New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

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

[Chris Knipp]

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

[Chris Knipp]

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

[Chris Knipp]

CHEUNG TIN-FU,SANDRA NG IN LOVE LIES

HO MIU-KI: LOVE LIES (2023)

The long tease of an online romance becomes a charmingly inverted rom-com

Love Lies is a touching and teasingly suspenseful Hong Kong feature debut starring an energetic and brilliant Sandra Ng (Zero to Hero, NYAFF 2021) as Veronica Yu, a wealthy, widowed gynecologist whose (seemingly) deepening relationship on a dating app is actually, unbeknownst to her, with a charming but rather native online deceiver, who begins having second thoughts abut the well-orchestrated running scam he's become the center of. Is there some affection wafting about amid the deceptions?

The film's costar is K-Pop star Cheung Tin-fu young, as the fledgling con artist, whose nom-de-scam is simply "Boy." "Boy" has just joined a whole office full of pro scammers as a trainee. (These thihgs, sadly, do exist.) Veronica is his first connection, and he is being constantly coached on what to say to her, supervised by the Man in White and given practical minute-by-minute tips by an out-there femme fatale love scam expert buoyantly played by Stephy Tang.

But Love Lies is above all a two-hander, shifting back and forth mainly between the mutually uncomprehending two points of view of young "Boy" and "Veronica." Both are, from the start, deceivers. She pretends to be merely a young nurse, though her wealth is soon revealed. He pretends to be a middle-aged French engineer, a faux persona carefully calculated by the scam team as most likely to appeal to this Chinese lady of a certain age.

Various things make this movie work well. The eternal appeal of love stories, because this is one of those, though a strange one; the excitement of deceptions; the suspense waiting to see whether the secrets will come out; and ultimately whether this odd "couple" will finally meet. There's also the fascination of the way, while the middle-aged doctor becomes more and more enamored of her French engineer fantasy, as "Boy, thae "K- Pop star (who no doubt has plenty of experience with public images) goes through a metamorphosis from gangly young rube to smooth, well-dressed, fashionably-bespectacled young operator; and from eager trickster to someone with mixed and gentler feelings.

The lady is lonely, a widow, and middle aged, and sometimes this shows. But Sandra Ng sparkles and is stylish. Veronica wears her hair short, blonde-dyed and up to date and her bright, nifty outfits show her to be every inch the accomplished professional woman. In fact she is an ob-gyn doctor who is frequently delivering babies, though we don't see that. But though she is a smart woman, "Boy" and his handlers are skillful in both teasing out her affection and tricking her - as is their basic aim all along - into sending large amounts of money to her "French engineer." Veronica remains adamant that she knows she may be throwing away money, and doesn't care. Part of the con victim wants to be deceived. The giddy pleasure of living with an illusion that a con brings can, for a while anyway, be worth the financial cost: Veronica thinks so.

"Boy" isn't hardened like his handlers, and perhaps he has developed some of the same affection for his victim that she has for his false persona; thus he arranges to give back one of the large sums of money to her. And their online datng game is dangerous, because as they get more intimate, leading to the possibility of talking on the phone, for instance (texting is chosen as more romantic), there is more danger of giving away the game, and ending it.

Ultimately, you may, like me, start to fall in love with the fantasy and begin to wish that the Chinese youth and the middle-aged Chinese doctor - who are communicating in English because they're supposed not to sperak the same language - could actually meet up in person and still, by some miracle, somehow become a couple.

But the screenwriters are too clever for that, and have something more complicated in store. First of all they gradually "open up" the hitherto closet drama by keeping the relationship alive and changing while the doctor and the imaginary "French engineer" are (seemingly, anyway) getting closer. The ultimate tease is a plan to meet in Japan, in the town of Sapporo at a resort hotel. But there is much more teasing than that...

At nearly two hours Love Lies may seem a little long (and note: the English subtitles are faulty), but there is brilliance in this romantic comedy and it leaves us with many happy memories.

This is, as mentioned, director Ho Miu-ki's directorial debut. She started working as a film screenwriter in 2008, and has collaborated on screenplays for films including the 2010 La Comédie humaine, the 2014 Naked Ambition 2, and 2022's The Mermaid . She was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 36th Hong Kong Film Awards for the latter, which had a successful international release.

Love Lies 我談的那場戀愛 ("The Love I Had"), 116 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-20).

