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New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS
GENERAL FILM FORUM SECTION
NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL JULY 12-22, 2024
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-17-2024 at 10:43 AM.
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BUSHIDO (Kazuya Shiraishi 2023)
TSUYOSHI KUSANAGI IN BUSHIDO
KAZUYA SHIRAISHI: BUSHIDO (2023)
A shamed samurai regains his honor
We've previously reviewed two other Kazuya Shiraishi films: a Silence of the Lambs- style serial killer tale, Lesson in Murder (NYAFF 2022) and before that a yakuza movie, The Blood of Wolves (NYAFF 2018). This is Shiraishi's first foray into a full-on jidaigeki period samurai drama, and, let Mark Schilling of The Japan Times say it, this is a "lovingly conceived and meticulously executed throwback that revitalizes the genre."
Perhaps not for everyone, because if your memories of the ancient board game of Go, central here, are like mine, you may find its function a little alienating. Or just incomprehensible. I was not good at chess, and when friends in college who were, took up Go, that was even more mystifying. Instead of kings, queens, knights, pawns, rooks, etc., there are just black and white stones, one places on a board covered with a fine network of lines. I could never understand how white stones could be used to trap or "kill" black ones and vice versa. Experts see all the complexities at a glance, which is what happens here.
Except men wear samurai swords here, and losers of a game may get their head chopped off. At a climactic moment (spoiler alert) a magnanimous protagonist chooses to forgive the two men who have lost a wager and, instead of chopping off both their heads, he brings down his sword and chops the Go board in half, a dramatic effect, if a gesture not good for the sword and terrible for the thick, handsome board. In fact the Japanese title "Gobangiri" actually means "Go board cutting, so if this is silly, it's nonetheless important.
This film is about honor, shame, contest, and forgiveness. Go boredom and occasional excesses aside, its image of the period is intense, restrained, and beautiful. Nothing here is not aesthetically pleasing and photogenic; it almost makes one wish Japan had never moved into the modern world, things looked so great back then. The protagonist is a shamed, impoverished samurai, Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), who lives in a tenement with his daughter Kinu (Kaya Kiyohara), who is threatened with resorting to prostitution if 50 ryo gold pieces that disappeared while the hero was playing Go with the aging, amiable businessman Genbei Yorozuya (Jun Kunimura) aren't found again in time. It's a complicated plot, that doesn't matter very much. What counts is the stately pace and the suspense. And there is a very scrappy sword battle toward the end.
"Sir" Yanagida is reduced to working as an appraiser, and is also expert at Go. He's a man who knows how to distinguish genuine objects from sham ones. He doesn't seem to be quite so good at protecting the honor of his daughter. He is not an altogether appealing protagonist and appears a bit of a snob, as well as eaten up by (justifiable) resentment. Watch this, patiently, for the period settings and costumes and the splendid low-light sequences toward the end reminding one, Schilling reminds us, of Kubrick's tour-de-force candlelit images in Barry Lyndon.
After Yanagida has resolved the matter of the lost 50 ryu, he disappears in search of the wrongdoers who ruined his reputation years ago by accusing him of the theft of a manuscript that he did not steal, causing his dishonor and his wife to drown herself in Lake Biwa (we see her gracefully walk out into the lake; typically for this film, Shirashi makes this seem a beautiful way to go). Yanagida finds his sworn enemy (Takumi Saitoh), a fellow clan samurai who made the false accusation, and, as Schilling says, "the swords come out."
Once again Shiraishi has delivered a handsome exercise in genre, the handsomest yet. That this could have been tightened up, by eliminating some of the Go footage and simplifying the plot, is obvious, but it's a splendid looking film.
Bushido 碁盤斬り ("Gobangiri,""Go Board Cutting") , 129 mins., debuted May 1, 2024 at the Far East Festival in Udine, Italy. Screened as part of the 23rd New York Asian Film Festival (Jul 12-28, 2024), showing Tuesday Jul 23, 8:15pm (Beatrice Theatre, SVA Theatre)
Intro and Q&A with director Kazuya Shiraishi
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-03-2024 at 10:00 AM.
