NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

KASHO IIZUKA: ANGRY SON/ 世界は僕らに気づかない (Japan 2022)


GOW AND KAZUKI HORIKE IN ANGRY SON

The coming of age of a beleaguered "Jappino" is a messy but irresistible tale

As hinted in Li Gen's Before Next Spring, also NYAFF 2022, a film about Chinese emigrants living in a Tokyo suburb, there is no such thing as assimilation in Japan, and here we see that's true even when you were born there if you're not pure Japanese. Kasho Iizuka's entertaining, annoying, and heartfelt little film Angry Son focuses on Jungo (Kazuki Horike), a "Jappino" or biracial Japanese-Filiipino teenager. He lives combatively with this reality in a Japanese suburb with his Filipina bar hostess mother Reina (singer and actress GOW, whose acting is too crude and strident), who loves but maddens him and whom he rails at constantly in private, departing from his generally buttoned-down Japanese manner. He obviously speaks native fluency Japanese and would assimilate if they'd let him.

Jungo also happens to be gay, and he has a strong link with the society: a devoted Japanese boyfriend, Yosuke, whose family accepts his sexuality and their relationship. But Jungo and Yosuke become estranged. It seems permanent, and in the wake of this disaster Jungo, academically unmotivated (and not planning to go on to university), hurt by the regular racist and sexist abuse he suffers from present and former classmates and wanting to find shelter away from his annoying mother, becomes obsessed with searching for for the Japanese birth father he has never met - while still constantly fighting with the well-meaning but sometimes obnoxious mother.

This film engages us with its wealth of human experience. It has two weddings and a funeral, tearful reunions, and a presentable and resilient young protagonist, whose perpetually going around with a camera around his neck snapping photos may make him a cliché artist-autobiographer, but we get the point. The film is also technically unimpressive (the rickety handheld cinematography hardly seems intentional), the casting is often dubious and unappealing, and events play out with a jerky pulse more suited to a meandering TV sitcom than a slightly overlong feature film. But eventually its sincerity may grab you.

There are a number of little scenes where Jungo, the protagonist, is teased or humiliated by classmates for being half-Filipino or for being gay. He was born here in Japan and speaks as far as we know only Japanese. He has to live with the fact that while he gets maintenance payments from his father's family, his mother is in thrall to an extended family in the Philippines she tries to send money to even though she never has any and the electricity in their tiny apartment repeatedly gets cut off. She also violates Japanese manners as he would never do, yelling at her boss at a new job, which humiliates him. He can yell sometimes, perhaps to his benefit, but he also has an inbred sense of Japanese politeness and deference and knows when to bow and be silent and humble.

The meandering structure takes Jungo around the world of Filipino hostess bars as he does some surprising detective work tracking down the family of his birth father, who met Reina in one years ago. It also takes us into the relationship of Yosuke, Jun's boyfriend, with his family and the sudden appearance of a self-declared "asexual" young woman who knows of the boys' relationship and wants to form a three-cornered family with them in which Yosuke will enable her to have children the three of them will raise. Scenes with Yosuke's family show their warmth not only toward the boys' relationship but toward their plan - once they reunite and Jungo pledges steadfastness, love, and loyalty - to take advantage of new local regulations allowing legal same-sex partnerships.

Director Iizuka identifies as trans and as having experienced some of the issues of Angry Son first hand. IMDb shows another film by Iizuka this year, The World for Two of Us, depicting a ten-year relationship of a woman with a trans person (Angry Son isn't listed on the site). Angry Son is a well-meaning and heartfelt film. The director has things to say about subjects new to Japanese films.

Reviewed by Hayley Scanlon in Windows on Worlds and with a directorial interview by Marina D. Richter in Asian Movie Pulse, but information is lacking, including an IMDb page.

Angry Son 世界は僕らに気づかない ("The World Doesn't Notice Us"), 111 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival where it is in the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film Competition. It has been shown at several festivals including Osaka and Frankfurt. North American premiere.