SCHEDULE:
Monday July 15, 8:45pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)
Intro and Q&A with director Ho Miu-ki


"BOY" AT THE SCAMMER FACTORY


CHEUNG TIN-FU,SANDRA NG IN LOVE LIES

[Chris Knipp]

HWARNG WERN-YING: BE WITH ME (2023)

Who are we being with?

This film which is indebted to the filmmaker's mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien depicts a woman, working in the movies as a production designer, who returns to her hometown of Chiaiyi to see to her ailing father and in doing so awakens memories of family and grandfather and Taiwan's troubled history and a desire to return. In unfolding her tale the director Hwarng Wern-ying (also known as Huang Wen-Ying) melds flashbacks with scenes from a film-within-the-film, juxtaposing black-and-white footage of Taiwan's long period of Japanese domination.

The father of Faye ("Ma-ya" in the film, Ariel Lin) is stubborn, announcing he won't go back to the hospital for further treatment and insisting on being released home earlier than the doctor wants. Ma-ya is too. She is boarded here by a man, a Mr. Yu (Ethan Juan), who's apparently big in real estate; he drives a spectacular car, a McLaren with flying doors. Flashbacks to 2015 when they first met in Shanghai, apparently, when she spars with him and subtly mocks his pretension to being a man of great taste with a big collection of antiques. Black and white flashbacks to granddad's childhood when the Japanese are taking over Taiwan in 1941, forcing replacement of local gods by Japanese ones. (All this in the first twenty minutes.) Taoism is important in the film, seen as part of the protagonist's search for meaning in life in this grand, if somewhat artificial and predetermined film that tries a little harder than it needs to to impress.

Also in 2015 Faye/Maya meets another man, a Mr. Fu Chunshan (Vic Chou). She wants to hire him as an architect for a film, though he's said to be expensive. She likes him much more than Mr. Yu, he seems to be much more sympathetic, more of the place, into raising and roasting tea. The black and white flashbacks show granddad's house and the inn he runs destroyed in an earthquake, which was rebuilt and then bombed by the Americans, a similar theme to the film Ma-ya is working on now, it turns out. Supervising the production of her current film allows her, in a way, to revisit and reconstruct her family's past. There are also flashbacks, in somewhat heightened color, to Taiwan in the 1980's when men partied in supper clubs with children, including young Maya, but not their wives.

In an article about this film, Charlie Smith on Pancouver (Feb. 2024 ) points out the Taiwanese history presented here is "selective": no mention of the martial law declared by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, which was to last for nearly forty years, and an implication that when the New Taiwan Dollar was introduced that year everything was "hunky-dory," but it was not. Smith feels this can be forgiven because of the interesting structure of the film and performance of the lead. But it's not so easy to overlook big oversights about the history of Taiwan in a film that takes such a grand overview.

The historical parts of the film start to feel a bit like window dressing. A simpler structure might have been a better way to get at the nature of the protagonist who is, already, carefully considered. But in that alternate film the flashbacks and history would have to go, and the concern with Taoism postponed to another movie. However, this is, after all, an autobiographical film about being true to your origins that's also about filmmaking and about debating how a film should be.

Be With Me 車頂上的玄天上帝 ("The God of Heaven on the Roof"), 130 mins., premiered Oct. 20, 2023 at Hawai'i International Film Festival, and was also shown at Taipei Golden Horse Nov. 9 and Taipei Film Festival Jun. 25, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (July 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 1:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57


ARIEL LIN, ETHAN JUAN IN BE WITH ME

[Chris Knipp]

NIKKI HSIEH, AUSTIN LIN IN SUFFOCATING LOVE

LIAO MING-YI: SUFFOCATING LOVE (2023)

A rom-com-style movie that drifts into the surreal

The director's NYAFF 2020 I WeirdDo presented Chen Po-Ching (Austin Lin) and Chen Ching (Nikki Hsieh), a cute couple in the making except they both suffer from OCD, which includes mysophobia, fear of contamination and dirt: it was a defense of oddity. Quirks abound here too, but this film seems to have been less well-received (to go by Letterboxd). Everyone is still cute. As Maggie Lee wrote in Variety apropos of I WeirDo, Lin "who sports a Spock haircut, exudes boyish charm in spades." He still does, and makes a great alter ego or muse.

He, the Austin Lin character, that is, sets up to live with a girlish young woman called Pai Chia-chi, who turns out to be a control freak whose "few principles" will limit his every movement, and he will have to let her read his phone every day and constantly report where he is. She is a vegetarian, expects him to be likewise, and provides odd-sized meals which he must consume all of. She is a total tyrant. He reports on this to his best bud, who provides an additional male point of reference.

