ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Lincoln Center JUNE 30 - JULY 16, 2017

[Chris Knipp]

YOSHIYUKI KISHI: DOUBLE LIFE (2016)


MUGI KADOWAKI IN DOUBLE LIFE

Spying on life to try to understand it

Double Life, though it traces back to a French novel, is very much a contemporary Japanese film. It contrasts with the NYAFF Main Competition films from other countries, the violence and political commentary of the films from Hong Kong and the Philippines, the energy and moral concerns of the Film from Thailand. Here the people are comfortable, and often cute. They live in surroundings that are attractive and clean. But nobody quite knows what life's all about, and suicide is a distinct possibility for some. This is a world of angst and anomie Michelangelo Antonioni would understand. In one of his films, the role of Tama would be played by Monica Vitti. There is a fleeting resemblance. With the distancing and reveals there are hints of Michael Haneke too.

Tama (Mugi Kadowaki), a philosophy graduate student ("What Is Existence in Contemporary Japan," is her Master's thesis title), wakes up in a bedroom steeped in blue and gray next to a boyfriend, Takuya (Masaki Suda), as beautiful as a woman (he's a game designer busy making soft porny girly pictures). They make love using Sagami Original 0.01 thinner-than-ever Japanese condoms. Then she gets up and smokes a cigarette on her balcony and watches her neighbor, Ishizaka (Hiroki Hasegawa), a successful book editor who seems like the perfect family man, down below with his wife, playing with his little girl.

Soon Tama's budding voyeuristic obsession gets her inextricably tangled in other people’s secret lives. Her following one person is a suggestion of her philosophy dissertation supervisor Professor Shinohara (the very busy actor Lily Franky), who views her idea of surveying 100 people more the methodology of sociology or psychology. The professor has a book on his desk by Sophie Calle, a French author who has incorporated real life stories of tailing or shadowing people into her work. (Her book True Stories was an inspiration for the novel by Mariko Koike on which this film is based.)

Tama immediately begins following Ishizaka closely and sees him making it in an alleyway with another woman, whom she also in turn follows: his mistress, she learns, is "Shawamura Shinobu, Bookbinder": her picture and title come up on her smart phone. Tama has become a detective - and is having fun, becoming so zealous everything else in her life, her boyfriend and social life, falls by the wayside. She doesn't really know what she's doing, and she leaves a mess as well as observes a mess.

When a nosy, or more likely turned on, department associate (Shôhei Uno) questions her about her thesis at a departmental drinking party, Tama's understandably reluctant to explain. It is, after all, not only irregular but arguably nutty, what she's doing. And she doesn't tell Takuya, and must not have contact with the man she's tailing, the professor tells her.

But that doesn't work - and leads away from the long, subtle, observational passages without dialogue to a central sequence when Tama explains herself far too much and appears so naive and weepy it's a turnoff, though, paradoxically, it follows the film's second intensely erotic passage. When Tama's identity is "blown," that closes Ishizaka, her "Subject A," off as a subject, but she has also been tailing her professor, who is "Subject B," and now occupies the foreground of her study.

In a flurry of intense activity, Tama finishes her thesis (it's not very long), alienating Tacuya perhaps terminally in the process. Meanwhile the professor attends his dying mother with what is apparently his wife. Before Tama submits the final version of her thesis, which Professor Shinohara ultimately rates a 93, he gives her an address and a theater ticket that lead her (and us) to discover something about him she couldn't have known - people you tail aren't always who they seem - while throwing in some jokey existential references to hHamlet for good measure.

I don't know where contemporary philosophy has been going, but all this seems a bloody awful topic and methodology for a philosophy thesis. But it winds up seeming not a bad idea for a movie - one that mixes detective fiction with domestic drama while reminding us that in watching a movie, we too, like Tama, are basically voyeurs, maybe also, like her, trying in our fumbling ways to figure out the meaning of contemporary existence.

A parallel counterpoint to the main story of Tama's voyeuristic obsession and her professor's problematic behavior is provided by an older female inhabitant of Tama's and her boyfriend's apartment building, Setsuko Karasuma, who installs a CCTV surveillance camera out back to find who's making such a mess of the common garbage/recycling area. It's a not a very subtle Haneke-esque device, but this lady is one of the ways the plot lines can be intertwined. So the camera is spying on everybody with its cold fish eye and black and white imagery while Tama's spying more selectively, but in color and with all her heart.