NYAFF 2022 SHOWING: Thursday Jul 31, 9:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center).
Director Kasho Iizuka will attend the screening.

[Chris Knipp]

KAZUO MAEDA: BROKEN COMMANDMENT 破戒 (Japan 2022)


ANNA ISHII AND SHOTARO MAMIYA IN BROKEN COMMANDMENT

New adaptation of Shimazaki's 1906 novel about caste in Japan

Full details of this film can be found on an online page for the June 28, 2022 Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan sneak preview. This is the third screen adaptation of Toson Shimazaki's 1906 novel Hakai about caste discrimination in Japan. Previously Keisuke Kinoshita dramatized the book in Apostasy (1948) and Kon Ichikawa did so in The Outcast (1962). The term "eta" or "pariah, we see, was still being applied in Japan in the Russo-Japanese war period. It was used to exclude hisabetsu buraku, Japan's untouchables.

In the story, a young man of noble character, Ushimatsu Segawa (Shotaro Mamiya), struggles with the secret he is hiding: that he has links to this caste. His father's "commandment" was never to reveal this, and by not doing so he has gotten a good basic education and now arrives to become a teacher at a country primary school. But Segawa is very conflicted over his secrecy because he knows openness is necessary to fight the injustice of the caste system - which the Meiji Restoration supposedly removed, but survives in practice and mentality. Segawa is a great admirer of well known writer Rentaro Inoko (Hidekazu Mashima), a burakumin rights activist who has recently published a book in which he confesses that he himself is an "eta." Segawa is shamed by this example. His conflict becomes greater when a fan letter he writes gains him an audience with the distinguished, intensely committed author.

Trouble comes early on when Segawa, newly arrived for his country school job, begins to fall for Shiho (Anna Ishii), a sensitive young woman who comes from the former samurai class and resides at the Renge temple where he also comes to live. Try as he may he can't bring himself to reveal his origins to her, but a rival in love for Shiho sets out to undermine him because he is suspicious. Meanwhile every other scene is rife with casual racism, classism, social brutality, indifference to disability, and enthusiasm for war and power. The icky guys are stuffy oldsters who yell out their opinions like actors in a play and shiny young men in western suits; Segawa's purity is signaled by his traditional garb.

Statements about this new adaptation point out that (like a lot of the world) Japan today is going though a new shift to the right as it did "at the end of the Meiji period, with constitutional reform, revision of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the rise of the opinion that war is inevitable."

The film is glossy, respectable, plodding, and has "well-meaning historical TV drama" written all over it. And in fact director Kazuo Maeda is a veteran of such dramas as well as of promotional and educational films. Reports lead one to suspect that the 1962 film version of the book by Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, The Burmese Harp) has more dash and flair. This release corresponds with the hundredth anniversary of Japan's first human rights declaration, which designated Burakumin, Zainichi Koreans, Ainu and other "disadvantaged minorities" as deserving of full human rights. Broken Commandment is a pretty good watch if your expectations are not set too high. (The farewell speech to the kids is great - but the long dragged out goodbye is tedious.) The film is both relevant today overall, and a vivid sketch of the social and political mood of 1905 Japan.

The book was adapted for this film by Masato Kato and Norio Kida. Also featured in the cast are Yuma Yamoto, Kazuya Takahashi, Ayako Kobayashi, Kou Nanase, Wooyear Yoshitaka, Shunsuke Daitoh, Naoto Takenaka, Hirotaro Honda, Yohji Tanaka, Renji Ishibashi, and Hidekazu Mashima. A Toei production. International Premiere.