Before long he runs into former girlfriend Ai-hsien, who is in a seven-year relationship that is running dry: they're supposed to be getting married. He and Ai-hsien start meeting on the sly, and she gives him an extra phone so they can communicate with out Pai knowing. But then he decides to leave that phone on the table so Pai can see it.

Then, whether it's a dream or a reality, he starts seeing a third woman, whom he knows as Kurosawa. They get close, but he begins spying on her, and also sneaks into her apartment when she's not there. She starts providing him with food and drink, but that begins to seem nefarious, and after she gets pregnant - well, let's not go there. It's at this point that things become quite surreal. There is a dream-devil, a good looking but bald young man dressed in red, with red-painted fingernails and a large silver revolver.

He sees Pai again and she has become repentant, realizing that she was being cruel. She also is ill, as well as sad. And now she starts serving him meals with lots of meat in them.

A late scene shows the protagonist visiting an automobile showroom where Kurosawa has him look at a luxurious car. Isn't it expensive? he asks (the price is a million Taiwan dollars). But we will need a good car now that we are going to have a child, she says, and then leaves to go to the bathroom, suggesting he sit at the driver's seat. At this point she has become so suspect you may fear the seat will be poisoned. Then he looks out and sees Pai with another fellow. He smiles his charming smile; she smiles more wanly back.

One looks forward to further viewings and reviews of Suffocating Love to see what interpretations people come up with. I also await more complete cast information since the final credits are only in Chinese and IMDb doesn't have characters' names linked with actors'. Lin Dayuan and Chloe Xiang reportedly play the other women. It is clear that director LIao remains skillful at filming with an iPhone and likes melding rom-com with thriller and horror elements, also enjoying abrupt plot shifts.

SuffocatingLove 愛的噩夢 ("Loves Nightmare"), 102 mins., debuted at Taipei Jun. 26, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 27, 6:30pm (Silas Theatre, SVA Theatre)
Intro and Q&A with director Liao Ming-yi and cast members Austin Lin and Nikki Hsieh

[Chris Knipp]

JUN SAITO, GO AYANO IN LET'S GO KARAOKE!

NOBUHIRO YAMASHITA: LET'S GO KARAOKE! (2023)

Choir kid mentors Yakuza mensch

This is a coming of age charmer matching unlikely types: a meek, bespectacled boy soprano from a choir and a Yakuza boss who comes to him for voice coaching. (It's complicated.) Sparks fly and then they bond. The kid, as the boss puts it, "goes ballistic" when he's angry. His speeches when aroused are illustrations of the fire that can hide behind a seemingly quiet Japanese exterior.

The boy is Satomi Oka (Jun Saito), and he's the star boy soprano of his mixed choir, but as the story begins he's worried about the final competition. The secret is that his voice is changing and he may not manage the solo any more. That is pushed aside when he is suddenly approached by a sleek, suited man, Kyoji Narita ("Crazy Kid," Go Ayano), who grabs him and says "Let's go Karaoke!" The leader stages Karaoke contests among the gang. Kyoji is afraid of losing, and the loser gets an ugly, mocking tattoo crudely and painfully etched on him by the boss himself. He knows of Satomi's musical accomplishment and wants help. For all Satomi's musical experience, this unexpected new job will take him far afield. He never expected to have one-on-one sessions with a gangster.

What follows is quite hilarious and unexpected, revealing the human and vulnerable side of Japan's most menacing gangsters and the courageous and macho side of apparently meek types like the boy soprano. At one point Satomi is called on to assess the singing abilities of each member of the whole gang, and with his brutal and specific comments, he astonishes. Frequenting Kyoji and oddly bonding with him leads Satomi to Tokyo's colorful Minami Ginza district. The boy and the gangster start exchanging text messages, and however often Satomi tells Kyoji to go away and stay away, the communication continues and the bond keeps growing.

Kyoji's hidden paternal instincts obviously are aroused and so is Satomi's need to expand his horizons, and show he can not only use that changing voice to sing sweetly, but to yell authoritatively. Our own desire to root for the underdog is aroused along with our need to see the good in bad guys. Perhaps director Yamashita wants to avoid the obvious, but I would have liked the Yakuza to be played by an actor a little more conventionally tough looking than Go Ayano. But in the heat of the moment that can be overlooked and the film, though slight, goes down easy.

Let's Go Karaoke!, 108 mins., debuted Taipei Nov. 2023; released Jan. and Feb. Japan and Taipei. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Wednesday July 24, 6:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Nobuhiro Yamashita