NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

LEE IL-HA: I AM MORE 모어 (South Korea, 2021)



INTERVIEW

Documentary portrait of an elegant Korean trans dancer and drag queen

A New York ASian Film Festival blurb for this film describes it as "A compassionate, colorful documentary about Korean transgender trailblazer and fabulous drag queen 'MOre,' whose years of rigorous training as a ballerina culminate in an invitation to dance in New York." You can call MOre a "transgender trailblazer," but I'd say Mo-Jimin is the classiest drag queen you've ever seen. Mo-Jimin gets cast in a show in New York in June 2019, 13 Fruitcakes at Theater La MaMa, to commemorate the the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and this important event in the life of the well-known Korean drag performer is the pretext for this documentary.

Should one refer to MOre (or is it simply "More"?) as "he" or "she" or something else? In an online interview with MOre in Korean, MOre says he is "Not a woman or a man, but a person who lives in pursuit of beauty." His boyfriend calls him "him," so we'll do that, but we may slip into "she" and that's natural, MOre is gender-fluid. David Cameron Mitchell, Wikipedia tells us, in 2022 "came out as non-binary, but still chooses to be addressed by he/him pronouns."

We don't wind up seeing much of the New York 13 Fruitcakes show; the main focus is on MOre. We see dozens of clips of MOre in heavy makeup, with the longest fake eyelashes you've ever seen, nearly as long as Salvador Dali's mustaches sometimes, wearing fantastic costumes, twirling and posing in beautiful settings, including dancing quite convincingly on her toes in preparation for the Fruitcakes show, in a brand new pair of ballet pointe shoes. (Her gymnastic skill shows in her incredible balance.)

We learn MOre may have been barred from full ballet studies in Korea. However, some details remain a bit vague in I Am MOre. The film mainly blends clips of MOre's drag performances (or posing in magnificent drag, or naked, in outdoor settings) with footage of him in the present moment. We don't learn much about 13 Fruitcakes or the Korean company involved in it. Its website shows it is a celebration through vignettes of thirteen significant LGBTQ figures, including several Korean ones and Virginia Woolf, author of the gender-shifting novel Orlando. MOre says he is going to play Orlando. But he played multiple roles, and must have beenthe main or one of the main performers, though the film doesn't make that clear.

We regularly encounter MOre's big bearish longtime (Russian? 20-year?) boyfriend Zhenya, a Pokemon devotee, who plans to perfect his Korean while on an 18-month job-seeking visa and apply for citizenship but is currently out of work. In an earlier clip he doesn't look so big and bearish; they look more alike and more like a regular affectionate gay couple in speedos at the beach. MOre, petite, wafer-thin and disciplined, is a convincing ballerina, a small, light classical dancer. By the way, classical ballerinas tend to have flat chests, though MOre seems to pad his when in ballet garb sometimes.

We meet MOre's friendly parents and her sister. Growing up in the country, she may have experienced less bullying than - but not none. He went to study ballet at the Korean National University in Seoul, where right away, he says, a male ballet student knocked him down and said "get rid of the femininity." Homophobia was and is strong in Korea, and to illustrate that, "eradicate Queer" festival and several other overtly homophobic street events are glimpsed.

MOre meets up with a famous American gay icon, John Cameron Mitchell of the 1998 trans musical classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch, whom he had met in Korea years earlier. He recounts trying suicide in school before a test but throwing up the 50 pills and going in and taking the test. Later, in the army, she came out and as a result was classified as insane and sent to a mental hospital. At that time (many clips are shown) MOre discovered Itaewon, Seoul's "party" and gay and drag district, and began dancing like crazy, and crazily, dancing all night, sometimes till he foamed at the mouth. She found joy, an escape from a life she saw as miserable. These moments are helter-skelter in the film's somewhat jerky progression that is held together by MOre and his serene, elegant, disciplined face.

Unfortunately when MOre sees Mitchell at his apartment in Manhattan it turns out he can't see 13 Fruitcakes; he has to be away that weekend to receive an award and perform in Provincetown. A sad letdown, but they hug and exchange gifts.