The Broken Commandment 破戒, 119 mins., no data about release, was screened for this review as part of the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. Japanese theaatrical release July 8, 2022.
For full promotional material about the film (in Japanese): https://hakai-movie.com

NYAFF: Thursday Jul 28, 2022 at 6:30pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)

[Chris Knipp]

TAKUYA KATO: GROWN-UPS わたし達はおとな (Japan 2022)


FUJIWARA KISETSU, KIRYUU MAI IN GROWN-UPS

The unexpected pregnancy of an art student

The director and playwright Takuya Kato, who presides over the theater company "Tagumi" and has written for some admired Japanese TV including "Heisei Monogatari," helms his first feature film with Grown-Ups, a little drama set deep in the realities of middleclass early adulthood that's engaging and keeps viewers on their toes. By shooting in a chic, streamlined style and shuffling chronology of scenes, he has made a conventional enough sequence of events feel fresh and different: Kato is being a bit experimental with basically simple stuff. Even though there is nothing earth-shaking and new here, there's a natural, unexpected effect, and these feel like real people and a real situation. Certain Japanese twenty-somethings ought to find a lot to debate about here. For international festival viewers, Takuya Kato represents a new Japanese director with a distinctive writing and visual style.

The dirctor's theatrical background shows in his way with loose, vernacular dialogue, especially as the relationship between the principals, Yumi (Kiryuu Mai), an art student already selling some of her designs, and Naoya (Fujiwara Kisetsu), an young theater director who wants to have his own company, slides into more and more impossible states of disagreement over her surprise pregnancy. Also theatrical is that a great deal of the action takes place in Yumi's rather nice apartment, which, with the good looks of all the twenty-somethings, contributes to the casual chic of everything - without conflicting with the serious subject matter.

They all (the couple and her friends and other college students) seem like attractive young slackers, the mood so casual the viewer thinks for a while nothing much is ever going to happen. And Naoya is apparently not living with Yumi. That's part of being noncommittal and Gen X, right? But serious stuff sneaks up on them, and us, when she does an at-home pregnancy test, it's positive, and suddenly everything changes. Then come more complications. She's not sure Naoya is the father. There's someone else it could have been. She won't say who; she won't introduce him to Naoya. He accepts this. It most likely is his child. He loves her.

But everything is fluid, and in successive scenes and conversations Naoya and Yumi go through all sorts of changes. For a while he is very loving and caring. But nobody is very forthcoming, and this is certailly not something he'd planned on in his idealistic fantasy of becoming a theatrical director. Note she won't reveal the other possible father. Her refusal to get a DNA test, Naoya's very reasonable request, is a stumbling block hat won't go away. "No, let's just raise the child as if it is ours," she says. Really? Then, her mother dies and she goes home and there are scenes with her father (Kenta Satoi), but Yumi doesn't seem to tell anybody about this, except one friend on the phone who says nothing.

Then all of a sudden Naoya, who has still nominally been residing elsewhere, won't let her come to visit him there and admits he's still rooming with his ex! Arguments continue, and one day Naoya gives Yumi the keys back and goes off with his light bags. Scenes have gone back to show early meetings and first sex; then back to a decisive fight; he leaves; and she stands at the stove and fries a couple of eggs.

Grown-Ups わたし達はおとな ("We Are Adults"), 108 mins., was screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. International premiere.

NYAFF: Saturday Jul 23, 2022 at 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

[Chris Knipp]

MAYU NAKAMURA: INTIMATE STRANGER 親密な他人 (JAPAN 2021)


FÛJU KAMIO AND ASUKA KUROSAWA IN INTIMATE STRANGER

Spider and fly

Intimate Stranger is a slow burn Japanese suspense horror film built around the rather kinky theme of a middle-aged woman who keeps a pretty young man prisoner in her flat. Look at the movie poster and you will see its teasing eroticism. Framed in various shades of desaturated film color using the bleach bypass technique and with human and home appliance sounds in lieu of score, it begins with a promise of elegant oddity, but it drags on a little too long in the middle passage.

