A Review of Now Streaming, a Series of Pandemic Stories

 

We've all been affected by this pandemic in different ways, and the CignalPlay series Now Streaming tries to articulate that in audiovisual form, telling six stories from varying genres depicting pandemic life. The set of six stories can be divided into three pairs, based on theme or genre, but each gives us a distinct look at life during this unprecedented historical event,

Perhaps the most lighthearted of the six pandemic stories is Carlo Catu's From My Window, a love story about a man who distantly observes, and falls in love with, his next door neighbor. It speaks to a primal need for people to seek others, amplified by the isolation and loneliness imposed upon us by quarantine. There's a lot of stuff to unpack regarding the neighbor's condition, which can potentially lead into darker things depending on how cynical one is, but the episode focuses on the two protagonists' on again-off again relationship. 

Although seemingly conventional on the surface, the most alluring thing about Siege Ledesma's First of May is the way in which it presents its story: it first shows us Mon and Ida (Sid Lucero and Annika Dolonius, a reunion of sorts from Apocalypse Child), a couple talking via video call. It then engages in a clever bit of misdirection, with each layer, twist and wrinkle feeding us more character bits and unravelling a larger and more complicated story. In contrast to From My Window, which aimed to depict how the pandemic can keep people apart, this episode depicts how the pandemic can lock people in together, whether they want to or not.

In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term Parasocial Interaction to describe the way people interact with personas or celebrities. It's a phenomenon that perhaps gained more prominence during the rise of cinema, radio and television, though arguably it's been a phenomenon from the birth of 'celebrity' itself. In these interactions, people gain a false sense of intimacy or closeness with a public personality, even though this relationship is one-way. The next two episodes explore this concept, mutated and evolved thanks to the advent of streaming, social media, and how pandemic isolation has forced some of us to consume this continually.

Bradley Liew's Eater takes this concept to its extremes. It relates the parasocial relationships we have formed during the pandemic (elevated to dangerous levels) to the act of eating, in particular the activity of Mukbang. To me, there's always been something deeply disturbing about the activity of Mukbang, something that is intended as a communal activity, but something that reads as a disgusting expression of excess consumption. That sense of unease translates well here. But I digress. In a way, the creepy stalker antagonist of Eater has a possessiveness fueled by a twisted drive to connect with someone else. Driven to even further extremes, this episode could have ended with the antagonist wanting to consume or be consumed by his object of obsession, but the film shies away from that at the last minute. 

On the other hand, Rae Red's Year of the Rat approaches this concept in a different, metafictional way, by making us part of the audience on one end of the relationship. Andy (Thea Marabut) is an influencer, making the most of social media and the pandemic by creating inane, shallow content. In fact, stupidity is part of her brand as an influencer, often using the hashtag #tanganation (idiot nation) for the things she makes. The viewer's engagement (meaning, our engagement) may stem from ironic enjoyment, incredulousness, or the kind of fascination one has when seeing a car crash. This leads to a crazy fan using her as a means to gain subscribers of their own. It plays out as one might predict for most of its runtime, but then it throws the audience a marvelously constructed curveball out of nowhere, evoking the words of one Obi Wan Kenobi: who is more foolish, the fool or the fool that follows him?

While the previous two episodes dealt with the horror that we find in other people, the last two episodes deal with a pandemic horror that is less tangible - the impact of increasing isolation on our psyches.

In Dodo Dayao's Destroy Everything You Touch, the zoom conversations between six friends get stranger and more terrifying as their anxieties and neuroses begin to manifest themselves in the real world. The episode gives us a reason for these manifestations, but the effects resonate regardless. It perfectly encapsulates a sense of anxiety, fear and paranoia that lurks in hidden places, just out of sight.

And finally, in Kenneth Dagatan's As You Can See, our "communal isolation," so to say, makes some of us vulnerable to exploitation (in this case, the supernatural kind), especially in the absence of a proper emotional support system. The film's main character Patricia (Beauty Gonzales) is separated from both friends and family, and her boyfriend is a gaslighting creep that doesn't try to understand or care about his girlfriend's situation. She seeks solace in a mother figure (a popular trope in Dagatan's works) but it is part of something sinister and malignant, spreading like a virus in a crowded room.

Now Streaming is available for free until May 4, at Cignal Play.

Present Confusion Reviews | Ride or Die (a.k.a. 彼女; 2021)

 note: spoilers.