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CAREFREE DAYS (Liang Ming 2023)
LIANG MING: CAREFREE DAYS (2023)
The excitement of burgeoning doom
Many of the admiring things Jessica Kiang says in her Variety review of actor Liang Ming's 2019 directorial debut Wisdom Tooth (not seen by me) could be applied almost equally well to this sophomore feature, this one based on a novel (or novella?) of Ban Yu. (Notice of the debut by Wendy Ide in Screen Daily though briefer is similarly admiring.) Liang Ming's work has the same chaotic energy and packed foregrounds (and backgrounds) you get in Jia Zhang-ke's early movies. This one is almost overwhelming in its richness and complexity and overlapping of one event on another. It is just in its overall trajectory's arc toward numb tragedy that it disappoints, seeming to reflect a better grasp of the parts than of the whole. Can a protagonist's arc be called "tragic" when she can also be considered doomed from the start? Or does this matter?
The focus is Xu Lingling (Lyu Xingchen, also in Wisdom Tooth), who lives in Shenyang, a northeastern Chinese city, usually the setting of Ban Yu's writing, that the film blurbs describe as "decaying" ; this may be mistaken: it just looks busy, crowded and chaotic. Some of the people in the foreground here seem to be going to hell, but doing so with energy and aplomb. Xu is diagnosed with kidney failure. We don't know why, but she will die of uremia without frequent dialysis, and she needs a kidney transplant. Her mother pledges to support, but before you know it, she has gotten suddenly sick and died. Xu's estranged father appears now and offers to help, but he is a serial seducer wrapped up in himself, though he does perform some acts of generosity.
Eager for companionship and love and unable to be alone, Xu finds her close friend Tan Na (Li Xueqin) and old classmate Zhao Dongyang (Zhao Bingrui), who help her. With the three of them, Carefree Days becomes a road trip, even as we know that Xu can't go far or for long without dialysis, and during the second half of the trip the symptoms of uremia are there: nausea, lack of appetite, fatigue. She barely makes it back home - or does she? Much of this film is full of the sickly excitement of burgeoning doom, where joy and frivolity always have an edge.
Some of the details of this movie are implausible, or perhaps it's just that though its two-hours-plus length seems overlong, it's not long enough to cram in all the events of an overstuffed novel (or even novella). Xu at one point takes on a job that she can't possibly do. Later she enters a studio and darts back out again: on a platform she has seen her father posing nude for artists.
The analogy with films like Jia's 1998 Platform and 2002 Unknown Pleasures (the ironic title analogous to Carefree Days) is a very imperfect one because Jia is presenting panoramas linked to a time. Even the two young losers of Unknown Pleasures are seen in a national and historical perspective. Carefree Days, on the other hand, is full of intense, intimate moments and big closeups. Only at the end it may draw back a bit from Xu as if to see her finally as an object, helpless and alone. Recently Mike D'Angelo commented on Stephen Frears' The Hit that he likes "almost every individual moment" yet finds that "it fails to coalesce in a satisfying way," and this comes close to my feeling aboutCarefree Days. I feel that Liang Ming has exciting skills as a filmmaker. The ability to create burgeoning life and make people and their every moment seem so natural and real is unusual and to be cherished. But here after a while, as the trip wears on, there start to be a few too many "individual moments" to care in the same way about them as one did early on. And so the skills wind up seeming to be used rather heedlessly. Nonetheless, this is a filmmaker to watch. Carefree Days deserves to be seen and reviewed by Jessica and Wendy, and all the rest. So far it seems to have slipped through the cracks.