At the periphery is COVID (masks abound) and phone scams on old ladies, lured into turning over tidy sums to guys who come to collect for their "grandsons" who are sick or in trouble. Into this world wanders Megumi (the excellent Asuka Kurosawa), a sad lady who works at a baby clothes store, in whose wares she has a special, excessive interest. Megumi is searching for her son Shinpei (Yuu Uemura), missing for a year. Along comes a homeless waif called Yuji (heartthrob Fûju Kamio) who has several possessions of Shinpei's and says they met at an internet café. Megumi pays Yuji several small sums (starting with $50) for information and, finding he seems to be without fixed abode (though he is immaculate), eventually lures Yuji into her small apartment and keeps him locked in there "for his own safety." And he seems to accept being kept. He has a warm bed and knows where his next meal is coming from. Maybe he is wanted by several parties, or maybe it's just that scamming is a rat race in which he isn't a main cog in. Or maybe Megumi is the mother he never had. But when she trims his pretty bob it's not particularly motherly. And when she gets him in her lap with a straight razor in her hand the consummation threatened is a violent one.

Fûju Kamio isn't altogether convincing casting, at first anyway - not seedy enough. But director Nakamura is a woman (she studied at NYU: Film School, by the way), and the camera lingers teasingly over Kamio's face. As Megumi, Kurosawa fills the screen too. She is seedy, but more importantly despite her age exudes an erotic aura; she has a complexity worthy of a French star like Isabelle Huppert or Juliette Binoche, as director Nakamura noted in the Tokyo Q&A. These two actors wind up being wonderfully well used by the director, who above all wanted to give an older woman an exciting central role and has done so. Yuji and Megumi look and look and look at each other, and their gaze is always interesting and mysterious (Kamio was chosen partly for his eyes - good enough to make him alluring wearing a mask).

This teasing two-hander, though it's great, is stretched out a bit, and it's rather late in the game when things finally start to heat up. But this movie does have some surprises for us at the end. When Yuji opens that box he was not supposed to touch, we don't have to see the contents. This is a tale of scamming the scammers, and it's an endless loop.

Intimate Stranger is low octane slow burn psychological horror with some nice moments. There isn't quite enough here for the whole 95 minutes, but Mayu Nakamura has a good eye and works in the tradition. This is only her second feature; her first was The Summer of Stickleback in 2006; in between she has made documentaries. One can see the enthusiasm for tradition in homages to David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieślowski, John Cassavetes and many others. Mayu Nakamura is a director to watch. Her next project is to shoot a film featuring non-binary actors in the US.

Intimate Stranger 親密な他人, 95 mins., debuted at Tokyo 2021. It was screened for this review as part of the 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. North American premiere.

NYAFF: Thursday Jul 21, 2022 at 7:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Mayu Nakamura will attend the screening.

[Chris Knipp]

KAZUYA SHIRAISHI: LESSON IN MURDER 死刑にいたる病 (Japan, 2022)
TRAILER


KENSHI OKADA, SADAWO ABE IN LESSON IN MURDER

Warning: depicts torture

AS the veteran Tokyo-based film critic Mark Schilling points out in his Japan Times review, this film is one of many offshoots of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. Thus it depicts a gruesome, smart serial killer, Haimura Yamato (Sadawo Abe) who from death row plays with an inexperienced young investigator, Masaya Kakei (Kenshi Okada). This time instead of Jodie Foster's inexperienced but highly motivated FBI agent it's a handsome law student the convicted killer used to know as a young customer at his pastry shop whom he lures into studying his "work," and then teases and manipulates. In the course of this there is a detailed review of the personality and the crimes of the killer and the private affairs of his young "adversary." As Schilling says there are different movies mashed together in Lesson in Murder. Its enthusiastic exploration of meticulous tortures and murders of teenagers ill fits with its family dramas and coming of age tale.

For those who find Silence of the Lambs' fascination wIth its odious champion killer repellant, Lesson in Murder won't have much charm. Demme's film sold lots of tickets, but it was was picketed with good cause for its transphobic and homophobic elements. I couldn't forgive its use of Bach's Goldberg Variations as background music for a gleefully meticulous murder. There was deep perversity in this movie. Demme had a screw loose. The pious, boring AIDS flick Philadelphia didn't make up for the homophobia of Lambs. Lesson in Murder if free of these taints, it simply depicts a twisted killer and has scenes of him torturing his victims that are realistic and nightmarish.