At around the end of the first third of Ryuichi Hiroki's Ride or Die, Lovefool by the Cardigans starts to play. The song - the lead single off of the 1996 album First Band on the Moon - reveals its true nature when one looks at the lyrics, which contrast with its bubblegum aesthetic. It's a song about a person desperately struggling to keep someone in their life, whether that other party likes it or not. The song goes:

I don't care if you really care

As long as you don't go

So I cry, I pray, and I beg

Love me, love me

Say that you love me

This isn't a song about longing, Lovefool is a song about a need for codependence on a level that approaches obsession. One may hardly call it love at all - and that's the kind of feeling that embodies Ride or Die, an adaptation of Ching Nakamura's manga Gunjou. Hiroki, with a script penned by Nakamura herself and frequent collaborator Nami Yoshikawa, trims out a lot of the fat from the original manga but keeps the spirit of the manga intact.

The movie begins with a dizzying half hour sequence where Rei Nagasawa (Kiko Mizuhara) kills a married man after a tryst at a bar. This man turns out to be the husband of her former highschool classmate Nanae (Honami Sato). Nanae is the victim of domestic abuse, and Rei takes it upon herself to kill her husband. Before this murder, Rei has lived an otherwise ordinary, even happy life: she lives with her older girlfriend and works as a successful plastic surgeon. But her infatuation with Nanae, something that has continued from her high school days, leads her to throw all that away.

The murder serves as the bloody exclamation point to an extended, explicit sex scene between Rei and her victim. For people who know Kiko Mizuhara through, say, her guesting stint on Queer Eye, the proceedings may be a bit shocking, to say the least. Hiroki is no stranger to scenes like this in his movies; before moving to the mainstream, he worked as a director in pinku eiga in a variety of subgenres such as S&M, and was even one of the early pioneers of the sub subgenre of gay themed pinku eiga. But to call the film's scenes sexploitation is in my opinion, unfair; in my opinion all such scenes in this film serve as subversion and don't read as titillating at all. Hiroki's work isn't shy about sex or sexuality, but he also manages to craft emotionally complex characters (especially women) whose motivations lie in a large morally gray area.

Perhaps one of the biggest moments of this subversion of the male lens is in the subsequent bathroom scene, where both Rei and Nanae strip off their clothes, the former does so to wash off the blood off her body, and the latter to show the bruises and wounds she has gained over the years. The camera lingers over their bodies in a panning shot which wouldn't be unusual in a gravure video, but here the desired effect is unsettling, framing their bodies as canvasses of violence. At the same time, the scene serves as a moment of extreme vulnerability for both women. The confrontation that follows is probably one of the best acted moments of the film, an amazing performance from Mizuhara, who has flown under the radar with her movie roles in the past few years, and Sato, who is perhaps better known as the drummer for indie rock band Gesu no Kiwami Otome.

The relationship between Rei and Nanae isn't a romance in the normal sense, if it could be called love at all: although it is a bit more ambiguous in the film, Nanae in the manga is straight, and cannot reciprocate Rei's affection, at least in the way Rei wants. Whatever kindness Rei gives her is rebuffed or met with aloofness or hostility, because due to her history and self-loathing, she is unable to process the love she receives. Rei desires Nanae, and would do anything for her sake, but this love is unrequited. She is also troubled by a sense of insecurity and inadequacy. Like in Lovefool, she is consumed by a desire for codependence that she cannot shake off. Perhaps it is better to say that they need each other rather than love each other, and that they often cope with that neediness in self-destructive ways. For Rei, it manifests as a moment where she engages in casual sex with another man, a moment that serves more as an act of self harm than an act done for her own satisfaction.

These are two strangers that, in the words of the manga, are neither lovers nor friends. The nature of their relationship can be seen as transactional: one offering services to the other in exchange for something else. The journey that the film takes us through oscillates between tender moments of gentle reflection and table-turning hysterics. But by the end of the film, this relationship evolves when both Nanae and Rei consummate their bottled up feelings and come into a twisted sort of understanding: that sometimes, when all we have left is each other, that's all we really ever need.

Unifying Japan for Fun and Profit

 

What!? A video game entry in a movie review blog!?

Yeah, I'm diversifying (again). I just want to talk to the void about this.

To lessen my time playing the insanely addicting gacha hellhole that is Genshin Impact, I've decided to take up another video game, a "part time" game to lessen the crushing existential dread that's been in ample supply recently. The game of choice was Samurai Warriors 4 Empires, a cross between Koei's kingdom simulation games and a Samurai Warriors game. The latter is itself a spinoff of Koei's popular Dynasty Warriors series, where historical figures fight large scale battles against hundreds or thousands of enemies with over the top weapons and sometimes even magic. However, the Samurai Warriors series is more than just "Dynasty Warriors but Japan," it's a lot more tactically diverse and the gameplay has diverged quite a bit from its parent game. It has its faults, yes (it skims over some controversial parts of history, understandably so, and its gameplay loop can prove to be tedious for some) but it has developed its own niche following.