Double Life is a little more complicated than it needs to be, winding up feeling longer than it ought to, but it's also full of ideas and quite ingenious, a worthy product of an over sophisticated culture. The film is original and has depth and complexity; the director shows promise and so does his lead. All three male leads are good, Suda, Franky, and Hasegawa, the latter particularly surprising as the duplicitous, manipulative, and, up close, dangerously boyish "Subject A," who can't be trusted as a husband, an editor, a lover, or even a man to tail.

Double Life/ 二重生活/Nijû seikatsu, 126 mins., debuted in Japan 25 Jun 2016. It is based on the novel Nijyuu Seikatsu by Mariko Koike (published 28 Jun. 2012 by Kadokawa Shoten. Dp Kozo Natsumi. It is Kishi's directorial debut and Mugi Kadowaki's first lead performance in a movie. Reviewed as part of the NYAFF where it was shown at Lincoln Center 3 Jul. 2017. It is the Japan entry in the festival's seven-film Main Competition.

[Chris Knipp]

CHEN MEI-JUIN: THE GANGSTER'S DAUGHTER (2017)


ALLY CHIU AND JACK KAO IN THE GANGSTER'S DAUGHTER

Bad girl and wise guy

Chen Mei-juin, a documentary filmmaker, enters the gangster film world crabwise in her feature debut, The Gangster's Daughter, through a father-daughter relationship in which Taipei wise guy Keiko (Hou Hsiao-hsien regular Jack Kao) is reunited with his daughter Shaowu (Ally Chiu) and each tries to move in the direction of the other. Keiko is a feisty girl, a bit of a tomboy, left to be raised by her grandmother on Kinmen Island, a Taiwanese county lying closer to China than to Taiwan. She gets in a fight and is sent to live with her dad in the big city. In the event, Keiko takes parenting seriously, sternly disciplining Shaowu - though they have an almost inappropriately comradely relationship, but good vibes. Keiko is a boss on a limited level: he has two guys in his crew, raised up there since they were Shaowu's age.

While Keiko rejects his overlord's turn from gambling and prostitution to a more lucrative drug trade, Shaowu gets into fights at school and links up with a boy who does drugs. Emulating her father, she gets a tattoo on her back. Keiko's trying to be more on the up-and-up. Shaowu has a naive fascination with the gangster world. In class when introduced she says her hobby is collecting weapons. In a school fight she calls herself "Shaowu the Bad." This amuses Keiko, but he has the wise guy's parental puritanism. He is enraged when he finds she has unwittingly brought home drugs and won't even allow her to be accompanied home by a boy, let alone have a boyfriend. Shaowu's bravado hasn't been fully tested, but maybe she's the tougher of the family members. When she achieves mafia-style retribution by dumping a bucket of cow manure on a schoolboy bully and his father turns out to be a city councilman, it looks like maybe Shaowu's headed for a career in radical politics.

Despite lively scenes, though this movie has reportedly done very well on home turf, it lacks truly defining moments. Throughout the action meanders and the energy doesn't really heat up and move toward the inevitable showdown till 90 minutes in. That's too long to wait, even for a humanistic twist on a crime picture. Chen's screenplay needed to play up the intimacy more, and the violence level as well, to give the action some contrast and bite. Shaowu and Keiko make an odd couple with good chemistry, and the gangster movie trappings are here. But when a bad cop is the scariest dude and schoolkids' clashes have the same voltage as gang tiffs, you know something's off.

At the 90-minute point, Keiko's two posse members and girlfriend are shot in a club gunfight where the bad cop has tracked them down. Keiko's fantasy with going straight is dropped and he must go for vengeance over fatherhood. A final montage is a sentimental distraction. This is a film bookended by funerals, but neither the warmth nor the fatalism and grandeur are there. The attempt to blend a teen school movie and a noirish crime film doesn't quite work.

The Gangster's Daughter/林北小舞 ("Showu the Bad"), 105 mins., debuted 10 March 2017 in Taiwan. Reviewed as part of the NYAFF (shown 28 Jun. 2017), the North American debut with Chen Mei-juin in attendance. This was the Taiwan entry in the seven-film Main Competition of the NYAFF.

[Chris Knipp]

CHO HYUN-HOON: JANE (2017)


GU GYOHWAN IN JANE

A wandering homeless girl meets an engaging transgender woman

Elizabeth Kerr's Hollywood Reporter review calls the new Korean film Jane "A disjointed experiment in narrative form that takes the unreliable narrator trope to untenable ends." She says the transgender female caretaker for teen runaways portrayed by Gu Gyohwan will insure the film mileage in LGBT festivals, but "after that Jane is destined for oblivion."

Everything that Kerr says is true. The most memorable person in Jane is Jane, Gu Gyo-hwan, who disappears early on, though she is in a final scene in a night club, performing. She and the quiet troubled teenager So-hyun (Coin Locker Girl’s Lee Min-ji) spend time together during the first part of the film, in which we soak up the atmosphere created by Jane. So-hyun is a placid, mousy girl who has been abandoned by her boyfriend, Jong-ho. Throughout the film So-hyun provides narration in the form of a letter. What she recounts is circular, and may or may not be true. Jane may be an invention of hers, or just some of the scenes with Jane may be, or not. They are at a kind of foster home, with some other lost youths.

The foster home ends when Jane dies, and they bury her and disburse. So-hyun winds up in another "home" of runaways, which isn't as nice. It's dominated by a cruel young man who in the first scene of it, has beaten her, why we don't know except he has judged by her face that she's a "pilferer."

But as Kerr says, the kinds of "misery" that come up here are "rote," and "seen in street-kid dramas from every corner of the globe." The action is drab and repetitious. It's still harder to keep track of because of the unreliable, circular narration.

It is a paradox that Jane may seem technically adventurous, but its content is drab and familiar. That rather undercuts things, doesn't it? And so it's also true as Kerr says that this would work better as a short film, in which the centerpiece would be a portrait of the transgender woman Gu Gyo-hwan, as Jane. Director Cho has made her most interesting material somehow peripheral.

Jane/꿈의 제인 (kkum-eui je-in), 104 min., debuted May 31, 2017 in South Korea. Reviewed here as part of the NYAFF where it shows 13 July 2017. Presented with the support of Korean Cultural Center New York.


LEE MIN-JI AND GU GYONWAN IN JANE

[Chris Knipp]

LÊ BÌNH GIANG: KFC (2017)



Boldly horrific, fresh, but for many unwatchable

This is described as a splatter film, which in this case mean a random series of bloody, murderous events. The director at the outset states three different ways that these things never happened. That's nice to know. "WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!" the Lincoln Center festival blurb warns, continuing "This omnibus of strange and harrowing stories connected by vagabond characters at various levels of moral bankruptcy is truly sick in most parts, but what makes it unforgettable is the sheer talent of its director, and the ineradicable sense of profundity throughout."

A splatter film is not something I signed on for when I became a film critic, and I did not plan to watch - or to finish watching. BUt in the event, I did watch, all the way through. AT festivals, I have sat through much, and so I was, in a sense, prepared. Furthermore, Kfc is not non-stop splatter in the way that Hollywood actioners are not-stop action - no, not at all.

For many, Kfc will be unwatchable, indeed; it's for cultists, in search of the fetishistic, the bizarre, the trippy, and the outlandish. It focuses largely on poor, young, alternately scrawny or overweight boys and young men in rough, impoverished urban settings. You would not want to watch this while eating. One visual transition is from flesh-eating worms on a corpse's face to a plump young man pacing toward the camera stuffing french fries into his mouth. Cannibalism is a recurrent theme, and so is food and eating: the two run into each other, but not always.

I still cannot say what an "ineradicable sense of profundity" is. But But since the film is one of the seven Main Competition films of the NYAFF, below you will find a description of it by someone who has watched it all through, Panos Kotzathanasis of iAsian Film Vault. As he explains, the young filmmaker had to struggle to get this made, but stuck to it. There is determination, and perhaps strong conviction here, and much filmmaking skill and freshness, if turned to a perverse end. Not likely to win the Main Competition prize, but a daring choice as the Vietnam entry.

Le Bình Giang (1990, Vietnam) was educated in Film at the University of Ho Chi Minh, but he wasn’t allowed to graduate because the script for his film Kfc was considered too violent by the Council of Examiners. Lê didn't give up on his project and tried to find sponsors. He won the Film of the Future Award at the Vietnamese Autumn Meeting 2013, which helped him get started. After making several short films he finally made Kfc (2016), his feature film debut, three years later.

The story takes place in Hanoi, and revolves around a number of characters. A cannibalistic doctor who uses an ambulance to hit people in the street and then posthumously raping them. His son, who has become fat due to eating human flesh and his friend, the daughter of a prostitute who has fallen victim to the doctor. Another boy roaming the streets who becomes friends with the two children. A man whose wife has also fallen victim to the doctor. Overall, a circle of violence and revenge that seems to transcend generations.

Le Binh Giang directs, writes, co-edits and produces a genuine splatter film, where onerousness seems to derive from every frame. In this fashion, the movie includes cannibalism, amputation and torture, kid violence, necrophilia, and even flesh-eating worms. Giang, however, managed to include some comic scenes, mocking multinational companies like Coca Cola, Pepsi, and KFC. A somewhat romantic scene with a couple riding on a motorcycle and the main theme, a romantic and nostalgic song, also move towards the same direction.

The issue with the film lies with its narration, that includes many flashbacks and back and forths in time, which deem the story quite difficult to follow, despite the fact that, at the end, much of the events are explained.

In terms of cinematography, Nguyen Phuc Vinh uses some interesting techniques with slow-motion, fast forward, and Bullet Time shots. The special effects are impressive, with the torture scenes and the depiction of blood being utterly realistic. Tilkerie Pham has also done a great job on the sound, which occasionally sounds even more grotesque than the actual images it accompanies. In terms of editing, there is an amusing scene, where the torture is paralleled to a comic strip.

Evidently, the film addresses only fans of splatter, but "Kfc" is an impressive entry in the genre, especially considering that this is Le Binh Giang's debut. --Panos Kotzathanasis, Asian Film Vault.

Kfc, 68 mins., debuted at Rotterdam 27 Jan. 2017. Presented here as part of NYAFF where it shows 6 Jul. 2017. It is one of the seven NYAFF Main Competition films, representing Vietnam.

[Chris Knipp]

LEE ZOO-YOUNG: A SINGLE RIDER (2017)



Far away, in a world of loss and regret

Kang Jae-hoon (the eminent Korean actor Lee Byung-hun) is a sad, elegant, hollow man. This movie that he dominates seems becalmed - not a bad thing to pause and think - though Kang's story seems to run dry almost from the first. This brief film, Lee Zoo-young's directorial debut, could have been even shorter, but its quiet ruminations are often pleasant. It provides the sense of a lost time that no madelaine can regain.

Perhaps preparing for disaster from his profitable work in a corporate bank selling bad loans, two years before he has sent his wife Soo-jin (Kong Hyo-jin) and child to Sydney, Australia to live, and learn English. Now the disaster has come, the bankruptcy of his bank, the failure of investments, the dozens of angry clients and friends who trusted him. Humiliated and in disgrace, he goes to Sydney unannounced, with no baggage, in a good suit. Neither he nor the suit appears to wilt as the days go by, but whatever purpose he has had falters. Creeping up on his wife and the house he discovers her in constant association with a jolly, burly neighbor with a small daughter, an Australian construction worker whose own wife is in hospital in long term care. And so Kang begins shadowing his own life, or what might once have been his but seems lost.

Like a ghost Kang enters and explores the house, the beach, follows Kris (Jack Campbell) to the bridge he works on, even follows him to the hospital and talks to his wife in her bed. He finds Soo-jin has taken up the violin again and is seeking work, to remain in Australia. Remaining isolated, a lonely stalker of Soo-jin, Kang is pursued by a Korean girl he ran into on the first day, Jee-na (singer and Train to Busan cast member Sohee), a vacation worker who's been cheated by some fellow countrymen out of all her earnings and wants his help.

When Kang sneaks up on this other life that should be his but isn't there's mystery about what he'll find and what he'll do, and that's cool enough. But as his world is becalmed that also gives us a little too much time to wonder if this is or could be happening or we've been transported to the Twilight Zone, down under. Or one may feel events are starting to feel generic; might have had a little more edge. The whole affair is anemic, especially for Australia. But in this reportedly fifth time working with a woman director, Lee Byung-hun delivers in this reflective melodrama about regret.


A Single Rider/싱글라이더/Sing-geul Ra-i-deo 96 mins., Korean and English with English subtitles, debuted in Korea 22 Feb. 2017. Reviewed as part of the NYAFF where it screened 1 July 2017.

[Chris Knipp]

LEE KYOUNG-MI: THE TRUTH BENEATH (2016)


SON YE-JIN IN THE TRUTH BENEATH

A politician's wife uncovers dark secrets

This political thriller-slash-family mystery is a rip-snorter from the rising Korean female director Lee Kyoung-mi, and the role of a lifetime for lead Son Ye-jin, who reportedly has had to do with relatively mediocre, conventional feminine parts up to now. She plays Kim Yeon-hong, wife of politician Kim Jong-chan (Kim Ju-kyuk, also fine). He has just won an intense campaign for his party's presidential nomination when their teenage daughter Min-jin (Ji-Hoon Shin), disappears. The result is an increasingly dark and feverish unleashing of secrets and lies and passions that's worthy of David Fincher. This is an ambitious and polished movie, as well as an elegant one, that at points may also remind you of Park Chan-wook (who in fact is one of the five writing credits on the screenplay).

The public is turned off when Jong-chan keeps on with the campaign for president and at first has kept the disappearance of Min-jin a secret so as not to look as driven and egocentric as he is. Also turned off by his behavior is Yeon-hong, who reacts by beginning her own personal investigation of their daughter's disappearance. These ambitious parents seem to have known little about the girl or her life at school. First off, she doesn't seem to have been as nice a girl as they assumed, or very popular. She was linked with Choi Mi-ok (Kim So-ni), daughter of her father's chauffeur (Park Gene-woo). Despite the awkward social difference the two girls were fellow misfits, in a strange punk band. Their intimacy, the questionable nature of their activities, lead to doubts of hostility and violence and make Mi-ok a suspect in Min-jin's disappearance. But that's only the beginning, as things move gradually on toward scandal, tragedy, and revenge - while skillfully juggling Yeon-hong's feverish investigations, mixed with videos, social media, and other trendy artifacts including the repeated strains of a nonsensical but haunting pop song.

The whiffs of scandal, both school and political, grow stronger. The screenplay's contemporary relevance in view of recent events in Korea is evident. But there is nothing doggedly realistic; the writers and filmmakers have let their fantasy run free, with pleasurable results. Much depends on odd revelations which we can't go into, because it's essential to the pleasure in The Truth Beneath to be a breathless, constantly unfolding mystery. One set of secrets involves the gift of a car deodorant, but we can't say why. Wait and see!

Undeterred by her femininity, Lee Kyoung-mi gradually but inexorably ramps up the film's foul language and its glimpses of violence and sexual intrigue, in the end becoming an exquisite violence porn. Ups and downs with her politician husband - whose fortunes do not fade, and her discoveries in several fields lead Yeon-hong into turbulent reversals of passion and finally, a kind of madness. Things arguably get a bit too graphic in the final quarter. This is, however, continually not only a dramatic but a visually satisfying film, full of chiaroscuro and delving into a great variety of imagery.

The Truth Beneath (Hangul: 비밀은 없다; RR: Bimileun Eopda, lit. "There Is No Secret"), 102 mins., debuted in Korea 23 June 2016, showing in at least five festivals including Fantastic Fest, Kyoto, Tokyo and Taipei. It has been under-seen at home and deserves more abroad. Worth a US release (excellent English subtitles too). Screened for this review as part of the 2017 NYAFF. (Already shown.)


KIM JU-KYUK, CENTER, IN THE TRUTH BENEATH

[Chris Knipp]

PARK KWANG-HYUN: FABRICATED CITY (2017)


JI CHANG-WOOK AND SHIM EUN-KYUNG IN FABRICATED CITY

Video computer games, sadistic murder schemes, and teamwork among misfits

Wow, where does one begin to describe this big-budget Korean thriller starring a young unemployed misfit hung up on video games? Again David Fincher and Park Chang-wook seem guiding spirits in an effort that's director Park Kwang-hyn's first in 12 years. Park sets the bar a little too high with an opening sequence of Kwon Yoo (Ji Chang-wook) as "Cap" (the Captain) of a video game team engaged in an intense combat sequence. It hasn't much to do with what follows - except the actual people behind the game, with names like Yong_Guru, COV3R, DEMOlition, negativeSpace and Mr. Hairy, whose team name is Resurrection, come into play later. The sequences cost plenty and is pretty impressive. At the center of it is Captain, who is skilled, heroic, and known for being selfless in protecting his teammates.

Captain, Kwon Yoo, is a handsome young Taekwondo champion, but was kicked off the team for assaulting a fellow member. He seems to live with his long-suffering mom, who begs him to get a job. That ends quickly when he's called from the game room to return a lost cell phone to a girl. As soon as he's done so he's railroaded into prison sentenced to life for murder and rape, though the girl was in the shower and he never saw her, that he knows of. (There's a whiff of a suggestion that since he's an obsessive gamer, the line between reality and violent simulation may have blurred too much for him to know what he's done; but we know he didn't do it.) The public defender, Min Cheon-sang (Jeong-se Oh) is no use. It's a maximum security prison built into the side of a mountain that's full of brutes. Kwon Yoo is brutally beaten, but being defiant, athletic, and skilled at hand-to-hand combat, holds his own. Other prisoners not the ferocity of his "will to live." Not so his mom, who has been trying to campaign for a reexamination of the obviously manipulated evidence, but suddenly commits suicide. Despite this tragedy through the help of a serial killer Kowon Yoo escapes from the prison and returns to the city to find how he was framed and exact revenge. We are in Park Chang-wook territory, but with a unique new gamer vibe.

If you like action, this is your movie, because all this and more happens in the first 30 minutes and plenty is to come. Admittedly, the evil mastermind and his scheme are plot elements that are overcooked. But it's all fun.

Back in the "real world" (not) Kwon Yoo is a fugitive, and one of his main prison enemies, a ferocious gentleman known as Ma (Sang-ho Kim), has been released to help find him. But it turns out his game team - and others - are his great fans, and they are pledged to track down the real wrongdoers in what turns out to be a series of murders and frame-ups. They're one of those motley crews who become a gang of brothers. Sisters too: Mr. Hairy turns out to be a contact-adverse but pretty and hacking-brilliant young woman called Yeo-wool (Shim Eun-kyung) who prefers to communicated only by cell phone even when the other person is sitting next to her. Several of the men are older and accomplished; there's a range of talent here. The techie tricks fly fast and loose as they investigate the crime scene from which Kwon Yoo was sent to the clink, and they find similarities between that event and other murder scenes Mr. Hairy invades multiple computer files as well as CCTV videos clearly establishing Kwon Yoo's innocence. But they want to find who's behind the fiendish series of crimes.

Korean filmmakers are masters (or mistresses) of the choreography of violence, so when Kwon Yoo finally gets to beat up the evildoer behind the crimes and his mistreatment, you must appreciate the shifting motions of camera and the bodies as a dance. Nothing much new in the car chase, but the images are beautiful and the editing crisp. Sometimes we must be contented with over-the-top plotting and good production values. There's too much good stuff here - - enough for two movies; it seems that, twelve years from his previous feature, Welcome to Dongmakgol, director Park's brain was crammed with pent up ideas.

Fabricated City(Hangul: 조작된 도시; RR: Jojakdoen Doshi; lit. Manipulated City), 126 mins., and released in various countries in Feb. and Mar. 2017 and thereafter. Reviewed here as part of the 2017 NYAFF, where it shows at the Walter Reade Theater July 15 at 3 pm.