While Jodie Foster's intensity and caring are positive, relatable elements in Demme's film, Schilling points out the weaknesses of the young investigator character in Lesson in Murder. Okada has little acting experience and is simply too handsome to seem plausible as the awkward, friendless, repressed young man Yamada is supposed to be: he seems to be explaining his character rather than embodying him. But of course Okada is easy on the eyes. He makes something pleasant to look at during the scenes of procedural investigation and the prison meetings between Yamada and the killer.

The motival thread for the action, which is based on a novel by Riu Kushiki, is provided by Yamato's insistence that the 24th of the 24 murders he's accused of is one he didn't do, though he admits to all the rest. At Yamato's prompting, Masaya carries out his own personal investigation to verify this claim, energized by the fact that he hates his school, which he considers very inferior. He wants to prove himself, perhaps discover himself. There is a lot to be learned about him. . .

The NYAFF previously included Shiraishi's 2018 yakuza movie The Blood of Wolves. (reviewed here).

Lesson in Murder 死刑にいたる病 ("Sickness Unto Death"), 128 mins., opened in Japan May 6, 2022. Screened for this review at the 2022 NYAFF. North American premiere.

NYAFF SHOWING: Thursday Jul 21, 2022 at 9:30pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)

[Chris Knipp]

TAKASHI SHIMAZU: OX-HEAD VILLAGE (JAPAN 2022)


KEIKO HORIUCHI, RIKU HAGIWARA IN OX-HEAD VILLAGE

A popular horror thriller mystery in a woodsy setting winds up being a slog.

Ox-Head Villageis the work of pop horror auteur Takashi Shimizu, most famous in the West for his Ju-On series (2003, 2003, 2004, 2006; remade in the United States as The Grudge). It seems safe to guess the "Village" series is Shimazu working in a less serious, less adult mode. Perhaps less successfully.

Ox-Head Village is the third in Shimazu's popular "Village" horror trilogy. It is the story of high school senior Kanon (Keiko Horiuchi) and her goofy would-be boyfriend Ren (Riku Hagiwara), who view a strange online video in which a trio of teenage girls, rather hysterical and silly and one of them bleach-blond, explore a supposedly haunted hotel. One of the girls—who looks exactly like Kanon—is apparently attacked by a supernatural force and disappears. Ren and Kanon decide to investigate the site of the disappearance, and—this being a horror film—predictably spooky things ensue. If that is what you're looking for. But this is a thousand miles below the quality of Japanese horror you find in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure or his later Pulse. It is designed for fans of popular genre material who know what they want and are not too discerning.

The festival blurb points out the trilogy features "the eponymous ox head, sinister twinships, murderous curses and three missing high school girls." There always seems to be a young man with nice hair. This is the fourth NYAFF Japanese film in a row with one of those.

But from IMDb user commenter who goes by "BlackMarketScum" comes the following grim report that gibes more closely with this writer's viewing experience:

I'm sitting here currently forced by my girlfriend to watch this rubbish. This movie suggestion may have just ended our relationship...

The plot is boring, drawn out and utterly unbelievable. The production quality is poor, TV-drama-level at best. There's not a single scare or spine chilling moment, and apparently flesh and bone are tougher than a falling elevator. Add on to that a few cheesy moments of 'comedy' and you get this disaster of a movie.

This is coming from someone who has sat through plenty of other bad movies just for the bizzare moments...but this has to be the most unbearable 2 hours of film I've had to endure.

It became clear to me early on that the acting quality, most of it anyway, is bad, and I'm not critical about that very often, which also must mean the direction is sloppy. The action seemed trivial and hard to get interested in. What more is there to say? They make bad movies in Japan sometimes. Though there is some found footage use, this is very much not Blair Witch Project quality. There's some pretty natural scenery, which wound up being my only solace in this slog.

Ox-Head Village, 115 mins., opened Feb. 18, 2022 in Japan, later opening in Taiwan and Thailand. Screened for this report for the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival showing, which is he North American premiere.