In Samurai Warriors 4 Empires, you are put in charge of one of several clans (based on Japanese history) with the ultimate aim of conquering everyone else and unifying Japan under your rule. You fight battles, defend your territory, recruit new generals to fight for you and manage your domain's economy. To the right kind of person, this kind of game is very fun, and I'm exactly that kind of person.

The map of Feudal Japan that you have to work with. Each territory is controlled by a clan, indicated by the flag.

By the third playthrough (a single playthrough on normal difficulty lasts around 9-12 hours), I decided to play the Sanada clan, which featured the Samurai Warriors series' poster boy, Yukimura Sanada. The starting territory is right in the middle of Japan, surrounded by hostile clans. I tried to make alliances at the start so that I wouldn't be attacked constantly, but few clans responded to my offers of alliance. I won each battle by the skin of my teeth; in one battle in which I invaded a territory despite being horribly outnumbered, I won with just 9 seconds remaining on the clock (running out of time means you lose, and you fail to capture that territory).

Eventually my economy started to pick up and my kingdom wasn't running on fumes anymore. To protect myself from the western clans, I struck up an alliance with a clan next to me, creating a barrier and preventing other western clans from invading as I began to conquer the east. In the meantime another clan, the Shimazu, were getting busy conquering the western half of Japan. A showdown was inevitable.

One of the most troublesome enemies I had to deal with in East Japan was the Tokugawa clan, whose defense and troops were, at this point of the game, top tier. One general in particular, Tadakatsu Honda, was a big source of most of my problems, as he is the strongest character in the game. (Historically the man was a badass too.) While the Shimazu were conquering domains left and right, I had to ally with eastern clans (that I would later betray) just to defend myself against the Tokugawa. By the time I was done with the Tokugawa, limping and injured, the Shimazu had time to recuperate and organize their troops. 

After finally uniting East Japan, incurring a number of losses to my own troops, I thought I had some time to rest and recover. That was, alas, only a pipe dream because in the next turn, the Shimazu had conquered my western ally, and were rearing up for an invasion of my territory. When they struck, I was still depleted and my attempts to defend my westernmost domains were feeble at best. I managed to regain my lost territory, but my men were dwindling. Thankfully I had a secret weapon: Tadakatsu Honda, the man that frustrated my attempts to put down the Tokugawa clan earlier. After the defeat of that clan, Honda found himself in my service as I had to recruit people to bolster my forces.

The battle between east and west began and I took my sweet time. With each victory I crept closer and closer until finally I had cornered the Shimazu to their last domain and won handily. A united Japan at last. It may not be a game to the level of immersive AAA masterpieces, but a fun gameplay loop and the ability to make a story by yourself through gameplay (like what I've done so far) is something that I value in my games. Some games want you to go on a predestined track, which is sometimes okay, but the ability to create your own (meta)narrative is something not a lot of games have.

So that's about it. Sorry you had to endure all that.

Oh, one more thing.

In this game, your playable characters or generals have the ability to form relationships with each other, either as friends, rivals, mentor-students, and in the case of female and male characters, as husbands or wives. There's a way in-game, once the correct things have been unlocked, to create your own cutscene where two generals marry each other in a solemn ceremony.

The marriage scene looks like this.

There are rules, however, but I don't know if they thought this through. Males and females only, which should disappoint some shippers. You also can't put as husband and wife two characters that are historically father and daughter (Mitsuhide Akechi can't be married to Gracia, and Tadakatsu Honda can't be married to Inahime, for example). But brothers and sisters? Mothers and sons? Apparently it's fair game. That's just weird.

Thoughts on Dito at Doon

Compared to other major historical disasters of the past century, this pandemic feels like a catastrophe unfolding in super slow motion, where we are all ripped from our former lives and placed into a situation that is for all intents and purposes, out of our control. In such a situation, wouldn't it be logical to want someone to hold your hand while you watch the world die? 

There is a sense of longing in JP Habac's Dito at Doon, a sense of wanting to live a way of life that no longer exists. It is deeply felt in the film's form, especially in the way it frames online conversations. It rejects the "zoom aesthetic" pioneered by productions created during the early months of the pandemic, instead opting to depict these online meetings as in-person conversations. This framing gives the goings on a sense of intimacy that wouldn't have registered as well if it was filmed as two people staring at each other through a screen. Its romantic tropes and clichés even evoke pre-pandemic romantic films, treading very familiar ground in that respect.

And that thought leads to the tragedy at the core of this film: no matter how much we try to escape with someone else into fantasies of comfort, it is slowly getting harder to avoid the reality that this is not going away. Something was lost when we all retreated into our homes, and that thing is something people struggle to reclaim. Whatever aspirations we have towards love take a back seat to responsibilities towards family and ultimately, one's own survival. To me, Dito at Doon isn't a romance, it's a disaster movie: a movie that takes place in a world where the soil where romance grows is barren.