Carefree Days 逍遥游 (Xiao yao you, "Carefree Journey"), 122 min., debuted Sept. 22, 2023 at San Sebastián. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Thursday Jul 18, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Sunday Jul 21, 1:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-01-2024 at 04:25 PM.
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THE ESCAPING MAN (Wang Yichun 2023)
WANG YICHUN: THE ESCAPING MAN (2023)
About a boy
Wang Yichun made an outstanding debut with her uncompromisingly dark 2015 small-town procedural, What's in the Darkness, which interwove a grim murder mystery with a girls's coming of age story. This time also she weaves a playful, surreal mix of love and crime, featuring the story of a prisoner, Sheng Li (Jiang Wu, NYAFF 2018 Star Asia Award recipient),now released after serving 20 years on trumped-up rape charges, who quickly gets lured into helping his former girlfriend, his putative victim, to kidnap the little boy whom she's been hired to nanny. She wants to get back at the parentsfortheir condescending way they have been treating her. Sheng Li has sought out his accuser and become her collaborator. This leads to a bizarre mixture of the benevolent and the cruel.
This is a story about personalities and social status, abilities and injustice, and also about excessive bourgeois privilege in modern China. As in her first film, Wang is simultaneously focused on several different subjects, another one being the contradictory ways that adults interact with children and how children behave in the world. Maggie Lee described the earlier film as "Like 'Twin Peaks' with Confucian characteristics." This film's festival blurb calls it a "juxtaposition of cynicism and hopeless romanticism." What emerges is that Wang's cinema is a place to go for unexpected combinations. This will be the friendliest kidnapping you'll ever see. It rings new changes on the Stockholm Syndrome, and is unusually forgiving toward some criminal activities and hard on the new bourgeoisie. The level of whimsy becomes extreme, but Wang enters into her own unique world of fantasy.
The Escaping Man 绑架毛乎乎 ("Kidnapping ...."), 101 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF. For What's in the Darkness the 47-year-old director, who studied French before becoming a filmmaker, won the best director award at the 9th FIRST International festival in Xining, China and it was included in the Berlinale Generation section in 2016. This is The Escaping Man's international debut.
SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 26, 9:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Wang Yichun and producer Zhao Wendi
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-14-2024 at 03:33 PM.
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GOLD BOY (Shusuke Kaneko 2023)
MASAKI OKADA AND JINSEI HAMURA IN GOLD BOY
SHUSUKE KANEKO: GOLD BOY (2023)
The bad kids
There is certainly a special queasy pleasure in immersing oneself imaginatively in unmitigated evil, people who just kill everyone they don't like (like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley). It's even queasier when the wrongdoers are a trio of young teenagers. These kids are 13, for heaven's sake. (The actors are around that too; Kaneko deserves credit for how at ease they seem.) There's also an adult, Higashi (Masaki Okada) who they catch killing his in-laws by pushing them off a cliff and making it look like an accident. They happen to have been shooting a film by accident when they meant to do a snapshot and caught the double cliff murder in the background. They immediately approach Higashi with extortion in mind. He's not such an easy mark. Eventually Higashi and the kids join up, briefly. Several adults get poisoned - a favorite - using (spoiler alert) Okinawa holiday food treats. Be careful if someone offers you a drink, also.
Masaki Okada is a tall actor with a pallid beauty of visage that is given a sickly look here, and he is effective, but the memorable actor is Jinsei Hamura as the psychopathic Asahi Amuro, a boy who is so smart he won a math prize the year before, but he uses his intelligence and composure entirely to do harm now. Higashi is married to rich, spoiled Shizuka (Rena Matsui), whose aging parents own a huge company. It is they whom he pushes off the cliff. He immediately goes into a big grief act for onlookers and the cops, which succeeds. This may be a bit implausible as is much that follows, but it's all too absorbing for that to matter.