Tuesday Jul 19, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Director Takashi Shimizu will attend the screening.

[Chris Knipp]

NON: RIBBON (JAPAN 2022)


MISAYO HIRUKI AND RENA NONEN IN RIBBON

COVID disrupts the life of an art school student

Ribbon is the first feature directed, scripted and starred in by actor Rena Nonen, who goes by the stage name Non. It is one of the rare Japanese films that acknowledges the present issue of the COVID pandemic. This is discussed in an article about COVID and Japanese movies by Mark Schilling in The Japan Times.

It is the winter of 2020, and an art school graduation project that had taken a year to complete can no longer be showcased at its planned venue because of COVID-19. Art school is closed down, and Itsuka Asakawa (Rena Nonen) lugs a bunch of wrapped up canvases back to her little apartment (she's got her own apartment), complaining all the way. The apartment is an ungodly mess - and how bad it is to be stuck in a small apartment alone with that: Itsuka's art school friend is tidy and gets up at six a.m. Itsuka's major project, a big painting of a grand girl hung with paper shreds is enshrined at the center of her room. But while this is home in a way, it's also lonely, and nothing quite makes sense anymore.

The strongest and most shocking sequence is the visit of Itsuka's mother (Misayo Haruki) who, while straightening up the apartment, unbeknownst to Itsuka throws the big painting in the trash because she thinks it's junk. And that isn't the end of the humiliating things this ultra-irritating okka-san says about her daughter and her ambitions to her face. Moreover when she learns she made a mistake she won't apologize. It's excruciating.

Dad comes the next day to check up on their daughter and his visit is more purely comical - a "social distancing" device he's brought like a giant Dalinian crutch, which got him stopped by the police, and jars of fruit jelly which are to be consumed at one go. More visits from Itsuka's younger sister and her - dare we say? - more talented art school friend Hirai (Rio Yamashita) follow, and an inexplicable secret invasion by the two young women into the closed art school premises, thereby risking expulsion, where Itsuka and Hiriai partly gleefully, partly tearfully destroy Hirai's big painting project, a surreal landscape, presumably because it's too big to remove from the studio. But still, why?

A charming, if somewhat fey, episode is that of the man (or tall boy) in the park, whom Hirai and Itsuka think is a creepy weirdo, surely vastly overreacting, until gradually he reveals that he is, in a big twist of fate, not only Tanaka (Daichi Watanabe), the middle school classmate whose praise of Itsuka's artwork was decisive, but also a neighbor who lives in her apartment building. This oh-so-tentative rapprochement is a little pathetic - Japanese shyness at its most extreme - but is also sort of heartwarming in a slightly kitsch way, providing all sorts of hitherto missing hope: of art supporters, of a boyfriend, of tentative human company, even under COVID. The way Itsuka runs around and spies on Tanaka trying to see him with his mask off at a distance before she's sure he is who he says he is seems odd and exaggerated but probably makes sense within the culture and may be a natural part of pandemic comedy.

The movie is full of tweeness that makes Non seem very much a Japanese Miranda July and is pretty off-putting, at least for an older male Western viewer (and Miranda July non-fancier), but it's nonetheless impressive, relevant, and perhaps even brave. It shows the strange disruptiveness of the COVID pandemic's early stages and particularly how students' lives have been disrupted, and not only that but examines the fragility of an artistic calling. Maybe Itsuka hasn't the talent or the motivation to continue: but would we take on the odious role of the unsupportive, uncomprehending mother? Some art work - no, nearly all art work - in one way or another requires some kind of community to flourish. So does humanity, pretty much. The "ribbons" seemed a nonessential magic realism element thrown in to elevate Itsuka's experience to a more spiritual level - but they may be a valid representation of the transcendent element that art provides so maybe they're not a bad idea, after all.

Ribbon,, 115 mins., debuted at Shanghai June 2021. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-31, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. East Coast Premiere

NYAFF SHOWING: Thur., Jul. 21, 2022, 4:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater.