smiles, it's a breathtaking moment. Director Hsiao's suave control can be seen at work.
Old Fox 老狐狸, 111 min., debuted Oct. 27, 2023 at Tokyo and Nov. 11 at Taipei (best feature, best director), Golden Horse (best director award, other awards), and this year (Apr.-May 2024 at Udine Far East Film Festival. It was screened for the present review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 6:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
A BALLOON'S LANDING (Angel Teng 2024)
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FANDY FAN (AS A-XIANG), TOP, AND TERRANCE (CHUN-HIM) LAU (TIAN-LU), BOTTOM, IN A BALLOON'S LANDING
ANGEL TENG: A BALLOON'S LANDING (2024)
TRAILER
In search of Jin Run-Fa
What this movie from Taiwan about the unrequited attraction of two young men may lack in verisimilitude or logic or sexual oomph in its screenplay it compensates for, if you view it sympathetically, via the charm and good looks of its twin protagonists, the complex romantic wistfulness of the action, and the beautiful scenic locations.
In the main action a frustrated Hong Kong writer, Tian Yu, meets a Taipei street gangster, Xiang, and the two of them embark on a journey to find the Bay of Vanishing Whales, a place that leads to paradise. But a Letterboxd comment (in Chinese) is "The Taiwan travel promo has no plot at all, and the parallel time is very fragmented." Some have commented it's not really gay but just a movie packaged as "queerbait." This indeed is a long tease of a gay romance, with no punch line, just the wistfulness.
At the outset, the poetic voiceover mentions the death of legendary actor/singer-songwriter Leslie Cheung along with the passing of the speaker's parents. One of Cheung's songs will be referenced later. The voiceover is spoken by Tian Yu (Terrance Chun Him Lau), a young writer in Hong Kong who, though he has admirers, is adrift. He winds up going to Taiwan, which he used to visit on summer trips with his parents as a child, where he wakes up in a room in Taipei with a male hustler, A-Xiang (Fandy Fan), whom he owes money. He tries to escape, and keeps being pursued by the increasingly enthusiastic and clingy A-Xiang, who wants his money, and seeing he's loaded, sticks around for more. There's probably also an initial attraction, but that is only hinted at with a look or two, and scuffles that are an opportunity to get physical. They have a good time, including attending a summer fireworks festival, but nothing happens, that we see, other than closeness, and the longing that follows, years after.
Flashbacks and voiceovers recount how Tian Yu as a student found a letter from an orphanage from a boy of eight called Jin Run-Fa. They begin a correspondence. It is Jin Run-Fa who tells Tian Yu about the Bay of Vanishing Whales. Tian Yu in turn tells the boy about how years ago he fantasized writing the story of a boy alone on a remote desert island who finds a bottle washed up on the sand containing a message from ten years in the future. As I've written previously, even Wong Kar-wai indulged in romantic hooey like this, borrowed from Chinese pulp novels. It weaves in and out to add a dreamy, poetic aura to the foreground narrative and to intermix fantasy with unrequited experience.
Of course it would turn out - it seems obvious when it's sprung on us - that Jin Run-Fa later changed his name to A-Xiang, so Tian Yu has, without their knowing it, met the boy he corresponded with when he was a student. And this gives him an excuse to go back to Taipei and seek out the young man who, anyway, he was wanting to see again, after he has snuck back to his, after all, successful life as a writer there - his novel is going to be made into a TV series - a dry, bureaucratic interlude that makes the viewer long for the Taiwan seashore and the energetic, good looking young hustler. (A-Xiang is supposed to be considerably younger than Tian Yu, though the age difference of the two actors, 30 vs. 35, doesn't show much.)
For the Chinese audience much of the fun may be in contrasting the lonely, jaded Hong Kong writer guy with the vibrant young Taiwanese hustler. Different cultures and dialects linked by, perhaps, a common need. And for all of us, the charm is in the actors. On the road trip A-Xiang, with the Taiwan heartthrob Fandy Fan turning on the charm and energy in the role, dances around the glum, reserved Tian Yu, the latter in approach-avoidance mode, pretending to reject A-Xiang while following him in a trip to the coast through various changes of venue and means of conveyance, on the pretext that A-Xiang can take him to the Bay of Vanishing Whales, almost a mythical, dreamlike place Tian Yu knows or dreams of only from the lost boy's letters. But after a while the motor bike rides and dips in the water and tastes of new dishes Tian Yu starts to smile and feel attracted, hinted at when he grabs A-Xiang around the waist on the motorbike. He enjoys being with A-Xiang very much. But not that way.
Director Angel I-Han Teng is already known for a successful LGBTQ+ drama series, "Fragrance of the First Flower." But she doesn't have the kind of remarkable grasp of male homosexual desire, and sex, for a woman, that was displayed so notably by Patricia Nell Warren in her unforgettable mid-Seventies gay page-turner, The Front Runner. In fact this movie seems to dance around rather than plunge into male-to-male desire. If this is a homosexual awakening for Tian Yu as some presume, it remains on a very platonic level. A Balloon's Landing seems to want to linger forever at the first glimmerings of experience.
A Balloon's Landing 我在這裡等你 ("I'll Be Here Waiting for You"), 100 min. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 4:15pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
THE TIME OF HUAN NAN (Leading Lee 2023)
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LEADING LEE: THE TIME OF HUAN NAN (2023)
TRAILER
This is a woozy, beautiful Taiwan film full of "BL" content, meaning soft core gayness, and focusing on three homoerotically filmed handsome young men and a vibrant young woman who bond as eternal "brothers" (even though one is a sister) in the vicinity of the eponymous Huan Nan Taipei food market, a traditional landmark whose rooftops, some in the film say, provide the best panoramic nighttime views of the whole of Taipei. The film is both epic, and intimate. And intensely colored, perhaps a little too much so. Above all it is replete with young male eye candy.
There isn't really that much about the market. There are a lot of swoony closeups of smooth male faces, torsos and butts, and intimate sexy closeups of a rugby game and more than one sequence of nude male bathing in all of which the homoerotic aspect is more than hinted at, though there is no male kissing - not any kissing, in fact - or sex. The emphasis is on longing and sadness. There is a heartbreaking, as well as slightly confusing, sequence of the three young men plunging riskily into a dangerous surf, with a teasing suggestion that a tragedy might be averted, though it's only a tease. The young woman stands by.
Did I say this is a time travel movie? It is, and reminded me of the equally woozy and soft-core erotic 2022 French Netflix time-travel series "Les 7 Vies de Léa," "The 7 Lives of Lea," which involves teenagers and also goes back 30 years to 1991. Something like that, only not as complicated, happens here. One of the young men, Chen Yao-hua (Hsia Teng Hung), the protagonist, if you like, is Back from the Future, visiting for a lengthy stay from 2022, a time of masks and Covid. At the present time, as the film begins, he works in the butcher stall of his father Chen Bao Ding (Edison Song) in the market. When he's up on the roof trying to persuade his father to stop dancing up there with a sword, he's suddenly transported to 1991 when his father was young, 30 years earlier.
In most of the film we see Chen Yao-hua, who becomes known as Liu Hung-hui, being taken for a highschooler who had gone missing, at a time when his father is young and handsome. And he's also in love with another man, something that wasn't at all okay - as it is, relatively, in Yao-hua's time, since in 2019 same sex marriage was legalized in Taiwan. Gay desire existed back then too, of course, but met with serious obstacles. Yao-hua encounters his young father and there are intimate, homoerotic moments even, perhaps oddly, between them. Yao-hua also sees his older father when he gets back back to 2022 and gives him a bath, also intimate.
Yu Kang Min (Wang Yu Ping), the young woman, plays an important role in the bonding of the Four Brothers of Yuan Nan. Yao-hua falls for her, while realizing that his younger father-to-be is gay and in love with another of what becomes the foursome, Chang An-jian (Chu Meng-hsuan).
Yao-hua becomes concerned with a developing tragedy, the disappearance of Chang An-jian. But this is not a world in which the visitor from today is able to alter events. Things get tricky for Yao-hua (and for us) when he returns to the present. It turns out he is now seen to have been gone for thirty years. It's complicated, and unclear. The film doesn't wind itself up well.
A review of the film by Brian Hioe in The Cinema Escapist confirms this about the weakness of the ending. Hioe is more knowledgeable about gay-themed Taiwanese films and lists and compares them. Though he finds faults in this one, notably a too didactic and explanatory section toward the end, a too obvious effort to highlight the famous market, and the failure to "stick the ending," yet he believes The Time of Huan Nan to be one of the best recent wave of Taiwanese LGBT-themed films. He feels that it is "well shot and excels at pacing"; that the acting "carries the movie," with all the principals "having excellent chemistry" and "oozing charisma." Some would argue that there are a tad too many intimate closeups, but we are invited to admire the handsome young men, and we do. Much though this may, by US or Western standards, seem somewhat timid about the sexual side of homosexuality - the step back to a more restricted time may be meant to justify that - still the film is full of warmth, sensuality, and one might almost say love. It may be considered audacious in combining gay themes with a traditional food market.
The Time of Huan Nan 環南時候,139 min., debuted in the Kaohsiung Film Festival Oct. 8, 2023, and opened in Taiwan May 31, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 13, 6:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
A LONG SHOT (Gao Peng 2023)
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ZU FENG IN A LONG SHOT
GAO PENG: A LONG SHOT (2023)
Impressive debut about China in chaos on the brink
The early scenes of this film, which are dark, desperate, and violent, grabbed me immediately. However "grimy" or gritty, rain-drenched and in multiple shades of grey it is, Gao Peng's directorial debut is a wonderful film, transferring the searching moral intensity of Krzysztof Kieślowski with the action showdown of a great Western to a period Chinese setting and with an intense human drama at the center of it all. Based on a real event, A Long Shot focuses on northeastern China and the huge, festering Fenglin Ferroalloy Factory, an old iron and steel foundry which isn't functioning productively and hasn't paid its 8,000 employees for months. It's the winter of 1990, before the economic miracle, when the changeovers of the economy were struggling to happen. Violence and disorder prevail and there are frequent thefts, culminating in a shootout toward the film's end. Amid the schemes and robberies and violence what's happening is a human struggle to live one's life.
A Long Shot is brilliant enough to have gotten complimentary festival reviews in Hollywood Reporter (Jordan Mintzer) and Screen Daily (Wendy Ide). Mintzer is basically right in his concluding assessment that what's "ultimately most memorable" here isn't the finale "gunplay" but the film's overall "setting itself," which has the air of "a small city" that's become the victim of "a major dystopian catastrophe." The gunplay, the action, is good too, and so are the intense human bonding and coming of age stories and the portrait of a struggling society. There are a lot of characters, a lot going on, wrangled by the three writers plus the director who penned the screenplay. Apart from the workers, who figure, as well as their disaffected, aimless or delinquent young offspring, there are the managers, who tilt into criminality in the desperate situation too, and a rough gang of security guards who function as local police, when they're doing what they're supposed to, settling trouble often violently, often without turning it over to the police.
Though the opening depicts violence among youths and the security crew's aggressive handling of it, and these youths will flow in and out of the scene, riskily stealing parts and scrap from the factory's interior, playfully throwing firecrackers at each other and on the windshield of the factory manager's car, in the foreground of the film is its struggling moral center, the former champion sharpshooter Gu Xuebing (Zu Feng), who once was a local celebrity, but became deaf in one ear and had to quit. Now he is one of the security guards, but unlike the others, he refuses to take bribes from thieves. There is also his female friend Jin Yu Jia (Qin Hailu), whom Wendy Ide assumes is his former lover; she thinks her son Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie) is also his. Jin Yu Jia urges him to mentor the boy, who gets caught in a robbery of the factory in the opening sequence, though boy and man have a love-hate relationship. Zhou Zhengjie's intense expectant gaze and Zu Feng's world-weary gloom are the contrasting emotional and visual hearts of the film. When Zhou discovers the sleazy bar his mother has been forced to moonlight at, it's a classic scene of disillusionment. Everyone struggles with each other - and with the pushes and pulls of the environment, with its social volatility and economic stress.
The action thriller finale is as clear and compelling, transported to this chaotic setting, as a John Ford Western. It comes at a time of an ill-starred 40th factory anniversary celebration when the 8,000 employees are going to finally get some back salary payoffs. The sound of firecrackers mingles with machine gun fire. Gu Xuebing and Xiao Jun both put their hands on a certain illicit homemade weapon - changes in arms access regulations are another theme underlined in opening and closing onscreen texts. But when the smoke clears and the film's over one has lots more to ponder than that, guided by the youth Xiao Jun's intensity and moral confusion and Gu Xuebing's courage and sense of loss. This film is a thrilling picture of a country full of energy, a "smoldering crucible" just on the brink of betterment. It may also refer (as Mintzer notes) to the country's "current economic slump," or to all the twisting and breaking of law that's always gone on.
A Long Shot老枪 ("Old Gun," also "Old Timer"), 117 mins., debuted at Tokyo (Best Artistic Contribution winner: see coverage of the Tokyo Q&A); it was also presented at Mykolaichuk (Ukraine) Jun. 16, 2924. Screened for this review as part of the2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 9:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Gao Peng
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TEEN REBELS INA LONG SHOT
SUPPOSED (Thanakorn Pongsuwan 2023)
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CHAYANIT CHASANGAVEJ IN SUPPOSED
THANKORN PONIGSWAN: SUPPOSED (2023)
Wild for to hold
Supposed is a sort of dating app rom com involving a successful executive who meets a beautiful, younger woman via Tinder, is entranced, but can never hold her. This begins to be a telling, touching study of the attractions and dangers of such relationships. It seems to fade away a bit into little more than a music video at the end. But we must cut it some slack, since the director, Thankorn Ponigswan, died of lymphoma, at the age of 46, shortly after the film's completion and he may hot have been able to put the finishing touches on it.
The encounters of "Non" (Ananda Everingham), the Tinder-cruising businessman, and "Dear" (Chayanit Chansangavej) start via social media. She says she has been away for five months. He never gets a clear answer from her about what this means. But her teasing, wild, playful ways are entrancing. When the Korean restaurant where she wants to eat is closed, she breaks in and makes "Non" cook for her.
There is some of the life of Laotian-Australian actor Everingham in "Non," because the actor's father was an Australian photojournalist who scuba-dived to save his lover, and aa "Non" he is always taking pictures and wants to be a writer, and talks about scuba diving. "Dear" won't say what she does away from "Non." They have a sex life and things seem great except she is distant, keeps disappearing, and seems to have another involvement, while "Non" falls more and more in love with her.
"Dear" and "Non" made me think of the 16th-century English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt's famous poem "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind," which imagines his lady love as a wild deer that he chases in vain, and concludes she is "wild for to hold, though she seem tame." He imagines a necklace around her "fair neck," "graven with diamonds in letters plain" saying "noli mi tangere," touch me not. "Dear" escapes "Non." He cannot trap her. At the end he sorts through her cancelled web page's many images and pursues her at the places she has seen and photographed.
She has said revealingly that whenever she is involved with someone she enters his world and imitates him, but so she does not know who she really is herself. With "Non," she also has begun taking a lot of pictures, as he like to do. But early in the film, we see him posing, and describing that he wears blue because he's been told it's a friendly color, and he photographs himself. He's a narcissistic male and, like so many before him, pursues an image, "Dear" with her unspoiled young face, her tempting eyes, instead of being attracted by the other woman he sleeps with briefly, who is communicative, and available: not interesting, too easy, too practical.
Supposed is a study of modern dating app romance, but winds up being such a classic love story it can be epitimized in a 16th-century poem. Chayanit Chansangavej is certainly entrancing in the role of the elusive young woman, and Ananda Everingham is a suave, able dupe, the eternal male chasing a women who is too young and too mysterious to remain in his clutches for very long. Too bad the film does't find a less pretty, less ambiguous solution, but most of the way it depicts the eternal chase beautifully. The cinematography of Vardhana Wanchuplao has a dark, distinctive look; the score by Wittawin Amornrattanasak, however obtrusive, is essential to the online, pop-culture mood.
Supposed, 100 mins., opened in Thailand Dec. 5, 2023, debuting at the Osaka Asian Film Festival Mar. 4, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 3:30pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro with cast members Ananda Everingham & Chayanit Chansangavej
BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY (Lin Jianjie 2023)
LIN JIANJIE: BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY (2023)
New York Premiere
Brief History of a Family
家庭简史
Lin Jianjie's gut-punch of a debut rips the Band-Aid off the wounds of post one-child policy China and exposes the scars and anxieties beneath. When Wei, an outgoing only son from a middle-class milieu, and Shuo, his taciturn but scarily sharp-eyed classmate, get tangled up in each other's lives after a mysterious incident at school, it sets off a chain reaction that turns Wei's picture-perfect existence inside out. As Shuo worms his way deeper into Wei's family and becomes the unofficial new member of the household, the cracks in the foundation start to show, and what was once a mutually beneficial friendship turns into a pressure cooker ready to blow. Lin's filmmaking style foregoes hand-holding in favor of pure, raw emotion, turning a simple family drama into a seductive, unsettling psycho-thriller that holds up a mirror to the absurdities and contradictions of modern life and makes you want to call the therapist.
Director: Lin Jianjie
Cast: Sun Xilun, Lin Muran, Zu Feng, Guo Keyu
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
2024; 99 min.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 20, 4:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
SNOW LEOPARD (Pema Tseden 2023)
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PEMA TSEDEN: SNOW LEOPARD (2023)
Everyday problems and the eternal in Tibet
It's hard to know sometimes what is going on in Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden's posthumous film Snow Leopard. It awakens vivid feelings of place and presence, the beautiful, remote, snowy landscape and the eponymous snow leopard (or snow leopards) who are calmer, smarter, and infinitely more powerful, lithe and dangerous than humans. Tseden captures both ordinariness and magic here in a simple tale of a wild animal mauling livestock that resolves into something both messy and transcendent, with arguments and threats and an intervention by the law in between. I would say this is about mediation and transcendence. John Berra in his Venice SCreen Daily review says it's about "the tension between tradition and modernity," and there's that too. Director Tseden's mastery is in using simple elements to convey levels of meaning, bringing in multiple subjects without losing focus. He is the founder of Tibetan cinema, and his death at 53 of heart failure is a tragic, too early loss.
Between the trapped leopard who has come in the night and killed nine rams and their furious herder Kimba)(Jinpa), who, saying each ram is worth a thousand yuan and he wants both compensation and revenge, has trapped the great beast in his pen, is the young "snow leopard monk" or lama (Tseten Tashi) into whose gentleness and fantasy life the film compellingly escapes.
The most memorable sequence in the film is (spoiler alert) a dream filmed in chilly monochrome in which the monk, in extremis, lost and exhausted at the end of a pilgrimage, is rescued by the snow leopard he met as a cub. Metaphor morphs into personality in the character of the young monk, a quiet, gentle, mysterious, playful young man who becomes a magnet for the film's sympathy and affection, its desire to bond with nature and the Other. He promises that he recites sutras too, but capturing snow leopards on his cell phone camera months ago, a clip that went viral, has led to his being given a camera with a long lens. He carries it about with him to pursue his obsession. While the snow leopard is a predator for the rancher, a great subject for the TV crew, and a "a first-class protected animal" for the local official, for the monk it's something ineffable and essential, the goal he pursues.
Meanwhile this film is also more broadly about itself: the first, foreground, characters we meet are a TV team traveling out to this remote place like naturalists and ethnographers to film a show. The lead journalist, Wang-xu (Ziqi Xiong), is a friend of the young monk from junior high, and they rendez-vous on the road. The angry ram owner and the beautiful trapped beast are perfect subjects for the film crew. The ram owner seems like director Tseden laughing at reality TV with his mugging for the camera. But he also represents humans acting beastly and, from another angle, a local who rejects outsiders coming to lecture him about protected species. The police are called in by the furious local official, also on the scene, and even then things keep getting worse, but finally, with a lot of translating back and forth, an understanding and acceptance are reached. But what matters is the unexpected manner in which the snow leopard behaves when released.
Exactly how the snow leopard action sequences were shot may puzzle you, but the beasts themselves, in the awesome snowy landscape and mountain lake, linger in the mind as complex presences, wild, inexplicable, massive but featherlight, lumbering on tiptoe but lightening quick, sweet and deadly, friendly but wholly other. It's for the snow leopard that this film exists, and if it works for you, nothing else gets in the way. The closing credits music is wholly fresh, a remnant of a location that was strange yet real.
Snow Leopard. 雪豹 | གངས་གཟིག 109 min., debuted out of competition at Venice, presented as an official selection at Toronto and won the Grand Prix in Nov. 2023 at Tokyo; also shown at Warsaw, Paris, Lyon and Moscow. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 6:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
TROUBLE GIRL (Chin Chia-hua 2023)
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AUDREY LIN, TERRENCE LAU CHUN-HIN IN TROUBLE GIRL
CHIN CHUA-HUA: TROUBLE GIRL (2023)
A disjointed movie about irresponsible adults and a neurodivergent 12-year-old
Despite festival blurb raves about this as being "a disquieting head-trip" and "a prickly, paradoxical but ultimately transcendent work," this study of a 12-year-old schoolgirl with ADHD, an absentee father, and a teacher and mother who are having an affair fails to jell beyond the "prickly" and "paradoxical." An interesting Chinese Letterboxd comment by Jay Wei about its surprising of expectations, its score that goes against the moods of scenes commends a lack of "melodrama." But one winds up longing for that, for tension, suspense, for the strong emotional payoffs of conventional drama that never come.
The opening sequence, returned to later, is of the lithe young Hong Kong-born teacher Mr. Chen, aka Paul (Terrance Lau Chun-him) giving the girl Xiao Xiao (the actual title of the film, Audrey Lin) a swimming lessen. The lessen goes well and it's the tenderest, happiest moment of the film. Another big moment, pulled through much of the film, is a typhoon. It causes school to be hastily dismissed: the excitement is in sympathy with Xiao Xiao's disruptive nature. Her neurodivergence is seen as a cause both of disruptiveness and bullying by her classmates that leads to further anger and acting out. Positive aspects of the disorder - creativity, intense focus - are not on view, though the girl has warm moments, as in her brief contacts with her father (Ming-Shuai Shih).
But the central drama, what there is of it, is in the triangle of mother, daughter, and overzealous teacher, along with the unruly class. Mr. Chen has set up a system of rewards to classmates for being kind to the girl, but they corrupt the system by provoking her so as to get points for interceding. A trouble here is that the class begins to seem too much like the "trouble girl" and the mother, though approaching forty while Chen is younger, is too girlish looking and acting.
One thing that's clear is the mutual jealousies. Xiao Xiao, in a rare grownup moment, jumps in a taxi follow her mother and her teacher in the rain to see where they are going. Her mother shows annoyance at the teacher when, in intimate moments, he starts talking about the girl's problems or progress. Understandably, she wants the affair to be about her. She used to be a piano teacher. There's a big piano in the living room to show it. And this is some kind of symbol, perhaps of lost potential, missed creativity, a better life.
There is no shortage of varied scenes. An episode is the unexpected return of the father, who has playful moments with the girl and quarrels with her mother. (What is it about all the binoculars?) There is a trip to a park of Mr. Chen, Xiao Xiao, and her mother. There is a surprising full-on bureaucratic conference of school officials and teachers and the mother about the girl, which the mother, inadvisably, brings the girl herself to. But these disjointed sequences of scenes are like the girls's jumpy, staccato behavior. It's hard to see where they are going. The viewer is continually jolted. What it all adds up to is hard to say.
It feels as if a lack here is in giving the complexity, even the maturity, that's needed to the affair. Its most memorable moment may be the childlike one where Paul jumps on top of the mother, playing like kids, and it becomes sensuous and sexy. But in her grumpiness she seems to be becoming like her daughter.
It would also have been nice to delve more into the neurodivergence of the girl, what ADHD is and what variety of it the girl has, and its potential positive aspects as well as the disruptive ones. One wishes the idea had come up not just of helping Xiao Xiao to conform but of finding ways for her to be different in positive, creative ways. Positive values of ADHD for example can be: hyperfocus, an ability to commit deeply to projects and tasks that interest them and be super efficient; and creativity, an imaginative and busy mind that can create original ideas and novel solutions to problems. We don't glimpse those potentials here.
This film lacks the complexity of recent French films like Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning/Un beau matin, which deals with similar themes. However, in fairness, Hansen-Løve is a mature artist in her prime, while Chin Chia-hua is just starting out, as is the obviously very promising young actress who played the lead, and won a Golden Horse acting award at an unprecedentedly early age for this performance. We can look with interest for what they do in future. Terrance Lau Chun-him, the fresh and appealing Hong Kong actor who plays the teacher-lover, who has won his own best actor award for Beyond the Dream, may also be one to watch.
Trouble Girl 小曉 ("Xiao Xiao"), 103 mins., Debuted at Taipei Golden Horse Festival Nov. 2023, opened theatrically in Taiwan and Hong Kong Dec. and Jan.; showed at Udine and Taipei Apr. and Jun. 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (July. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 27, 3:30pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Chin Chia-Hua
PATTAYA HEAT (Yang Shupeng 2023)
YANG SHUPENG: PATTAYA HEAT (2023
Pattaya Heat
ปิดเมืองล่า
A glorious ensemble of Thai stars Ananda Everingham (Shutter), Thaneth Warakulnukroh (Bad Genius, among others) bring their A-game to this bodacious postmodern crime-action opus set in the country's notorious "sin city" destination. At the center of the madness is an ex-con-assassin-turned-drug-dealing pizza maker, a corrupt cop with a twinkle in his eye and a rumble in his belly, a tarot card-dealing femme fatale, and a megalomaniacal crime king who makes Scarface look like a choir boy. These ne'er-do-wells cross and double-cross paths in an elaborate quest for riches in gold, leaving in their wake a trail of ultra-violence, rampant sexuality, with a sprinkle of Thai-flavored dark humor into the bargain. With a little help from movie friends Yang Kil-Yong, action director from the legendary Oldboy and producer Shang Na, of Detective Chinatown 3, and Sheep Without a Shepherd fame, seasoned Chinese director Yang Shupeng, a NYAFF 2017 guest, has whipped up a plethora of pulpy influences into a furious cinematic cocktail that's equal parts Tarantino, Woo, and something entirely its own.
Director: Yang Shupeng
Cast: Ananda Everingham, Jirayu Tantrakul, Krissada Sukosol, Laila Boonyasak, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Gulasatree Michalsky, Gigi Velicitat
Languages: Thai with English subtitles
2024; 117 min.
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 1:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro with actor Ananda Everingham
Ananda Everingham
Working primarily in Thai films, Ananda Everingham broke through internationally with his lead role in the 2004 hit Shutter, and began working not only in Thailand, but in Singapore and Laos. After anchoring Me... Myself (2007) and having a featured role in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 2007 Cannes film Ploy, he starred in the Singaporean romance The Leap Years (2008). He went on to the fantasy Queen of Langkasuka, then starred in Sabaidee Luang Prabang, the first commercial film produced since Laos adopted communism in 1975. In 2017, he starred as Maj. Gen. Khun Pantharak Ratchadet in the first episode of the ongoing Khun Pan series. As the NYAFF 2024 Actor in Focus, Ananda is presenting three dazzlingly diverse films: Supposed, Pattaya Heat, and The Cursed Land.
TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN (Soi Cheang 2023)
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LOUIS KOO IN TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS:WALLED IN
SOI CHEANG: TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN (2024)
Artfully cluttered everyman epic in a long-gone Hong Kong gangster enclave
Kowloon Walled City was an incredibly dense, decrepit, and busy, rickety, multitiered and dark underworld until it was demolished in the nineties with the takeover of Hong Kong by China. It is at once the incredibly rich reconstructed setting and the real star of this enjoyable, if self-undermining film, whose reconstructed location is better than its somewhat slow and perfunctory plot line, which probably works better in its source comic book. As the Variety review's title says, here, "Blazing Action Delights Get Marred by Languid Soap Opera." One of two Guardian reviews summarizes: "The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish." These are unkind, and mislead if they suggest this won't be at all a pleasant experience, but are correct in suggesting there are flaws.
Things begin with a prolonged street fight, straight wuxia stuff except almost invisible because staged in very dark surroundings, with many wince-inducing, bone-crushing encounters, designed to show that the underdog protagonist, Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is tough and invincible. But he's an illegal from the Mainland, and his struggle to buy an ID card from the local triad bosses is doomed. And still he refuses to join them, and winds up escaping from the remorseless triad leader Mr. Big (legendary actor-director Sammo Hung) and retaliating by grabbing a bag stuffed with drugs and making a run for it through long dark streets, onto a bus, and into - the Kowloon Walled City, where he's safe because it's ruled by another boss, a different jurisdiction.
Gone is the realm of the odious Mr. Big, to be replaced by "enigmatic crime boss Cyclone (an aged-up Louis Koo), an effortlessly cool [and chain-smoking] barbershop owner," (quoting again from the Variety review ). This world is decrepit, but in its scuzzy way rich, familial, and cozy. That Guardian reviewer calls it "a Piranesian labyrinth" - I like that - "of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise." It's some time in the eighties. People dance to disco. Karaoke seems to be a new thing. Welcome to Kowloon Walled City, in glorious decline (and gloriously recreated by the production crew of this movie). And to what all acknowledge to be the true star of this teeming, dark, somewhat lumbering movie: what the festival blurb calls "the true star, the "delirious production design," "a ramshackle metropolis fused into one fetid super-organism of exposed wires, makeshift shanties, and human desperation–teeming with triads, refugees, and wuxia-powered henchmen sporting rat-tail hair." Very much a throwback to certain glory days of Hong Kong cinema; a kind of hypertrophied version of the movies Wong Kar-wai was making before he became Wong Kar-wai.
Here begins an even more intense and prolonged struggle by our undocumented but tireless hero (a kind of parody of the over-motivated immigrant), who sleeps on eaves to save up cash and becomes known to the local, shall we say, 'administration.' By a third of the way through the two-hour film, Chan starts to smile sometimes. He starts to play Mahjong (or some tile game) with pals, and tells the boss of it all, Cyclone, that he wants to stay here. He was orphaned as a child, he says, brought up in foster care, never had a real home. Now he can sleep all night, he says. But remember, says Cyclone, you sleep well because of the people, not the place. Around Cyclone is a klatch of attractive young men, each with his own shtick.
Like a traditional epic poem, Soi Cheang's movie digresses when a detail of background becomes interesting and jumps into a flashback history. Eventually people tell Chan the story of how the Walled City became the way it is now ruled by who rules it now and what fell by the wayside on the way. This includes the "ruthless goon, the King of Killers, Jim," one of the chorus of youngsters recounts. "Sooner or later this place will be torn down," Cyclone warns, and in fact there are glimmers on a TV broadcast of the tentative plan to do so when the Mainland assumes administration of Hong Kong. But will this genre of movie ever go out of style?
Featured here (an all-male cast): Raymond Lam, Terrance Lau, Philip Ng, Richie Jen. For fans of Chinese fight genre and traditional Hong Kong gangster films, despite the warned-of soap-opera languor of the hero's trajectory, this is potentially a delight, depending on individual tastes, of course.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In 九龍城寨·圍城 ("Kowloon Walled City Beseiged City"), 125 mins., opened in China and Hong Kong May 1, 2024; other releases, and inclded at Cannes, Buncheon, Montreal. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
Sunday July 28, 7:00pm
SVA Theatre
Q&A with producer John Chong and actor Philip Ng
(SOLD OUT)
