NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020 online

New York Asian Film Festival Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020
Aug. 28-Sept 12, 2020

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GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS
Beasts Clawing at Straws 지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들 (Kim Yong-hoon 2020)
A Beloved Wife 喜劇 愛妻物語 (Shin Adachi 2019)
Beneath the Shadow 影裏( (Ohtomo Keishi 2019)
Dancing Mary Y ダンシング・マリ (Sabu 2019)
Detention 返校 (John Hsu 2019)
Dear Loneliness 致親愛的孤獨者 (Lien Chien-hung, Sunny Yu, Liao Che-yi 2019)
Forbidden Dream 천문: 하늘에 묻는다 (Hur Jin-ho 2019)
Forgiven Children 許された子どもたち (Naito Eisuke 2020)
Heavy Craving 大餓 (Hsieh Pei-ju 2019)
IWeirDo 怪胎 ( Liao Ming-yi 2020)
Kim JI-young Born 1982 82년생 김지영( Kim Do-young 2019)
Legally Declared Dead 死因無可疑 (Yuen Kim Wai 2019)
Lucky Chan-sil / 찬실이는 복도 많지 (Kim Cho-hee 2019)
Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash Them Down (Leung Ming-kai, Kate Reilly 2019)
Miyamoto 宮本から君へ (Mariko Tetsuya 2019)
Moving On (Yoon Dan-bi 2019)
My Prince Edward 金都 (Norris Wong 2019)
One Night ひとよ (Shiraishi Kazuya 2019)
Ròm (Tran Thanh Huy 2019)
Soul/Roh(Emir Ezwan 2019)
They Say Nothing Stays the Same ある船頭の話 (Odagiri Joe 2019) Centerpiece Film
Victim(s)) 加害者，被害人 (Layla Zhuqing Ji 2020)
Wild Sparrow 野雀之詩 (Shih Li 2019)
Witness Out of the Blue 犯罪現場 (Andrew Fung 2019)

OHTOMO KEISHI: BENEATH THE SHADOW 影裏 (2019)

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ANANO GO IN BENEATH THE SHADOW

Friend

The blockbuster director of the romantic manga sword fighter Rurouni Kenshin films here explores his contemplative side with an arthouse film based on a prizewinning contemporary novel. It is the story of a strange, haunting friendship. Shuichi Konno (Anano Go)is a delicate-looking young man of thirty who's transferred to northeastern Japan, Morioka (Iwate), by his company. He seems to have been excited, and then, lonely. Someone else comes to work there, Norihiro Hiasa (Ryûhei Matsuda of The Sythian Lamb, NYAFF 2018), who latches onto Konno, gets drunk with him in his apartment, takes him fishing, later, even camping. We know there is something, well, fishy about Hiasa, but we also believe in Konno's fascination, need, even, it seems one night, desire, in this moody piece of minimalism.

The devil is in the details. And Ryûhei Matsuda, who seems more confident, even aggressive, even hostile with Konno, seems devilish. Anano Go is a bit of a sex object at first, the camera caressing his butt and crotch in jockey shorts in opening scene repeatedly. The "friendship" between Konno and Hiasa seems a bit suspicious, or maybe Konno is just so lonely. But no - Kazuya comes for a visit, and it emerges that in Tokyo Konno had a relationship, commemorated by a very long hug, with someone who has become a trans female. But the details are of the fish, how to put a worm on a hook, then gang hooks, Hiasa's little chat about the cycle of nature - "moss loves fallen trees" - and his story about the pomegranate tree (an image picked up later) in his yard growing up.

This is yet another Japanese film that weaves in the Fukushima event. Iwate, where this mostly transpires, was affected by the earthquake, I understand. But first, there is Hiasa's sudden disappearance from work, followed by his surprise reappearance later selling shares in a suspicious mutual aid society he forces everyone he knows to subscribe to, including, after a night of drinking, Konno. Then, Fukushima, and Hiasa seems to have been in one of the devastated areas.

Konno goes hunting for his lost friendship that never was. But then, it was a very special friendship. We have seen that. Only Hiasa has this other side. And he has warned his friend, with another haunting speech about the deeper shadow behind a face, the warning that he's not all he appears to be. This, Konno finds out something about, as revealed in scenes of meetings first with Norihiro's father (Jun Kunimura), then with his older brother, Kaoru (Ken Yasuda).

This film is a little too slow and too long, but early on it reminded me of Lee Chang-dong's wonderful, haunting Burning (NYFF 2018) created by just spicing up a bit a Haruki Murakami short story. One feels one is very much in the realm of the short story here also. Director Ohtomo Keishi has worked here from a novel by Shinsuke Numata, which won the Akutagawa prize in 2017. It's the essence of this story, and of the film, that the secret of Hiasa, Konno's intense, mysterious friendship, slips away like the fish Konno releases at the end of the film. But that seemed somehow rather anticlimactic.

This is a movie whose beginning and middle are better than its end. James Hadfield is cruel but not inaccurate in his Japan Times review when he concludes that the film finishes "in an awkward hinterland," not "atmospheric enough" to be a "mood piece" nor "taut" enough to "satisfy as a suspense story." Ohtomo doesn't hit a home run in his foray into art filmmaking. Nonetheless this is a memorable, in some ways classic, theme.

Beneath the Shadow 影裏 , 135 mins., debuted Dec. 2019 at Hainan, and was released in Japan Feb. 14, 2020 (Sony Music Entertainment). The dp was Akiko Ashizawa. Screened for this review as part of the Aug. 28-Sept 12, 2020 virtual cinema New York Asian Film Festival.

SHIN ADACHI: A BELOVED WIFE 喜劇 愛妻物語 (2019)

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AZAMI MIZUKAWA AND GAKU HAMADA IN A BELOVED WIFE

Hellish family road trip seen as redeeming comedy

Shin Adachi is not a conventional Japanese filmmaker or one who fits time-honored cultural norms of understatement and politeness. As a screenwriter he debuted in 100 Yen Love (Japan's 2015 Oscar submission) with the story of a thirty-something woman who became a boxer to help a guy who is a jerk. In his directorial debut 14 That Night he focused on a high school student whose ambition is to fondle the breasts of a porn star. This time, adapting his own novel, he depicts a highly unappealing version of himself as Gota (Gaku Hamada), a currently unsuccessful and sometimes lazy screenwriter whose big complaint is that he is not having "sex" (the Japanese use the same word) with his wife. The film focuses on a hellish and unenjoyable but also funny road trip the short, dumpy Gota drags his wife and TV-addicted daughter on to Kagawa Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku gathering information for a screenwriting assignment, a film about a high school girl who makes udon commissioned from Gota's agent as a vehicle for a financier’s mistress.

Chika (Azami Mizukawa), the shrewish wife, never hesitates to berate Gota. And she seems justified. He hasn't been much of a provider. He says what he's earned in the last year amounts to 500,000 Yen, which is less than $5,000. Now, he keeps bugging her to have sex with him, meanwhile indulging in porn through a virtual reality headset and getting stopped by police for looking up the dress of woman passed out drunk on the street. Perhaps it's no wonder Chika goes to comical (or wearying) efforts to save money. Not a pretty portrait either, Chika dresses like a slob and drinks to excess. She's also however currently the family breadwinner. The family dynamic is ultimately leavened by the presence of sweet young daughter Aki (Chise Niitsu), one positive fruit of this unglamorous ten-year marriage.

It all seems dull and sordid, but Adachi pointed out in an interview with James Hadfield of The Japan Times that Gaku Hamada was chosen because his diminutive, baby-faced look makes him ultimately hard for audiences to dislike. Adachi told Hadfield it's all based on his "actual experiences" but that the movie makes it (the behavior) "all look better." (Hadfield's aside is that he presumes the cramped, messy apartment used for the family here must surely be "rather less fancy" than Adachi's own current one.) It emerges that Adachi is a child of the eighties and kitchen sink TV series like Taichi Yamada's which Adachi saw as "unsparing" and "harsh" but also "big-hearted." A sweet-and-sour mixture is what Adachi strives for here, though with this autobiographical protagonist who's without shame or politeness in front of his wife and daughter and has drag-out fights with his wife, it can wind up being hard to find the big-heartedness or sympathy.

Adachi is a cutting-edge, increasingly in-demand Japanese writer and director who is seeking to take local cinema in fresh directions that make Peter DeBruge of Variety compare him to Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach or, even more, Woody Allen. Deborah Young in her Hollywood Reporter review of this high-profile new film notes its "weird originality" and, underneath its "near-constant vulgarity," "a beating heart." Maybe so, but a lot of this seemed tiresome and icky to me. Woody Allen never had this kind of crude, kitchen-sink quality and at his best is much funnier than this as well. Note: the current subtitles are below par in quality.

A Beloved Wife 喜劇 愛妻物語, 117 mins., debuted at Tokyo in competition Nov. 2019. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, presented virtually Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020.

ODAGIRI JOE: THEY SAY NOTHING STAYS THE SAME ある船頭の話 (2019)

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Of time and the river

This ambitious and beautiful Japanese historical film was directed by Joe Odagiri with cinematography by Wong Kar-wai's superb muse Chris Doyle and lovely but a bit obtrusive music by Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan. The forty-four-year-old Odagiri's Japanese Wikipedia page is immense. As Deborah Young tells us in her Hollywood Reporter review, at home Odagiri's known as a "gothic rebel with a reliably huge female fan base," and he has been involved in many films and TV series. He wants to do something art house and impressive here, and he does, if it might have used some tightening up here and there. He may be inspired in his calm setting and aging, simple protagonist by Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring by Kim Ki-duk whom he worked with on the latter's Dream, but Akira Emori's old boatman Toichi doesn't spout Zen wisdom like Kim's old dude. He's just a stoical, unlettered old man who's modest and a bit lost but an integral part of a beautiful, natural place.

Toichi is always ready to row village-to-town passengers of all sorts, loud or quiet, offensive or polite, across the wide mountain valley river in his flatboat whenever asked. He says it takes three days to learn the oars, three years to learn the pole. It's all he knows how to do, and he does it tirelessly and lives in a shack at the bend in the river. His frequent companion is a loud, goofy young man called Genzo (Nijirô Murakami, a media cutie in Japan, here doing a nice character turn), who provides such delicacies as bean paste baked on summer rocks.

But remember Marvell's "To His Coy Mistreess, "at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near"? At Toichi's back, in the distance, rarely seen, he always hears the sounds of a bridge building over the river. Genzo hates the idea of faster, busier people, loss of the few coins for his crossings for Toichi, of his livelihood. They dream, once vividly, in black and white, and violently, of attacking the bridge and its builders and stopping the whole thing. This never happens. At the end, the bridge is built (it's surprisingly pretty, a soft red), the town and village people rush back and forth, and Toichi is a back number, advised to take it easy and not think too much by the doctor.

The Japanese are great at historical, costume cinema, and this film set in the Meiji era (late 19th to 1912) shot by the master Christopher Doyle sets an enchanting mood. This is also a nation of storytellers. Americans saw this combination epitomized early in a US import triumph from Janus Films, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, which skillfully blends three Ryunosuke Akutagawa stories within a haunting mood. This is not that. So often I longed for the brilliant storytelling this movie hints at, feeling it has the material, and just needs to rearrange it a bit and cut out the fat - or "kill his darlings," since surely there are numerous beautiful passages Joe was loathe to part with.

Nijirô Murakami says somewhere a Jim Jarmusch film is his favorite movie, and one of the other key players, who plays Nihei (Masatoshi Nagase) was in Jarmusch's Mystery Train, so it may make sense that I thought of Dead Man, the way its incidents flow from one scene to the next and with death, like here, hanging around the corner. They Say Nothing Stays the Same has very good scenes in this glamorous package, but they don't quite mesh enough, and there's too much space between them. Scenes are vivid and good nonetheless.

The first big one, disturbing the generally tranquil life, comes when Toichi's flatboat runs into a lump of something floating in the water. It's a dead girl. Only when he lugs her to his shack, Genzo discovers she's not dead, she's breathing. She may be called "Fu," which Toichi thinks it would be nice if it meant "wind," but IMDb knows her only as "Girl" (Ririka Kawashima). Toichi treats her wounds with Genzo's mix of mudwort and bear bile, but they fear she was hit on the head, and when she finally speaks she has forgotten all about her life. On the river Toichi hears all rumors and there is one of a family massacred at Ichinomiya with one girl carried off. They think Fu may be the girl. Her muteness seems to confirm this. Later she begins to speak, then runs off, later comes back and lives with Toichi and eventually becomes his helper. She is dark and knowing. Once, she jumps off the boat into the water. Toichi divers after her, to rescue her, but in a typically lovely underwater scene, we find she swims like a fish. They live, by the way, off fish-on-a-stick sandwiches. Later the story about a massacre at Ichinomiya turns out to be just a story.

We meet, with Toichi, rude, impatient people who treat him abominably, including some bridge engineers, and some nasty little boys who throw stones and mock, all giving a sense of evil in the world. But ultimately the message is ecological. Since the bridge is building, the water is dirtier, and without clear water there are no fireflies. "Fu" (Girl) says fireflies are more important than bridges. We meet also, with Toichi, a girl ghost, in ragged grey clothing - another thing the Japanese excel at is ghosts - and she says she is watching him. Maybe she's going to take him away, with the tides, with the seasons.

It all ends, in a way, with winter, which brings astonishing scenes of snow that show the region where this film takes place is more beautiful, grand, stark, and mountainous than it seemed in the closer, lusher greenness of summer.

Before the snow there is a great storm with heavy rain when the straw period raincoats come out. The Girl and Toichi sit huddled in his shack when Nihei, a longtime passenger and friend, arrives carrying the body of his dead father, asking the favor of Toichi to aid him in fulfilling a promise. His father spent his life hunting animals; Toichi ferried him to his hunting grounds and considered him "a great man." His last wish was to have his body offered to the animals he hunted to repay those lives he took. But this must be done in secret. So they, with the girl, take the corpse of Nihei's father into a dark and rain-drenched forest across the river. (Here in particular the score of Tigran Hamasyan seems a little too sweet and prominent.)

A Letterboxd contributor comments that the film is "really good for 95%" of the way but in the other 5% chooses to "drive off a cliff" - breaking the calm and peace too much. James Hadfield is similar in The Japan Timeswhen he says Odagiri "can’t quite reconcile the film’s mood-piece feel with his more dramatic urges." This is indeed a challenge in such a long film (two hours and seventeen minutes): ruthless editing might have helped. But, again as Hadfield says, Odagiri is probably too in love with his beautiful cinematography and high quality cast. So was I.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same ある船頭の話, 137 mins., debuted at Venice (in the Giornate degli Autori section), where Odagiri was also present as one of the stars of Lou Ye’s (not as good) competition spy film Saturday Fiction Sept. 2019, also showing at Busan, Montreal, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12).

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RIRIKA KAWASHIMA, AKIRA EMOTO
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CINEMATOGRAPHER CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

SHIRAISHI KAZUYUA: ONE NIGHTひとよ(2019)

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TAKERU SATOH, RYOHEI SUZUKI, YUKO TANAKA AND MAYU MATSUOKA IN ONE NIGHT

Family dynamic not improved by spousal murder

Ths screenplay of One Night was written by Shiraishi’s collaborator Takahashi Izumi and based on a 2011 play by Kuwabara Yuko. Shiraishi's a bit of a NYAFF bad boy (we know him from The Blood of Wolves and Dare to Stop Us), and here returns with a multilayered meditation on the stigma of violence. This time he focuses on a family.

The film opens with a flashback to a stormy night when Koharu (Yuko Tanaka) returns home, in mannish taxi driver garb, to inform the three children that to eliminate the family's pain and suffering she has murdered their violent, abusive father by running over him with her taxi. She will turn herself in now, and will go to jail, but they are free. She promises to come back in a decade - no, make that fifteen years - to rejoin them. Meanwhile they will be safe and can pursue their lives unimpeded.

Well, Koharu has made a brave sacrifice, but of course she's left her two sons and daughter to grow up without a mother and father and in the shadow of yet another trauma. It turns out that in the absence of the parents their mother's family runs the provincial taxi company and takes care of the kids. But in the wake of the ugly physical abuse of the murdered father (of which we get a hideous glimpse) and the outsider status bestowed upon them by having a murderer for a mother, the three kids aren't exactly what you'd call lucky, or the town's favorite young people.

We quickly jump forward fifteen years, when Kooharu appears, looking totally gray and surprisingly neat and respectable. It seems she has spent several years since her release working at different jobs elsewhere but they haven't been in touch. She hesitated to come back, she says, but she has kept her promise. She had reason to hesitate.

Now we meet the three offspring as they are now. Yuji (Takeru Satoh), the talented, smart one, has a dashing, saturnine appearance and a chip on his shoulder and is cultivating literary fantasies while actually working for a porn mag in Tokyo - where a scene shows his lowly status. He's come back back home to the provinces now for the first time in a while to meet mom, but he's the least happy with her return, or with anything. He's meanwhile gathering data on the family scandals and horrors for a planned novel, taking constant snapshots of the family scene with his smartphone as part of the preparation. As for the tall, still stuttering Daiki (Ryohei Suzuki), he is in a foundering marriage to a wife whose family business he's been working at, though the wife wants to divorce him and leave, taking their little girl with them. A brief scene fills us in on that.

Most positive - she insists their mother did save them from a much worse life - is the daughter, Sonoko (Mayu Matsuoka),a pretty young woman who dreamed of being a hairdresser, and was a hostess at a snack bar, but lately, as she tells Yuji, focuses on being a call girl, an "escort," if you like, while getting drunk every night at a karaoke bar.

Koharu's brother's family, who've been running the taxi company successfully, seem more happy to see her. We meet some of them. Yumi (Mariko Tsutsui) is having an affair while caring for her senile mother-in-law. Michio/Doushita (Kuranosuke Sasaki) is a new driver. He arrives around the same time that Koharu does, looking a bit the worse for wear but mercurial and all smiles. He doesn't drink, do drugs, or gamble, which got him hired right away. But following scenes where he's reunited with his teenage son after a long separation and encounters an unwelcome former colleague, it emerges that he has a problematic past of his own that he's trying to escape from.

Whatever the family or taxi firm employees may think or however well they get along with Koharu, the locals of this provincial town quickly grow hostile to Koraru's return when they hear of it: her presence, seen from a slight distance but still too close for them, is a scandal. Local news has reported on it and little flyers multiply around the taxi company broadcasting that there's a murderess, a husband-killer, in town. The siblings hasten to clean up the company vehicles that they awaken to find covered in abusive white graffiti. If this film is good at anything, it's mess: cluttered, disorganized rooms, littered spaces, graffiti-covered walls and vehicles are, perversely, a delight to the eye. Sometimes the Japanese seem to be reacting to the design austerity of their traditional culture, the empty tatami-spread rooms, the rolled-away futons. Of the graffiti-decorated cars, Yuji takes snapshots with his phone, but promises his saying it's to show Koharu is only a joke.

Koharu's return is a classic gesture for a play. It causes all the old traumas to come back to mind. Realized cinematically it also brings about a lot of things - like the abusive fliers and graffiti. Perhaps the cathartic reconciliation wold work better on the stage. But what Shiraishi can provide that a playwright can't is another big storm outside.

James Hadfield of The Japan Times, who calls this "the most conventional thing [Shiraishi has] done to date," sees this a treatment of themes Kazuya cares about: "whether the ends ever justify the means, and if there’s any hope for people who commit awful deeds. He thinks that some of the early scenes show "taut execution" but finds the climax to be "a disappointing mess." An Italian critic (the film debuted at Udine) calls it "hasty" and says that's the "only fault." Well, the finale is busy. Some of the physical clutter that provides the film with its pleasingly icky contemporary texture may seem to pour over into overelaborate action. But nonetheless those final minutes are cathartic. There's nothing like family for drama.

One NIght ひとよ (Shiraishi Kazuya 2019), 123 mins., debuted Oct. 2019 at Tokyo, showing Nov. 2019 at Taipei, and included in the online Jun.-Jul.2020 Udine Festival. It was screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020).

MARIKO TETSUYA: MIYAMOTO 宮本から君へ (2019)

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SOSUKE IKEMATSU, LEFT, IN MIYAMOTO

Enthusiastic salaryman

Early this year the Harvard Library's film collection featured a series on Mariko Tetsuya called "Self Destruction Cinema" and that may be the best place to begin in describing the latest of his two more high-profile films (he has been active as a writer and maker of movies and TV mini-series since 2003). The previous film is called Destruction Babies (and that's the title, transliterated in Japanese characters, Disutorakushon beibîzu) and features someone more sadistic and more masochistic than young Hiroshi Miyamoto. (The full title this time is From Miyamoto to You and there was a miniseries, with the same actors and director, based on the manga series "Miyamoto kara Kimi e" by Hideki Arai.) Sôsuke Ikematsu plays the role in both and he owns the role; there are several other actors from the miniseries also here. Ikematsu is awesome as the baby-faced young salaryman who goes for broke in feelings and commitment, no reserves, no good sense, no physical fear.

Cinema of extremes, also. Miyamoto is some kind of madcap hero, but no role model. He takes it on himself to rid a pretty young woman, Yasuko (Yû Aoi) of an unwanted ex-boyfriend. Then she takes to him and they have sex and get involved. Next thing you know, he's meeting her parents, the Nakano family, who own a company. The mother loves that he drinks like a fish. (In some parts of Japanese society it's considered a good social trait to be able to drink a lot.) There is a sequence of extreme beer drinking. Miyamoto drinks so much he later passes out in a comatose sleep while with Yasuko. A member of the Nakano family is a ruby player and has giant bruiser-type rugby player friends. One of them comes and rapes Yasuko, right in front of Miyamoto, stretched out sleeping like a baby. He's so out Yasuko's screams never wake him. The rape is the hardest of a series of violent, hard-to-watch sequences in this movie of gonzo interpersonal violence and scream-fests that sometimes seem grating and at others, purgative.

When Miyamoto finds out what has happened to his girlfriend (he has to guess, which makes the sequence more painful), he becomes determined to take revenge against the giant rugby player rapist. He is also more than ever determined to marry Yasuko. Only what has happened has made Yasuko unable not to loathe him. She called on him for help again and again and he did not budge. Her revulsion will change, somewhat inexplicably. The storytelling provides no clear logical explanation of Yasuko's change of feelings toward Miyamoto.

In many scenes Miyamoto is missing three front teeth, because in his first of several violent encounters with the rapist, he gets a giant fist in the mouth ("like a bowling ball," he recounts afterward) and loses them Later he gets more damaged, but in a final encounter between the two high up on an apartment building balcony, Miyamoto manages to reverse roles by doing damage where it hurts most and capitalizing on the advantage inflicting excruciating pain gives him over his huge adversary.

The dialogue is at two levels in this movie, low and high, with nothing in between. People are either talking calmly, under their breath (with some voice-over narration) or, when it gets intense, shouting at the top of their voices, possibly spouting blood or foaming at the mouth as they do so. Particularly memorable in this vein is a scene where Miyamoto comes to propose marriage at the top of his lungs to Yasuko in the middle of her place of work. There is scattered applause, but Yasuko screams back in front of everybody her absolute refusal and desire never to set eyes on Miyamoto again.

Everyone (in the English language comments I've found) talks about how cringe-inducing and hard to watch a lof ot the action is in this movie. Japanese fans of the mang seem to have been delighted by the film. "You are in a comic book world," one says, and that sums it up. The Japanese are not as offended by or judgmental about fictional violence or extremes as Americans are. Even if you're shocked, this is also compulsive watching, except for the rape, when I wanted to look away. This is not a Cinema of Cruelty a la Antonin Artaud or spatter action a la Grand Guignol. Many blockbuster action of thriller films have more violence, cruelty, and blood. Here, it's mitigated by Miyamoto's good-heartedness and sincerity. His courage is foolhardy, but his determination and loyalty are worthy of the tales of courtly love. In its warped, hysterical way, Miyamoto is a rom-com. Wait for the Judd Apatow-produced Hollywood remake.

Miyamoto 宮本から君へ, 129 mins., opened in Japan Sept. 2019 and Hong Kong Nov., 2019; featured at Chicago Oct. 2019. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival.

KIM YONG-HOON: BEASTS CLAWING AT STRAWS 지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들 (2020)

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A pleasing genre debut surrounding a bag of money

The bodies really mount and a fancy bag gets shifted around in this engaging, if occasionally a little opaque multi-segmented tale of people scrambling for money. It starts with a cheap hotel with sauna in Pyeongtaek, a northwest port city in South Korea, where the action transpires (and there's some good seafood). In the prologue, down-on-his luck employee at this joint Jung-man (Bae Sung-woo) finds a big Louis Vuitton satchel (presumably a real one, to honor the contents) that somebody left in a locker, heavy with maybe a million bucks in Korean money. He stuffs it away in a back storage room to retrieve later, as it turns out, after getting fired for not being punctual at work. In what follows the shifted-around sequences show us what happened before this event - and after it.

Jung-man and wife work at lowly jobs due to heir small business going belly-up, and live with his aggressive, difficult mom with dementia (Yun Yuh-jung). As stylish if not particularly helpful story segments unreel ("Debt," "Bait,", "Food Chain," "Shark," "Luck Strike" [sic], "Money bag"), over time we meet hip madam Yeon-hee (Jeon Do-yeon) and her spousally-abused top call girl Mi-ran (Shin Hyun-been), who needs to get rid of her husband and also (Yeon-hee does) owes a lot of money from losing stock market investments loaned to her by her boyfriend, whom we'll also be meeting. Jin-Tae (Jung Ga-Ram), a cute but goofy young Chinese illegal with processed orange hair , volunteers to do the husband disposal, having fallen for Mi-ran, by faking a car accident. Then he can go back to China with her.

With some fanfare there arrives the madam Yeon-hee's boyfriend, who's a customs agent Tae-young (Jung Woo-sung), who gets hounded by loan shark Mr. Park (Jung Man-sik) and Park's cannibalistic enforcer (Bae Jin-woong). There's a nosy, self-indulgent cop, a nasty hotel manager, a high school classmate of Tae-young's coming around to bother people, and other creditable actors.

Most of these projects go badly wrong, and hence the growing body count.

Debuting filmmaker Kim Yong-hoon, as a generous [Korean Herald article reported, is a late-bloomer long toiling in a media corporation, is working zestfully from an adaptation of Japanese writer Keisuke Sone's novel. There are influences and Kim acknowledges Fargo. US reviewers have mentioned What's Up Doc? (with more blood) as well as Pulp Fiction meets No Country for Old Men "one could charitably say," says Neil Young in his Hollywood Reporter Rotterdam review.

Well, those are two of my favorite Tarantino and Coen brothers movies, and we shouldn't expect that level of intensity. But we can enjoy the glossy gangster movie style, nice lighting and cinematography (there's a swell fire, and lots of night-time neon panorama, doubtless enhanced by first-time director Kim Yon-hoon's beginner's enthusiasm. Most of all there are watchable actors, headed by Jung Woo-sung (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird) and Jeon Do-yeon, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2007 for her lead performance in Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine (NYFF 2007). At the end, I wanted more - but nowadays, that's a good thing. We can well hope for other explorations of the wealth of genre possibilities and the Korean flair for gangster violence from Kim Yong-hoon.

The Variety critic said all the genre tics might have made this deserve retitling as "Beasts Clawing at Cliches" "if it weren’t such an amusing, echt Korean romp." But it is, and we had fun.

Beasts Clawing at Straws 지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들, 108 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 2020, winning the jury award there, and opened theatrically in South Korean in Feb. 2020. It has played in France, with a premiere in Paris Jun. 22, 2020 and theatrical release in Paris Jul. 8 (AlloCiné press rating 3.6: Nouvel Observateur "un polar amphétaminé"; limited release July 30, Singapore. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 NYAFF.

ANDREW FUNG: A WITNESS OUT OF THE BLUE (2019)

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AVIAN WITNESS TO A MURDER IN A WITNESS OUT OF THE BLUE

An attractive criminal and a red parrot

In this classy, if conventional, new Chinese polar noir, we follow the cops and the crooks with equal sympathy. Particularly we follow career heist specialist Sean Wong (Louis Koo), who currently holes up in a rooming house where where the other lodgers are on the old side (one lady is 95, another 100) and the pretty landlady (Jessica Hester Hsuan), smitten, like us, plies him with special soups and meds. She has a hidden weakness. The cops are less attractive. Three months ago there was a jewelry heist (led by Sean Wong) which left several people dead, but has left few clues. Now, Homer Tsui (Deep Ng), one of Wong's confederates, has been found murdered in the industrial building where the loot was kept. The only witness is a magnificent scarlet red parrot, which has been trained to talk.

In one scene, Detective Lam (Louis Cheung), who's keeping the parrot just in case, dreams it can speak in sentences like a human. He wakes up with a shock and tells the parrot about his dream, and says, "I wonder what I'm like in your dreams." He need not wonder what his colleagues think of his keeping the parrot and hoping for clues from it. Not much. He's a bit of a bumbler. As for the parrot, its Cantonese is poor. But Lam says Cantonese is just too hard a language to teach a parrot. They should have chosen English or French, relatively simple tongues.

Nice details like this are worthy of Andrew Fung (Fung Chih-chiang), a screenwriter of films such as Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer and Johnnie To's Sparrow. This is the fourth of his features as a writer-director, which are in a variety of genres. It's not a high-powered, big budget Hong Kong dazzler. TheScreen Anarchy writer Ard Vijn says it's not to be remembered "for its action scenes, plot twists, or outrageous style." Really? Well, aybe not. But it's a nicely crafted procedural with fine moments of character and mood, the parrot, and an ending that seemed twisty enough to me.

Wong is playing detective too, because the jewelry has disappeared, while his heist team members are getting polished off one by one by a mysterious killer. He wants to prove that killer is not him. This whole setup for Louis Ko and the charisma bestowed upon him remind one somewhat of Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. Edmund Lee calls the character "an amoral enigma" in his South China Morning Post review. He may have musings and misgivings, but he's also capabel of pulling out a long gun and mowing down people. He's got an arsenal in a satchel at the rooming house.

Another officer dies, Inspector Yip (Philip Keung), who had suspected Wong of killing Homer Tsui. As the thieves are knocked off one by one, Inspector Lam and his colleague Charmaine (Cherry Ngan Cheuk-ling) now suspect Yip. It's the old good Hong Kong movie thing of cop double-crosses and suspicions. Another officer accuses Lam of having it in for Yip and protecting Wong, and Internal Affairs comes in to relieve Lam of his badge and gun. Of course that doesn't stop him. Before it's over, all riddles will be solved and needed organs donated. Too tidy? Hey, Forget it Jake, it's Hong Kong.

A Witness Out of the Blue 犯罪現場 ("Scene of the Crime"), 104 mins., debuted a and opened Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and opened in China and Hong Kong in Oct. 2019, Nov. 2019 in Taiwan. It was screened for this review as part of the Aug. 28-Sept 12, 2020 virtual NYAFF.

YOON DAN-BI: MOVING ON On 남매의 여름밤 (2019)

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PARK SEUNG-JOON (AS DONGJU) ENTERTAINS THE GROUP WITH HIS IMPROVISATIONAL DANCING

A slice of fragmented Korean family life, in transition

In Yoon’s gentle family drama, a newly divorced man, Lee Byunggi (Yang Heung-joo) moves into his aging, widowed father Lee Youngmuk's house with his 18-year-old daughter Okju (Choi Jung-woon) and tween son Dongju (Park Seung-Joon), and shortly afterward, their Aunt Mijung joins them, escaping a broken marriage. It's a steamy summer. We join them all for a while.

Everybody is good humored and good at coping. Okju and Donju squabble, but it doesn't get nasty till it emerges that Donju is loyal to their mother, and Okju refuses contact with her. Grandpa is initially in the hospital from heat stroke and when he's back, doesn't say much, but he seems not to feel imposed upon. They give him a birthday party after Aunt Mijung comes, which he seems to enjoy. Mijung sleeps in the same bedroom with Okju at her invitation which she, perhaps understandably, refused to allow Dongju to occupy, while Dad, Grandpa, and Dongju sleep in the other bedroom.

Michael Rosser's Rotterdam interview with Yoon Dan-bi appeared in Screen Daily. "When I first saw Good Morning by Yasujiro Ozu," Yoon said, I felt he was a good friend of mine. Even though I don’t know him, I just hope my film can be a friend to someone too." On this first feature as a director, Yoon took advice from cinematographer/co-producer Kim Gi-hyeon that Ozu might have liked, to cut out the dramatic incidents and just focus on the basics, family unites with grandpa and then departs from him.

This obviously is neither the style of Ozu nor the world of Ozu. The world of Ozu is gone and this is Korea, not Japan. The film doesn't give us much information and these folks are tight-lipped, the period of time covered, brief. Mijung won't tell dad, Byunggi, what has gone wrong in her marriage to drive her here; she appears to have a drinking problem. We don't know why the kids are with their dad, or what grandpa used to do; teasingly, Donju says his biography reports that he used to be a gangster. He appears comfortably off. It's a pleasant, lived-in old house: the director has has reported that it had been occupied for fifty years and was used for the film as-is. With its pleasantly overgrown garden, front and back, with vines and fruit, and interiors with nice wood paneling, it's a warm, living presence whose future, like grandpa's, sadly is uncertain.

Dad appears to be selling shoes out of his van. Whether this is a desperate move or his usual routine, we don't know. Okju gives a pair of white trainers to a boy she meets who may be her boyfriend. Later, there's an incident when Okju on her own tries to sell a pair of her dad's sneakers to a guy who suspects they're (1) not new or (2) knockoffs. Which it is, and why Dad has to come and pick up Okju from the police station, is unclear.

The shoes assume less importance compared to looming bigger events, notably the grandfather's declining state, and the need for decisions to be made about the future, which, in turn, are swept aside by the natural course of things. In the end the film does assume an Ozu-esque feel after all through its simple focus on the generations, the strength of family, and the big transitions in life.

My cast list is incomplete but the other main actors are Park Seung-joon and Kim Sang-dong.

Moving On 남매의 여름밤 ("Sibling's Summer Night"), 105 mins., debuted at BUsan Oct. 2019, winning four awards, and showed Jan. 2020 at Rotterdam, winning the Bright Future award there for best debut feature Rotterdam was good for young Korean directors, with its jury award going to Beasts Clawing at Straws). Screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual NYAFF (Aug. 28-Sept. 12).

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YOON DAN-BI

YUEN KIM WAI: LEGALLY DECLARED DEAD 死因無可疑 (2019)

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CARLOS CHAN AND ANTHONY WONG IN LEGALLY DECLARED DEAD

For the devotee, not creepy enough

This terminally grisly thriller is something you might not want to watch if you've got a big life insurance policy. To begin with, it says insurance adjusters regard every client as a crook. Next, it might give you some wrong ideas about bumping off relatives to collect, or make you think it's cool to be sadistic. I had a lot of time for the fresh-faced young Hong Kong film star Carlos Chan as insurance salesman Yip Wing-shin. But he hasn't much to do but act eager and worried. And the reason I called this movie "terminally grisly" is it's only grisly at the end. It's Based on Yusuke Kishi’s 1997’s Japanese novel The Black House, which was previously adapted into both Japanese and Korean films in 1999 and 2007 respectively. This probably isn't an improvement. These facts (but not the guess about competition) comes from an informative review for ScreenHK by Casey Chong.

Declared Legally Dead is a good example of slick, highly competent Hong Kong filmmaking without any original ideas. The scenario and direction lack the grace notes and originality to appeal to cinephiles. And there's not enough horror to appeal to genre fans, either. One thing that's impressive: the lush score by Yusuke Hatano, utilizing the Budapest Art Orchestra. Excellent musicians, beautifully recorded and remixed for the film. They had me with the introductory music.

Mr Yip's got trouble. It's not enough that life insurance seems to attract the sadistic and the larcenous. He himself gets ured into a spooky den occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Chu, an evil couple who later turn out later to owe big to a loan shark for gambling debuts. Chu Chung-lak (professional creep Anthony Wong) is persistent and scary like a zombie. Mrs Chu, aka Shum Chi-ling (Karena Lam, cast against type) has a cloudy eye and a limp. Shhh....don't tell anyone: she's the evil one, he's the doofus. They lure Mr. Yip into their creepy den to be witness of the suicide of Chu's stepson, Chu Kafu. Only Chu's eagerness to collect the insurance suggests it's not what it might appear. Later Yip is saying, "He set me up, used me as his alibi."

The insurance company delays, Mr. Chu is impatient, and Yip starts investigating. The police don't get involved, probably too busy arresting pro-democracy protesters, suggests the Today sarcastic Singapore-based reviewer, Douglas Tseng. He calls this movie a "half baked insurance scam thriller." Damn, he has all the good ideas.

As the delaying and investigating go on, we meet Yip's girlfriend, Wai-yee (Kathy Yuen) a psychology major, and her teacher, Kam Chio. He has some terrible ideas about the desirability of extreme punishment for criminals (the stuff about the cruelty of narcissistic types sounded rather familiar), and while he comes to an awful fate it seems not undeserved. On Letterboxd - where people get to the point fast - astute critic Big Chungus deplores "a regressive mindset towards mental health - where people who are sick are presented as insane, and the good guys try to diagnose them off textbook terms based on broad assumptions instead of understanding." True, and simply incinerating the person who displays this mindset isn't enough.

Going back to labels, South China Morning Post's Edmund Lee (or his editor) calls this in their review's headline "a psychological thriller with a slasher ending." But the trouble is it patently fails on both counts. What it offers is the opportunity to admire Carlos Chan in a wife beater staying up all night with his girlfriend while you're listening to the rich sounds of that Hungarian symphony orchestra. If you want a recent Asian psychological thriller, Lee Chang-dung's Burning is as good as it gets. If you want quality gore with psychological sickness as well, try Fincher's Se7en or Demme's Silence of the Lambs.

Speaking of titles, the English one, as can happen, makes little sense. The meaning of the Chinese title is "Cause of death is not suspicious," which is what the first half of the film is about.

Legally Declared Dead 死因無可疑, 109 mins., opened in Hong Kong in Dec. 2019 and in Singapore and Malaysia Aug. 20, 2020. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF virtual 2020 edition, where it shows only in the NY State region Sept. 5.

NAITO EISUKE: FORGIVEN CHILDREN 許された子どもたち (2020)

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Bullies as victims: you can run but you can't hide

This second stab by Naiko Eisuke at a movie about bullying - the first was a bullied person's revenge flick, gruesome but satisfying to some tastes - has justifiably received more recognition. It gets more into the complexities, seeing the bully as victim and noting the cruel destructiveness of contemporary social media attacks. Eisuke doesn't sustain his style throughout; he seems more obsessed with his subject than with his art. But it stays lively throughout. He has performed the difficult feat of making a memorable film about a well-worn topic.

The early segment has an artful wildness. It's playful, then dead serious. It follows with nimble camera the group of four bully boys, young teenage pre-delinquents, out in a wasteland. Their leader is Kira Ichikawa (the striking Yu Uemura). Another boy, Itsuki (Takuya Abe), who is bullied, arrives with a small homemade crossbow made out of chopsticks, a flimsy thing. Only a miracle turns it into a murder weapon. Kira aims it at Gurimu (Ryuju Sumikawa), another, smaller bullied boy. Itsuki steps in front of Gurimu to protect him, and Kira shoots, catching Itsuki in the neck, and the boys run off and leave him to bleed out and die. All this has a shocking blunt vérité clarity.

Also simple, flowing, and effective is the quiet police interrogation of Kira at home, with his parents very much in evidence. The judicial trial that follows with the devastated parents of the dead Itsuki present, the whole thing seeming too flat and rapid, also feels like a reasonable simulacrum of the event. After that, where there were more choices where to go with scenes, the energy and focus dissipate.

A saving grace is Kira. He is made to seem a dark void in the center of everything, a person mysterious even to himself. He's strong at first only because he's inert. He's the exact opposite of the hyper-conscious monster (who commits a massacre with a crossbow) played by Ezra Miller in Lynne Ramsey's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Yu Uemura, whom Max Scilling in his admiring Japan Times review has compared to the bright-eyed Yuya Yagura of Koreeda's masterful Nobody Knows, holds the increasingly busy and turbulent film together. He has a kind of feral grace, seeming both pretty and damaged, with a rough look and a scar under his left eye from being bullied himself, looking alternately hurt, vulnerable, and defiant.

After the incident and the judge's decision absolving Kira, comes the hard part - which shows what a tough, demanding movie this is to watch (that's why it should be more spare and precise).The focus is on the aftermath. At first Kira is hanging around with his pals again, but then other boys come and beat him up horribly - their action polished off by Gurimu, the boy he used to bully, landing him in the hospital. Kira's father (Mihara Tetsuro) is fired from his job, and even his defiant mother gets the message.

What they need is witness protection, but that's not available. In fact, though their disappearance temporarily complicates that, Itsuki's parents are initiating a civil suit against Kira. They move somewhere else and Kira goes to a new school under a new name. He's a smoker now and a loner, followed by Momoko (Yukino Nagura), a girl from school good at making stuff. She helps him rebuild a crossbow (really?). She's an outsider too, accused of dating her adult drama teacher, participating in an illicit relationship.

We go back and forth to a discussion of bullying in Kira's class, broken up into groups to hash out the issue. This is when the idea comes up that the real victim is the bully. The bullied person is the root cause of the bullying: blame the victim. Kira is silent and hiding in multiple hoodies. But his story is all over the internet, and his classmates are all over the internet too, and one of them outs him in the bullying discussion class. All this is certainly a bit on the literal side but shows Eisuke's flair for wrangling groups of kids. After that, the screen goes media-mad for a while, and Kira's mom is lured into writing a defensive memoir that's reviled, but well-publicized in a tabloid magazine. Somehow all the media stuff doesn't overwhelm the personal side. It's hyper-active and distracted: that that's the world we live in now.

Schilling writes that Forgiven Children (the actual translation of the Japanese title, for a change) has "a legal, moral and psychological complexity" that shows "the messiness of reality," in which "storybook endings have no place." He's referring to bullying films where there's retribution, or reform.

The film meanders, but the intense, theatrical scene when Kira gets outed in the classroom is still great, both horrific and funny, with the chant of "Tweet it! Tweet it!" Kira and his parents must flee again, Itsuki's parents find them, and the father flees. Shinri, Kira's mother (Kuroiwa Yoshi) remains his unshakable ally. The screen is repeatedly filled with tweets and texts, videos, and other online media blasts - a busy, destructive cyber world where you can run but you can't hide. It's called "the Riverbed Case" - a homage to Keanu Reeves' debut, perhaps?

At the end, which goes on too long, Eisuke tries for some poetic and surreal moments and celebrates the bond between Kira and his mother, with nods to earlier coming of age classics (Clio Barnard? Shane Meadows, perhaps?) and a moment of positivity, fruit tart, and coffee, offering sweetness, smiles, and a little hope. For all his mixed messages Eisuke winds up making a solider and more humane movie this time. His persistence with this familiar theme has taken him to a new level.

Forgiven Children 許された子どもたち, 131 mins., opened in Japan Jun. 1, 2020. It was screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (Aug 28-Sept. 12).

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YU UEMURA IN FORGIVEN CHILDREN

LEUNG MIND-KAI, KATE REILLY: MEMORIES TO CHOKE ON, DRINKS TO WASH THEM DOWN 夜香‧鴛鴦‧深水埗(2019)

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GREGORY WONG AND KATE REILLY IN MEMORIES TO CHOKE ON, DRINKS TO WASH THEM DOWN

A collection of segments set in Hong Kong fails to engage

This is an odd collection of shorts with a Hong Kong setting and a wealth of opportunities not quite seized.

1. "Forbidden City." An old woman with mild dementia spends a few hours with her pretty new Cantonese-speaking Indonesian caretaker who consents to take her on a bus trip ("Forbidden City" because she's not supposed to go out), knowing that if they ride around in a circle her charge will not know the difference and will think they're been on an outing. This seems to be about the repetitious dialogue. We feel for the caretaker who has to listen to the same stories five times in a couple of hours. Greater humor and greater poignancy in the writing were needed; the two actors are fine.

2. "Toy Stories" focuses on two brothers in the Japanese toy shop of their mother. The information they exchange about various toys is quite precise. Each toy refers to an experience of their childhood or an aspiration of their adulthood. But the main interest is the sudden revelation that the younger brother has lost his job and would like to take over the store but has just learned she wants to turn it over to somebody, and he hasn't told her about his situation.

3. "Yuen Yeung." A female American English teacher and her local math teacher male colleague meet regularly to eat Hong Kong food, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and drink (Yuen Yeung is a coffee-tea mix with a local labor history connection). This could be a low-keyed romance about shyness, frustration, and disappointment - if the writing were better and the acting more expressive. This seems a collection of narrowly missed opportunities for greater humor and warmth.

4. The oddest segment and most unexpected, since it's a documentary. It cuts back and forth somewhat confusingly between campaigning and personal moments as Jessica Lam, a young Hong Kong barista and cat fancier of and also someone running in the city election in 2019 - one in which, we are told by story cards, the DAB Pro China party lost big. But we are shown that Jessica, though ostensibly on the winning side, herself lost, if by only 102 votes. We learn that she not only likes cats in some sense doesn't like people - or at least doesn't care to have them sit close her at the bar. She also tells us she didn't want to serve on the political committee much anyway. Two videos by Teenage Riot are inserted in this segment in which Jessica appears. There is some information about Hong Kong politics in this segment, obviously, but it seems confusingly edited and lacks depth.

Each of these segments has strong story possibilities that, in a revised or expanded form, might have emerged. In the present form however they are underwhelming.

Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash them Down, 77 mins., presented by Golden Scene Co. Ltd, was an extra at the 2020 all virtual NYAFF.

JOHN HSU: DETENTION 返校 (2019)

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An elegantly filmed videogame of a moment in Taiwan's repressive 1960's

This film is set in 1962 during Taiwan's long nightmare of government repression, a period when hyper-vigilance against communist infiltration dominated national daily life. Two students are trapped at the hillside Greenweood High School at night. Trying to escape, they discover a missing teacher and run into ghosts and what the Wikipedia article calls "the dark truth of their fate." Detention, strangely enough, is based on a videogame described as a "survival horror adventure." Knowing that makes things a lot clearer.

That medium seems a strange entree into the rarely depicted "White Terror" period of the Kuonmintang regime of repression in Taiwan when thousands were executed. It leads to a rather strange combination of the elegant and the crude - but elegant prevails and this film won a raft of awards in Taiwan. As a depiction of an historical moment, it's odd to see the horror movie style used. On the other hand, this is a classy horror movie, one that's never really frightening, but with awfully good-looking young men and women representing students repressed for a book club presided over by two dissident teachers (reading Turgenyev's Fathers and Sons - a very serious offense), a striking sound design (too loud, in the horror movie manner, but still subtle by horror movie standards) and a nicely recorded score of strings and piano by Luming Lu and handsome cinematography by dp Chou Yi-Hsien. The choice has been made to depict the horror of government repression as a horror movie, but a tasteful one. This is a handsomely made movie, but ultimately not a very interesting one by the standards of films about repressed students and spooky government oppressors.

In the film's favor, it's banned in mainland China. It "enjoyed strong box office success in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Wikipedia). On the other hand, it doesn't seem likely to arouse much excitement among western viewers. Those in search of historical truth will find events dealt with too impressionistically. Genre horror fans will find it too restrained and tasteful. Some young men are dunked head first into vats of water. One gets his throat slit by a young woman. There are a couple of executions by bullet. There is some intimidation. The best scenes are those at the beginning when students are meeting clandestinely and being found out.

Really there don't seem to have been a wealth of ideas about how to vary scenes. Many of them involve young men (with nice eyebrows, casting seemed to favor those) in khaki shirts and pants being marched or pushed around, or given the head-dunking treatment. The staging is dark and grand, rather than bright and intimate, where in might have been more scary.

In her Variety review Jessica Kiang notes that the "White Terror" period has been little depicted in film, that the Taiwanese would rather forget it (but those who forget risk repeating). An exception is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 A City of Sadness and Edward Yang alludes to it in his 1991 autobiographical masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day. Hsu's Detention is meant to be what Kiang calls a more "populist" and less "arthouse" approach. It's extraordinary to learn that The White Terror period lasted over 38 years, staring in 1947 and ending in 1987. That's a lot to forget.

It winds up being an "ambitious, but not entirely successful" mashup of "haunted-house horror," of "monster movie" of "love story," and "historical reckoning" or "sentimentalized call" for national reckoning. At best it probably couldn't do all that. The videogame source accounts for an effective theatricality, but also thin characterizations and a sense that events are mechanically predetermined rather than natural. But after all, the whole thing is intentionally surreal in style.

The dissident teachers are led by Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi) and Mr Zhang (Fu Meng-Po), who pass out the banned books to the nice looking young men/boys and women/girls. As Kiang puts it their discussion sessions are "bathed in a honeyed nostalgic glow", which leads us to expect a standard glossy historical film. Then suddenly the film morphs into a nightmare where the school is transformed into a wasteland with monsters and torture, with a network of flashbacks depicting the book club's betrayal, and the repression - arrests, torture and executions - that followed, as well as details as to Miss Fang's troubled home life and relationship with Mr Zhang, Finally in the action "rather cleverly," Kiang thinks, "it’s revealed just who is doing the dreaming of this hellish place, what their real mission is and how it relates to the history of the White Terror and the fog of willful amnesia in which it has been shrouded." That's a large order, and some of it was lost on me. Multiple viewings might be necessary. But since this lacks the breath of real life one doesn't feel highly motivated, though this is, in its way, a beautiful film to look at and listen to, without question.

Deterntion 返校 ("Back to School"), 102 mins., debuteed at Busan Oct. 2019, showing also at Taipei Golden Horse, Taipei, and Miami. At Golden Horse it won seven major awards and was nominated for five more. Screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12).

KIM DO-YOUNG: KIM JI-YOUNG BORN 1982 / 82년생 김지영 (2019)

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JUNG YU-MI IN KIM JI-YOUNG: BORN 1982

A well off young woman seen as a victim of ingrained misogyny in Korean society

Kim Ji-young Born 1982 is a conscientious issue picture. It's about female discontent and unfair male dominance even in upper middle class contemporary Korean society, and is based on the eponymous bestselling semi-autobiographical novel about a typical young woman: "Kim Yi-young" is like "Jane Doe" in Korean. These basics could not be more clear, and are familiar from other societies where situations and feelings are quite similar. In the film, the details - which it's said have aroused strong arguments or even caused breakups between couples in Korea - can be confusing to sort out. The film provides a sequence of scenes and flashbacks whose interrelationship isn't so easy to follow, though it is evident that despite advances, and well educated women working in executive positions, Korean society remains highly patriarchal, and older generation women can tend to reenforce that. And this is a film that obviously needs to be seen. The specifics may be elusive, the film may have failings, but the subject is so important the book has been translated into over a dozen languages.

The message may be confused by the complexity of the protagonist's situation, or just be presented confusingly. Kim Ji-young has worked at a firm where some women have - well, one has anyway - a respected position, even though the males get promoted first. She may have found this work challenging and interesting - her female boss was encouraging - or a pain in the neck. Now she is at home to care for her new baby. The rigid relationships of dealing with her in-laws at holiday time may drive her nuts. She may simply be suffering from postpartum depression. She may just be tired of being cooped up in the house all the time (and this is why she thinks of taking a part time job at a local shop. Or she may just be losing her mental stability for reasons that have nothing at all to do with her current situation. But the story's point must be that the protagonist's experience of a totally male-dominated sexist world has driven her literally mad - as an only way out.

Unfortunately, this immaculate-looking, well cast and acted film is a little opaque. It doesn't provide very many clear guidelines, particularly in indicating the chronology of scenes set at different times, and some "scene skips" are so rapid it's not clear who the new characters are. Through depicting the protagonist as largely a helpless victim, the film fails to show what's actually going on inside her, but perhaps she does not know.

Then there is the prolonged issue of Ji-young's returning to work, when her husband offers to take a year of paternity leave so she can do it, but family members balk, and she won't be able to earn as much at the same level. Kim Ji-young's husband Jung Dae-Hyun(played by the rangy, serenely authoritative and sexy Gong Yoo) becomes ambiguous in all this. It's not clear what he really wants; he may not know. He promised to help when pushing to have a baby, he makes the paternity leave offer, but then he tells Ji-young she's not well, and proves she has acted strangely.

Perusal of a Guardian review of the source book shows it is differently organized, being mostly a linear chronological account by the psychiatrist the woman goes to. This structure, the reviewer, Sarah Shin, argues, is used to convey a sense of a"claustrophobic" as well as "airless, unbearably dull world." That aim must explain the tidiness of all the interiors in the film as well, though sometimes they just feel glossy and bland.

But the film may not convey some of the author, Cho Nam-joo's points as well as the her book, or the film's subtitles may lose subtleties that are embedded in the Koran dialogue. Korean is uniquely structured in its complex linguistic distinctions among generations and status levels. When the protagonist starts speaking like her mother at the family gathering and her father-in-law is outraged, subtitles can't convey this very well. Indeed some points (quoted in the review) are made by statement, "told" rather than "shown," e.g. "The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all." (This is a statement quoted from the book in the Guardian review.)

The group scenes nonetheless are what work best, in themselves, even if they don't fit together into a cogent whole: they show the subtle tensions that may exist in all interactions where people aren't happy with their situation, but can't overtly show that - yet keep constantly almost showing it. The blurb for the festival presentation suggests Kim Ji-young (Yu-mi Jung) starts having visions or being possessed. But at the family gathering when her husband whisks her away, saying she's unwell, it merely seems she has spoken up out of anger and frustration. This is the kind of moment when a sense of alien family pressure seems at its most intense.

The book came out at a particularly opportune time of much heightened Korean awareness of gender inequality (see theGuardian review). Non-Korean viewers should know particularly what happened in Korea when Kim Ji-young's mother's wish of a woman president came true - the worsening gender inequality, the patriarchal authoritarianism, the scandal and ouster, the counter reaction, the new movement for a feminist consciousness. The film may be less opportune, or serve a different audience.

Euny Hong's New York Times review of the book is more blunt. She says the book shows the "banality of the evil that is misogyny," that the subject is "young stay-at-home mother driven to a psychotic break" (by that misogyny as it impacts her), and adds that this story forced her to confront her own "traumatic experiences" that she had pretended were "nothing out of the ordinary" (perhaps they weren't!). She also writes that the book became a kind oof Uncle Tom's Cabin for gender roles in Korea. She is astute and specific in highlighting details of the book's Korean dialogue that show how the accomplished and ambitious Ji-young is abused by men from childhood to the present. She likes the translator's choice of a word in the subtitles, suggesting they're well done. But as a non-Korean, one can't help feeling much of the heft and meaning of this film remain allusive. It's not entertaining and accessible to a western audience like a Hong Sang-soo film (especially when one has seen a dozen of those!).

Sarah Shin, the Guardian reviewer, ties the book in with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite. Let's hope that the social commentary here is more subtle and precise.

Kim Ji-young: Born 1982 / 82년생 김지영, 118 mins., opened in Korea in Oct. 2019, showed in the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival Nov. 2019, and opened in many other countries in Nov. and subsequently. Received a number of nominations and awards in Korea. Screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020).

TRAN THANH HUY: RÒM (2029)

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TRAN ANH KHUA AND TRONG VAI IN ROM

Running for lottery numbers in Ho Chi Min City

Tran Thanh Huy wins the most intensely kinetic award for this film about a couple of Ho Chi Min City teenage street boys, a promising Slumdog Millionaire-esque debut whose inspiration was one of a series of shorts by the filmmaker that was a Golden Kite winner 16.30, shown at Cannes in 2013. The action here is central but its direction is immaterial. What counts is the propulsive movement and the fluid camerawork of dp Nguyen Vinh Phuc. Notably, the wide aspect ratio images are stylized by alternating left or right diagonal tilts, giving a kind of order to the chaos. Two boys are running around here, and at the end, they're still running: there's no resolution. More of a story-line is needed than this, but there is a lot of potential here, a light, comprehensive touch with urban life, if another time there is more of a script and some sequences that are allowed to breathe.

This is all about two scrawny, energetic Ho Chi Min City street boys who survive (or do they just keep in motion?) through acting as intermediaries for bookies selling numbers tickets - and finding good numbers: this is an impoverished world where, as elsewhere on an overpopulated planet, the poorest of the poor live on dreams of sudden luck, and where there is much reliance on superstition and magic. The debut-burdened customers in run-down apartment complexes - trying to ward off their housing from being demolished - beat the boys if the numbers lose and give them a nice tip if they win. Both the boys, who look underage for there 14-15-16 chronological age, yet also ageless, are engaging as well as indefatigable.

The initial focus is on Ròm (Trần Anh Khoa), who says he once got a 25USD tip. It's the most money he's ever seen. Rom was abandoned by his parents after a demolition and failed relocation scheme, but expects them to come back to pick him up. He keeps waiting, and lives by this dream. Rom soon gets a rival in the nimble, penytailed Phuc (Nguyễn Phan Anh Tú), a fast talker who also does a mean back flip of a wall, or in the middle of the street if the spirit strikes him. Phuc, who's as fleet and acrobatic as a young Jackie Chan, tries to move in on Ròm; his deviousness relies so much on speed he seems to outrun immorality. . Phuc says (is it a joke?) he adopted the name from an American client who kept losing and would say "Fuck!" ever time, which he thought sounded cool. It's one of many throwaway moments because this movie is in such a hurry it's all over in seventy-nine minutes.

As Allan Hunter notes in his Busan Screen Daily review, this action, like Danny Boyle's Slumdog, Has "a Dickensian sweep" in the way Rom's life is "measured in the characters he meets" (at whose mercy he is from moment to moment, his survival, and the way he's "constantly at the mercy of fate." But we don't have a thrilling, satisfying Slumdog plot here. Rom is brfriended by the motherly lottery dealer Mrs Ghi (Do Nhu Cat Phuong), buteverybody's out for themselves here. There are many frantic fights, especially between Rom and Phuc. There is one sequence when Phuc takes Rom on a rid on a tiny grass-lined raft. Rom's afraid to get on, for good reason. They're constantly falling off, and one shutters to think what the water is like.

The climactic action climax is a scramble where everything goes wrong, and the slum dweller customers and Rom both get cheated. There's no prize: the way to the prize is the prize. All the fun there is is in trying to get there, even if you don't. Some of the editing by Lee Chatametikool is pretty nifty in a Guy Ritchie kind of way, but even that kind of cheating survives because the vernacular realism makes almost anything seem real. Another reviewer mentions not only Boyle's Slumdog, but also City of God. But this film, for all its kinetic charm and neorealist grip on street life, doesn't have those kinds of grandeur, violence, or plot payoff.

Rom, 79 mins., debuted at Busan oct. 2019 and released theatricallyl in Vietnam Jul. 31, 2020. It was screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual New York Asian film Festival.

LIEN CHIEN-HUNG, SUNNY YU, LIAO CHE-YI: DEAR LONELINESS 致親愛的孤獨者 (2019)

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LIU KUAN-TING IN DEAR LONELINESS

Girls on their own

There is more: a TV series and a novel are tied in with these three short films about young women and sexual fantasy commissioned by a Taipei production company called Dream Image. Surprisingly, they shorts draw inspiration from a two-part documentary on 80 of Taiwan’s independent bookstores. The bookstore is in the first short and the third but only as a resting place in the second. Loneliness is a common theme, but in quite different ways. These three shorts are fine, but, being by different directors, are different in theme and feeling. If there's a common literal object, it's not so much books but cell phones. Not for that reason, or not alone for it, the three shorts' cumulative impression is very sad.

Why did the first of the three remind me of Gaspar Noé's wife Lucile Hadžihalilović? Because there's something at once extreme and creepy and sensuous and pretty about it. The girl (Lin Chi-en?), whose name Xiaoyu (Cih En Lin) is as unspellable as Hadžihalilović, doesn't look twelve, though her boy classmates do. She's a little plain, but also a seductress. Strangely, her erotic fantasies of sexy Teacher David (Chung Cheng-Chun), licking him all over, etc. have nothing to do with reality, and yet she somehow does manage to get him fired for inappropriate behavior just the same. She has little real inner life, so we don't know what she might have felt about what happens. The other teacher is a monster. He gives Chinese poetry a bad name. His screaming commands are hysterical. The girl Xiaoyu is very sly. What is she doing on the smartphone she steals and hides in the bathroom, with its Turkish-style toilet seen from high above? This is a strangely tense and economical piece and a reminder that depictions of school life are one of the best ways to make films about weirdly warped and frustrated human behavior. This is an excellent short film and its mix of fantasy and reality is just right.

Second short's girl establishes more sense and control. She arrives in town with pink daypack and roller-blade suitcase with simple questions. "Where is the girls' dorm?" "Is this room 2019?" Her name is easy: Chan Kai Han (Angel Lee). This is a tale of alienation and bureaucratic hassles and Chinese meanness that is first Kafkaesque and then violent and finally bitterly ironic. Wow! Another excellent short film that's sure to leave memories. Imagine going away to college and when you get there, they have no room for you, and your parents blame you for it. A very sardonic world vew is here.

Third and longest short focuses on Xun or Hsun (Janine Chang or Chang Chun-ning or ‎Ning Chang or Zhang Jun-ning: there is little hope of getting a grip on a Chinese name if you're not Chinese), a twenty-something newcomer to Taipei from the provinces who ekes out a living, after a worse sex worker job, off playing flirtatious visits to lovelorn inmates. They are paid for this. Really? How does this work exactly? Instructions from the girls' 'boss' (who of course like any pimp has designs on the girls, prior access) are to open your jacket and show cleavage, act happy, and say you'll "wait for him" and be his girlfriend when he comes out. Second inmate she sees is #2923 (Liu Kuan-ting), a big young man with a sensitive face and sad eyes - he reminded me of one of Claire Denis' great regulars, Grégoire Colin. He does not speak at all the first visit, but asks for her for next time. The relationship continues. There's no use trying to cheer up the prisoner, and Hsun becomes honest. #2923 sees through her cheeriness. He speaks in favor of loneliness and - here comes the tie-in: when she asks where she can go for a quiet escape, he recommends she spend the day in a bookstore. The Grégoire Coin lookalike has rapidly become adorable. But also a little predictable, and this segment doesn't quite justify its extra length. The bookend of the three, a writer-bookstore owner and his musings, and the closing song, are trite and unworthy of the vivid short stories. If you're looking for a short film collection, this presents three promising young filmmakers.

Dear Loneliness 致親愛的孤獨者, 99 mins., was released in Taiwan Sept. 2019. It was screened for this review as paort of the NY Asian Film Festival 2020 virtual edition (Aug. 28- Sept. 12).

]KIM CHO-HEE: LUCKY CHAN-SIL (2019)

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KIM YOUNG-MIN AND KANG MAL-GEUM IN LUCKY CHAN-SIL

Woman at a crossroads

At a drunken wrap-party, the director collapses and dies. Producer Lee Chan-sil (Kang Mal-geum), a middle-aged, never-married woman who has so long worked with him, finds herself out of a job and questioning her life. This is the premise of a new Korean film by a woman director, a collaborator of Hong Sang-soo (who has in fact herself co-produced eight of his films in the last decade), that's been seen as a riff off Hong or a lighthearted parody nodding at and perhaps chiding Hong's male point of view.

The reference to films and filmmakers and focus on one of the latter in difficulties come straight out of Hong Sang-soo. This certainly seems self-referential, and by indirection a reference to Hong. It's harder to detect a parodic, satirical, or comedic aspect referring to Hong or of any kind. This seems primarily a warm-hearted female professional midlife-crisis film, small and based on conversation like Hong, but more like a conventional film than like one of his. Pleasant and not very demanding (which might fit Hong, but his films are complexly self-referential by now), this has a bittersweet quality.

The constant presence of Granny (Yoon Yuh-jung), an old lady with philosophical observations from an end-of-life position, heightens the focus on self-reflection. Likewise a young man in underwear (Kim Young-min) who identifies himself as the ghost of Leslie Cheung, the Hong Kong megastar and regular of Wong Kar-wai films, who committed suicide in 2003. He serves as a quiet cheerleader and contributes to the meditative mood - and sense that Producer Lee is at the end of her tether.

She has gone to stay with an actress friend she calls Sis, Sophie (Yoon Seung-ah), does housekeeping for her, and helps Granny with her "homework." Granny can't read, it turns out, because in her day girls weren't allowed to learn because it would make them uppity - one more sign of Korea's deep misogynous bent whose current manifestation is shown in another 2020 NYAFF film, Kim Do-young's Kim Ji-young: Born 1982.

But the main self-realization comes through a would-be romance. Sophie has a man giving her French lessons, Young KIm (Bae Yu-ram) who's also an aspiring filmmaker. Producer Lee has some friendly conversations with Young Kim; both are single and have little to do, they share some meals, and Producer Lee gets ideas which eventually Young Kim sets straight. He thinks of her more like an older sister. A rude awakening for Producer Lee. But she has Granny and the ghost of Leslie Cheung to consult with. And when Producer Lee finds Young Kim found Ozu's Tokyo Story boring and prefers Christopher Nolan, she's relieved of her illusion they might be compatible. Only trouble is she's realizing now she's missed out on love by being work-driven and never entering into couple-hood. Granny warns her not to regret the past, to enjoy each day: you know the drill.

Yes, this does have a "transition from female sacrifice to female empowerment." Simply being a film about someone (formerly) involved in making films doesn't, however, make it a "smart metanarrative on the art of filmmaking," though the film may be a comment on the filmmaker's own life. It's a more conventional one than Hong Sang-soo's. It does have the one opening drunken scene, too short for Hong though; and Hong-like exterior scenes, perhaps duplicating actual locations he's used, though I can't be sure of that. I might have enjoyed it more had I not been asked to see complexities and cross-references I couldn't find.

Lucky chan-sil / 찬실이는 복도 많지("There are many corridors in the cold room"), 96 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 2019, also showing at Seoul, Independent Film Festival, Osaka and Pyeongchang festivals in 2019 and 2020. It won Best Picture at Seoul and the CGV Arthouse Award, the KBS Independent Film Award, and the Director’s Guild of Korea Award. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12).

SABU: DANCING MARY ダンシング・マリ (2019)

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AINA YAMADA AND NAOTO IN DANCING MARY

Before remodeling, an exorcism is sometimes needed

Some of the scenes in this genre mashup are delightful, perhaps especially ones that have nothing essential to do with the plot. I liked when some young office drones finish an urgent conversation in the cafeteria and one says, "Good lunch!" And when the protagonist Kenji Fujimoto (dancer-rapper Kataoka Naoto, known as Naoto) is in a hospital for the spirit medium he's recruiting and two women with cancer in the ward mercilessly rag him for being a cowardly loser. It's not essential to the action, but the rhythm is great. The government agency for which the normally lazy Kenji works has put him in charge of a nightmare job - the demolition an old showa-era dance hall to be converted into a mall and offices. There's a serious snag: the ugly old building is haunted and people are afraid to go in. So the yakuza, the Japanese mafia, is called in as well as some ghosts who can help out. And Kenji, who never stops being comically frightened, enlists the medium he hears about (who's being bullied for it, by the way, the class "Carrie"), a high school girl called Yukiko ((Aina Yamada)). It doesn't hurt that to channel the ghost connection, Kenji has to hold hands with Yukiko all the time. A dancer called Mary (dancer model Bando Nozomi. haunts the building. (The involvement of Naoto and Bando Nozomi is due to a contract Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) has signed with a talent agency.)

A plane ride take Kenji to an all-out battle of dead guys in limbo. An aim is for lost souls to be allowed to go to heaven (So: ghost story meets martial arts.) He and the medium go over with a slaughtered yakuza full of swords from "death by a thousand" - or a dozen anyway - cuts. They come back with the wild Johnny (Kaito Yoshimura), a scruffy, rambunctious ghost of a rocker Mary's lost boyfriend, who hopefully will free Mary of her entrapment in the dance hall building. Johnny is a laugh all the way. Notice his wild reaction to being in a plane; and his demands after landing, en route to see Mary - chewing gum and a boutique outfit - and his critique of the boring modern car - lots of fun, throwaway moments come with Johnny.

Jason Maher, whose review in VCinema elucidates details of the narrative that had eluded me, is one of several who note, in his case admiringly, that the style Sabu evokes here at times recalls the early Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Sabu acted in Kurosawa's 2001 Pulse). Maher notes that Sabu exchews "jump-scares and gore," and adopts (I liked this) a "texture" that is "damp and cold." Refreshing on a hot day! Maher describes the sensory atmosphere of the movie admirably : "Shrill strings, wailing winds and melancholy music are heard while cobwebbed corridors, abandoned abodes, decrepit danchis and the mouldy dance hall provide the settings." There are several supple ballet sequences too, by the way.Ghost-communication scenes are in black and white. Maybe it doesn't all hold together because there are so many disparate genre elements. But if you hang on for the ride, fun is to be had.
Dancing Mary ダンシング・マリ, 96 mins., released Japan Oct. 2019, Imagine Film Festival (Netherlands) Sept. 5, 2020. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival.

HUR JIN-HO: FORBIDDEN DREAM 천문: 하늘에 묻는다 (2019)

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HAN SUK-KIU, CHHOI MIN-SIK IN FORBIDDEN DREAM

A period celestial bromance with complicated consequences

This is the story of the extremely important 15th century Korean scientist-inventor-engineer Jang Yeong-sil (Choi Min-sik) and King Sejong the Great (Han Suk-kiu), who nurtured his talents. Hur Jin-ho has made a grand and glorious costume drama out of this well known part of Korean history featuring two of the nation's most distinguished actors (united for a second time, the first being for the 1999 thriller Shiri). Korea's dominance by China hangs over this story. Since Yeong-sil's most notable inventions were astronomical, his work was bound to violate the Chinese rule that the skies were a sacred region Koreans were forbidden to broach. Yeong-sil also caused local hostility in the royal court because the free-thinking Sejong had made him, a person of lowly status, a high-ranking advisor. This is the story of the complications of this important relationship, which is both enhanced and diluted by costume drama pomp.

The West has stories like this, like Galileo's, which comes a century or so later. One wants this film to be more intellectual, richer in the science of the time. But perhaps it does the best it can. In any case it is handsome to look at and the moments of intimacy are unique and touching if a bit schmaltzy at times, especially on the part of Choi; Han is more wont to laugh, as if being a radical Joseon dynasty king was all a lark.

In the film it's said that Yeong-sil was initially a slave. Elsewhere he is described as one of the Cheonmin or "vulgar commoners." In any case his discovery and elevation to the status of a court counselor is an important and controversial event. This King Sejong is egalitarian, and also grandiose. In one gesture he selects a star and tells Yeong-sil it's his, that social status doesn't restrict who can own a star, and goes on to say all the stars rank as his personal servants. Perhaps, for his time and place, they truly seemed to be. The grand operatic string orchestra rings out in the background. Yeong-sil and Sejong lie down beside each other and contemplate the stars. By this point, if not before, this has become a real sentimental bromance. During the honeymoon period, Jang designs a special clock and astronomical globe, and many other things not fully described in the film. I wish they were, that one got more of a sense what it was like to be the Leonardo of Korea.

In these activities competition with or defiance of Ming, the Chinese emperor, have to be somehow implied. And this is a great danger, since China is far more powerful and Korea owes fealty to the Chinese emperor.

When King Sejong asks Yeong-sil what reward he would like for his achievements, he answers, "Always to be with you, Sire."

Naturally this can't last. There are courtiers who never liked the raising of a person of such low status to such a high position nor his having the ear of the king - though it's insinuated that years pass before the trouble comes. Yeong-sil has made numerous positive contributions to the country having to do with time and water as well as the stars, and he has advocates in the court. Sejong never personally, fully, turns against him until Yeong-sil forces him to.

Through pressure from the Chinese, Yeong-sil's largest device is torn down - his celestial globe, a grand device, yet primitive by modern standards, of course - and King Sejong himself torches it. Others are afraid to, perhaps disagreeing with its destruction or afraid Sejong is not truly in favor of it. Now King Sejong heads out for Incheon to recover from ill health.

The extended turning point is the collapse of the gama, a large carriage designed by Yeon-sil, in rain and mud and muck while King Sejong is riding in it. This is probably the most demanding of a number of complicated physical reenactments in the film involving elaborate reconstructed period machinery. Miraculously, the king is alive. All the very many royal servants who are found surrounding the crashed gama bow down in the muck - from which King Sejong has emerged chanting in unison, begging to be put to death. Members of the court regularly chant in unison. It's disconcerting; also one of several things that make one feel the film, with its color-coordinated court uniforms, is about to morph into a musical. It's assumed by all that the collapsed wheel of the gama was sabotage: everyone agrees that a I]gama[/I] designed by Yeong-sil simply could not collapse. This seems mistaken, though it shows what regard the man is held in. But if tragedy could strike at Cape Canaveral, why not a broken carriage wheel in the 15th century?

In the wake of this, when the quartet of royal maintenance men are tortured and jailed and Yeong-sil is under investigation and eventually sent to the same cozy cell, it's discovered that he has had in his quarters a little wooden box with some odd squares in it. He professes to know noting of it. This is the beginnings of Hangul, another great innovation during the regime of King Sejong. It's made very clear (though students of Korean culture would not need to be informed) that Hangul was part of Sejong's democratizing, liberal moment by ending the necessity of using Chinese characters, which effectively made literacy in Korea a thing of the aristocratic and powerful. A system of letters (though to us they look like characters), it was created to replace the complicated use of Chinese characters. But use of Chinese writing kept literacy firmly in the hands of the aristocracy. Hangul would make ordinary people able to become literate with easy and writ their own language. So this is part of the story of the period, though how it relates to the relationship between the King and the commoner-sage is a bit complicated, and perhaps a little dry. As Yoon Mitn-sik says in his Korea Herald review, the film "mixes it up" at this point. It blends the bromance, the conflict with China, the carriage accident scandal, and the creation of Hangul and the mix creates tension but not a sense of narrative logic. .

Yeong-sil and King Sejong have another intimate meeting. But Yeong-sil is held with the four maintenance officers for the gama accident. We know Yeong-sil was flogged, but nothing more. An online biography says it's possible he may have survived into the next regime. There's material for another, more purely invented story, perhaps, a great inventor living out his last days in obscurity - like Tesla? But the best part of this film comes early, the star-gazing and bromance moments, where the interaction of these two fine actors is most effective.

Forbidden Dream, /천문: 하늘에 묻는다 (2019), 132 mins., released theatrically in Korea Sept. 2019, and in Japan Dec. 2020. It was screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12). It's currently available for rent on Amazon.

LAYLA ZHUQING JI: VICTIM(S) 加害者，被害人 (2020)

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POSTER FOR VICTIM(S)

A lurid movie about bullying full of ugly scenes of abuse

This debut feature about school bullying, murder, and bad parenting from mainland Chinese director Layla Zhuqing Ji shot in Malaysia for greater freedom is ambitious, but confusing, and doesn't shed new light on the subject. It seems overly busy, too much sliding toward horror movie genre, lacking in emotional depth, particularly after seeing another, much better new film about bullying in the NYAFF, Naito Eisuke's touching Forgiven Children.

Ji indulges energetically at first in in multiple platforms - present action, kids' group chats and messaging, individual interviews, flashbacks - conveying the busy media-dense atmosphere of such situations, but the action drops back to a simpler two-pronged narrative approach later with emphasis on flashbacks; the crime of murder somewhat falls by the wayside. The flashbacks show that the murder victim was a chief bully, the killer mercilessly bullied by a small group of vicious class misfits to which the victim belonged.

But things are further complicated by there being homosexuality in two of the main boys - though this is a theme not followed through on. And yet, though, anyway - how does this make sense, exactly? - they both seem interested in and in competition for the same new girl, an art school transfer. She it turns out was molested by a teacher, and she too is soon mercilessly bullied and teased at the new school for that by the girls. Both the girl and the boy are subjected to having their mistreatment filmed on smart phones. She and the bullied boy, the top student, become comrades in misery. (It was at this point, 45 minutes in, that I discovered this is a coed boarding school.)

The boys' social statuses and mothers are contrasted. The murdered boy's is a lowly masseuse with a drunken husband (not followed through on),while that of the killer, who was cruelly bullied, is a woman well off from the sale, we're told, of violent video games. Everyone seems to hate the "rich" boy for being uppity. I'm not sure the filmmaker is aware how ambiguous and confusing a lot of details are, such as the sexuality of the boys; the uppityness of the killer's mom.

Her interest seems more in shooting violent encounters and sudden actions, scary, penumbral scenes, shadowy interiors alternating with bright street or schoolroom exteriors, some of which are beautiful as lensed by dp Eunsoo Cho.

The school and the authorities come in for some harsh depiction. No one is ready to step in and prevent bullying, or make the classroom a human space. The classroom scenes are crudely stylized things out of a comedy film. The system is stark. Students are seated in order of GPA, top in front, lowest in back. All emphasis is on test score and rote knowledge. When the group bullying sessions come they're depicted in horror movie mode. They are trying to observe, and the mode they're in makes it hard to take them seriously, though not hard to be disgusted by them. The grasp on tone is very uneven.

While undeniably effective as crude fiction degenerating for a while into misery porn with hideous torture scenes, this film has too little sense of reality to work as a comment on current events, on which it's only an impressionistic riff, in any case. Since it's approach to these events is so crude, it also can't be taken seriously as cinema. But that doesn't mean it won't contribute to discussions of these issues, especially by Chinese audiences. An uncertain beginning for Layla Zhuqing Ji, who studied in the US but plans next to make a film in China, which she says has rich opportunities for independent cinema. That's all except for the censorship, I guess.

Victim(s) 加害者，被害人 ("Perpetrators, victims"), debuted at Udine (Udine Far East Film Festival) June 2020. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020).

LIAO MING-YI: IWeirDo 怪胎 (2020)

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NIKKI HSIEH AND AUSTIN LIN IN IWEIRDO

How becoming normal can be alienating for the odd

Liao Ming-yi, emerging from a new generation of filmmakers from Taiwan out of music videos and using an iPhone XS Max (or actually a bevy of them), has produced a troubling and some think uniquely timely delight. AmandaTheJedi observes on Letterboxd, "I don't know if I've experienced something so delightfully quirky get so horrendously bleak so fast," and that is also true. Eye candy that takes us to a magical place and then makes staying there suddenly complicated when all it had been was safe.

In this vein we meet Chen Po-Ching (Austin Lin) and Chen Ching (Nikki Hsieh), a cute couple in the making except they both suffer from OCD, which includes mysophobia, fear of contamination and dirt, causing them to suit up in gloves, surgical mask and raincoat (or as one urgently contemporizing blurb has it, "PPE") whenever they go out and to spend a lot of their time scrupulously cleaning house when at home, as they consider it far safer to be. They know they're two of a kind when they see themselves outside - at a grocery store, where Po-Ching spots Ching outfitted just like him and follows her from the subway car to the supermarket where he sees her compulsively shoplifting. (They also repeat rituals all the time, and stealing chocolate she can't eat is one of her regular ones). Po-Ching understands. They start dating. They move in together. They go out for challenges, like a recycling center or cleaning up outside. He is a translator who works at home. She is an occasional model in an art class.

The images are simple and eye candy bright, the two actors click and are cute and special. I love the delicate glimmer of violet in Hsieh's hair. Lin has a Spock peaked haircut and broad Magic Marker eyebrows, is tall and ripped but boyish, appealing but not a conventional bland Asian male cutie (we see one later).

Remember in De Sica's Chaplinesque Tuscan fantasy Miracle in Milan there is a couple in love, he is black and she is white. The day arrives when magic comes to the squatters' camp where they live and each makes a wish and rushes off happily to find each other with hope, then disappointment, the man now white, the girl now black? This story is something like that.

The shooting with an iPhone isn't so much a thing as it was with Sean Baker's Tangerine five years ago. You don't even notice it and as Maggie Lee notes in her Variety review, when midway the phone is turned and goes from confining academy ratio suited to the couple's restricted life to a "widening frame size (aspect ratio 1.85:1)" that matches one protagonist's expanded, but thus alienating world.

This is very clearcut theme-developing. But the parts that matter are the little details, the vigorous joint teeth-cleaning when preparing for a kiss and cleaning up after it, the glorious moment of picking up a tiny piece of dirt and not minding it. Liao enters this world of shared oddness and limitation with deepest sympathy and pictures it for us with effortless charm. He has a little trouble toward the end knowing how, well, to end, and falls into repeats and reversals that are themselves OCD-ish, but unsatisfying. But we can excuse that because this is such an original, artful, cherishable product. Except for that flubbing at the end the writing is very, very good. Bravo! Not to be missed.

(As for those who feel like Maggie Lee that this movie's especially relevant because it "plays out like Love in the Time of Corona," that's fine if it works for you: but this couple unites because they they're unlike, not like, everybody else as we with our masks and lock-down and social distancing are forced to be.)

Weirdo* 怪胎, 100 mins., debuted at Udine June 29, 2010, showing at Taipei Aug.7, with a theatrical release in Singapore Sept. 17. Screened for this review as part of the virtual New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12, 2020).

SHIH LI : WILD SPARROW 野雀之詩 (2019)

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CHEN SHU-FANG, LI YI-CHIEH, KAO YI-HSIA IN WILD SPARROW

Beautiful losers

In his little feature debut Wild Sparrow Shi Li has made a partly beautiful and graceful film, with poetic moments but also dissoluteness and ugliness. The handling of images, scenes largely without music and a major character who rarely speaks, is elegant and minimal. But the story told is largely ordinary and uninteresting, a little short on distinctive storyline and with parts that never quite fit together.

It's a film of jarring contrasts and tonal unevenness, though its clashes are largely the point, one supposes: between the fey, mystical rural mountain world and the disheveled, corrupt world of the city, between being a mom and being a whore. The little boy, Han (Kao Yi-hsia) caught in the middle, whose point of view is central to the tale, is discovered living an idyllic life in the mountains with his great-grandmother (Chen Shu-fang). A slim, graceful waif, as it were a numb, Asian Peter Pan, Han is brilliant in school and a sensitive observer of nature, who can stand and watch the insects and birds for hours and then write poetry about them.

But as Han Cheung points out in his Taipei Times review, the Taiwanese countryside is mostly a place of poverty and old people, the younger ones having all gone to the city for work. So not surprisingly Han's school is shutting down and during a visit from his mom, Li (Lee Yi-chieh), it's decided that he will join her in Taipei City to go to school. But Han is as lost as a sparrow, a caged wild one that, in the titular metaphor, has to be set free for money, a way of exploiting Buddhists.

He travels to the city on his own. He is silent and shy, but the young actor is good enough to convey his reactions while maintaining an enigmatic exterior. The boy is obviously not enthusiastic about leaving his observations of sparrows (one of which he has ceremonially buried) and the quietude and the warmth and folk wisdom of his great-grandmother in the mountains. And we soon see how right he was. In the tiny apartment he is forced to hear his mother, the pretty, also waif-like Li have noisy sex with an ugly old man, her current date, in the next room. This unpleasantness is all the uglier became of the delicate touch of what has led up to it, the first big shift of tone. It almost makes you sick, or ready to walk out of the virtual theater. But we're meant to feel Han's shock. The city world is a harsh, ugly place of dirty alleyways and neon. One of the few attractions is boys break dancing out the window, whom Han sometimes tries to imitate.

Li is soon disabused of the notion that this "Uncle" may become Han's new "father. Though he spends some time with Li and Han, teaching Han how to cut a piece of steak, buying him gifts and Li a nice dress and playing carnival games with them, he receives some complaining calls on his cell phone and soon heads out for the country to tend to his factory, and presumably his family, and is not seen again. Li has to return to her job as cocktail waitress/call girl again, and there's more loud sex Han has to listen to. There's also a similarly pretty and waif-like young man (Teng-Hung Hsia), a waiter at the bar who lusts for Li and also wants to be her pimp. Their involvement gets him fired. His pimping soon leads to conflict with Li.

Han is a largely silent victim of these activities, constantly taking refuge in his room. His mother loves Han like a friend, or like a pet. She wants to care for him, but she's a child herself, and her lifestyle gets in the way. There are no fights, no reproaches, except between Li and the waiter.

All these events are beautifully staged and shot, but don't seem especially memorable. There is one scene, though, when Li returns to the apartment drunk, not for the only time, and confronts Han, who's up late working on a poem about the souls of animals. Li begs him to read it to her but he won't. In her drunkenness she seems to chide him and at the same time exclaim at his specialness. Is she mad at him, contemptuous, or in awe? Her drunken raving makes it hard to tell. She raves on about him as he retreats to his room, then he returns and recites his poem to her. But she can't listen. This is a troubling and distinctive moment with an originality the others lack. Here but elsewhere too Li comes across as a complicated and confused person and Lee Yi-chieh sparkles in the role enough to have won an acting prize at the Taipei Festival.

Also unusual is the last part of the film, which completely drops the problems of the earlier part. In the summertime Li sends Han back on the bus by himself to see his great-grandmother and when he gets there she's lying dead and he just lies down beside her. In a dream sequence, he meets with her for a talk and ramble in the woods and slopes. She tells him the sparrows (repeatedly shown in flocks flying overhead in the mountain sequences) are dead souls that return to watch over the living, as she will come back to watch over him. This is followed by the wake for the great-grandmother, with Li and the pimp, who're apparently back together on good terms now, making paper lotuses to be burned by Han in a bowl for the great-grandmother. The ghostly great-grandmother hobbles off into the rain, and the wild sparrows flock in the sky. All very nice, but I have the distinct feeling that these are all parts of a whole that doesn't fit together. The poetry and the sparrows don't resolve the mother's disheveled life and this boy's uncertain situation. Maybe he'll get a scholarship and go to Eton? Shih Li has a delicate and beautiful vision and thinks up some provocative characters and situations. Better luck at integrating them next time.

Wild Sparrow 野雀之詩 ("Poem of the Wildfinch"), 94 mins., debuted at Taipei June 2019, nominated for several awards there, with Lee winning Best Actress, then showed at Busan, Vancouver, Kaohsiung,and Chicago in Oct. 2019. It opened in Taiwan theatrically in July 2020. It was screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept 12).

EMIR EZWAN: SOUL / ROH (2019)

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SCENE FROM ROH

Horror at jungle's edge

Emir Ezwan's Malaysian art house horror film explores folkloric ideas of invasion, possession and witches in a remote edge-of-the-jungle village setting whose beauty in itself well compensates for the low budget - though some will find the action a little too low-key. (The low budget style is the trademark method of the Malaysian-based Kuman Pictures, who had an international success with James Lee's film Two Sister last year.) Limitations are also offset by the beautiful droning-rising score by Reunchez Ng, which is the first thing that greets the viewer as the film begins. Lovely cinematography by Ahmad Saifudd does justice to every leaf of the rich jungle growth and the dark spaces under the green canapy. The horror fan who looks for something low-keyed and original should be the best audience for Soul. Those in search of a complex narrative will come up short. This is above all a gloomy, foreboding mood piece. It's no coincidence that it's dominated by the unchanging but satisfyingly enveloping score.

You have to be into the trip Ezwan takes you on. If not, the quiet, relaxed pace and absence of the usual horror-film shocks might make the action seem to lack energy and drive. I have to admit that while I appreciate the film's beauty (even the closing credits are a marvel of elegance and precision a bigger budged film would admire), it failed to engage me fully. My opinion may parallel that of Letterboxd contributor Colin McEvoy. He gives Soul three stars after a NYAFF 2020 viewing and describes it as "Atmospheric and creepy," saying financial and artistic restrictions gives it "a distinct sort of charm." But he concludes he can "not honestly say" it held his interest all the way through.

This is the story of a mother, Mak (Farah Ahmad), and her son , Angah (Harith Haziq) and daughter Along (Mhia Farhana) living remote from anything. The film takes them through states of increasing dread. The brother and sister bring home a strange girl, Adik (Putri Syahadah Nurqaseh) they find in the woods. They should have known better. There mother warns them of a slain deer they find hanging from a tree, in effect, "What happens in the jungle stays in the jungle." Next day the girl warns this family they'll all soon die. Troubles begin from there. The girl kills herself and bleeds out. A gray-looking woman called Tok (Junainah M. Lojong) then comes, said to be a local healer, also warning, and offering to help. Guess what? (Spoiler alert!) Tok is only the ticking clock of doom. She is not there to help the little family, who know they should flee, but don't get around to it in time.

More obviously sinister is Pemboru (Namrom), a strange man in tightly-wrapped clothes who comes looking for a mysterious girl. And there is also a spear-wielding hunter (Nam Ron). By this time Mak and her two children are aware that where they are is indeed an area where evil hovers. Strange, scary rituals are going on, animal are being mysteriously slaughtered. It's a curse, it's bad magic - or someone is after their souls. Perhaps one may come around to the view that where folkloric superstitions reign, people start to get what they wish for.

The writer for the Malay Mail, Zurairi AR, recounts his astonishment that the first feature he'd go to see when cinemas reopened after the Coronavirus lockdown would be a horror movie. Zurairi AR is learned and helpful and has provided an exceptionally fine analysis and explanation of this film that I wish I'd read before watching it. He points out the rudimentary tenor of the cast names: "Mak" is Malay for "mother," "Along" for "first born," "Angah," "second born, "Adik," "little child, and so on. He directs our attention to the film's epigraph from the Qur'an, referring to Iblis (as associate of Satan) who warns that he is made from fire, and ordinary men from clay - two elements that thread through the film. Blood is another key, linking element. But he points out that this film isn't overtly Muslim like many Malaysian horror films but refers more to a pre-Muslim time in Malaysia and hence has characters who must find help within themselves and not from above, making this "more hard-hitting than many preachy, Islamic-themed Malay horror films." On the other hand, in Zurairi AR's analysis, is that this film does have an ultimately Islmic, healing message: that "one should not isolate oneself when facing great evil and trying to save one’s soul. Help is just one prostration away, one submission away to the divine."

The Malay word for "soul," "roh," is also the Arabic word. However, knowing Arabic, I could not recognize one word of the Malay dialogue.

Soul / Roh,, 82 mins., debuted at Singapore and the Indonesia Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival in November 2019. It was screened for this review as part of the 2020 virtual New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept 12).

NORRIS WONG: MY PRINCE EDWARD 金都 (2019)

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STEPHY TANG AND CHU PAK-HONG IN MY PRINCE EDWARD

Pre-marital squabbles over a bridal shop make for a delightful, realistic farce

Norris Wong Yi Lam's directorial debut is a feisty, fun new film that seems unbound by Hong Kong movie traditions. Its cutting edge points toward the current status of women in Hong Kong. Far more than a romantic comedy, in the foreground it's an entertainingly specific tale of divorce, marriage and relationship squabbles and discoveries with a semi-farcical plot-line. Beyond that it may be one of the most fresh and original films to come out of Hong Kong in some time.

The protagonist is Cheung Lei-fong, known as "Fong" (Stephy Tang) a young woman who works as a clerk in a small bridal store in Golden Plaza, a mall in the Prince Edward district known for its affordable yet elegant wedding merchandise. Nearby her problematic boyfriend Edward Yan Chun-win (stage actor Chu Pak-hong), whom she's lived with for seven years, has a little wedding photography shop, and they live together in a small flat over the bridal shop.

Stephy Tang, though perhaps a tad more recessive than necessary for my taste, delivers an engaging and subtle performance as a woman who is shy and tight-lipped, but by no means weak, and now coming to a time of major decisions. She may deserve a generous share of the acting awards, but Chu Pak-hong, as Edward, is a revelation and delight as a loud-mouthed man-child who is dominated by and dependent on his tiny but iron-willed mom (Nina Paw), who wants to keep the couple in the flat Fong doesn't even really like.

Edward is the kind of lazy multitasker who may be arguing with Fong, talking with a client on the phone, and playing a video game at the same time in their tiny flat. Chu isn't handsome, or particularly young: he's real, but also funny. Behind Edward's macho outbursts and sputtering complaints one senses there is always tenderness and warmth. He's possessive and obnoxious, but we can believe that Edward loves Fong. We have to discover whether Fong loves Edward. She doesn't not love him. But the way Edward searches through Fong's stuff and bombards her with text messages is borderline abusive, and makes you wonder if she should.

Also to be mentioned, herself a significant statement since she leads to a discussion of the topic of gay marriage, is the lively bridal shop assistant, Yee (Eman Lam), wno's pretty openly lesbian. But the other main personality we need to be acquainted with appears a little later when chance leads him to find Fong, whom he's been looking for for years. He is Yang Shuwei (Jin Kai-jie), a Mainlander. Ten years ago Fong entered into a sham mariange with him, using the money ("chump change," she now realizes) to afford to move into her own apartment. (Hong Kong flats are costly as well as small.) Yang wanted to be married to a Hong Kong woman to apply for a Hong Kong ID so he could eventually move to Los Angeles, his dream. Well, he has not acquired a Hong Kong ID or gotten to L.A. Now he wants to get married.

And it has turned out that the divorce Fong left with the agency to arrange for her never took place because the agent got arrested, and she and Yang are still legally wed. Bad for both of them since Yang has a girlfriend (who will shortly turn out to be pregnant) and Edward wants to marry Fong, and his mother wants the event to happen in a mere matter of months. Arranging the divorce alone might take Fong a year or two. It seemed both Fong and Edward favored a low-keyed affair, but Edward's mom has other ideas. A fancy surprise public betrothal ceremony (see photo above) makes Fong feel the pressure.

Just as in Noah Baumbach's wonderful recent movie Marriage Story (the 2019 NYFF Centerpiece Film), this is really all about the lively, amusing scenes and dialogue, including some virtuosic verbal battles, but is also, importantly, quite specific about legal requirements and where all this happens. The sense of place comes from director Wong's having lived near Prince Edward all her life.

Yang is still young, and it may come as a surprise to find that he, with his trendy hairstyle and free-ranging ambitions, turns out to be both hipper and more progressive than the film's Hongkongers. His spirit may make Fong aware of the limitations of her life and her relationship. There are moments, even in the final sequence, when you wonder if Fong may drift toward him. But I don't think there is really a chance of this on either side; it's just a sign of director Wong's skill at keeping every moment of this enjoyable film and its characters open and interesting. Director-writer Wong has made a film that's a prime example of Hong Kong's move away from blockbuster actioners toward lifestyle and relationship pictures - one that's not only amusing but smart and grown up.

When listing the main characters we must not forget the smallest one, the little turtle Fong brings home from an aquarium shop on Goldfish Street (another local feature) because she sees it flipped over in the tank, and then gets expelled by Edward's bossy mom over an issue of feng shui. The whole relationship almost collapses over turtles, and Edward hopes to restore it through them. At film's end, we don't know if he'll succeed.

My Prince Edward 金都, 92 mins., debuted Nov. 17, 2019 at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, showing next day at Taipei Golden Horse fest, and the end of Nov. at Seoul Independent Film Festival. It won many nominations and awards including screenplay and new director awards for Wong. Theatrical opening it Taiwan May 22020. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12). It has a country-wide North American release, and you'll soon probably have the opportunity to see it.

Nov. 12, 2020: Norris Wong: My Prince Edward arrives on DVD and Digital on Dec. 15, 2020.

HSIEH PEI-JU: HEAVY CRAVING (2019

Ying-Juan (Tsai Jia-yin) is spunky, smart... and 230 pounds. She cooks at a preschool where the kids call her Ms. Dinosaur. Even her mom, who’s also her boss, constantly fat-shames her. But she just doesn’t give a damn… until an unwanted membership to a weight loss program and an encounter with two misfits prompt her to change and put her on an uphill path to self-acceptance, paved with crash diets and boot camp workouts. Pei-Ju Hsieh’s poignant debut cleverly flirts with screwball comedy conventions while embracing an unorthodox body positivity message, and ultimately delivers an uplifting, sobering moral.



It's closer to a TV movie than a movie for the big screen, but it's a complete mature work. Of course, I can say that it would have been better and more impressive if the director had explored more deeply and criticized this and that, but in retrospect, I am grateful that the film tells the story in such a gentle way, without chicken soup and without preaching, because after all, it is not easy to be "seen" in this kind of story. I'm glad to see the story of an ordinary fat girl, and I look forward to the director's future works and hope that more similar stories will be seen.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)



Audience Choice Award, Taipei Film Festival International New Directors Competition

HSIEH PEI-JU: HEAVY CRAVING 餓 (2019

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TSAI JA-YIN IN HEAVY CRAVING

Being oneself

Hsieh Pei-ju, who gained her MFA at Columbia University and here delivers her feature film debut as a director, taking us on a rocky road to putative self-acceptance in Heavy Craving, screened for this review in the New York Asian Film Festival. This is an uneven film, but one that makes a lively and generally pleasant impression. There's cuteness, also emotional shocks, also violence and surreal moments. Some plot details are left hanging, and psychological details aren't delved into too deeply. Luckily it's all anchored by Tsai Jia-yin, the actress who plays Ying-juan, who's at the center of the action. Tsai's naturalness and air of good nature reassure us whatever her character is going through. The message is, forget "normal," and outliers are not alone. Whenever I am feeling this movie has become silly or extreme, I remember that it's entertainment. In teaching, it sugars the pill.

Ying-Juan's evident talent and zest as a chef seems more than what's needed for the preschool her demanding mother Shu-fen (Samantha Ko) runs. The kids gobble up her productions but make fun of her for her weight and call her "Ms. Dinosaur." She doesn't hesitate to punch a kid playfully if he acts up. Ying-juan tips the scale at 230 pounds, making her decisively "obese," though she carries the weight around in a sprightly fashion. It also gives her a decisive advantage in hand-to-hand combat, as we shall see.

But her mother gives Ying-juan a birthday present that's a sign of disapproval, enrollment in a weight loss program for which we've seen the ad in the opening sequence, Action Weight and Body Wellness Center. This is the kind of outfit where the boss singles somebody out and passes around a plate of fat to show how much the subject is overweight, and shaming is combined with talk of "will power." (Can we say that the Brits - witness Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Fleabag" - far outrank the Taiwanese in social satire?) On the side are slim maidens in uniform with neck scarves ready to sell Ying-juan expensive diet supplements or interest her, if all else fails, in gastric bypass surgery. (Ying-juan eventually submits to the latter, but neither the surgery nor its aftermath is explored in detail.)

While Ying-juan is submitting to this, which she does in a bargain to be allowed to plan the school meals, she makes two illustrative friends. There is Xiao-yu (Chang En-wei),a little boy who likes to cross-dress. He happens to be a top student. His wealthy mom knows but does not approve. There is Wu (Yao Chang), a handsome young man who works for the Golden delivery service. We soon find out why he befriends Ying-juan, after bringing her a diet pack delivery: it's because he used to be a fat boy, so fat he broke two seats at the pizza shop. He''s cute and now his physique seems quite perfect. But he has a guilty secret as to how he keeps the fat off, and when Ying-juan discovers it, Wu, in his embarrassment, disappears for a while. What other issues does Wu have? He goes to a movie with Ying-juan, and we can imagine how exciting it is for her to have such a handsome date, but we blanch to see her eating movie theater snacks. Apparently, a sugar-free drink on this occasion is what causes her to gain weight this week, to the great disapproval of the diet programmers, especially Fitness Coach Allen (William Hsieh).

Ying-juan becomes frustrated and goes on an extreme diet, to more disapproval, and people say she looks pale. Eventually she has the surgery - and the only clear result is that she loses her sense of taste. It is one of the surreal moments to see her uselessly stuffing herself with fried stuff at a fast food restaurant, findin even the sauce is tasteless to her. This is a low point for the usually ebullient Ying.

I don't know if Ying-juan's encouraging little tranny honor student Xiao-yu to wear a shimmering dress and blue wig to perform in a school show can be seen as a wise move, but it's a boldly indulgent one, and this may be a place where director Hsieh is expressing new and emerging attitudes in Taiwan. He looks fabulous, but his mother is furious with him and Ying-juan's mom knows she's responsible and is likewise enraged. This, with the apparent failure and disastrous effect on her olfactory system of her surgery, sends Ying-juan into a violent tailspin of acting out where she gets drunk and does damage to the Action Weight and Body Wellness Center. When any slim woman attacks Ying-juan, the latter's considerable avoirdupois enables her to toss away her opponent like a rag doll, as happens in a surreal imaginary battle with a "perfect" woman staged inside a stomach. The wreckage Ying has done at the weight loss clinic seems to be forgiven. Her mother finally seems to see something is wrong. A later scene shows a comfortable Ying-juan riding with Wu in his delivery truck. Not a resolution, a sketchy ending, but a pleasant sight, at least.

Ying-juan has learned to be herself. We must not put too fine a point on it. Obviously this film doesn't delve deep into the psychology of Ying-juan, Xiao-yu, or Wu. But there's laughter and good nature here, the moment of deep unhappiness doesn't drag on too long, and the message is an affirmation of self-acceptance, particularly of a range of body types, message delivered, as Letterboxd writer Becky Chen says, in "a gentle way, without chicken soup and without preaching." Tsai Jia-yin stands out for her authenticity and originality. As another Letterboxd writer says, this is "maybe not a fully formed piece," but its "bright color palette" providing a "sunny feel," with topics "tackled within" that are "dark and sensitive" but "balanced with many laughs, smiles and positivity," engage and instruct. This is what Hsieh Pei-ju contributes to the subject of self-acceptance.

Heavy Craving 大餓 ("Hungry"), 90 mins., debuted at Taipei Jun. 2019; international debut at Busan Oct. 2019. At Taipei it won the Audience Choice Award at Taipei Film Festival International New Directors Competition. Other fests included Taipei Golden Horse, Nov. 2019. Screened for this review as part of the virtual 2020 New York Asian Film Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12).

Reviewed by Elizabeth Kerr at Busan for Hollywood Reporter.