ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Lincoln Center JUNE 29 - JULY 15, 2018

[Chris Knipp]

ERIK MATTI: ON THE JOB (2013)


JOEL TORRE IN ON THE JOB

Training days

Erik Matti of the Philippines is a leading figure of Southeast Asian genre cinema. His new feature BuyBust, also included in the NYAFF, is his first pure action film. This one from 2013, also in the festival, is highly admired. It gained him international notice through inclusion in Cannes Directors' Fortnight , and was a New York Times Critic's Pick when reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis. It shows Matti's élan and brilliance as a filmmaker.

Mario aka Tatang (Joel Torre, who looks like Argentine star Ricardo Darín) is the central figure here, and the central relationship is between him and his cocky protege, Daniel (Filipino-American Gerald Anderson). Both are hit men, and both are prisoners. They are let out to do a hit, then go back in, a perfect cover. They live as ordinary prisoners - it's important to maintain a low profile - in a prison that's more like a cross between a fantasy boy's school and a teeming slum with gay-dominated independent laundry and food services. Tatang explains the game to Daniel, and is with him when he does his first and subsequent hits. The first hit is done by Tatang right out in the open in a crowded and chaotic market place location that's like something in the Bourne series, but more organic.

Parallel to this pair is Francis, a classy, clean cut, and model-handsome NBI (like the FBI) academy grad (Piolo Pascual, a Manila TV matinee idol) who becomes the protegee of principled cop Acosta (Joey Marquez), but whose key relationship ultimately is with Manrique, a powerful politician (Michael De Mesa), due to marrying his daughter. That marriage, Francis learns, puts him in line not just for distinction in law enforcement but possible high political office. But before long he learns the assassinations have a source close to Manrique, and the whole system is rotten.

Manrique schools and advises Francis as Tatang tutors Daniel. Francis is investigating the assassinations, which we learn are by hit men from various prisons. At first the film cuts back and forth seamlessly between these two stories without our understanding them or their connection. Also confusing is the fact that the two men not only hide from fellow prisoners what they're doing on the outside but hide from their families that they're even in jail. Tatang's family, including a daughter in law school, which he visits, thinks he's simply working in another town. Daniel only calls mom and pretends he's got a job in Dubai.

It's all dark, messy, loud, and chaotic. But it's also got atmosphere you could cut with a knife. Our attention is held by the world-class gritty authenticity of the action as staged by Matti and shot by dp Francis Ricardo Buhay III, the skill of the editing by Jay Halil, which makes the film enjoyable even before we understand it, and the punchy score by Erwin Romulo, which adds pizzazz precisely when and where it's needed.

Call this genre, call it a B picture or merely workmanlike, but up to the inevitable Godfather-style hospital kill and chase that leads to an action showdown linking cops, hit men, and politicoes, the writing by Matti and screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto is skillful in making all elements convincing. They draw us into Tatang and Daniel's weird lifestyle so thoroughly we start to worry when we learn that, now that Tatang has been notified he'll soon be released from prison, his job is over, and he may be put on Daniel's hit list. On the Job makes you enter a full-fledged other world, and Matti uses this B-actioner mode to critique real Filipino corruption and violence.

On the Job, 118 mins., debuted May 2013 in Cannes Directors' Fortnight and has been in at least 13 other festivals. Its Metascore was 70%. This film was also featured at Toronto last year. It is being revived for the 2018 NYAFF at Lincoln Center, where it shows July 14 at 12:30 p.m.

[Chris Knipp]

SHINSUKE SATO: INUYASHIKI (2018)


TAKERU SATOH IN INUYASHIKI

Dangerous youth

With the story of the meek salaryman or hirashain, Inuyashiki, and the teenager who're simultaneously struck by a a flashing white light like a cosmic ray and wake up turned into cyborgs, we are plunged into the world of manga at its least realistic, but still with plenty of human touches. (The original is by Hiroya Oku.) We also enter a franchise starting for director Shinsuke Sato, who has already done several cult manga films. The 2018 NYAFF includes a couple of other manga adaptations, the high school nightmare River's Edge (which makes one long for Eighties American youth pictures) and The Scythian Lamb, a highly entertaining genre mix, with its absurd but promising premise of a brace of convicted murderers dropped into a small town as part of a nutty "repopulation" scheme.

