ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Lincoln Center June 28-July 14, 2019

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//LQPD.jpg.......http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//OYOY2.jpg

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/23AFF.jpg

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS:
Another Child 미성년 (Kim Yoon-seok 2019)
Complicity (Ken Chikaura 2018)
Crossing, The 过春天 (Bai Xue 2018)
Dare to Stop Us 止められるか、俺たちを, (Kazuya Shiraishi 2018)
Dark Figure of Crime 암수살인(Kim Tae-kyun 2018)
Fable, The (Ken Eguchi 2019)
First Farewell 第一次的离 (Wang Lina 2018)
Five Million Dollar Life 五億円のじんせい ((Moon Sung-ho 2019)
Gun, The 銃 / Jû (Masaharu Take 2018)
If You Are Happy 学区房72小时 (Chen Ziaoming 2018)
Jinpa (Pema Tseden 2018)
Lying to Mom 鈴木家の嘘 (Katsumi Nojiri 2018)
Maggie ( 메기 (Yi Ok-seop 2018)
Money 돈 (Park Noo-ri 2019)
Mr. Long (Ryo-san) (Sabu 2017)
Samurai Marathon (Bernard Rose 2019) Opening Night Film
Scoundrels, The 狂徒 (Hung Tzu-hsuan 2018)
Song Lang (Leon Le 2018)
Walk with Me 雙魂 (Ryon Lee 2019)
White Snake 白蛇：緣起 (Amp Wong, Ji Zhao 2019)
Winter After Winter (xing Jian 2018)
Wushu Orphan 武林孤儿 (Huang Huang 2018)

FULL LINEUP (53)
Titles in bold are included in the Main Competition; the list excludes the secret screening.

More detailed list of films H.E.R.E

CHINA (11)
Co-presented with Confucius Institute Headquarters and China Institute
– The Crossing (Bai Xue, 2018)
– A First Farewell (Wang Lina, 2018) – U.S. Premiere
– If You Are Happy (Chen Xiaoming, 2019) – New York Premiere
– Jinpa (Pema Tseden, 2018) U.S. Premiere
– Push and Shove (Wu Nan, 2019) – North American Premiere
– The Rib (Wei Zhang, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Savage (Cui Siwei, 2018)
– Uncle and House (Luo Hanxing, 2019) – International Premiere
– Winter After Winter (Xing Jian, 2019) – North American Premiere
– White Snake (Amp Wong, Ji Zhao, 2019) – North American Premiere
– Wushu Orphan (Huang Huang, 2018) – North American Premiere

HONG KONG PANORAMA (10)
Presented with the support of Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York
– The Attorney (Wong Kwok Fai, 2019) – International Premiere
– The Fatal Raid (Jacky Lee, 2019) – North American Premiere
– G Affairs (Lee Cheuk Pan, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Iron Monkey (Yuen Woo-ping, 1993) – Tribute to Yuen Woo-ping
– Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (Yuen Woo-ping, 2018) – Tribute to Yuen Woo-ping
– The Miracle Fighters (Yuen Woo-ping, 1982) – Tribute to Yuen Woo-ping
– Missbehavior (Pang Ho-cheung, 2019)
– See You Tomorrow (Zhang Jiajia, 2016) – North American Premiere
– Still Human (Oliver Siu Kuen Chan, 2018) – New York Premiere
…and the secret screening!

INDONESIA (1)
– 212 Warrior (Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2018) – North American Premiere

JAPAN (11)
– 5 Million Dollar Life (Moon Sungho, 2019) – North American Premiere
– Complicity (Kei Chikaura, 2018) – New York Premiere
– Dare to Stop Us (Kazuya Shiraishi, 2018) – New York Premiere
– The Fable (Kan Eguchi, 2019) – U.S. Premiere
– Fly Me to the Saitama (Hideki Takeuchi, 2019) – New York Premiere
– The Gun (Masaharu Take, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Hard-Core (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Jam (SABU, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Lying to Mom (Katsumi Nojiri, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Mr. Long (SABU, 2017)
– Samurai Marathon (Bernard Rose, 2019) – North American Premiere

MALAYSIA (1)
– Walk with Me (Ryon Lee, 2019) – North American Premiere

PHILIPPINES (2)
– Ma (Kenneth Lim Dagatan, 2018) – International Premiere
– Signal Rock (Chito S. Roño, 2018) – New York Premiere

SINGAPORE (1)
– Zombiepura (Jacen Tan, 2018) – North American Premiere

SOUTH KOREA (9)
Presented with the support of the Korean Cultural Center New York
100 Years of Korean Cinema KOFIC program
– Another Child (Kim Yoon-seok, 2019) – North American Premiere
– Dark Figure of Crime (Kim Tae-gyoon, 2018) – New York Premiere
– Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels (Kim Tae-yong, 2018) – U.S. Premiere
– Maggie (Yi Ok-seop, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Money (Park Noo-ri, 2018) – New York Premiere
– Move the Grave (Jeong Seung-o, 2018) ) – International Premiere
– The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (Lee Min-jae, 2019) – North American Premiere
– A Resistance (Joe Min-ho, 2019) – North American Premiere
– Sub-Zero Wind (Kim Yu-ri, 2018) – North American Premiere

TAIWAN (4)
Presented with the support of Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York
– Han Dan (Huang Chao-liang, 2019) – North American Premiere
– It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show (Hsieh Nien Tsu, 2019) – North American Premiere
– The Scoundrels (Tzu-Hsuan Hung, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Someone in the Clouds (Mitch Lin and Gary Tseng, 2018) – International Premiere

THAILAND (1)
– The Pool (Ping Lumpraploeng, 2018) – North American Premiere

VIETNAM (2)
– Furie (Le Van Kiet, 2019)
– Song Lang (Leon Le, 2018) – New York Premiere

BERNARD ROSE: SAMURAI MARATHON (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/sM5.jpg
TAKERU SATOH IN SAMURAI MARATHON

Runners world, Tokugawa style

It's difficult to know what to make of this film, set in 1850's Japan, shortly after the arrival of Commodore Perry (Danny Houston, in the director's Frankenstein four years ago), breaking the country's centuries of isolation with his "Black Shiips." It's based on a presumably tongue-in-cheek 2014 novel by Akihiro Dobashi. This is not historical, you can count on that. Some aspects feel like a YA novel - blown up into a disorganized but pretty flashy film. And some of it is just wacky. It premiers as the Opening Night film of the 18th edition of the New York Asian Film Festival. It's a Japanese sort-of samurai movie, in Japanese, made by a British director known for Tolstoy adaptations admired by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved, and the horror movie Candyman. Go figure. It doesn't fit into any category. It had to stand by itself.

The Japan Times' reviewer James Hadfield has commented on an uncertainty of tone. He calls it "not-quite-comedic." But is that like not-quite-pregnant? Rose achieves visual beauty, has an all-star cast, and a score by Philip Glass that's energetic and elegantly stirring. The plot is too complicated to summarize and its early presentation is a jumble. If you want to see a motley crew of actors running an extended marathon (as described it's about 36 miles) through forests and mountains, this is your movie.

Along the way you've got a lot of cheaters, a lot of blood and mayhem, a little kid with an old samurai sensei, a repentant spy, a trigger-happy madman, and a runaway princess. And some pretty tired guys. There only seems to be one fellow, described as a "foot soldier" and therefore looked down upon, who's in any way trained as a runner when it all begins. Some elements are certainly comedic. But you'd need a sick sense of humor to laugh at all the disgorgements and beheadings, with realistic sound effects that must be holdovers from the director's horror film, Candyman.

The marathon is an offbeat way for a feudal lord, Itakura Katsuakira ((Hiroki Hasegawa) of the Annaka clan, to get his men in shape for the tricky situation of having foreigners in the country. Unbeknownst to Katsuakira, there's a spy for the Shogun in his midst, Jinnai (Takeru Satoh), and he mistakes the marathon preparations for the planning of a rebellion and sends off a secret report that will lead to all the runners being killed. When he finds out his mistake he frantically sets off on a marathon of his own to ward off this action. Meanwhile there is Princess Yuki (Nana Komatsu), who can't get past the checkpoint.

For a while running of the marathon gives the cinematographer a chance to provide gorgeous displays of Japanese scenery and provides the tangled up action with some solid focus. Everybody seems to want to join in, like the Boston Marathon or the Bay to Breakers, wearing whatever they've got on, and that includes the (unsuccessfully) disguised Princess Yuki and the kid with the elderly sensei. There are understandable efforts to cheat with shortcuts and stolen horse-rides. There is blood, several beheadings, some awful use of the Colt 45 "Peacemaker"; sword fights, of course; some nasty uses of rope; even a bow and arrow. The marathon gets a bit lost. I was confused (not for the first time) about why the runners were being identified and given chits and turned around at a checkpoint, while some runners avoided that.

The focus on the marathon gets diffused as the vigorous conflicts between rival bands lead to fighting the neat lining up of corpses, but still there is a remaining band of brave samurais back in the race, and when there's a shot of them speeding away with feet bound in frayed cloth, as a former participant in modern marathons myself, I winced. But the race is still on, and the arguments rage about who'll allow whom to win. Then more stuff happens. The crazy plot-spinner pulls out all the stops. It's funny, violent, silly, and strangely stirring the way things end. Darned if I wasn't kind of touched.

Samural Marathon/サムライマラソン 103 mins., was released in Japan Feb. 22, 2019, and gets its US debut Jun. 28 as the Opening Night Film of the New York Asian Film Festival, 7 pm, at the Walter Reade Theater.
Trailer.

PEMA TSEDEN: JINPA (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/Pe5.jpg

[NYAFF blurb.]
Stoic truck driver Jinpa picks up a silver-dagger-wearing hitchhiker in the desolate Kekexili plateau. The stranger suddenly reveals he’s going to kill the man who murdered his father. After they part ways, Jinpa starts to reflect and goes looking for him, ostensibly to prevent further bloodshed. Pema Tseden’s sixth feature, produced by Wong Kar Wai, boasts mesmerizing cinematography, striking misè en scene, and a deceptively minimalist story for an existential road movie of spiritual transcendence. Dream and reality meld in this stark tale, with its Tibetan locales conjuring the feel of a philosophical art-house Western.
Received the Orizzonti award for Best Screenplay at Venice.
Reviewed by Boyd van Hoeij in Hollywood Reporter and Jonathan Romney in ScreenDaily and in Asian Movie Pulse.
Sat., June 29
3:30 PM
Walter Reade Theater

MASAHARU TAKE: THE GUN 銃 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//LF&NN.jpg
LILY FRANKY AND NIJIRO MURAKAMI IN THE GUN

Chekhov's gun rule observed

One senses a nihilistic streak in Japanese culture and aimless university student Toru Nishikawa (Nijirô Murakami) has one that gets a dangerous boost when he comes across a pistol by the riverside one night, takes it home, and begins polishing and admiring it. It's a handsome .357 magnum, and it's loaded with bullets. Toru lives alone. He has a pal at the fac, a cheerful boy in a pork pie hat who wants to join him in picking up babes, but Toru keeps his babes to himself. There's one for sex, the other, the emotionally delicate Yukio (Alice Hirose) he really cares about and is shy with. The gun makes Toru feel sexier.

Apparently it's okay to smoke everywhere in Japan, even on the subway. Toru lights up with the satisfying ka-ching of his Zippo every time he goes anywhere, the school cafeteria, cafes with the babes, after sex. We know that Toru, a foster child with little connection to his adopted parents, and here, a proven disinterest in his real father, would rather light up than express his feelings. A voiceover where he narrates helps us guess what's in his head, but just barely.

Next door to Toru's solitary apartment there is a time bomb. A woman moves in who is loudly abusive to her small son. The boy doesn't talk to anybody, but his pain shows to Toru when he leaves behind a plastic bag containing live crayfish with their legs torn off. Toru is watching the irresponsible mother, noting her habits, when she grocery-shops.

This screenplay by the director and Hideki Shishido is a kind of existential horror story. It's also stylish, style taking the place of morality or inner self-worth for the young existential protagonist. In fact Nijiro Murakami is a fashion plate. Waif-cute, a look that the popularity of skating superstar Yuzuru Hanyu showed appeals to Japanese women of all ages, as Toru Nijiro has anime hair and, for summer, wears long white open-top T shirts, loose white blouses, and a long half-length white smock like a lab coat, his slim jeans fashionably rolled at the bottom, black shoes immaculately invisible. Toru starts supplementing his sharp-looking, demonstrably empty day-pack with a black slung pouch containing the pistol, because he decides since he has it, he might as well start carrying it around. It feels so good to have it!

The whole idea of a weapon probably carries a frisson in relatively peaceable Japan that it would lack in the gun-crazy States.

Is it a surprise that somebody notices him when one night he shoots a cat, wearing his white smock, and, wildly excited, runs away from the scene? Soon an umbrella-toting detective shows up at Toru's door. .357 Magnums are a bit thin on the ground in Tokyo, and he left a bullet in the cat that matches the one in the dead man where Toru found the gun. The all-knowing visitor is played by the always excellent Lily Franky, who sets the parameters of the situation with crushing thoroughness in his words to the tight-lipped Toru when they adjourn to a coffee shop. To go out for this interview, Toru dons a black smock instead of the white one, but that doesn't fool the cop. The film suffers from a lack of options. But perhaps that is the point. For Toru, life is a dead end.

As Mark Hadfield noted in his Japan Times review, though The Gun is adapted from a the 2002 debut novel of Fuminori Nakamura, it would "feel familiar" simply if you're read Crime and Punishment or "the works of Albert Camus and Kobo Abe" - though, as Hadfield adds, this movie isn't on that exalted level. It's more simply a mood piece that plays with the sense that youths who aren't motivated at university or have good family backgrounds may be, as it were, loaded guns.

Hiromitsu Nishimura is responsible for the black and white cinematography, which goes well with Murakami's alternately black or white outfits. Sometimes the style seems the only thing, but as Hadfield notes, despite some "weak soundtrack choices," Take sustains a nice combination of tension and despair to the end. The Gun has the qualities of a good short story, and it could come back to haunt you.

The Gun 銃 (Jû), 98 mins., debuted at the Tokyo film festival Nov. 2, 2018 winning the Japanese Cinema Splash Best Director award; Nijirô Murakami won the Tokyo Gemstone award for his performance. The Japanese theatrical release was Nov. 17, 2018. Reviewed for Filmleaf as part of the NYAFF, where it has its North American debut.
Sunday, June 30
6:15 PM
Walter Reade Theater

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//Ju.jpg

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//Th5.jpg
ALICE HIROSE AND NIJIRO MURAKAMI IN THE GUN

HUANG HUANG: WUSHU ORPHAN 武林孤儿 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/HuHU.jpg
HOU YUNXIAO IN WUSHU ORPHAN

Yearnin' learnin'

In the late ’90s, the clean cut geeky Lu Youhong (Noah Jin) takes a first teaching job as the instructor in Chinese (to which maths and English are quickly added as faculty members defect) at the remote Zhige Wushu Academy for martial-arts for young boys. It's an arid environment for humanistic learning. The wushu lessons, intensely physical, leave little time or energy for book learning and that's okay with the headmaster. Moreover Lu isn't anybody special. He's gotten this job because he's the dean's nephew. The dean wants him to serve as a "catfish," stirring some life into the sluggish, bored other faculty members.

This is an atmospheric period piece that charms by reveling in the simple life of inland China more than two decades ago, when there are no computers or smart phones and you pay someone to use a local phone if you need to talk outside. The school buildings are big and old and rustic.

These boys in the early teens, all wearing identical red and white school sweat suits, are in fine shape, visible at shower time, an anonymous cast that seems to have been carefully screened for athletic talent. Their mass displays of uniformly choreographed martial arts moves led by harsh coach You Hu are impressive. This is an old fashioned tale of boarding school sufferings and life lessons. But this is a special place because 99% of the students live only for the dream of becoming another Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan or Jet Li.

Of young novice teacher Lu's many students, only one visibly cares about academics: Zhang Cuishan (Hou Yunxiao), who excels at schoolwork but hates martial arts and tries to run away all the time, getting caught on one of his escapes in fact on the very day of Lu's arrival - by bicycle - the way most people got around in China before the industrial capitalist boom time came. As Lu tries to form a protective bond with the bullied Zhang, whose parents live on a boat and have sent him away because he can't swim, he also develops a crush on the school’s pretty young doctor An Lan and receives insider tips and wisdom from the principal’s quirky grown son Jiang Qin, who ranks lower in his father's eyes than his beloved pet falcon. Jiang Qin likes to chew gum and smoke. He's a slacker who hangs around at the school, out of favor with his father but ever present on the fringes.

There is also an elderly marshal arts guru, a distinguished-looking Mr. Miyagi type with goatee and eyepatch, who wanders the country looking for opponents. Only later in this longish two-hour film does this season-marking subplot make sense. Huang Huang's movie, simple and crowd-pleasing but ambitious in its way, almost wants to be a TV miniseries, the director seeming as enthusiastic and willing to take on additional subjects as his young schoolteacher protagonist.

Whushu Orphan 武林孤儿, 120 mins., premiered at the 31st Tokyo International Film Festival, where Huang Huang was awarded the Spirit of Asia Award for a promising new director presented in the Asian Future section. Reviewed in Asian Movie Pulse.
TRAILER
Sunday, June 30
8:30 PM
Walter Reade Theater

HUNG TZU-HSUAN: THE SCOUNDRELS 狂徒 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/sC5.jpg
WU KANG-REN IN THE SCOUNDRELS

The mayhem and the speculation

It would seem strange for a fan of Edward Yang and Ho Hsiau Hsien to think of a violent crime movie out of Taiwan, but a story from Vancouver dated less than two weeks ago is headlined "Crime dramas dominate this year’s Taiwanese Film Festival." So there you are. One title listed, strangely, is from 2017 and was in last year's NYAFF, The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful - but that's because it's the Taiwanese Film Festival of Vancouver. A brief but knowledgeable review of The Scoundrels comes from LP Hugo of Asian Film Strike, a young Parisian who writes in impeccable English and who's clearly a big fan of Asian actioners.

The Scoundrels is an actioner, alright. In fact you have to sift through the nearly nonstop violence of the first twenty minutes to locate the plot elements, in particular a protagonist, Ray (aka Rui aka Liao Wen-jui) (JC Lin), who's a pro basketball player so disgraced after he beats up a member of the crowd in a terrible fit of anger during a game that he's not allowed to play ever again, and, because his debt to the injured party leaves him broke, drifts into servile tasks for a crime boss, setting up hits for a sophisticated car theft ring.

Through an attempt to do good that goes awry, he becomes the sidekick of the anonymous Raincoat Robber aka Ben / Wu Shun-Wei (Wu Kang-Ren). This relationship between Ray Ben LP Hugo calls a "love/hate bromance," and once it gets going and one has gotten used to the high speed, adrenaline-drenched action, things start to make sense, though Elizabeth Kerr is right her in Hollywood Reporter when she says this film "zips by so economically there’s no time to register its flaws." That's part of what's going on.

The NYAFF blurb explains that /Ray has been "hijacked and framed for robbery" while he is "trying to help an injured woman." The robbery he's framed for was done by the Raincoat Robber. The latter stops Ray from helping the woman to escape in a car driven by him, and it's thus that Ray gets drawn into what the blurb calls "a downward spiral of crime, treachery, and violence." And then you realize this idea of a Raincoat Robber, who holds up armored cars wearing a motorcycle helmet and raincoat, in heavy rain, is another way of inducing a heavy dramatic mood in scenes where the viewer also can't make out all the details. LP Hugo unintentionally points to another flaw when he describes Ray and Ben respectively as "coarsely juvenile" and an "amoral cipher." Their volatile, shifting relationship may be interesting, but they're not very worthy of our time otherwise.

We join the obligatory young-old cop duo, chatting in a car, at thirty minutes. They go to the hospital to interview the injured woman. This interlude provides a rather overdue interlude of relative quiet. But their roles are vastly overwhelmed by the mayhem perpetrated by Ray and Ben, first acting as a team, in gang boss Hsiao-Hei's gambling den trying to get some money back. The Ray/Ben action goes too fast, and the two-cop one goes too slow. Another thread involves Shin-jei (Chien-Na Lee), Ray's former girlfriend, a physiotherapist.

The interesting thing about this film is that while some people are quietly trying o figure out what happened, we're also following Ray and Ben's evolving relationship and eventual partnership in crime, so what happened becomes irrelevant. And there is a real and structurally nice contrast between the mayhem and the speculation about it. However the end is in mayhem and violence and a grimly ironic finale that gives a sense of an ending, yet is absurd. Well done, one must admit, for someone who previously made only short films.

The Scoundrels 狂徒 (Kuang tu), 105 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 8, 2018 and also showed in Oct. 2018 at Kaohsiung and BAFICI - Buenos Aires. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
Monday, July 1
6:00 PM
Walter Reade Theater

KEI CHIKAURA: COMPLICITY (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/cOm.jpg
LU YULAI IN COMPLICITY

Being Chinese in Japan

In this painfully touching tale of illegal immigration, Chen Liang (Lu Yulai, in an intimate, committed performance), is a young Chinese man burdened with debts after the death of his father. He becomes "Liu Wei" when he takes on a false identity to seize a job opportunity in Japan, hoping to return with a pile and restart his dad's garage. Immigrant labor is much needed for Japan's aging population, yet foreigners aren't welcome in Japan, and there is a continual threat of deportation if Chen's false identity is discovered. It was not the wisest financial decision to move to a country not only resistant to foreigners but long economically stagnant. Chen/Liu was, obviously, spurred by optimistic rumors. Yet he takes to his new life with a quiet passion that makes its frailty heartbreaking.

Flashbacks show what it was like living with his sick mother and poisonous grandmother before he leaves. Selling stolen water heaters with some others is how he makes up the money to pay for his smuggler and fake ID papers when first arrived in Japan. He buys the latter on the black market, then takes the job, offered to the original owner of the phone number, without knowing what it'll be. Soon he is apprenticing in a rural soba shop, lugging huge bags of grain, cleaning up and politely serving at table, and most importantly being shown the trade by a fatherly old man. Unlike the others who were buying fake ID's with him, who go into shifty work under the radar, Chen's job is perfectly legitimate. He is terribly sincere to, and treated extremely kindly by, his rural Japanese employers, save for the fact that he is lying to them about who he is. Whatever structural weaknesses Chicaura's film may have (it can seem meandering and prolix at times), he makes his protagonist's complex, stressful situation intensely clear and emotionally vivid for us.

They give him a low-ceilinged room upstairs, scrupulously clean, and treat him like family, though understanding Japanese may be a struggle for him. What's said to him is translated in subtitles for us; how much he gets isn't always altogether clear, but he seems to follow quite a lot even if he doesn't talk much.

The immigrant is a nice looking, low-keyed guy and he not only bonds with his soba chef boss Hiroshi Inoue (Tatsuya Fuji of In the Realm of Senses) but also with Hazuki (Sayo Akasaka), an artistic young women he meets through delivering a meal to her studio on the edge of a beautiful forest - who takes to him immediately. She has been learning Chinese, so they can communicate, though the more wordless communication with Hiroshi seems just as intense. Part of Chen's bonding with Horoshi turns out to be shared opposition to the son's stubborn desire to close the restaurant. In one fraught scene where the son comes to visit with his wife, Chen/Liu's "complicity" as a near-family member in the house becomes clear.

How would Ozu have treated this subject? The scene where sister and her visiting brother fight loudly in one room and Chen putters around in another listening and looking worried, is the most powerful and strangely intimate moment in the first half of the film. Later, when authorities suspect that Liu is Chen, the other meaning of "complicity" appears as the relationship between the young immigrant and his soba chef "dad" deepens.

Kei Chikaura’s aim in his feature debut is to perform an act of sympathy, providing insight into an experience rarely observed on screen. This story doesn't depict moving from one conflict zone into another like Jacques Audiard's Palme d'Or-winning 2015 Dheepan. Chikaura need not go to such an extreme. He succeeds by staying close to its protagonist, following him up and down stairs, even calling out attention to the various T shirts he wears and how he adjusts the fan in his attic room. A little more detailed sense of Chen's personal motivations for immigration would have improved the writing, especially since the screenplay focuses on Chen/Liu's private experience much more than on political issues and has numerous little flashbacks, some of them unnecessary. But the intimacy and emotional closeness to the protagonist make a strong impression.

Kei Chikaura started a career as a filmmaker with his first short film Empty House in 2013. His second, The Lasting Persimmon, was selected for the Clermont- Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2016. In 2017, his third short film Signature, which focused on a Chinese immigrant and featured the same lead actor, premiered at Locarno.

In fact Chikaura, coming from shorts to a feature, seems trying to include too much and having trouble integrating different elements - the grim details of illegal immigration, the sudden intimacy in a family not one's own, and lighthearted and sentimentalized romantic moments with a semi-girlfriend don't quite mesh. This film could have used some sharpening up and paring down. But it also shows intense humanism and takes us pretty deeply into the world of its hopeful traveler.

Complicity コンプリシティ (katakana transliteration of "Complicity"), 115 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2018 and also showed at Busan, Tokyo FILMeX, and the Berlinale Feb. 2019. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF June 29, 2019. Asian Film Pulse review by Marko Stojilković, Eye for Film review by Jennie Kermonde, Windows on Worlds review by Hayley Scanlon, Moviebreak review by Lida Bach, Filmrezensionen review by Oliver Armknecht.
Saturday, June 29
1:00 PM
Walter Reade Theater

KEN EGUCHI: THE FABLE (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/fA5.jpg
YUYA YAGIRA AND JUN'ICHI OKADA IN THE FABLE

Being "normal" is too difficult for a yakuza hit man

This wildly absurd, over-the-top gangster film (but aren't they all?) has just that extra edge of absurdity that is explained by one thing: it's from manga. The central figure, "the Fable," pronounced "za faburu", a legendary yakuza hit man whose existence some think is purely mythical till they find out otherwise, is Sato (Jun'ichi Okada), an ace, invincible professional killer put on leave by his boss (Kôichi Satô). His orders are to act "normal" for one year, because his boss thinks "top assassins need that skill." Sato goes underground in Osaka (at first exaggeratedly imitating the rural Osaka accent) with his hotshot female sidekick. He starts dressing in casual, nondescript clothes. He is commanded to get a "normal" job. It's hard for him to find work because he refuses to pretend he likes any activity he might be hired to do. Finally Sato meets Misaki (Mizuki Yamamoto), a charming woman, who helps him work at a publisher as a handyman. There, he develops a new talent, raising his pay from 800 yen an hour to 900 (laughably little either way for a hit man), by doing childlike doodle-drawings that seem so charming to the boss because they "make people happy." These drawings indulge a kind of cuteness peculiar to the Japanese taste.

This film notably also notably contains Yûya Yagira, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2004 at the uniquely young age of 14 for his first movie role n Hirakasu Koreeda's extraordinary Nobody Knows (誰も知らない Dare mo Shiranai). Here Yaqira takes the role of Kojima, a wild, absurdly egotistical and histrionic young gangster type just released from eight years in prison. The boss has trouble keeping Kojima in check, being, through much of the film, in the hospital for a stroke. (He has to have someone else keep an eye on Sato.) The boss has ordered Kojima to do nothing till he is up and about to watch over him. But that doesn't quite work. This story is about the need for control. Yagira's wild histrionics, his facial expressions and drawn out, comically menacing or chortling speech, help make this clear manga material and more a caricature of a gangster movie than a serious one.

Misaki has posed for "art" photos. When Kojima finds this out and starts trying to force her to pose for porn, she is in danger, and when Sato finds out about this, he cannot allow it. He is going to have to find a way of getting around his overlord's restrictions on his behavior. This finally leads to a prolonged sequence of violent martial arts action involving hand-to-hand combat and shooting. The movie is quite restrained till then, late in the game, it explodes into wild but carefully choreographed chaos on a network of railings and metal and concrete stairways. The sound of the bullets clatters deliciously and so does the click of feet on metal. All this is reportedly staged "by Jackie Clan's crew." The festival blurb concludes, "The Fable is a vibrant pastiche of kinetic storytelling, wry humor, nail-biting suspense, and hyperbolic action." It's kinda true, but you might enjoy this a lot more if you keep reminding yourself, "Forget it Jake, it's manga."

The original manga is by Katsuhisa Minami,the screenplay by Watanabe Yutsuke.

In his "normal" life Sato keeps a parakeet in his room, his only decoration, which reminded me of Alain Delon's canary in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic Le Samouraï . But if Eguchi could achieve the iconic austerity of Melville, he'd have made quite another movie. I didn't even get to the legendary origin story of this chock-full film.

The Fable ザ・ファブル (kitagana transliteration for "Fable"), 125 mins., has four festival releases listed in June and July 2019, starting with Shanghai June 15, and including the NYAFF, where it was screened for this review.
NYFF showtime
Tuesday, July 2
6:00 PM
Walter Reade Theater

CHEN XIAOMING: IF YOU ARE HAPPY 学区房72小时 (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/hA5.jpg

Bourgeois stress, Shanghai style

This film's ironic (English only) title comes from a relentlessly jaunty American kiddie song ("If you're happy and you know it, clap you hands"). That's what plays in Professor Fu's car, to feed his little girl English. She is in kindergarten but, welcome to the life of contemporary Shanghai yuppies: all focus is on preparing her for getting into the best schools. For getting ahead. And at the moment in this virtually real-time film progressing over less than a week, Prof. Fu's whole focus is on buying an apartment in the Huanuang distrct, where there's a good school for the child.

In the opening scene Fu looks at a classically shitty flat many flights up with dangling electrical wiring and a "view" of the school you have to climb up on a chair to see. He engages in virtual hand-to-hand combat with the crude realtor over whether he can have a chance at this dump, for which he must pay the equivalent of over $500K USD with a hefty cash down payment, more than he has, due almost immediately, or another buyer will snap it up.

In the course of the film Professor Fu shakily puts this project together, risking anything, including job, marriage, reputation, to do so. And then it all sort of falls apart again. Director Chen Xiaoming builds the action with tense, semi-vérité precipitousness that creates real tension for a while, but weakens his story with an indecisive finale partly suggesting regulations in China have now changed and all this might not make sense anymore.

In this venial depiction of contemporary China, everybody's after something so they can get ahead, and nobody cares much how they get it. Professor Fu's college students, with inadequate averages, are out to bribe him to change their grades. His and his wife's housekeeper "Auntie Niu" wants to get the Fus' nice apartment that he's willing to give up for a low price to get rapid cash, so her son can secure a residence in Shanghai that will enable him to marry. Fu didn't plan on that but accepts it as cash in hand. Later when the realtor tells Fu the price of the other apartment has gone up, he's quite willing to double-cross "Aunt."

Central to this high-class soap opera with a facade of social commentary is Professor Fu, present in every scene. He is a tall, stylish man with handsome salt-and-pepper hair and a little scarf knotted French-style. We see him making out with one of his girl students, a rich one, in his car. We see him wrestling with the "Aunt", with the realtor, with a lawyer, and with his weak, depressed wife. Rarely do we see him in in a classroom, but we see him repeatedly talking to a university official who warns him there are accusations of faculty bribe-taking which eventually turn out to be against him.

If You Are Happy may be vivid contemporary social commentary for Chinese viewers. A Chinese article says of the film that its "plot has accurately hit the anxiety of many Chinese parents today." But it fails to rise to the level of cinema achieved by a similar litigious drama that comes to mind, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (NYFF 2011). Farhadi's film too has a telenovela quality, at first, anyway. But it is far more complex. In its rushed, precipitous action and limited time-scheme, If You Are Happy limits itself - to the narrow scope of its limited people. Nonetheless, as a slice of contemporary urban Chinese life, it provides a telling picture.

Chen Xiaoming worked as miscellaneous crew on Wong Kar-wai's Grandmaster in 2013. The cast features Guan Xuan, Xu Xing and Fu Wei.