We enter a (for most of us) wholly unfamiliar world of violent teern crime, when while his doting mother (Haru Kuroki) is at work, 13-year-old Asahi (Hamura) is gets a visit from by his best bud Hiroshi (Youji Maede), accompanied by Hiroshi’s half-sister Natsuki (Anna Hoshino), who announces she has stabbed her abusive step-father. (As is the custom here a quick flashback spells this out/.) Netsuki thinks he is dead. Asahi shows where he's coming from when he calmly assures Netsuki and Hiroshi the cops can’t arrest her since she’s 14. Hiroshi threatens some uniformed schoolboys next just to get money for them to order some fast food. This is the world we are in.
This takes place on the island of Okinawa, which imposes its own rules starting with poverty, because it is considerably less well off than the Japanese mainland. But this lurid material, a condensation of a serial, comes from the Chinese iQiyi platform, pared down by writer Takehito Minato. It's an embarrassment of riches, if you like, of so much meanness and evil in a short time that it's nauseating. Only in this piece, if someone feels nauseated, they've probably been poisoned and are about to die.
Once again a film has been allowed to run a bit too long. But the extra time allows for a lot of final twists and turns, and after all, the original had 14 episodes.
In a review in The Japan Times, Mark Schilling describes Gold Boy as a "kids-versus-adult story" but points out that this time, our normal inclination to root for the kids is powerfully undermined - by the morally repellang nature of the kids. Schilling describes the film as "a gripping study of evil," and there's nothing to challenge in that - though it would be more gripping if it were less breathlessly plot-intensive and more plausible.
Gold Boyゴールド・ボーイ ("Golden Boy"), 128 min., Japanese theatrical release Mar. 8, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 19, 3:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday Jul 20, 4:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-02-2024 at 05:08 PM.
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FOR ALICE (Chow Kam Wing 2023)
CHOW KAM WING: FOR ALICE (2024)
Some old tunes played again
Some old themes here. No harm in that, and this aging actor and fresh young one go for a ride in atmospheric Hong Kong settings. The themes: recently released jailbird lured into one last job. . . neglectful father spending a few idyllic, secret days with unfamiliar offspring. . . loved one revealed to have a serious illness. A Hong Kong touches: loudmouth, mother whose boyfriend has a history of abuse. . . heavy rain. . . jumbled housing. . . cramped flophouse room. . . many cigarettes. . . noodle shops.
Festival literature tells us For Alice "unfolds" in "the faded opulence of Tsim Sha Tsui's Mirador Mansion." Also that we are to see the main action as "an unlikely bond" between "grizzled veteran Tai Bo" (the jailbird) and "rising star Kuku So" and that we are to see him as "a mysterious rescuer." How mysterious he is and how much of a rescuer he becomes isn't so clear, but thanks to the skill and charisma of the two actors, a believable relationship indeed develops through the short hour and twenty minutes of this slow, moody little film.
Whether For Alice lives up to the festival hype - wielding "colorful yet noirish atmospherics with a maestro's command," making "the dank stairwells and flickering fluorescents" conjur up "palpable peril" and lead to a "cathartic finale" others will have to judge. The ghost of Wong Kar-wai haunts any arthouse Hong Kong film for me: impossible to forget how his visuals sang, how the tawdry became instantly sexy abd mysterious. The writing isn't skillful enough to create real mystery here. The "mystery" comes dangerously close to the obvious, a massaging of clichés. But if this is a kind of neo-noir, we always welcome those. Nice try. But hey, don't try bookending a film with a kid playing Beethoven's "Für Elise" anymore, okay?
This seems old hat, but actually Chow Kam Wing has had most of his film career in advertising, and this is his directorial debut. Thee writer Lam Tsz Ki seems to have had most of their experience as an actor.
For Alice給愛麗絲 ("For Alice"), 82 mins., debuted in New York Jul. 13, 2024, and was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday Jul 13, 3:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Chow Kam Wing, screenwriter Lam Tsz Ki, and cast members Tai Bo and Kuku So
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-02-2024 at 08:50 PM.
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