Inuyashiki plays with several familiar Japanese tropes. There is the browbeaten salaryman or hirashain, the titular character, who uses his powers to do good, and there is the evil, malicious teenager who goes around murdering people, ultimately forcing Inuyashiki to stop him. The empowered teenager is Hiro Shishigami, played by Takeru Satoh of the "Rurouni Kenshin" series. (Takeru Satoh is a fantasy-manga-sci-fi star, but at 29 a bit old now for tthe role of an 18-year-old.) Hiro is a youthful bad seed. Whereever he goes, people die. A more haunting version of this type is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. (Takeru himself starred in Kurosawa's Real.)

Shishigami seems more adept at using his cyborg powers than Inuyashiki, right away, as he shows them off to his pal Ando/aks/Chokko (Kanata Hongou), by crashing parked cars into each other in a parking garage. The powers are like a new technology kids have more of a feel for. When Inuyashiki catches on that his young counterpart is "shooting" people right and left by pointing his finger and yelling "bam!" he has to learn how to do the same thing in order to stop him - but it's hard. This recalls Josh Trank's 2012 Chronicle, where Dane DeHaan shone, about American high schoolers abruptly gifted with special powers who struggle to learn how to use them and make a mess of it. Like Hiro they have teen angst and superpowers are a bad thing to have with poor impulse control.

The cyborg idea itself relates most notably to the seminal Nineties body-horror series Tetsuo directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, but this time without the creepy, haunting cyberpunk heavy metal style, only occasional dramatic flashes of CGI where man and boy sprout metal innards that flash, then fold back inside.

When it comes to the browbeaten salaryman who becomes an unexpected hero, there is no greater or more memorable example of the theme than Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) in Akira Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru, whose profound humanism contrasts sharply with the falling off from moral values and good sense represented by manga and modern films. We must give Inuyashiki credit for highlighting feelings and behavior over violence and pure action, compared to many similar manga films; but in Ikiru, we're in the world of real life andInuyashiki, depicts a thin, comic book world full of cliché.

Stopped by police for the family he killed after visiting his father, Hiro hides with a female admirer, Shion (Sumire Morohoshi). Then he begins killing people remotely through their PC or cell phone screens. He is mocked by trolls, so he kills 26 this way. He becomes the ultimate psychopathic young mass murderer now, deciding everyone is against him and that he must kill all of Japan, starting from the giant screen in Shinjuku. Now Inuyashiki becomes a disaster movie, with textbook fleeing, terrified crowd sequences out of Battleship Potemkin. Meanwhile the old salaryman tries to prepare to stop him, coached by Hiro's former best friend, Chokko.

From then on for the last twenty minutes or so of this rather long movie it's a battle of the titans in the air and on the ruined tops of tall buildings in what, for Japanese cinema, is a pretty Hollywood-style display of grand special effects. Inuyashiki finally wins the respect of his hitherto utterly mean family (especially the female members) - even if the evil Hiro has a more prettily-sculpted torso.

Sato directed the live-action film adaptation of Oku's Gantz manga, as well as its Gantz II:

Inuyashiki / いぬやしき, 127 mins., debuted 20 Apr. 2018 in Brussels, at the International Fantastic Film Festival, also showing at Udine and at Montreal's Fantasia. It opened theatrically in Japan 20 Apr. 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, where it shows at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center Sun, 15 Jul. at 1 p.m.


NORITAKE KINASHI IN INUYASHIKI


FINAL BATTLE FROM INUYASHIKI

[Chris Knipp]

KANATA WOLF: SMOKIN' ON THE MOON (2017)


RYO NARITA, ARATA IURA IN SMIOKIN' ON THE MOON

Japanese ganja bromance

Whether you take the action in Smokin' on the Moon seriously or not, it's fun to watch this first feature by Osaka-based musician and filmmaker Wolf (aka Yuichiro Tanaka) for its playful way with formats and punk visual style (including two animated dream sequences), which, except for the beginning, is vibrant without being overwhelming. Based by Wolf on his own manga, the film was filmed by dp Hiroo Takaoka in a manner that's intimate, yet clear, and gives the action and main characters a naturalism to counteract the fantastic stoned element. The main characters are appealing, and the story comes to a sweet, touching end. Wolf gives an engaging feel to his grungy slice of life with Hiroyasu Koizumi's intentionally decrepit set and production design (notably for the pair's mess of a flat supplied them by a wannabe rapper), idiosyncratic fast edits, and deliberately unrelated scene shifts. That's balanced by up-close camerawork of people that's surprisingly intimate, aided by the charm of the two main actors.

The early scenes, a Kaleidoscopic whirlwind of vignettes of the guys' lifestyle, seem like pure visual play, as they introduce the frivolous, wigged out pair of buddies, thirtyish Sota (Arata Iura) and twenty-something, scrawny-stylish, tattooed and red-haired "rooster" Rakuto (former model Ryo Narita), who work at a Tokyo bar and deal marijuana on the side. Their affection for each other is the emotional anchor of the film. We meet other colorful characters, including an oversexed landlady (LiLiCo) and a loud-mouthed rapper pot dealer called Jay (Yasu Peron).

Slackers are a poignant element in a Japanese society that doesn't afford a productive or lucrative spot for all its citizens. And we need to have sympathy for the two stoner pals in the foreground. They do most of the smokin', and spend life in a pleasant weed haze. That will end as the film moves along, going from stoner movie to crime story to medical melodrama, but the drug-inspired vibe and the spirit of visual play never completely disappear. A scene of extreme violence is mitigated, aestheticized, even, by casting it in low-resolution black-and-white, with splashes of red.

The guys' constant high numbs them from from the real danger posed by the yakuza toughs who come into their Tokyo lowlife sphere as part of drug dealing. That works for them till Jay is executed by the mob, and a sadistic baddie called Hatta (Kanji Tsuda) turns up to make sure Sota and Rakuto are in the dark about this. Sota is shocked by this encounter into the realization that at thirty-four, he needs to get serious about his life, while Rakuta considers going over to the yakuza side in a peripheral, safe capacity; a "straight" job isn't much of an option for a middle-school dropout with flaming red-dyed hair and arms full of tattoos. Sota's dad (Eiji Okuda) runs a restaurant in Okinawa specialized in okonomiyaki grilled pancakes, and this is an obivious legit birth for Sota. He left that life because it seemed boring, but his eight years in Tokyo have yielded nothing but one strong friendship, with Rakuto.

Flashbacks toward the end - the editing is constantly deft and playful - illustrate why Rakuto has nothing to go back to. He deeply resents his mother for not protecting him, or herself, from a stepfather who beat them every day - also in Okinawa. Now, perhaps to give back good for bad, he has become a surrogate dad for a little boy and his mother Tsukimi (Mary Sara), an old friend who's trying to kick a crack habit.

The shift from slacker bromance to addiction drama to crime story to a focus on child abuse, drug addiction, and a fatal case of Hodgkin's lymphoma may seem a bit much, and certainly turns sentimental. It's hard to take it all seriously. But while the visual dynamics make it still fun to watch, Wolf's sincerity never seems in doubt. As Rakuto, Ryo Narita is an irresistible boy-man who's sweet and nice. It's all so various and playful that the two hours pass smoothly, at least for this viewer.

Smokin' on the Moon / ニワトリ★スター ("Rooster [chicken] star"), 119 mins., screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, its North American Premiere, where it's showing Tues. Jul. 10, 2018 at 9:15 p.m. including a Q&A with diretor Kanata Wolf.

[Chris Knipp]

BONGKOD BENCHARONGKUL: SAD BEAUTY (2018)


FLORENCE FAIVRE AND PAKKAWADEE PENGSUWAN IN SAD BEAUTY

Extremes of friendship

Bencharongkul's Sad Beauty is a picture that delves into friendship of women, narcissism, spousal abuse, even murder, but it seems most notable (in this combination) for, as the title says, its beauty, a glamour and sensuality that's so strong even when a corpse is being fed to crocodiles, it's pretty. This somehow fits with the tropical magic of Thailand that's evoked by the country's most famous filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This is veteran actress Bencharongkul's second sortie as a director, and she seems to know what she's doing. This is a movie that's interesting and intriguing. It's an odd combination of elements, fashion shoots, a sordid beating and murder, a body disposal worthy of the Coen brothers with a touch of Patricia Highsmith, and then back to the night club scene where the model-failed actress Yo (Florence Faivre, well cast) looks glamorous even when she's bruised.

Yo's best friend, companion and unpaid assistant is Pim (Pakkawadee Pengsuwan, excellent), who's smaller, seems younger, also more stable, but is sorely tested. Pim's diagnosis with serious eye cancer - following a club night and a steamy, sensuous shared shower - leads the two women to Pim's house, where her mother has been badly beaten, and the fatal confrontation of Yo and Pim with Pim's brutal, abusive stepfather takes place. The body disposal, requiring a trip to Pim's "uncle," her mother's ex-boyfriend, way up in the woods, is the central, most absorbing section in the movie. Sparse, Hemingwayesque hints at his remote house suggest he may have experience in combat and big game hunting, or maybe he's just a tropical he-man. But he's young. Though he's a total contrast, and not a talker, he plays the same role as The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) when Jules and Vincent accidentally have a corpse on their hands in Pulp Fiction.

This is a hard act to follow, but one of Sad Beauty's best aspects is the assurance of its sudden shifts. Suddenly it's a year later but Yo and Pim, who had a bitter little spat after the corpse disposal (that was a long, tough night), are still friends. Pim has been having chemo. Yo is still making good money, but still has bad vibes in the business. She still is dissolute, has no purpose, is pursued by handsome guys after a good time, and now has nightmares inspired by that night of the crocodiles. Gradually it sinks in that this is a woman's picture, centered on an intense, dysfunctional woman's friendship, in which the killing is forgotten and the greatest crime is the failure to be there for one's friend at the crucial moment. But this failure is n't without repentance. This is a female director who can handle film noir with its appropriate violence, but also delve deeply into the complexity of a women's friendship. . The sensuousness also extends to things that are icky or disgusting, like the wrapped, seeping body and Pim's diseased eye, but also to a delicate handling of the lost friend that's sad without being sentimental.

The Far East Film Festival 20 blurb points out interesting details about the film and the filmmaker. More known in Thailand as Tak Bongkod, or her acting name before being married, Bongkod Kongmalai (Thai names aren't easy!) Bencharongkul began acting at fifteen in 2000, the "early days of the New Thai Cinema era." She starred in more than twenty movies for Sahamongkol Film, including blockbusters, and has also starred in TV series. This film, her first as an independent writer-producer-director (fortunate position) benefits from cult film director Kongkiat Khomsiri for details of production. The writer suggests an expressionistic role in the camerawork, bird's eye view angles "perhaps to signify the patriarchal control surrounding the protagonists," and handheld camera movement "to stress the convulsive sensibilities and feelings of being female in Thai society." But that seems to me secondary to the way the images deliver beauty even at the ugliest or ickiest moments in the action - an effect that is both cloying and liberating. And beyond the style, this director has something important and heartfelt to say. An excellent and original film.

Sad Beauty, 92 mins., debuted at Udine Apr. 2018, also Shanghai and Bucheon. Screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, showing at the Walter Reade Theater on 14 July 2018 at 5 p.m.


PAKAWADEE PENGSUWAN IN SAD BEAUTY

[Chris Knipp]

World premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival as its Closing Night Film.

ERIK MATTI: BUYBUST (2018)


ANNE CURTIS IN BUYBUST

World premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival as its Closing Night Film.

The heroics of a female cop, Nina Manigan (Australian actress Anne Curtis) are the highlight of a prolonged, scruffy gun battle of the Manila police against rank and file members of the local drug mafia in ace Filipino genre director Erik Matti's new film BubBust. The cops plan a "buybust" in which two teams infiltrate a drug deal with a local they've "turned," then surround and arrest. But in the event, the dealers change the location to an even seedier part of the city slums. Out of their element, they keep the audience waiting nearly an hour before the hard core action begins. Then, after the shooting starts, the police find themselves trapped when one of their own seems to have betrayed them. Armed members of the local population, enraged at being caught in the crossfire, turn on them too, and Manigan is a leader of the fight when they must struggle for hours to pull out without necessary backup. This is the essence of a chaotic, violent, and hard to follow action film (much of it takes place in the dark, in heavy rain) that is nonetheless, typically, well choreographed by Matti and his team. The elaborate production reportedly includes 1,278 extras and 309 stuntmen. Curtin does most of her stunts herself.

A premise is that Manigan, a newcomer to the force and unhampered by old loyalties or corruption, has seen her entire squad shot out around her during a previous raid. Mixed Martial Arts star Brandon Vera co-stars. The project is billed as one of the most ambitious Philippine productions to date. Whhile not merely a series of hand-to-hand combats like Gareth Evans' ultra-violent, now cult status, The Raid: Redemption (ND/NF 2012), BuyBust does consist largely of hand-to-hand and gun fighting.

Matti and his editor Jay Halili focus on moving rapidly around among the combatants. This makes the action sometimes confusing, but nice flashing light effects in the darkness photographed by dp Neil Derrick Bion and his team make the visuals often attractive and, however artificial, are necessary for the audience even to glimpse what's going on. The soundtrack includes the threatening broadcast voice of the drug gang leader, as well as loud, clangorous musical score by Erwin Romulo and Malek Lopez that often changes abruptly in mood and instrument, from guitar to strings to synthesizer to harpsichord to harmonica go drum. A harpsichord probably was never used to accompany a cops-and-robbers gun battle before.

There are some very, very violent moments, including a beheading - and, seconds later, we get to see the head sitting in a puddle of burning oil - one of dozens of elaborately-planned vignettes that punctuate the chaotic, exhausting action. At one point when Manigan and Yatco, aka Rico (Brandon Vera) are fighting off - to the death - a gang of angry locals in a claustrophobic space, a short circuit of crossed wires from above (in the heavy rain) causes a shower of sparks that electrocutes some of the combatants, including Rico, whom Madigan must fight to revive. They will continue, though, as a team of avengers.

There are moments of narrow escape for Manigan and Rico, but even three quarters of the way through this two-hour film, another crowd of angry, armed ghetto dwellers pours into a shabby square. There is more a sense of perpetual motion than of progress. One longs for the lean loneliness of a Western shootout. Finally there is a cool but deadly encounter between Madingan and the local drug kingpin, Biggie Chen (Arjo Alayde), and a final ironic voiceover that alludes to the current president's "war on drugs" to which perhaps this whole farrago of violence is an oblique allusion.

This is an exceptionally elaborate and demanding production that's as impressive as it is grueling to watch. But the action, however varied, ultimately becomes monotonous. In human terms this not ultimately as interesting a film as Matti's masterful 2013 actioner On the Job, also shown at the New York Asian Film Festival (and reviewed here), which has a more complex trajectory and an interesting relationship between two convicts of different generations who carry out targeted assassinations during releases from prison. Hopefully now that Matti has proven that he can do complex virtually non-stop action, he will go back to films that have more human nuance and variety.

The slum setting where the cops are trapped and must fight their way out of is a beehive of multi-storied makeshift cells, closed in, yet unprotected from the rain. This is a fascinatingly complex and picturesque feat of claustrophobic production design. But its basically uniform, indecipherable nature is one reason the action's logistics are hard to parse.

Other cast members include Joross Gamboa, Mara Lopez, Nonie Buencamino, AJ Muhlach and Victor Neri.

BuyBust, Phillippines 126 mins., debuted at the New York Asian Film Festival on Closing Night, 15 Jul. 2018 at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, at 8:30 p.m. World Premiere. Q&A with director Erik Matti and actors Anne Curtis & Brandon Vera · Closing Night Party. It will show at Fantasia International Film Festival in Canada 18 July, on 19 July at Comicon as part of the 21st Annuel Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza panel, and at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, at Fantasia in Montreal 18 July, and opening theatrically in the U.S. 10 Aug.