If You Are Happy 学区房72小时 (School District 72 hours), 99 mins., was released in China June 28, 2019. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
NYAFF schowtime:
Wednesday, July 3
7:30 PM

KAZUYA SHIRAISHI: DARE TO STOP US 止められるか、俺たちを(2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/dTsU.jpg
WAKAMATSU'S CREW AT WORK IN DARE TO STOP US; MEGUMI (MUGI KADAWAKI), LEFT

A radical Japanese movie company

Kōji Wakamatsu was a provocative Japanese film director who defies classification. He had been in the yakuza, and even as a filmmaker, gave free rein to an aggressive, provocative personality. His cinematic production ranged from softcore porn pinku eiga films like Ecstasy of the Angels and Go, Go, Second Time Virgin to films about revolution and the radical Palestinian PFLP. He also produced Nagisa Ōshima's famous shocker of radical sexuality In the Realm of the Senses. The porn ones themselves incorporated radical politics and radical aesthetics with the exploitation. This film about Wakamatsu, some of his key associates, and a young woman, struggles to convey this mixture which, for an American, may be hard to imagine, though there is a funky charm about the group dynamic.

The Sixties and Seventies were the most fertile period of Wakamatsu Productions, founded by revolutionary auteur Koji Wakamatsu (Caterpillar) and staffed (for free) with radical young artists like avant-garde filmmaker Masao Adachi, cinematographer Hideo Ito, and scriptwriter Arai (Kisetsu Fujiwara). Kazuya Shiraishi (The Blood of Wolves) himself got started making exploitation pictures at the company, now presents this raucous but fact-based account of one young dreamer Megumi (Mugi Kadowaki), who joins Wakamatsu in the spring of 1969 to make pinku eiga. She is somewhat at a loss, but sticks with whatever happens, except that she can't join in the company's radical political action. As she struggles to fit into the testosterone-heavy "family" and find her own voice, Megumi’s life becomes equal parts masculine and feminine, and over time, heroic and tragic. After she becomes pregnant by the company's still photographer Takama (Ku Ijima), Megumi's psychological instability and painful family background come forward.

One early Wakamatsu pinku eiga was Taiji ga mitsuryo suru toki ("The Embryo Hunts in Secret," 1966), in which a woman is sexually enslaved by her boss, and the 1969 Yuke yuke nidome no shojo ("Go, Go Second Time Virgin"), featured in this film. Wakamatsu co-directed, with Masao Adachi, a 1971 documentary about the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine. His later films included the docudrama Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama sanso e no michi (2007; United Red Army), which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Tokyo International Film Festival; Kyatapira ("Caterpillar," 2010), nominated for a Golden Bear at Berlin; and 11.25 jiketsu no hi : Mishima Yukio to wakamono-tachi (2012; 11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate), a biography of novelist Yukio Mishima shown at Cannes (referred to in this film), and Sennen no yuraku ("Millennial Rapture"), premiered at the Venice in 2012. Wakamatsu was named Asian Filmmaker of the Year at Busan in 2012.

At the time of his death in a traffic accident at 76 Wakamatsu was returning from a meeting for his latest project, focused on Japan's nuclear industry lobby and the Tokyo-based TEPCO company. The topical subject matter followed on the heels of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

There's a discussion of Shraishi's film by Mark Shilling in The Japan Times (October 2018). Shilling met Wakamatsu several times and says "He was feisty and outspoken, but his sense of mission also struck me. He saw himself as a truth-telling guerrilla in a business, society and world dedicated to peddling convenient lies."

Dare to Stop Us is a movie about a group, and about intense working friendships, bull sessions, getting drunk together, and a lot of cigarette smoking. It's about personalities hanging out. They're presented jokily at first, but as the enterprise gains credibility, are seen in a more serious light. There's an old-shoe quality about many of the scenes that is very appealing. The main characters, even the brusque Wakamatsu himself (Arata Iura), come forward and become attractive, not only Arai (Kisetsu Fujiwara) and Megumi (Mugi Kadawaki) but the soulful Takima (Ku Ijima), who winds up as Megumi's bed partner, and various others. Nonetheless something may be lost in the subtitles in this largely understated and unclassifiale film. Shiraishi is trying to catch lightening in a bottle. How well he captures it may elude the non-native viewer.

Dare to Stop Us 止められるか、俺たちを, 119 mins., debuted in Japan Oct. 13, 2018 after an Oct. 5 premiere at Busan. It has been in at least five other film festivals including the NYAFF, where it was screened for this review.
NYAFF showtime:
Showtimes
Thursday, July 4
3:00 PM

RYON LEE: WALK WITH ME 雙魂 (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/WwM.jpg
MICHELLE WAI IN WALK WITH ME

The horror of domestic life and a shitty job

The "legendary" and much-awarded Malaysian screenwriter Ryon Lee comes up with his seventh combined directorial and writing effort and his fourth horror film, his last credit having been Haunted Road 2. He pulls out all the stops here, though that doesn't mean special effects, of which there are hardly any. The cinematography is subtly colorful, with yellows, turquoise and light greens predominating. If the sing-song Cantonese dialogue (I guess) and yammering arguments are grating, one can always shut one's ears and look at the pretty pictures.

It's not any F/X but the varieties of spookiness wrecked quietly down upon Sam (Michelle Wai, aka Wei Shiya), the young female protagonist that are numerous. Interestingly, she is repeatedly threatened with rape or sexual menace from nearby men. But she just seems to live in a scary world. She is bespectacled, shy, and cute. She works in a garment factory, where the older, more experienced women workers don't like her. The manager bullies her, as does her father (Wu Yaohan) at home. Then he disappears.

Sam has recourse to a raggedy doll that may embody he spirit of her lost little brother, and may also be a vehicle of revenge. These are people who believe in ghosts, spirits that possess and haunt. Very early on, the young woman and her mother, with a group of neighborhood women, come upon a man changing over and manipulating an older woman he is apparently freeing of possession.

Randomly (in this film's rather vague sense of space) out of nowhere a young man, York (Alex Lam, aka Linde), appears, a friend ten years before when they were kids, now chubby no more but lithe, full grown, and attractive, and he rents the spare room and becomes part of the household. It is not clear to me whether Sam's mother (Wu Yiyi), known only as "Ma," is a spook or a friend. She is "just a clinic assistant" and constantly querulous, and sometimes seems afraid, at others angry and menacing. Is the young man friend or foe? And is this uncertainty an intentional ambiguity, or tonal clumsiness? Early on we see the girls's mother and father fighting? Is this menace too, the horror of domestic unrest? Or just atmosphere? Or are they possessed by the evil sports of the unquiet dead? Up on the roof with the laundry hanging on the line, York tells Sam he doesn't care about ghosts and will protect her from them. But he says "To defeat the darkness, you must become part of the darkness," which sounds spooky.

Later, while Ma and Sam are acting hysterical over ghosts - arguing over whether the doll contains the ghost of Sam's dead little brother - York uncovers a cistern and finds her perpetually disappearing dad floating in it. Who is responsible for Sam's dad's death? Is the spirit of her dead brother Dao Dao in the doll invading Ma's mind and making her crazy? Did Sam's boss Tham Kok Wai rape her as the doll tells Ma? One sequence of growing menace or suspicion is cunningly intercut with images of York dicing vegetables for a dinner he's preparing for the vegetarians, Ma and Sam, the chop-chop and the rising music almost worthy of Hitchcock. Lee makes an admirably efficient use of available scene for his chilling effects; a sewing machine becomes a fatal torture device - and it is all done subtly, without gore. The melodrama is excessive throughout, but there is an odd restraint which, with the lovely blues and greens, makes this an interesting experience.

Walk With Me 雙魂 (Shuāng hún, "Double Soul"), 92 mins., got its North American premiere in the NYAFF, where it was screened for this review. It reportedly was exported before its domestic release. Facebook page. This has some Hong Kong actors in the leads and I believe was shot in Hong Kong.

XING JIAN: WINTER AFTER WINTER (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/Wi5.jpg
AN EXTERIOR SCENE FROM WINER AFTER WINTER

Elephants sitting still?

Xing Jiang reportedly debuted with an austere self-financed film about an old man at the top of a mountain in winter. Things have hardly become less chilly or austere here in this sophomore effort, funded somewhat inexplicably by the tech conglomerate Alibaba. It is in wide screen "high-contrast monochrome" (I'll be relying as here on Clarence Tsui's Hollywood Reporter review), so the look itself is elegantly chilly. It focuses on a Chinese family in Manchuria headed by Lao Si (Gao Qiang).

It's the end of the War, 1944, and the Japanese are desperately trying to avoid the fact that their empire is crumbling, and are about to take Lao Si's three son's away to hard labor camps. The local Japanese commander (Hibino Akira) is at Lao Si's house to claim the sons. The old man is desperate to maintain his family line. He wants his young daughter-in-law to be impregnated, and since her husband (Dong Lianghai) is impotent, he gets the marriage annulled so one of the younger sons can step in and do the job.

The second son Lao Er (Yuan Liguo) decides to flee the house to join the guerrillas instead. The timid youngest son Lao San (Liu Di) tries to do what his father wants but fails before they are taken away. Things get more complicated when later Lao San escapes labor camp and is nursed back to health by the long-suffering, mostly silent wife Kun (Yan Bingyan. In the closeness of her nursing Lao San back to health, he does get her pregnant. Then Lao Er reappears and nearly kills Kun "out of jealousy and disgust" at this event. After Kun is pregnant, Lao Si arrabged a quick cover marriage between her and the mentally handicapped son of the village elder statesman.

All of this is grim but also not without its comic side. The use of long takes, the austere style, lengthily focused on menial tasks by Kun in the grubby, dark, unheated interiors of Lao Si's farmstead, and the stoical behavior make this a prime example of slow cinema. One early scene where a man and a woman, heavily bundled up against the cold, sit and stare mutely at each other for at least five minutes, almost lost me.

Tsui points out this film is represented by Rediance and that it is the Beijing outfit that "helped bring Cai Chengjie's black-and-white supernatural satire The Widowed Witch (a.k.a.Shaman) and Hu Bo's soul-shattering An Elephant Sitting Still to international prominence last year." They may not have quite that kind of luck this time.

Also reviewed at Rotterdam by Wendy Ide for Screen Daily.

Winter After Winter('Dong Qu Dong You Lai'), 110 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, showing in at least five other international festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
NYAFF showtime:
Friday, July 5
3:00 PM

ZHANG JIAJIA: SEE YOU TOMORROW 擺渡人 (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/SU6.jpg
TONY CHIU-WAI LEUNG AND TAKESHI KANESHIRO IN SEE YOU TOMORROW


[IMDb:]
The story follows Chen Mo (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), the bar owner and 'ferryman', as he is slowly facing his own traumatic past, whilst helping the people around him, including his co-partner Guan Chun (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the singer Ma Li (Eason Chan) and the neighbor Xiao Yu (Angelababy).
[Wikipedia:]
See You Tomorrow (Chinese: 擺渡人) is a 2016 Chinese-Hong Kong romantic comedy film directed by Chinese writer Zhang Jiajia in his directorial debut and produced and written by Wong Kar-wai with Alibaba Pictures.[5][6][7] It is based loosely on Zhang's own best-selling book Passing From Your World in the collection I Belonged to You.[8] It stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Angelababy.[3] Filming started in July 2015.[9] It was released in China by Alibaba Pictures on December 23 , 2016.[10].

No full-length review will be available of this film at the moment.

PARK NOO-RI: MONEY 돈 (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/$5$$.jpg
RYU JEON-YEOL AND YOO JI-TAE IN MONEY

Temptation

Money is a deliciously fresh, and a little raw, depiction of fast and shifty stock brokering and white collar high crimes and misdemeanors from Korea. Director Park Noo-ri has made a stunning feature debut, and Ryu Jeon-yeol's electric, nimble performance in the lead shows why he's a rising star.

As a new take on Oliver Stone's Wall Street from Korea, this movie ramps up the action to physical and high crime in the second half. While close to the Wall Street trajectory, its glossy big spender trappings make one think more of Scorsese's later The Wolf of. . . But everything is updated further here, and a smoothness with the latest technology. Money is already attracting interest in various quarters. There is a lengthy-ish piece on it in Cinema Escapist.

When fledgling broker Cho Il-hyun (Ryu Jun-yeol) comes to work selling stocks at Yeouido, Seoul's financial district, they call him Raspberry because his parents have a raspberry farm. He's fresh, energetic, and ready but very green. The early tipping point comes when Choi can't understand a rapidly mumbled phone order - but won't admit it - and, guessing wrong, loses a client fifty thousand dollars by buying when he was supposed to sell. This draws the attention of devious and shadowy fund manager Ticket (Yoo Ji-tae, Oldboy) who starts feeding him illicit insider deals using thumb drives that he throws in the river when the lucrative deal is done. His first such deal is a $50 million trade that nets Cho $1.4 million, instantly delivering him a whole new lifestyle and a whole new outlook. He ditches his old girlfriend for Park Si-eun (Won Jin-ah), a slick babe who's a fellow broker and introduces him to bespoke suits and other posh accoutrements. Cho steps forward from another young, handsome broker who's to the manner born, but isn't doing so much himself.

Cho is being tracked by an insidious and persistent investigator at Korea’s securities regulator - the sticky, troublesome Han Ji-chul (Jo Woo-jin), who repeatedly feeds Cho photos of himself in compromising situations, seemingf as much blackmailer as a law officer. Ticket urges Cho to act confident and says Han's creepy sub rosa snooping only shows his organization hasn't got a solid case.

As Richard Yu points out in his discussion of Money in the new global (and Asian-focused) online review Cinema Escapist, Cho hasn't the heft or even the interest as a character of the now iconic Gordon "Greed is good" Gekko memorably played by Michael Douglas. For all his energy, Cho seems barely more than a schoolboy compared to some of the brawny, driven financial manipulators in American Wall Street movies.

But we must bear in mind that Money is conceived throughout more as a slow-burn crime thriller, and, as Yu acknowledges, is still ultimately thrilling and fun to watch, without the big speeches or hefty characters but with good actors, a nifty script, and an elegant score.

At the public screening there will be a Q&A with director Park Noo-ri and lead actor Ryu Jun-yeol, and the latter will receive the Screen International Rising Star Asia Award.

Money 돈 (Don), 115 mins., released in South Korea and the US in March 2019. Also released in Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF. Billed as the New York Premiere, but according to an online review in J.B. Spins, it opened in Queens and New Jersey May 29.
NYAFF showtime:
Showtimes
July 6
6:00 PM

This will become available on streaming in the Us via Amazon Prime or Netflix in future.

KIM TAE-KYUN: DARK FIGURE OF CRIME 암수살인 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/dfc5.jpg
KIM YOON-SEOK, JU JI-HOON IN DARK FIGURE OF CRIME

The crazy killer and the dedicated investigator

This is a police procedural with a difference. The term "dark figure of crime" alludes to the mass of unsolved crimes, particularly murders, that continually accumulates. On the one hand it's the story of the fierce psychological confrontation between a detective, chief inspector Kim Hyung-min (Kim Yoon-seok) and a multiple killer, Kang Tae-oh (Ju Ji-hoon, and the lengthy teasing cat and mouse game as this plays out. On the other hand it the story of inspector Kim's extraordinary dedication to solving a series of unsolved murders in order not so much to achieve additional convictions, but to bring some kind of resolution to the families involved. Both Kim and the younger Ju, it must be said, are actors at the top of their game, with different acting styles. Kim is restrained, Ju flashy. Sometimes Ju's histrionics are extreme, but they are ridiculously entertaining. It's fun what he can do just with a pair of light-responsive glasses.

Kang entices Kim to visit him in prison and eventually to repeatedly give him gifts and bribes to earn his cooperation. He is in prison for killing his girlfriend, but starts confessing to a list of others, which Kim doggedly investigates, ably assisted by detective Jo (Jin Seon-kyo, also good). The tedium, and detail, of the film's investigative passages is regularly relieved by Kim's repeat visits to Kang in prison, which are not only dramatically entertaining, but each time alter the focus as new details come out.

It becomes evident that Kang has a strategy, that questions about statutes of limitations about his alleged earlier murders will enable him to appeal his original murder conviction and get a shortened sentence, or release. But through luck for Kim, Kang is instead convicted of another murder, and his sentence is changed from fifteen years to life. He subsequently commits suicide in prison. But Kim goes on seeking the solve the other murders.

The message, I guess, is that police work is not a product but a process. Inspector Kim is a model of tirelessness that makes this no ordinary police procedural. Kim Yoon-seok has said that this is his favorite of the numerous detective roles he has played. Surprisingly, this is Kim Tae-kyun's feature film directorial debut: it's a pro effort all the way.

The film is reportedly loosely inspired by the 869th episode of "Unanswered" [ko], a South Korean investigation television program recounting true events of unreported murders in Korea's second city, Busan.

Dark Figure of Crime has not been reviewed in any major US trade journal but covered in Joongang Daily September 17 and View of Korean Cinema November 7, 2018. Described in detail by Hayley Scanlon in Windows on Worlds.

Dark Figure of Crime 암수살인 (lit. Unknown Murders), 110 mins., won two Korean awards for best screenplay and one nomination for best lead actor. It was released in Korea Oct. 3, 2018. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
NYAFF Showtimes
Saturday, July 6
9:00 PM

AMP WONG, JI ZHAO: WHITE SNAKE 白蛇：緣起 (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/sn5ake.jpg
WHITE SNAKE AND HER SISTER VERTA IN WHITE SNAKE

A big Chinese animation sweetens an ancient legend

White Snake is a new animation that's reportedly been big box office in China. (Wikipedia says it's directed by Huang Jiakang, Zhao Wei, and Da Mao.) This is a kind of "Disneyfied take" (as a Letterboxd contributor puts it) on the traditional folkloric White Snake story that people of Chinese culture know from stories, theater, traditional opera, paintings, and other media. There are of course many different variations of the story, and a Wikipedia article on the legend lists ten film versions, of which this is the latest. There is even a DC Comics version, and a commemorative Swatch watch with green and white snake hands. The full Chinese title, "White Snake: Origin" suggests this is intended as the start of an animation franchise. And why not? It's touching, it's dazzling, and it's fun.

The film tells the love story of White Snake aka Blanca, a pretty girl with big Keane-sentimental girl eyes and demonic powers, and and a cute young man with a stylish top knot bun (think early Takeshi Kaneshiro), Xu Xian (or Xuan, who's a snake catcher. It's the end of the Tang Dynasty, the world is on the verge of chaos, and the national rulers have ordered the snakes to be arrested (eradicated?) in the country. White Snake falls into the water and Xuan rescues her, but she has lost her memory. They go to a big jade repair shop because she has a jade hairpin whose magical functions she wants to understand, and have restored. Xuan is enamored: he doesn't want to care that she's probably a demon. (She definitely is, but she likes him too.) The couple actually kiss and make sweet love, before things go dramatically wrong due to the wars of good and evil forces going on around. They pass through a town where there are a lot of poor, starving people they refer to as "refugees." They meet White Snake's sister Verta (Green Snake). And they have other adventures, where the animators pull out all their tricks, lots of effects too elaborate to mention. The Tao, the I Ching, Kung Fu, Yin and Yang, the Buddha, and other staples of Chinese culture are evoked, at least in the English subtitles.

Another Letterboxd commentator says the characters in this film "often feel very weightless, which lessens the intensity of the action sequences," and that is very true. Everything is softened and sweetened here, and the character literally bounce as if they had no weight, while not having much personal substance either, because everything is a bit sweetened. But that makes it go down easy. Later, during the adventures, things grow much more complicated. There is a vast war of worlds, a clash of powers one can't just call good and evil. But the filmmakers have their audience in mind, and so ultimately this is a sweet love story. The storyline neatly ties together with a kiss, and eternal love-longing.

In order to remain with Blanca, Xuan eventually gets changed into a demon, but only a weak one, in his normal form but with the tail of his dog, Doudo, who has started to talk, much to his chagrin (a funny moment), and is a demon too. Going rather in the opposite direction, Blanca turns into a giant white python, but she eventually fails in all her battles and turns back into Blanca, minus her powers.

A recent Variety article points out there is a "huge potential market" for animation in China, but a lack of good training for its production in the schools and universities. The budget for this film is extremely large for an animation by Chinese standards but also shows how much the country still lags behind Hollywood in this field. The $12 million spent on White Snake is paltry compared with $142 million for Kung Fu Panda 3, $146 million for Zootopia and $152 million for Toy Story 3. (In my view, however, the most original and interesting animations are very often the low budget ones made independently, in some unexpected corner of the world. And for all its gorgeousness, White Snake never strays beyond the mainstream.)

White Snake 白蛇：緣起 ("White Snake: Origin"), 99 mins., debuted Jan. 2019 in China and premiered June 10, 2019 at Annecy, the main western animation festival venue. English and Mandarin versions have reportedly been released in Canada and the US. Shown in Fantasia Fest in Canada July 2019 and also at the NYAFF, and at the latter it was screened for this review.

Showing at the NYAFF:
NYAFF showtime:
Sunday, July 6
1;30 PM

LEON LE: SONG LANG (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/sng2.jpg
ISAAC AND LIEN BINH PHAT IN SONG LANG

Gorgeous Vietnamese melodrama of sadness, loneliness and art

"Song Lang takes place during the peak of our cải lương scene, which in the 70s-80s was a big form of theater entertainment for all classes. It pays considerable amount of respect to the genre, making it the vehicle to bring our two leads together. the movie evidently draws heavy inspiration from the great Wong Kar-wai, so much so that some of these shots and set designs looked like they were pulled straight out of Happy Together (1997), a very appropriate inspiration considering the type of romantic relationship both films chose to focus on." - tap in Letterboxd.

Part of the charm of the quietly enchanting Song Lang is that it is in its own way almost as artificial as a cải lương performance. We have the strong silent type, Dung 'Thunderbolt' (Lien Binh Phat), who's a real softie underneath the tough facade and whose father turns out to have been a folk opera performer, but has been hardened by growing up largely alone. And there's the ostensibly "soft" and sensitive Linh Phung (Isaac), the young cải lương lead performer, who's brave enough to face off a bunch of toughs. They're really much alike, both in their way performers, both beautiful and lonely Vietnamese men. In fact they even look alike, and so they are, strangely, drawn together when Dung comes to collect a debt from Linh Phung, but then sees a performance and later takes Linh in when he conveniently gets drunk, in a fight, and forgets his key on a night when the electricity goes off.

Is this really inspired by Wong Kar-wai and even his sad gay odyssey Happy Together as the Letterboxd contributor says? I don't know. But isn't it nice to think so? The cinematography is not kinetic like Christopher Doyle's for Wong, and rather, is on the static side, like the series of colorful tableaux that take place in the cải lương performances we are treated to in the film. But Song Lang is saturated with soft, subtle colors (those yellows! those greens! those golds!) as subtly as a Wong film, or perhaps something more Southeast Asian. Every scene, every shot, is a delight to the eye, and indeed Song Lang's "never more glorious" Eighties Saigon, though frequently poor and hot, is as romantic and unbearably moody as the saddest and most beautiful of Wong settings.

It turns out Bob Nguyen, the cinematographer, is Australian, like Doyle, but grew up not knowing his work. But as he tells in an article of his own, Leon Le is in fact a big fan of Wong. The wonderful saturation comes from Nguyen's effort with digital means to create the quality of 16mm Fujifilm stock using an Alexa mini camera and a special set of lenses. Our eyes are drawn into each richly lighted scene through the choice of 3:2 aspect ratio.

With its attention to glorious looking people and richly visualized scenes, Song Lang is indeed primarily a homage to a time and place, and a mood piece. As its action draws toward a climax it seems to be constantly slowing down to a still point (the cross-editing of tragic stage performance and tragic action is excruciating). This may be because while now it is moving toward the sad and terrible, earlier it was drawing toward the unmentionable. The homoerotic theme of Happy Together is only timidly touched upon here. But what else could be going on? Only here the love that dare not say its name dare not be thought of.

It's a mood piece also because director Leon Le, who, as he revealed in a recent interview with Ada Tseng in the LA Times, once himself actually dreamed of being in a Vietnamese folk opera, and wants to dwell on the mood of the second upsurge of interest in this form thirty-odd years ago. Hence there are several sequences when we get a good look at an evening of cải lương with Isaac as Linh Phung actually performing in two or three different roles, in full costume. The music is, for an outsider, surprisingly accessible and pleasing. We are allowed to soak up the atmosphere. That matters at least as much as the action. The lovely light and colors tell us that.

Until the end - which brings things to a tragic conclusion, and is so terribly beautiful and sad!

Song Lang, 101 mins., opened in Vietnam Aug. 2018, festival debut Hanoi Oct., showing in at least five other international festivals including NYAFF, where it was screened for this review.
NYAFF Showtimes:
Sunday, July 7
6:30 PM

SABU: MR. LONG ミスター・ロン (RYU SAN) (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/POI.jpg
CHANG CHEN IN MR. LONG

Strong silent type

Mr. Long is a unique, perplexing, and rather uneven kind of pleasure. Its star, Chang Chen, an actor who excels at both martial arts and cooking, as does the lead character he plays, originally starred in the 1991 Edward Yang classic A Brighter Summer Day and subsequently worked with Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Ang Lee. His near-silent performance as "Mr. Long" in Sabu's eponymous film he's been compared to those of Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone Westerns. But the personality he project made me think back rather to "Caine, who wanders the earth," the David Carradine "Kung Fu" TV hero of the early Seventies. Something of the inner wisdom is there, though Mr. Long ("Ryo-san" is the original title))isn't shaven-headed like Caine but has a big swatch of hair down one side of his forehead. Ryo-san is a Taiwanese hitman so confident he wipes out a crowd of baddies with nothing but a short knife. This makes for a different kind of wipeout scene.

Owen Gleiberman in Variety points out there is "a tradition, if not a huge one, of movies that feature heroes who are too cool to speak" (Leone's Eastwood), and "Ryo-san" partakes of this tradition (Mark Shilling of Japan Times alludes to this also in his review). The silence is partly due to linguistic limitations, the hitman having been sent to Tokyo but only speaking Chinese. Chang Chen has also been compared to early Johnny Depp here (when he still had the indie cred), and that's partly right. There's something familiar about Chang Chen's face, the more haunting because he doesn't speak to detract from what the face may say to us.

And Sabu is a different kind of Japanese filmmaker (himself a former actor turned director) who indulges his own tastes, moves at his own pace, and, others have said, can really touch you, but also can try your patience and pour on the sugar. There are aspects of Mr Long too manipulative not to be glaring. But there is no denying that the film's odd, meandering byways are interesting and often original to follow if one has the patience, which, at 129 minutes, can be a strain, however.

Ryo-san gets sidetracked, and stuck in Tokyo, because when he's ordered to so another hit, of a bleach-blond baddie in a casino, it doesn't go at all well. In fact he winds up without money or passport, in a gunny sack, being kicked down a hill. He rolls away and saves himself and takes refuge on the outskirts of town, in wrecked buildings, where he encounters a little boy who will be his talisman and companion. The boy is experienced as a caretaker, being in sole charge of his drug addict mother Lily (excellent newcomer Yiti Yao), a still-beautiful ex-yakuza call girl very far down on her luck. His plan is to take a mob boat out of Yokohama, and he has to scrap together the money however he can.

There's nothing here but Ryon-san starts putting things together. The movie is partly a guide to self-sufficiency. This is what makes this hero so compelling. He boils some onions, and the result is delicious. Before long a miscellaneous group of neighbors, a chorus, or maybe just a singularly obvious deus ex machina, comes along to set Ryo-san up Tampopo-like making Taiwan beef noodles from a cart in front of the local temple. They know he barely speaks, never Japanese. That's acknowledged as what makes him cool. When he's not killing people, he's not only resourceful, but a pretty nice guy, if you don't mind his silence.

He has a good effect on the kid and his mom, if you don't mind the child labor: he becomes the on-site dishwasher and general helper for the noodle cart. It's only for a few days, and Ryo-san is refilling both his karma bank and his pocketbook, gathering the ship's passage to Taiwan. The rituals of the food-preparation, Lily's detoxiing under Ryo-san's tough administrations (he simply ties her up, and feeds her broth), and the giddy silliness of the gang of neighbors accumulate. The neighbors are fillers to break the zen monotony, and even perform in a local traditional folk theatrical contest (they're terrible, and come in third).

Eventually the bad guys come back, or course (we've been waiting and waiting for them), in the form mainly of Lily's yakuza handler. You can guess what will happen, but not all the details or the flashbacks that show who Jun's father was, and what happened to him and to Lily earlier - or, above all, what will happen later after Ryo-san has made it back for a while to Kaohsiung City, a massive port town in southern Taiwan. Prepare to shed a tear in spite of yourself.

Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) is a Japanese actor turned filmmaker. He has a second film included in the 2019 NYAFF, the omnibus film Jam.

Mr. Long ミスター・ロン (Ryu san), 129 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 13 Feb. 2017 and at least nine subsequent showings at international festivals have taken place. Released in Japan in 2017 and Italy 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF in July 2019.
NYAFF Showtime:
Monday, July 8
9:15 PM

LEE CHEUK-PAN: G AFFAIRS (G SAAT) G殺 (2019)


http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/gAff.png
HANNA CHAN IN G AFFAIRS

Hong Kong through a glass, darkly

This is one of those disapproving visions of urban corruption that makes everything look glamorous. Lee Cheuk-pan's debut Hong Kong feature won a raft of awards for its original and ravishingly stylish look at moral decay in a city it describes as "rotting," getting worse, but pretty on the top. Joining things together, besides the six people having some connection to the flying severed head that appears in the jaw-dropping opening shot, is the letter "G." The film playfully rings changes on the letter in a series of segments. G Major is the key of Bach's opening solo cello suite which the boy studying at the posh St Cassions school is constantly practicing in his little apartment, a scene often returned to that provides a still point of calm and beauty, if a fragile one. It's he who's faced with the flying head, along with the man who turns out to have "requisitioned" his apartment.

G words that appear on screen are Gut, Gastric Cancer, Groaning, Girdle, Gay, Gum, Gustav (Mahler and Klimt), Gospel, and finally GF, as the cello boy links with a girl he's long been eyeing in the ambiguous penultimate shot. There's a dog called Gustav, but that's deemed too pretentious and his name is changed to "Guts." Fancy G-word, simple G-word.

Simultaneously this is a crime drama and an experiment in self-conscious fractured narrative, one that takes the time to provide plenty of gorgeous, richly colored urban images. If Hong Kong is really doomed as the film suggests, this makes an elegant liebestod. Besides the letter G, a voiceover narration holds the fragments together, as do the constant references to the city.

The tall, pale schoolboy perfecting his Bach is Tai (pale, sculptural newcomer Lam Sen). As he's playing his cello, a man lets in a prostitute and, pulling her hair back savagely, fucks her, while Tai goes on. It's then that the severed head flies in. (This is, by the way, Apartment 6G.) The police come and question Tai, who claims amnesia.

Tai and his St. Cassians classmate Don (Kyle Li) turn out to have been drawn into criminal doings, and Tai's flat has been taken over by a very corrupt cop, Lung (Chapman To of Tsui Wai-kyung's two Infernal Affairs cop movies). Lung's wife dies of gastric cancer and he hooks up with a glamorous but jaded Mainland sex worker, Xao Mei ((Huang Lu)), whose red lipstick and red dress are screen poetry thanks to Karl Tam's lovely cinematography.

Also important is Yu Ting (Hanna Chan), a classmate of Tai and Don and the daughter of Lung, who is smart but constantly bullied. ( "I'm not liked, but I don't care," her voiceover declares.) Yu Ting seems pure as the driven snow, till she becomes involved giving blow jobs to the straitlaced "Christian" teacher Markus (Alan Yuk) and a scandal ensues. (There doesn't seem to be a G-word for cunnilingus, alas.) This event shows there is decadence behind the prim school uniforms the youths in the story are always wearing.

Even though I watched this film under conditions considerably less than ideal, I was impressed by both the sensibility and the style. I almost felt I might be in the presence of a talent worthy of Wong Kar-wai and with the same unique, fractured vision, sui generis, heavy with conceits and eroticism. One must admire the well-worked out screenplay of Kurt Chiang Chung-yu as well as what Richard Kuipers in his admiring Variety review refers to as "Barfuss Hui’s outstanding stream-of-consciousness editing," not to mention Joe Ng's deft score, which neatly traces, and guides us in following, the film's mercurial mood-shifts.

One to watch - not just the film, but the director. This is yet another calling card for Hon Kong's maintaining its unique identity and independence, now again in question.

In Cantonese.

G Affairs/G saat, G殺105 mins., debuted theatrically in Hong Kong and Taiwan in Nov. 2018 and in Japan in Mar. 2019. It has appeared in three festivals: Osaka, Mar. 2019; Fantasia, and NYAFF Jul. 2019. Screened for this review at the latter.
NYAFF Showtimes
Tuesday, July 9
6:30 PM

TRAILER

KATSUMI NOJIRI: LYING TO MOM 鈴木家の嘘 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/LyMm.jpg

An unpalatable death in the family

"The Suzuki Family Lies" is the more discreet Japanese title of this first feature by Katsumi Nojiri, whose focus on a family coping with the death by suicide of one of its members. Nojiri had this happen with his own brother, and the screenplay is his. This film is a scattershot treatment of the grieving process. There are Kubler-Ross's stages and then some: Nojiri throws the book at the situation. This means it's not particularly realistic - though it's hard to find the humor that some see here. Brevity is the soul of wit. This screenplay is shapeless, roundabout, and heavy-handed. Good ensemble work helps shore it together, but it's much too long.

The pivotal event is the suicide of Koichi (international star Ryo Kase), number one son of indeterminate age (Kase's in his forties, like the director), who's been a "hikikomori" home recluse for some time. When his doting mother Yukio (Hideko Hara) discovers him hanging from the ceiling, it's too much and in her shock she collapses into a coma. She comes to in the hospital with no memory of this trauma and her husband Sachio (Ittoku Kishibe) decides to keep the truth hidden, with cooparation from their daughter Fumi (Mai Kiryo), whose relation with Koichi was complicated, and also his brother Hitochi (Nao Ohmori), who's to pretend Koichi went to work with him in Argentina while Yukio was unconscious.

This leads to such lengths as getting everybody color coordinated Che Guevara T shirts (because Che was born in Argentina) and a colleague sending letters composed by Fumi actually from Argentina, and so on. Of course eventually the time comes when the pretense can hold no more and Yukio finds a sign that Koichi is gone for good.

This process is the mere pretext for explorations of anger, grief, and discovery. There's a strange insurance policy including a certain "Eve," and the father's trips to a brothel, Fumi's relations with group grief counseling sessions, a visit from an obviously fake "medium." If you think of Japanese manners as low keyed and repressed, their personality as shy, scenes here will belie those notions. The most histrionic moments come at the grief circle with Fumi, and the rich woman who offers everyone her homemade pickles and dominates the whole group with her loud intercessions. Eventually Fumi pulls out all the dramatic stops and expresses her anger, and then her guilt, with the group and with the family respectively. There is also consideration of the nature and meaning of death, and where Koichi "went" and so on, especially given that neither Buddhists nor Christians will accept his ashes (though the insurance company pays). And there's the bat that flies around in Koichi's room - like his not-yet-departed spirit - get it?

All this is very interesting, I suppose, if you have the patience for it randomly by itself and are willing to be looking at a grab bag treatment of the subject matter. But the tonal shifts, narrative twists and turns, and numerous unexpected and unnecessary flashbacks mar the artistic structure, assuming there is any. In his Japan Times review Mark Shilling suggests this film "recycles tried-and-true formulas of the local family drama genre." That doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, and the mere fact that "isn't as heavy as you'd expect" (which is open to question) doesn't help much. Still, it might have worked better with a whole lot more thorough editing.

Lying to Mom 鈴木家の嘘/Suzuki-ke no uso, 133 mins., debuted at Tokyo Oct 28, 2018, releasing in Japan Nov. 16. It also showed in the Nippon International and NYAFF, and was screened at the latter (the North American Premiere) for this review.
Showtimes
Wednesday, July 10
6:00 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/lklklk.jpg

KIM YOON-SEOK: ANOTHER CHILD 미성년(2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/kKJ.jpg
KIM HYE-UN AND PARK SE-JIN IN ANOTHER CHILD

Two teenage girls struggle through their dysfunctional parents' affair and an unplanned pregnancy

This directorial debut by new Korean director (and previously well-known actor) Kim Yoon-seok confronts adultery and the results of an unplanned pregnancy mainly (but not exclusively) from the point of view of two teenage girls "caught in the crossfire." They are not friends, but go to the same school. When the daughter of the woman who has become pregnant by the other girl's father Ju-ri (Kim Hye-jun) finds out about it, she gets in touch with Yoon-ah (Park Se-jin), the adulterous man's daughter.

Ju-ri's married father Kwon Dae-won (played by directorKim himself) is having an affair with Yoon-ah's single mother Kim Mi-hee (Kim So-jin), who owns and runs a restaurant specializing in duck. After she's found out what's happening by spotting her father with Kim Mi-hee , Jun-ri snatches her phone from Yooh-ah to tell Yooh-ah's mother, Yeong-ju (Yum Jung-ah), about the affair.

This may momentarily suggest an alliance of wronged children, but note that it starts with a provocative gesture, and that the two girls were not friends to start with. Since the two girls represent, as it were, different interests in the affair, hostility develops off and on, till there is an alliance again after events have gone badly for the parents. It takes time and events for a sympathy to develop. No one seems to seek help. No collective wisdom comes into play, including, except for one confession scene with Yeong-ju, the church.

Kim Mi-hee decides to have the baby, meaning Yoon-ah is going to have a (much younger) sibling (the girls are around 17). But then Yu-ri's mother Yeong-ju (Yum Jung-ah) has a violent run-in with Mi-hi that seems to precipitate a premature birth. At first the girls become excited by the idea of the baby, a boy, kept in an incubator, but the boy does not survive. As this goes on Dae-won's marriage and his career as well seem to disintegrate, but he doesn't agree to see the mother again.

I think Yoon Min-sik, who wrote about this film for The Korea Herald, is right when she says of the younger actresses playing the daughters that "the chemistry is incredibly good and believable and that director Kim keeps Dae-won from becoming "a generic slimy bastard." However I had trouble getting any foothold on the action. It doesn't seem that Yoon min-sik's defense that the film "is not about what the characters are going to do or what is going on in the story, but their experience and how it affects their lives" quite makes sense. We in the audience have to deal with what happens in the film. (Yoon grants that the film "may not have the strongest story" and lacks catharsis.) And the final gesture with the baby's ashes, in he moment depicted in the picture above, seemed extremely strange and in vary dubious taste, the girls' sudden hilarity arrived at far too quickly. There are good moments here, and numerous encounters between people where sparks fly. But more work is needed next time from actor turned director Kim in the script and editing departments.

Another Child 미성년, 96 mins., debuted 11 Apr. 2019 in Korea; opening 4 July in Singapore. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
NYAFF Showtime:
Thursday, July 11
8:30 PM

WANG LINA: A FIRST FAREWELL 第一次的离别 (2018)


http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/lim.jpg
KALBINUR AND ISA IN A FIRST FAREWELL

Growing up and saying goodbye

The Uyghur people are a persecuted muslim minority in China. Filmmaker Wang Lina, whose debut feature this is, provides an intimate, beautiful picture of a vanishing life. She focuses on children living in a village on the edge of a desert in Xinjiang Autonomous Province. It's not idyllic, but there are moments of great sweetness and beauty. Begin with the sharp, alert features of the main character, Isa Yasan, a boy of ten or so.

Isa, an adorable, sweet, earnest youth. The youngest son of a goat-herding family, he helps his father (Yasan Kasimu) with farm work, herding goats, feeding animals, picking cotton. He also tends to his mother (Ugulem Sugur). An (meningitis) has made her not only deaf and mute, but mentally handicapped in some way that's not quite clear. Isa loves her very much. But one day on his watch she escapes and wanders off. He goes all over rather desperately looking for her. Isa's mom is a worry, and his father wants to put her in a nursing home. (So there is one, somewhere.) Isa goes to school, but maybe not enough. It seems he needs to learn Mandarin better. (We see him briefly in a class, where all chant under an instructor.) But it is the increasing imposition of Mandarin that is cutting off the Uyghurs from their own culture.

Isa spends his free time with his best girl friend, Kalbinur Rahmati, and they have a baby lamb they raise together. Moments they spend together are priceless. Filmmaker Wang Lina captures magic in this and some other scenes of A First Farewell, whose theme is that the world is somewhat leaving Isa behind. We see his older brother Moosa (Moosa Yasan) leave to further his education. This puts more burden of work on Isa. and what of his education, his future? But when we see him lovingly feed milk to a baby goat from a bottle, the moment is all.

Another priceless time is when Kalbinur is picking cotton with her parents (Tajigul Heilmeier and Rahmati Kranmu) and her father sings a poem he wrote for her mother. Kalbinur groves with it in a way that expresses the spirit of all music. And then her mother jokes and teases. Yet Kalbinur says they fight so much she's afraid they will divorce.

This film made me think of the incredible and somehow similar though more strictly documentary, Honeyland (ND/NF), a remarkable feat of humanistic ethnographic documentary filmmaking, which is coming to regular theaters soon (Friday, July 26, 2019). A First Farewell is as remarkable in its own way, more personal, and more staged, but also about a threatened, remote way of life seen from the inside. The filmmaker herself dedicates this poetic film to her own hometown of Shaya in Xinjiang.

There is a Variety review by Richard Kuipers, who relates this stylistically to "fine Iranian films such as Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise (1999) and noting that it's primarily geared for young viewers, while also "offering plenty" for adults who "to read between the lines." Indeed its simply, poignant, authentic scenes offer much to ponder, while bypassing Chinese censorship that would have been aroused by reference to the political issues of YUyghur life.

This film is a gem, and there is a top notch team behind it. The editing was by Matthieu Laclau, of Ash Is Purest White, the cool, understated score by Xi Wen, and the cinematography, shot over the period of a year, by dp Li Yong.

A First Farewell 第一次的离别 (Di yi ci de li bie), 86 mins. debuted at Tokyo Oct. 2018 (winning the Asian Future best film award) and also showed at the Berlinale Feb. 2019 and winning the Crystal Bear of the Generation Kplus section there. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF. In Uyghur and Mandarin.
NYAFF Showtime:
Thursday, July 11
6:00 PM

LE VAN KIET: FURIE/ HAI PHUONG(2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/phuo.jpg
VERONICA NGO IN FURIE

Vietnamese superstar Veronica Ngo headlines as a mother looking for her kidnapped daughter in genre maestro Le-Van Kiet’s latest crime thriller.

VARIETY review by Elizabeth Kerr: "Another kidnapped child, another parent on a quest for revenge and/or justice. This time around the parent in question is a struggling Vietnamese single mom in writer-director Le-Van Kiet's Furie, a modest but engagingly familiar actioner that has just a fresh enough point of view to make it worth a look for fight fans. ...[an] ideal mix of fisticuffs, a wholly watchable lead, and being a selection from a country we see too little from outside Asia."

I found the shots of local landscape, rice paddies, greenery, wetland, and bush, and the villages just small enough to see crowded without having many people, very attractive and exotic, really feeling "Vietnamese," as if I knew what that was. I didn't find the villains attractive, and I found the heroine's struggle dogged rather than exciting. It was not I story that kept on giving.

BAI XUE: THE CROSSING 过春天 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/gdgs.jpg
HUANG YAO IN THE CROSSING

Coming of age dangerously, between Hong Kong and China

Cath Clark of the The Guardian oddly sees this as an "elegantly elliptical arthouse movie" with "echoes of Sophia Coppola" that captures "the impulsiveness and impatience of teenagers." There is elegance in the bright color and intense, cool action, but this is "arthouse" only in the sense of avoiding conventional selling points like sex and violence. Bai Xue, in this distinctive, relentless, sometimes beautiful debut, seems almost too eager to show her no-nonsense, non-stop focus on action and process. This isn't about "teenagers" so much as a girl ambitious beyond her years and driven deep into risk-taking by the freedom of her situation. She is half Hong Kong, half-Mainland, one parent from each place.. As is typical in such cases, called danfei according the Clarance Tsui in his Hollywood Reporter review, Peipei (Huang Yao) lives (or sleeps) - a typical arrangement, Tsui says, in Mainland China, crossing over from Shenzhen to Hong Kong for school every day.

The girlish school uniform she wears every day provides perfect cover for what develops: Peipei becomes a mule, smuggling new iPhones to the Mainland. Her ostensible aim is to make money for a Christmas trip that Peipei and Jo (Carmen Song), her "poor little rich girl" best school gf, want to take to Japan. There, they excitedly imagine themselves on holiday sipping sake in saunas looking out at a snowy mountain. It's a fantasy. The reality is that the danger, the recognition of her special knack (her schoolgirl invisibility), and the excess of money earned, provide frantic compensation for the emptiness of her emotional life. Her mother (Ni Hongjie) drinks and plays mahjong all day. Her father works at night in a warehouse. Neither provides that warmth and support a child needs.

It is hard to know who's more driven, the young protagonist or the first-time c0-writer-director Bai Xue, who seems equally bent on impressing with her no-nonsense coolness and relentless focus on insider worlds. This film would have been a bit better leavened by the occasional pause for breath - that is, beyond the few pointed freeze-frames used here to underline that Peipei has crossed another line into the danger zone. But both actress and filmmaker impress with their complete assurance.

Alan Hunter (Screen Daily) describes Mrs Hua (Carmen Soup), the smuggling boss whom young Peipei, just turned sixteen, goes to work for, as "a 21st century Fagin with her own gang of thieving boys." An amusing idea, but Mrs Hua' is more like a treacherous, potentially dangerous den mother, supervising loosely a program of dangerous fun - perhaps an exploitation of that "impulsiveness and impatience of teenagers" Cath Clark spoke of, in which Peipei as her new pet. The more pivotal, subtly accumulating, attachment is the restrained but intense one between Peipei and her more experienced fellow smuggler Hao (Sunny Sun), whose ambitions extend beyond soldiering for Mrs Hua. Hao was Peipei's gf's bf, so when she takes a jaunt up the mountain with him that has a romantic, fun edge, there's going to be blowback.

And since this is a movie that's Peipei's non-stop action and very insistently does not pause for breath, the most memorable scene is the one, in a small room all lit in red, when Hao secretly prepares Peipei for a bigger, more dangerous crossing in a scene that's very intimate, the more so for not being (overtly) sexual or romantic.

It is this teasing closeness, one realizes, the epitomizes The Crossing as a whole. It's perpetually too intimate, perpetually crossing over some kind of line whose seriousness this ambitious, wayward schoolgirl is too inexperienced to sense and be frightened by. As is often the case, Huang Yao is by a fair margin older than her character, but she rarely gives that away. She is very good. So is Sunny Sun as Hao, close but always a big heartbeat away. Props to the filmmaker and dp Piao Songri for shooting constantly in the tumultuous, crowded settings so essential to this story: Mrs Hua's boisterous young crew of boys (well differentiated), the noisy classrooms, and the crowds on trains and at the border; and to the deft editing of Matthieu Laclau (a Jia Zhang-ke regular) that maintains the seamless rhythm and flow.

The Crossing 过春天 (Guo Chun Tian), 99 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2018, also showing at Pinyao, Berlin, Dublin and Osaka. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
Friday Jul 12, 6:00pm (Beatrice Theatre, SVA Theatre)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/XXing.jpg

YI OK-SEOP: MAGGIE 메기 (2018)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/M9.jpg
KOO KYO-HWAN IN MAGGIE

The fragility of trust

This first feature film uses as its springboard an X-ray photograph of two people caught in the act of having sex, but then spirals out into a story which takes in a talking fish, a relationship breakdown and a series of freak geological events in Seoul. The director is riffing on the idea of how misunderstandings snowball, but, without a solid central idea to anchor the wackiness, the exuberantly nonsensical chaos of this movie is likely to have only niche appeal. - Wendy Ide, Screen Daily.

ven the director's name, Yi Ok-seop, will have only niche appeal. However, there is something to be said, from the festival-goer's or cinephile's point of view, for niche appeal movies. They can be excellent palate-cleansers. And though the material here is fragile and lightweight, the thing, for the most part, of youthful ponderings, this is not much different from what Jean-Luc Godard did in his cinema. Yi Ok-seop simply goes her own way. Which is goofier and has less edge than Godard's. This does not have the drive and cohesion of Godard and is a bit on the fey and quirky side. Bit there is a questioning, philosophical quality and the whole approach shows originality.

The subtitle ofMaggie is The Fish Who Saved the Planet. It's a catfish, and it's a voiceover narrator of the film - as a planet-saving fish has every right to be. The action starts at a private hospital that follows rather it's own rules. None of the staff eat at the cafeteria. All go out for lunch. In the quiet, a couple have sex in the X-ray room. The X-ray machine fires off, and shows a couple fucking. Zap! Nurse Yoon Young (Lee Juyeong) believes, erroneously, that it is she and her slacker boyfriend Sung-won ((Koo Kyo-hwan) ) who feature in the now notorious image. Shocked, she goes in next day to resign. But all the staff are taking the day off, except her boss Dr Lee (Mun Sori). Are they all guilty, or are they sick as they tell Dr Lee? The debate that ensues introduces the film's theme of doubt. (There is never any certainty about who was captured in the X-ray.)

From here on the film follows its own jagged narrative line, which wanders from one subject to another. Norse Yoon Young does things and has discussions wTih Dr Lee. Then there's an odd event that produces sink holes all over Korea and Sung-won gets a job filling them, when he loses his ring that Yoon Young gave him. He lies about it to her. Yoon Young agrees to meet with Ji-yeon, Sung-won's (less pretty) former gf. Then there is the strange case of the sinkhole-filling co-worker and the ring. Then Yoon Yeong and Sung-won fight. "Doubt" can also be interpreted as "bad faith," and it can be the element that undermines a relationship.

The momentum falters occasionally here, but this is original, valid work. This is young, questioning, imaginative cinema that has something international about it. The cast members have charm, and that counts for a lot.

Maggie 메기 ,88 mins., debuted at Busan in 2018, winning two awards, and played also at Rotterdam and Osaka, winning best picture at the latter, and Fantasia and NYAF. It was screened at the latter for this review.
A NYAFF showtime: Saturday Jul 13, 3:00pm
SVA Theatre


TRAILER

MOON SUNG-HO: FIVE MILLION DOLLAR LIFE 五億円のじんせい (2019)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/uuur.jpg
AYAMU MOCHIZUKI IN FIVE MILLION DOLLAR LIFE

A boy who is a magnet for kindness

The young director Moon Sung-ho, who is from Hiroshima, returned to his South Korean roots to study filmmaking in Seoul after high school in Japan, then returned to Japan to make this debut feature. TV writer Naomi Hiruta has provided a screenplay that's a weird mixture. It's about a suicidal 18-year-old heart transplant survivor, a saccharine and upbeat story (Mirai, the tall, wispy protagonist played by Ayumu Mochizuki smiles all the time) that conceals what the blog Genkinahito calls a "dark heart" - a continual preoccupation with suicide.

Mirai had a heart transplant when he was seven, financed by donations of $5 million from the community, and this drama was exploited by TV, which keeps on milking the story every year on the youth's birthday. He is depressed, feeling like a shell, not able to live up to expectations or repay the debt. Right when gushy locals and the media are making him feel like a fraud again, a troll called Kiyomaru on Mirai's smart phone sends him taunts about not being worth the money it cost to save him and deserving only to kill himself. There are several perennial Japanese themes here, excessive humility and suicidlity (perhaps close-linked?) with new ones of tech-crazed youth and homelessness, and more. A rather low view of Japanese life seems embedded in the idea that it costs a million-something to bring someone into the world and the average Japanese citizen makes about the same amount in a working life. What's the point of slaving your lifelong as a salaryman only to break even? By this kind of reckoning Mirai's life has been more costly than this, and it will take him 171 years to repay the debt by normal work.

Seeking some vague get-rich-quick scheme, Mirai runs away and has adventures, abandoning his plan to study medicine, and seeking naively to make back the money he somehow now thinks he "owes." It's a cockeyed idea, just a fantasy rom-com gimmick, but it provides a premise for sprightly changes of scene from a seemingly kind homeless man who empties his ATM account to day labor, to being a toy boy for pay in the city, falling in with kidnappers, and so on for a while.

This road-picture coming-of-age film may be contrasted with the more profound schemework of Ikiru, another movie about dying and the value of life. Unlike Mirai, Watanabe-san, the protagonist or Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, has only a few months to live to begin with, and seeks the best way to spend his remaining time, which in the end turns out to be right right at his humble city hall job, striving to do good by insisting that a small park be built. Both characters explore a series of different activities that test life's diverse possibilities and their responses to them. One is entertainment, the other is art.

Ikiru is ennobled by a magical combination of its maker's cinematic genius and a profound humanistic worldview. 5 Million Dollar Life is more concerned with skewering insincerity and media exploitation but wastes time focusing on a superficial monetization of the value of Japanese life. Maybe the real point is Mirai is sick of being exploited. Anyway this road movie coming-of-ager is a dramady that loses its moody point in enjoyable picaresque exploits and displaying its protagonist's irresistible innocence and charm. The lead actor Ayumu Mochizuki projects an freshness and sweetness that make things charming light. Sexploitation and a grim yakuza cleanup somehow don't soil him.

The film delivers a message, Hirai's discovery: the world is divided not into nice people and not nice people but into people who're worth being nice to and those who aren't. And he? He is one who learns he survives on kindness, and people naturally want to be nice to him. But how long can anyone be adorable and innocent, and how long can we endure such a character? The truths in Five Million Dollar Life are facile, but as with any picaresque tale, there is amusement in the lively adventures and the hero's durability.

If Moon Sung-ho can't ennoble or enlighten, he certainly can entertain and he may be one to watch. I hope he pares away the saccharine life lessons next time and embeds his truths instead in the images and action.

Five Million Dollar Life 五億円のじんせい ("500 million yen"), 112 mins., releases July 20, 2019 in Japan. It was previewed as part of the NYAFF for this review, where it showed July 11.