Though he says his being born with balls was a big mistake and he knew this from the beginning of his life, in a a revealing conversation with a prizewinning Korean transgender beauty MOre reveals he has given up the idea of surgery because it was always "too scary" and he has no regrets about that anymore, for one important reason because he knows that he has Zhenya's fully accepting love as he is. The film ends with a focus on the couple celebrating with sparklers at night, laughing and happy. The image that remains from this film is of MOre in a magnificent black costume posing in front of a grand building in the snow, but there is no still of this scene available, alas.

I Am More 모어 ("Mo-eo"), 121 mins., debuted Sept. 11, 2021 at DMZ Doc Fest, showing also at Busan Oct. 9, 2021. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere

NYAFF SHOWTIMES: Sun., Jul. 24, 2022, 7pm at the Walter Reade Theater.

[Chris Knipp]

CHO EUN-JI: PERHAPS LOVE 장르만 로맨스 (SOUTH KOREA, 2022)


RYU SEUNG-NYONG, MIN JIN-SUNG IN PERHAPS LOVE

Amorous confusion and literary inspiration

The Korean title of this this amusing and well made romantic comedy means "Genre Only Romance" and you should not confuse it with the glamorous 2005 Chinese mainland-set musical, English title also Perhaps Love (Chinese title 如果·愛), directed by Hong Kong's Peter Ho-Sun Chan and starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Xun Zhou and Jacky Cheung, which concluded the Venice film festival. This lower profile new film, a bold farce about love and writing with partner-switching and gayness, may really be more successful at what it sets out to do than Peter Chan's overblown musical. It may depart a lot from reality, especially with its gay-friendliness (word has it that mainstream Korean attitudes and practices remain pretty homophobic). But romantic comedies don't have to be realistic, and the gay element may soften Korean prejudices a little. The well-written screenplay by writer Kim Na-Deul makes things complicated but keeps them easy to follow - even for one who finds Korean names difficult.

The action starts with Hyeon (Ryu Seung-nyong), a best-selling writer who has been creatively blocked and written nothing in the seven years that have passed since the publication of his wildly successful first novel. His best friend is his publisher Soon-mo (Kim Hee-won), who is dating his ex-wife Mi-ae (Oh Na-ra). Things get complicated when Hyeon sees Mi-ae and they have wild sex. Mi-ae and Hyeon have a problematic adolescent son Seong-kyeong (Sung Yoo-bin), the reason why they're still in touch- who is witness to their sexual re-encounter and is very disturbed and confused by it.

While visiting a gay writer friend, Hyeon meets Yoo-jin (Mu Jin-sung), a young, also gay, aspiring writer who's been living with the friend. Yoo-jin follows up by visiting Hyeon, revealing that he's had a huge gay crush on the blocked older writer for a while - and leaves the manuscript of a novel he's written for Hyeon to read. Hyeon politely deflects the come-on, since he's totally straight, and at first, of course, ignores the MS. But when he gets to it, the MS turns out to be brimming with talent. Hyeon shows it to Soon-mo. They arrange to have Yoo-jin live with Hyeon and collaborate on a writing project incorporating Yoo-jin's novel. Awkward for Hyeon, but lovely for Yoo-jin, though he maintains a safe and unthreatening distance, writing up a storm and seeting with well-repressed desire, though also haunting Hyeon by attending his writing classes now. Hyeon is inspired to write again, but things get complicated, and funny, because he's sleeping in the same room with a young man who's wildly in love with him. I'm not sure how the Korean audience reacts to this, but it can't help but be titillating, at least for the gay audience, especially since Mu Jin-sung, who plays Yoo-jin, is very cute. So is Sung Yoo-bin, who plays the hilariously emotionally unstable young Seong-kyeong.

A funny thing in itself is the filmmakers' attempt - which doesn't have to be realistic, of course - to depict what the duo writing project would be like, with multiple media - pencil, computer and split screens. A major focus of Perhaps Love obviously is confused, misguided, or misdirected desire, but another big interest is the male ego. Hyeon's is constantly under attack, though he's stable - or depressed, not a prima donna or worthy of being one. To keep him in his place, in the background there' also a woman writer on the scene - though never honored by being given on-screen dialogue - who's shortlisted for the Booker Prize. If she wins the award (which she does, at the worst possible moment for Hyeon), Hyeon is going to be even further eclipsed.

There's also a whole slow-burning romance between Hyeon's adolescent son Seong-kyeong, who''s got plenty of time, since he uses his confusion over his parents' illicit sexual encounter as an excuse, not for the first time, to quit going to school or showing up for tutoring. A quirky young neighbor, Jeong-won (Lee Yoo-young), who says she's an actress, starts following Seong around. It's a big tease, and Seong is lonely, having just lost a girlfriend who dumped him when she got pregnant by someone else.

Except for the intense moment of ex-sex, there is no sex in this movie. What there is, is a lot of hilarity and confusion revolving around writers and writing and misplaced desire. Hyeohn and Yoo-jin are joint celebrities now, Yoo-jin is under contract to the publisher for future work, and all the mess has led to Hyeon being in the running again as an important author thanks to the jointly authored book, Two Men. He acknowledges publicly that Yoo-jin is a greater talent. But he has met the deadline and hasn't had to pay the huge penalty to the publishers and investors he was looking at if he didn't turn in another book.

The story winds up with the two collaborative authors, Hyeon and Yoo-jin. They plan to go their separate ways, but they reunite by unexpectedly meeting April 1 in Užupis, the town in Lithuania, actually a neighborhood of Vilnius, that every April 1 becomes an independent country for that one day, a place that Yoo-jin had long fantasized about and once described to Hyeon. This leaves a lot of other threads a bit dangling, but is a sweet, colorful change of location for an ending.

Perhaps Love 장르만 로맨스, 113 mins., debuted in Korea Nov. 17, 2021 on the internet; IMDb also lists it as opening in Mongolia Jan. 28, 2022. Cho Euon-ji won best director at the BaekSang Arts Awards. At the NYAFF Ryu Seung-ryong receives the inaugural Best from the East Award, which honors "a singularly outstanding performance in a film" and the film is included in the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film Competition. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American Premiere. On a official Korean website for Perhaps Love there are more stills than I've ever encountered for a movie - 106, an embarrassment of riches indeed. The glossy website makes this seem like an important production. I wonder if it was really only opened on the internet. Perhaps Netflix Korea?

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Tuesday Jul 26, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Cho Eun-ji and Actor Ryu Seung-ryong will attend the screening.

[Chris Knipp]

JEONG GA-YOUNG: NOTHING SERIOUS 연애 빠진 로맨(SOUTH KOREA 2021)


SON SUKKU AND JEON JONG-SEO IN NOTHING SERIOUS

TRAILER

Asian Wiki

A Korean rom-com, risqué, blasé and sweet

Here we have a fairly conventional, and fun, Korean rom-com, with risky bits, a journalistic angle, and a sweet finale, with two very watchable actors in the leads.

Ham [or Mak] Ja-young (Jeon Jong-seo), on the brink of thirty, is a young woman who's just lost her boyfriend and her job and owes a lot of money. She's feisty and fresh ("has a daring personality," a site says). Park Woori (Son Sukku), four years older, wants to be a novelist, but is working on an online magazine. His editor (Kim Jae-Hwa), a ferocious, bossy, but elegant and sexy lady, shaking up the mag to save it,
insists Woori has to write a sex column now, forget the sports one. He's lost his girlfriend too, and both Ja-young and Woori, after the manner of rom-coms, want to have a safe, unromantic affair and not get their hearts broken. And of course that doesn't quite work.

Ja-young (Jeon Jong-seo) and Woori meet with no previous experimentation on the dating app Love Bridge." His moniker is "Tweety Bird". Her's is "Sleeps Around." Upon meeting, they exchange their real names. Hers sounds-like "sleeps Once" and his sounds-like "the act of fucking."

The not-quite meet cute is well enough done to make one wish some of the preceding 25 minutes of chitchat with secondary characters had been skipped, but the Ja-young/Woori affair isn't meant to go too deep. And we needed to set up Woori's situation and meet Ja-young's girlfriends, especially her best friend, Sun-bin, a divorce lawyer, and her wise and elegant grandmother (Kim Young-Ok), important because her mother died shortly after her birth.

The meetup takes place, memorably, on New Year's Day. Ja-young got there early and seeing a blood donation truck, gave some as her New Year's good deed. This makes her hungry, which leads to a sit-down noodle meal. After a disagreement over buckwheat noodles, Ja-young suggests soju. They drink. She says she picked him on Love Bridge, since he asks, because he looked the least likely to have an STD. He blanches. "Even if a Prince Charming comes along," she adds, "he's no use if his dick is small." He chokes. "You're something else," he laughs.

They go to a hotel and have sex (not seen). Will there be more? He's interested, but she's non-committal. After all, she had wanted "nothing serious." She tells him so. But when Ja-young reports to her girlfriends, Sun-bin says she has a "FWB" now, and she doesn't deny it. (See my review of Will Gluck's 2011 Friends with Benefits with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake and a comparison with the, I thought, more intriguing Natalie Portman-Ashton Kutcher vehicle No Strings Attached.)

For meetup no. 2, the app pair start out with a really lengthy, drunken soju session this time, with mutual interrotations and opening-up. The setting and the activity are totally Hong Sang-soo, but the style and bright cinematography are Hollywood. This is not a European-festival-style movie; it's an entertainment, with jaunty music to accompany the drinking and the revelations to keep them light. They awaken in each other's arms and bed the next morning in another hotel, but they didn't have sex.

As this continues, with plenty of sex now, Woori is using the encounters for work in his "sex column." He doesn't describe the sex; he talks about the surprises and the feelings. There's a Situation here: he's mining a relationship - even if it's not one, yet - for titillating literary material. More and more people are reading the column. The editor is ecstatic when it gets over 500,000 hits, and takes the entire staff out to eat beef, promising them bonuses and a free trip. And this success is plausible partly because Ja-young is made to seem to us a truly original character, someone whose individuality young women would identify with and young men would find sexy.

But the more involved the soju and sex sessions become, the more attracted Woori is - on the verge of saying "I love you," the more uncomfortable he becomes with his column's success. Rising to over 700,000 hits doesn't help; it makes it worse. More pressure, more embarrassment, more shame. Though shame is not mentioned. When he is about to tell Ja-young it's over she drags him to her ex's wedding, which he willingly sabotages, though what he does is hidden and more malicious than criminal, and she realizes her plan of destroying the wedding was absurd and drags them away. With this act of complicity their mutual vibe is just too good for him to fess up now, and when she suggests they go to a fair next time they do. It's there, after a fun, romantic montage of rides, that he misplaces his smartphone and she finds it while he's in the loo, and the jig is up.

But what will happen next? You have to see and find out.

Both of these are interesting, much admired actors: people will watch this movie for them, and to a lesser extent because Jeong Ga-young has shown herself in her previous three films to be a bold and distinctive woman director whose work is also entertaining. Son Sukku spent a lot of time in the US and Canada studying and speaks good English. He majored in visual arts and film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been the CEO of a company, and in his military service volunteered for the "Zaytun Division" serving in war-torn Iraq. He has been in a popular Netflix series and been a director. He is quite famous and one can see why. With a few words exchanged with a woman met on a dating app he becomes immediately interesting. He has gravitas, an attractive, mysterious inwardness, and a wicked smile. As for Jeon Jong-seo (it was Jun Jong-seo before: so it goes with transliterations of Korean names), she came to wide attention through playing one of the lead roles in Lee Chang-dong's superb 2018 thriller Burning, one of the best films of that year's New York Film Festival. And that was only the beginning. She currently stars in the international Netflix series, "Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area."

Not pretentious, not earth-shaking, Nothing Serious is nonetheless full of scenes, mainly but not only the ones between Jeon Jong-seo and Son Sukku, that I'd be happy to watch again some day. These are characters you'd like to hang out with.

Nothing Serious 연애 빠진 로맨 ("Romance Without Love"), 94 mins., opened in Korea Nov. 24, 2021, and in Japan Jul. 8, 2022. It was screened for this review on a screener provided by the co-sponsors of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. New York premiere.

NYAFF SHOWINGS:
Sunday Jul 31, 3:45pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)

[Chris Knipp]

YOON JONG-SEOK: CONFESSION 자백 (SOUTH KOREA 2022)


SO JI-SUB AND KIM HUN-JIN IN CONFESSION

Tangled web of a powerful murder suspect and his ace defense lawyer, from a Spanish original

A remake of the twisty, convoluted 2016 Spanish thriller Contratiempo /The Invisible Guest, written and directed by Oriol Paulo. Italian, Bolllywood, and Indian Telugu language remakes also exist. This is a skillful mystery murder thriller with a posh dark sleek look. It is the purest hokum, but it done very well. The actors are good, the music restrained but effective. The focus is the long interview, with many illustrative flashbacks or filmed possible versions, as a rich corporate IT CEO talks to a woman defense lawyer who has never lost a case. He is accused of murder, she is to get him off. It all feels made up to hold us, but despite ourselves we are, indeed, held, right to the end. Nonetheless this is a construct of immense artificiality, a conversation filled with lies on both sides formed out of filmed possibilities and flashbacks can't seem very real, even though it pushes our cinematic buttons.

We can't go into all the details because that would spoil the surprises, even if we could remember them all. Yoo Min-ho (suave, convincingly despicable So Ji-sub) awakens, dazzed from a blow and a fall, found in a locked hotel room with his dead mistress Kim Se-hee (Im Jin-ah, known as Nana). He insists he didn't do it. But there was nobody else there. As he talks to attorney Yang Shin-ae (Kim Yunjin of "Lost") his story changes. For her to be able to defend him he must tell her everything, she insists. She also informs him that his confession isn't convincing, and, not that he must tell the truth, but that he must make up a better story. A good defense, she says, is made up of convincing fabrications.

Then, Mr. Yoo starts to tell a whole different story, not about the murder of his mistress, though he will get to that later, but about a crime that he and she committed a while ago - their coverup of the accidental death of a young driver when they were on a winding road and swerved to avoid an elk, and the other car hit a boulder. You see, they didn't want it to be known that they were on the road together because their affair was secret. An intricate series of eventS unfolds involving a strange coincidence and a lake - events that will double back toward the end of the film.

This suspenseful and smartly constructed film was deemed a worthy closing for the Udine Far East Film Festival. And it is wonderfully slick. But despite its success the critics didn't like the Oriol Paulo original and there is no reason why we can admire the same kind of construct made in South Korea. It is too self evidently more delighted in its own narrative ingenuity than anything else. But there is something addictive about it and the acting and filmmaking here are polished.

Confession 자백, 105 mins., debuted at 36th Fribourg International Film Festival Mar. 20, 2022,[1][2] and its Italian debut at the 24th Udine Far East Film Festival Apr. 30, 2022 as closing film of the festival. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Saturday Jul 23, 8:30pm
Asia Society
Director Yoon Jong-seok will attend the screening

[Chris Knipp]

DAN-GUEI SHEN: THE FUNERAL 頭七 (TAIWAN, 2022)


WU YIHAN IN THE FUNERAL

Bad reception

The visuals are generally elegant in this slow-burner horror film from Taiwan, which blends family conflict with folk evil spirits and explodes into traditional intensified scares and excitement in the last twenty minutes of its 103-minute run-time. An uncomfortable mood is definitely created, though some moments are just too conventional and a perceivable disconnect between the opening and later sections reveals a certain weakness in a screenplay that has some inconsistencies.

The family conflict, and the elaborate focus on funerary ritual, makes one wonder if this couldn't just have been a straight socio-psychological drama. On the other hand, for horror genre fans, all the delving into personal issues may seem to get in the way. Central is a mother, Chun-hua (Selina Jen Chia-Hsuan) and her teenage daughter Qin Xuan (Wu Yihan), who live in Taipei. The daughter suffers from kidney disease and is delicate, needing a transplant. The pic opens with a long sequence where mom, working in a large convenience store at night, walks around continually spooked by odd noises, then a power outage. Later, she and her daughter go out to the family seat in the country - a Chinese language site, Movies and Culture calls it "a dimly lit old mansion" - for the funeral and seven-day wake of mom's grandfather where they are met first by an unfriendly reception from relatives, then by the hostile pursuit of unfriendly spirits. The daughter meets family members she's never known. They are just as unfriendly as the spirits. This world is both familiar and unfamiliar for the mother now.

It turns out Chun-hua hasn't been back in a decade because there was a falling out when she became pregnant out of wedlock refusing to reveal the father's identity or to end the pregnancy as her parents, especially her father (Chen Yi-Wen) wanted, and went to Taipei to raise the child on her own. Her parents have not forgiven her for this. Her father, the most convincingly disagreeable, walks up and simply says, "You are not welcome here." That's about as malevolent as family relations can get, and no folk evil spirits are needed to reinforce it. Mom is nearly as unpleasant. More comes to show Chun-hua's mistreatment in early life, but this is never resolved or explained.

A "large mourning hall built in the countryside" (the Chinese site again) is an impressive reference point of the film that is both grand and scary, a place where "The hanging couplets and yellow curtains make people feel chills down their spines." The daughter is afraid to go to the funeral, so mom goes alone, and while separated from the girl is attacked by a peripheral family member (Na-Do) who, lacking legitimacy, has been excluded from the will and is enraged by this.

While her parents have told her to leave, Chun-hua is determined to remain for the traditional seven days of ritual surrounding a funeral, with the soul wandering on preceding days and set free on the seventh (and sometimes multiple seven-day rituals thereafter). There is a Taoist priest on hand played by Chen Jiakui. We don't quite get to the full ritual, because in the last quarter hour of the film all hell breaks loose, with some possessed by malevolent spirits and violence entering the mourning hall for a dramatic and surprising finale. The site I've cited says this is the best horror movie ever made in Taiwan. Maybe, maybe not; horror fans may like only the last part, but tech features are good throughout and the late scenes have good visuals.

(For more about the plot complications I defer to Don Aneli on Letterboxd who has the only lengthy discussion at present, in English at least.)

The Funeral 頭七 ("The First Seven"), 103 mins. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival, the film's international premiere. It debuted in Apr.1, 2022 at the Quingming Festival in Taiwan.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Wednesday Jul 20, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)


THE "LARGE MOURNING HALL BULIT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE"

[Chris Knipp]

TOM TENG: LIFE FOR SALE 售命 (TAIWAN 2021)


FU MENG-PO, JOANNE TENG IN LIFE FOR SALE

No time to die

This movie from Taiwan about a failed young insurance salesman Liang (Fu Meng-po) makes desperation fun. There's a daft, ironic nihilism about it that recalls early writings of William Burroughs and might have been directed by the Cronenberg of Naked Lunch.We're in a kooky urban purely cinematic world. With its candy-colored noir style, its desperados in the subway, it's elaborate failed suicide attempts (by attempting to consume fatal amounts of cinnamon, chewing gum and carrots), its cockroaches and the loosely-slung young female neighbor Yu-jen (Joanne Tseng) with a teenage son needing a heart transplant who comes over to drink, this is a sprightly and fast-moving tragicomedy full of youthful bravado. As time goes on the movie drifts into genre violence which is over-the-top fun but drifts from earlier promise.

After he gets fired from the insurance job for socking a high-earning stiff - since the income hs's bringing in, a bespectacled female accountant totes up, is less than they are paying him, Liang sets out to follow the theme of the eponymous Yishima novel he picked up on the subway, Life for Sale. (A nice detail is the lingering smell of vomit on the book cover from Yu-jen throwing up on it one night.) He decides to sell his life for real, on the internet. But once he makes known how little he values it, the more others seem to value his existence: e.g., a mysterious woman (Janel Tsa) who urgently seeks a test subject for a high-stakes experiment. Interesting and well costumed characters turn up: a medical experiment, and shady old Mr. Wang (Tsai Ming-shiou), who wants someone to perform dangerous tasks, including getting back a stolen dog from a vicious rival crime boss. Liang spends the rest of the film fighting off unsavory characters out to get him.

Things may begin to seem a little random by halfway into the 105-minute runtime. While the outcome is uncertain, the irony of the situation is clear, how Liang's death instinct has made him desirable material for various oddballs with missions. We could have used a pause for breath or a change of tone: this is a film where a completely new chapter, like in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, would have been welcome. But producer now first feature director Tom Teng in his enthusiasm misses, as feature debut helmers often do, the need to pause for air. The temptation of stylish pop genre violence has been too great. It's fun, but it swallows up the film's earlier promise.

However the first twenty-five minutes of so are among the freshest and most stylish footage the NYAFF has to offer this year, and we must be grateful for that. Better luck next time, Mr. Teng.

Life for Sale 售命, 106 mins., Mandarin and Taiwanese, English subtitles, debuted in Taipei in early May 2022. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. International Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES: Showtimes
July 24
9:30 PM
Q&A with Tom Teng
Walter Reade Theater LincolnCenter

[Chris Knipp]

GENG JUN: MANCHURIAN TIGER 东北虎 (2021)


ZHANG YU AND XU GANG IN MANCHURIAN TIGER

Cold laughter in China's far north

A review in Sino-Cinema by veteran Asian film specialist Derek Elley says of this extremely dry, off beat comedy that it "overstays its initial welcome." He describes in detail how the director shows off an indie style of longueurs and eccentric provocations. Though this effort is more commercial than previous ones, it did not do well at the box office.

A coal-mining city in set in Heilongjiang province, located in China’s northeastern corner, closer to Russia than to Beijing, the present day, winter. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu of An Elephant Sitting Still) operates his own bulldozer loading coal at a mine. He’s broke, is married to the heavily pregnant Meiling (Ma Li), and has a young mistress, Xiaowei (Guo Yue).

Before this "deadpan dramedy" takes shape, we see a few sketches introducing the characters. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu) is an excavator machine operator in a mine of this constantly cold Chinese Northeast, and between a cigarette and an excavation, he enjoys the regular visits of his mistress Xiaowei (Guo Yue), not the first, we learn. Despite her insistence, he is firmly and melancholically convinced that his marriage is the only thing he has left in his life. On the other hand, it's his wife who keeps the marriage together. With the same determination she instructs Xu Dong to get rid of their handsome German Shepherd, Ruyi, to prepare for the baby. He struggles to find someone who will buy the animal as a pet and not for the meat. As a last resort, he leaves it to builder Ma Qianli (Zhang Zhiyong), who has a spacious courtyard and a reputation as a successful businessman. Xu Dong also tries to help Luo (Xu Gang), a friend who has mental illness and considers himself a poet, by getting him a job as a schoolteacher, but this is not successful. And Ruyi winds up eaten.

The themes of Geng Jun's film are various: family and the attachment to money; desolation and the lack of a social structure of assistance for the disabled; betrayal, viewed fatalistically, at the expense of respect for women. The protagonist never really pays the price, except through awkward and clumsy triangular situations, which are as worthy of our scorn as of our forgiveness.

The film won the top prize, the Golden Goblet, at the 24th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival, June 2021, Variety reports. Geng’s previous film, Free + Easy, won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Manchurian Tiger is his fourth feature.

Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday, July 17 at 1pm, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center