QCinema 2023 | Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Fallen Leaves, Evil Does Not Exist

 

Angela (Ilinca Manolache) is a production assistant for a company that makes corporate videos.  She's been tasked to get interviews from former employees of a multinational company in an attempt to find a suitable subject for a planned work safety video. She's underpaid and overworked and the drivers in the streets all but want to run her off the road. Still, in her own brash way, she rides, curses and fucks her way through the streets of Bucharest and beyond to get by what seems like an endless day.

A scathing satire of modern-day Romania, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is a lot to unpack, but a good place to start is its obvious inspiration: the film is at once a spiritual sequel, reimagining and reevaluation of Lucian Bratu's 1981 film Angela Moves On, from which various clips and scenes are interspersed throughout this film. In that older film, the titular Angela (Dorina Lazar) is a taxi driver who also roams around the city of Bucharest in search of people to ferry, preceding films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997). Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World feels like a mirror to that film; in the first act, scenes from both films run in parallel, as if Bratu's and Jude's films existed as parallel retellings of the same scene. At the same time, Dorina Lazar and László Miske reprise their roles from Angela Moves On in this film, as the parents of one of the paralyzed workers Angela interviews.

Jude also becomes self-reflective, interrogating his use of satire and probing its limits. Angela often makes Tiktok videos taking on the persona of Bobita, a trash talking dude whose offensiveness is made to such an extreme it crosses back into parody. There's also a sequence where Angela (as Bobita) meets famed director of shlock Uwe Boll (playing himself), who famously boxed - and defeated - five film critics in the early 2000s. Angela says that portraying Bobita as such, transgressing boundaries of good taste is what enables her to make her point. But at the end, where Bobita goes on an unhinged Putinist rant, is there a point where the ironic edge of satire is lost?

It all culminates in the last third of the film where the work safety video is actually made. The parallels between the films of both Angelas - one made under Ceaușescu's regime and one made after it - only enforces the point that deep down, they are fundamentally the same. At one point Angela tells her passenger about a very dangerous road that has been a source of many casualties, followed by a minutes-long montage of memorial crosses along that same road, deaths spanning decades. Instead of moving towards change, Romanians find themselves repeating old mistakes. "We're idiots," Angela tells her Austrian boss at one point. Then and now, working-class folk still endure the same exploitation - where one Angela (or her son) has their voice gradually taken away, until all that is left is a template for capitalists to exploit, while the other Angela is complicit in that degradation. The title is, thus, a sort of exhortation: even as decades pass and dictators fall, as we hurtle towards an apocalypse that feels all but inevitable, do not expect too much from that end, as there will be no dramatic conclusion - it will all probably be as it is like now, with all of us trapped in our own circles.

At one point in Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) turns on the radio to set the mood for a date she is having with Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). But all she's getting are grim reports from a distant war, where dozens or even hundreds of people are reported dead, reports that we've been hearing since the beginning of the film. She turns off the radio in frustration.

For people like Ansa and Holappa, two working class people who live a meager existence in Helsinki, love is probably the farthest thing from their minds. Flitting from job to job, taking on any job that would take them, to be honest, having a roof over their heads is far more important. Ansa is fired from a supermarket job after keeping expired food; Holappa is trapped in a cycle of drinking and depression and regularly gets fired for drinking on the job. But after a chance encounter in a karaoke bar, Ansa and Holappa find love, and they begin to set aside parts of their lives for each other. Ansa buys extra cutlery and plates for a prospective date. Holappa starts to kick the habit after Ansa tells him of her bad experiences with drunks.

It's a story that Kaurismaki has been telling since his earliest films - indeed, his 1986 film Shadows in Paradise has a very similar premise (and also involves a supermarket clerk), and the other films of his Proletariat series sees the working class man fighting against their loneliness, sometimes successfully (as in Ariel (1988)) or in vain (as in Kaurismaki's masterpiece The Match Factory Girl (1990)).

Fallen Leaves is a prayer of sorts, for hope in an increasingly bleak world, where the remedy (though not necessarily the cure) for such a life is to live it with someone you love.

Note: mild spoilers.

I find it fascinating that the title for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's latest film, Evil Does Not Exist, is a declarative sentence that also feels like a question that gets asked throughout the film. It is a question that is not definitively answered, but we can at least try to do so.

The film begins with a shot of treetops and a man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) walking through the forest. The treetops exhibit crown shyness, which is to say that the forest follows their own order; they have their own set of rules. Takumi knows the land intimately - he knows all of the trees and is able to discern movements of animals through their tracks - so much so that he is sort of a steward of the forest, or to put it to extremes, he is the forest. He's been living an uneventful life with his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), and the town relies on him for many odd jobs as an everyman.

His quiet life is perturbed at the news that a company in Tokyo plans to build a glamping site higher up in the mountain overlooking his town. Its obvious that the company has no experience with this sort of thing, they're only doing it for the money, and their initial plan would negatively impact the lives of the people living downstream. A simple consultative meeting is made compellingly tense, and although well-meaning employees Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) try to answer their questions and sympathize with their concerns, it's unlikely any of their bosses would stop the project because the potential monetary gains are too big, townsfolk be damned.

Many have read the film as a commentary on the quiet but ever-present violence of urbanizing rural spaces. Evil in this context is banal, seemingly unfelt but guiding every decision based on greed. The CEO of the glamping company couldn't care less about the concerns of the townsfolk: he proposes a compromise that might superficially placate them, but would still cause harm. The waste of five people shouldn't be much of a problem, wouldn't it? He asks, expecting the answer to be yes when it would almost always be no. Ordinary evil does exist, evil that is tolerated and left to fester, and that interpretation serves as one answer to the film's title.

There is, of course, another way of answering the film's title: in an interview, Hamaguchi said that he conceptualized the title from Hana's point of view, in that - and I paraphrase here - upon seeing the forest and its tranquil beauty, she remarks that "(in such a beautiful place, surely) evil does not exist here." The last part of the film is marked by a sudden turn that at first feels out of left field, but has roots in past conversations - Takumi tells his two guests that the deer in his area, unaccustomed to humans, will never attack them, unless they are protecting their injured offspring. Nature is what it is, amoral and untethered to human notions of morality, neither good nor evil. When its own rules are broken, it has its ways of fighting back. Evil does not exist in this context, but 'evil' actions are done when action demands an equal reaction. That is not evil per se, only nature taking its course.

QCinema 2023 | QCShorts Short Reviews

 

It's surprising that A Catholic Schoolgirl is Myra Angeline Soriaso's debut film, because the filmmaking at play feels so precise. It helps that the ground it treads is well trodden, about intersections of identity and faith in a coming-of-age. There is a confession at the end of this film - usually accepted without judgement by a priest as a representative of a loving God - and it is met with exactly what we expect. In the many iterations of this tale, trauma sadly seems to be a defining trait of these comings-of-age.

The defining frames for me in Apa Agbayani's Abutan Man Tayo ng House Lights is that of Jon Santos dancing to exhaustion, as if his effort could chase the light away from the comforting dark of the dance floor. The inertia of a relationship that has run its course is the hardest to overcome because it means one has to face the end of something, or everything. Without Santos or Bart Guingona this probably would not have worked, but they're here, and it does.

Animal Lovers leans on absurdity, on humans that have abandoned love and even their own humanity. But there's a real danger here in the process of dehumanization, especially for those in the most unfortunate circumstances, and regarding exactly where the film gazes. The absurdity alleviates that for the most part, but it has left me with a few reservations with how everything turned out.

I'll be honest and say I initially struggled with the ideas of Microplastics, so much so that before I even dared to write this (this entire piece was meant to come out earlier) I watched it another time to give it a fair shot. The second time around I gleaned more from the film. It's said that microplastics can be found in all of us, even before we're born; imperceptible damage that accumulates over time, borne from careless actions. In that same way, that is how trauma destroys us, in small actions of love denied, rejected, in casual acts of violence. Some have read a particular part of the film as representing sexual violence, but it didn't read that way to me, it felt more like a manifestation of self hatred, being denied love leading to one denying love in the first place. I'm not sure if it all held together in the end, but it's better than I initially thought it was.

Tamgohoy is Roxlee directing his own RRR, a fictional reimagining of two historical figures who have never met, joining forces to fight against colonial masters. With his trademark animation, Zaldy Munda level editing and out of focus shots, the film is steeped in native traditions and rituals. Meanwhile, Roxlee himself, made up like a Catholic Heath Ledger Joker, taunts the natives and calls them savages. How exactly can one evaluate the form of a film whose creator has disposed of it entirely, when that seems to be the point? It's as if the film's own form rejects the western conventions of cinema, decolonizing through filmmaking. Does it work? Not fully. But the least I can say is I kinda like it.

We end this slew of reviews with Che Tagyamon's Tumatawa, Umiiyak - an animated film that sees how class disparities bleed into urban topographies, where even the dead have more space than the living, as long as they're rich enough. It's challenging, thought provoking stuff and a film that quite a few people have overlooked on account of its animated form.

QCinema 2023 | Solids by the Seashore, Tiger Stripes

 

Shati (Ilada Pitsuwan) works in an art gallery in a quiet seaside town. We first see her putting on a hijab as part of her daily routine. Her  parents ask her when she's getting married, eventually taking matters into their own hands and setting her up with the son of a family friend. Faisal (Khalid Midam). Her life seems set, though throughout the film there are pictures of restraint, of barriers in the sea, of birds in cages.

Her life is upturned when she meets Fon (Rawipa Srisanguan), an artist who comes to the gallery to present an exhibition based and set on the sea. It turns out that the barriers aren't as beneficial as what the authorities that put them up may think. "What constrains us, erodes us," she tells Shati. Feelings deep inside Shati begin to grow, feelings that run counter to her set life.

Solids on the Seashore is occasionally punctuated by Malick-esque scenes of sea life and other abstract things, as if the feelings burgeoning within Shati is being pulled from some supernatural force. When her feelings finally blossom, it culminates in a scene that feels so tactile, so intimate, yet so restrained at the same time. 

Unlike other similar films, the film makes Shati's choice not so clear cut; for all intents and purposes Faisal seems like a decent man, and it looks like if they did get married, their marriage would not be a troubled one. After laying bare Shati's feelings, director Patiparn Boontarig leans on magical realism, trying to reflect the dual yearnings for a life where one floats along the waves and one where one simply lets the waves crash into them.

We first see Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) recording a Tiktok dance in a bathroom with her friends. She's a bit of a free spirit, flouting the school rules and jumping into rivers, much like any child. One day, however, Zaffan has her first period and her body starts to change. She sees someone in the trees that no one else can see, and she begins to act out ferally. She is turning into a harimau jadian, or weretiger.

In her seminal book The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed writes about how the prototype of the monstrous in all forms of media is the female reproductive body. In her discourse regarding Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), blood - specifically, the blood related to menstruation - is linked to her supernatural powers. As a 'witch', she  "... sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary."

Folklore has long used a fear of the feminine to imagine its monsters. There's the pontianak who lives in trees and eats passersby, especially men. There's the manananggal who splits her body at night to hunt for food. Then there are the many spirits and demons in Japanese folklore, women wronged in some fashion and made to seek revenge against those who wronged them.

Yet in modern society, there seems to be no boogeyman so terrifying to men (and even women, as manifestations of internalized misogyny) as that of femininity itself. The harimau jadian is no less feared as that of the teenage girl, femininity as a monster that needs to be controlled and suppressed.  Director Amanda Nell Eu ties the bodily transformations of puberty with the supernatural transformation of man to animal, and this brings out fear in those who do not understand. In Tiger Stripes, Zaffan is subjected to all sorts of humiliation and trials simply because she has her period. By custom, she is unable to pray because her menstrual flow is unclean. She is bullied and ostracized by her peers because of it; Farah (Deena Ezral), her former friend, is the ringleader, though this disgust is learned - she picked it up from her father, who reacted negatively when Farah's sister inadvertently bled on the family sofa.

In real life, the film struck a nerve among conservatives, who censored the film to remove images of blood and unabashed femininity. Even in the real world, there is an undercurrent of fear regarding women and women's bodies, no 'monster' so feared. Yet these are just young women just coming of age, living their lives. To me the end scene communicates that: as they pass from children to young adults, they are treated as monsters, but they are no different in essence to who they were before - human beings capable of happiness, friendship and even love.

QCinema 2023 | Mimang, Love is a Gun

 

"Mukhang ganito na tayo, every few months," my friend told me once. We were seeing less of each other over the following years, each time sharing a small snippet of our lives in that intervening space. Maybe 5, 10 years ago this would have seemed impossible to imagine, given that we'd been in touch on a more regular basis for years prior, but this seemed to be the new normal. It made me a bit sad, but this is the way things are now.

These were the thoughts in my head as I watched Kim Taeyang's Mimang, a simple tale about two people who meet each other in much the same way as me and my friend. They talk about how the city has changed, how others have changed, and how they've changed too, and sometimes their appearance would be so drastically different that I'd sometimes wonder: is this the same person? At the time I'd meant the actor, but the same question could mean the actual character, and the answer to that would be no - just as urban topologies shift, as murals are painted over graffiti painted over murals, we gain layers of ourselves as time passes, so much so that we look completely different on the outside.

Every time we see these two again, there's much that is said and unsaid, and the latter proves to be the aspect that's more fascinating to me. There's a history in the space between these conversations that lingers in each meeting, and we are left to fill in the details by ourselves. 

Such is life: an endless journey of searching - what exactly? - meaning? companionship? who knows. But it is a journey that may stop every once in a while, but never ceases. One person talks about an old movie whose ending has been lost, but they believe that the movie as it is is completely fine, because life does not have definite start and end points. Through cinema, we are meant to glimpse points of it, though never everything.

Personal and national histories intermingle in actor Lee Hong-chi's directorial debut Love is a Gun. Sweet Potato (Lee) used to be part of a crime syndicate. He was arrested and jailed for shooting someone with a gun. Now newly released from prison, he wants nothing to do with his past life and attempts to live clean, living a simple life renting out umbrellas on the beach. But his criminal past and a lack of social systems to support him prevents Sweet Potato from getting a (better) honest job in Taipei. He finds friends from his youth who have all changed and moved on without him, and when his mother contacts him to help settle her gambling debts, his old life unceasingly beckons for his return.

Love is a Gun evokes the gangster dramas from films like Takeshi Kitano's earlier work in the nineties: quiet and deceptively serene, only erupting occasionally into violence. An undercurrent of anxiety fills the movie, anxieties that embody a generation of sociopolitical malaise.

This malaise partly stems from the powerlessness brought on by Sweet Potato's (and by extension, the youth's) position in these social structures - he needs to get a good citizen permit to get a job, but he cannot. His old boss, ever invisible except for one distant shot, tries to exert control over him. A local official, while seemingly friendly, is all facade: he is, for some reason, obsessed with Sweet Potato's childhood friend Seven (Patricia Lin), and resorts to threats to get people to vote for him. He is bound to an old home whose value inexorably goes down, so he can't sell it, and he is bound out of filial duty to his mother, addicted to gambling, who he blames for his problems.

It's understandable, then, that all that Sweet Potato desires is a simple life free from anyone's control. The reaction for many of the characters in the film is to try to break free, even through death - Seven, for example, rebelled against her parents' plan for her (allegedly) in a violent manner, but even then she was unable to completely live freely. Sweet Potato tries his best, but for a person with such a storied past, living in a country with an equally storied past, he is swimming against the waves.

QCinema 2023 | Raging Grace, The Taste of Things

 

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is an overseas worker in the UK. She's a trained healthcare worker, but she has difficulty getting jobs and might not be able to stay in the country for long. Joining her is Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), her daughter. Grace longs for a proper bed and some time to play, but their current living situation makes that difficult. Joy then comes across an opportunity to work as a housekeeper for a barrister (Leanne Best) and her comatose uncle (David Hayman). She takes the job, but surreptitiously smuggles Grace into the house as well.

Raging Grace is structured like a Hitchcockian thriller, with tension creeping along every corner of the film. I'd say it's best to see the film without reading anything about it, so I will refrain from detailing anything major. Instead, I will focus on something that was said during the Q and A portion that I kept coming back to during the writing process of this review.

Max Eigenmann mentioned something about Grace's character; in many parts of the film, the child sometimes appears out of nowhere. Director Paris Zarcilla and cinematographer Joel Honeywell lean into this, treating her appearances as jump scares or sudden camera movements, as if she were a ghost. And Eigenmann notes that that's Grace's talent: she learned how to become a ghost because she needed to be - it's part of her experience as an illegal immigrant. There's a little of that nature in Joy as well - she didn't announce Grace's existence to her employer out of fear.

And that leads me to how workers abroad and immigrants in general are often 'made' to be invisible - in one sense, via assimilation, seen in the many small things Joy's employers impose on her, such as cooking something more to their tastes. A certain character in the film starts to forget their own language after living so long in another country. The other sense is invisibility via the suppression of personhood and autonomy, as Joy is treated as a servant more than a person, who only exists to follow orders and nothing more. 'Masters' do not need to know the opinion of their 'pets,' and there's a whole history behind that sentiment (considering this does take place in the UK, it's quite appropriate.) While Joy is a trained healthcare professional, her knowledge and expertise is suppressed at first, but when she manages to use her talents (combined with knowledge that is distinctly of her homeland), the results are quite astonishing.

The most harrowing aspect of immigrant life is isolation, and while finding a place to belong may lead us to dark paths, there's a scene in the film that shows the warmth of community and how it gives life to us in equal measure.

Dodin (Benoit Magimel) is a talented restaurant owner and gourmet, lauded by his peers as the Napoleon of cuisine or some such title. In his 20 years in the business, he has worked closely with Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), an accomplished and equally talented cook. Together they're a force to be reckoned with in the French culinary world, though they've never stopped to think about what they mean to each other.

Tran Anh Hung's The Taste of Things is 70% scenes of preparing and eating food: I personally wouldn't be surprised if these scenes outnumbered scenes where people talked. In one early scene one of Dodin's friends notes that as men established civilization, there was a shift from merely eating food for the sake of survival to eating food purely for pleasure. And with that paradigm shift, our relationship with food changed, evolving into social activity. There's something profoundly intimate in actions around food: in eating it (together), in preparing it (for someone), in teaching a particular taste to someone else. People whose love language is acts of service will have a field day watching.

Cooking in this film is a sort of language as well: merely observing the various dishes prepared gives context to what's going on. A light soup or a rich melding of flavors communicates an identity, care (or carelessness), concern for a loved one, or even the fond memory of someone whose time has long passed.

QCinema 2023 | Abang Adik, All of Us Strangers, Last Shadow at First Light

Today's set of reviews are films that are, in their own ways, ghost stories.

The first film, Jin Ong's Abang Adik, features ghosts of the metaphorical kind: people who live out their lives invisibly, unable to be seen by society at large. Abang (Kang Ren Wu) and Adik (Jack Tan) are undocumented orphans living in Pasar Pudu, Kuala Lumpur. The place is known for its large wet market, but it is also where communities of the urban poor, marginalized peoples and immigrants of all sorts live.  While the deaf Abang tries to get by working various jobs in the wet market, Adik frequently skirts the law, faking identification cards and selling his body to make ends meet. The two brothers are helped by social worker Jie En (Serene Lim), though they have different opinions on the matter: while Abang wants to continue the application process in order to be able to get more jobs, Adik has lost all faith in the system and wants nothing to do with it.

The film takes us through the everyday struggles of the two brothers as they try to live in a community that is regularly raided by the authorities - a home that is more an oppressive open air prison than it is a home. Not unlike the urban landscapes here in the Philippines, the inhabitants of this place, all coming from different parts of Asia, live together through hardship in a sort of solidarity, but also in a shared existence that has its own hierarchy. 

Yet even though it looks bleak, there are certain glimpses of humanity: Jie En sacrifices her family in order to care for people who may or may not want to be helped. Abang befriends a refugee from Myanmar but knows their time together is limited - in one sequence, the doomed couple look at a mirror, perhaps catching sight of a life that will never be. Abang and Adik's benefactor, Money (Tan Kim Wang) supports the two brothers out of a sort of parental bond. The bond between the two brothers is strong, each gesture pregnant with meaning, communicating a long, shared history. I'll never look at breaking eggs the same way again.

The second half of the film is marked by a sudden turn that upends all of these characters' relationships, culminating in a sequence with Abang where no words are literally "heard", that (figuratively) ends up being the loudest scene in the entire film. When people end up being all but unable to be heard or seen by the land of their birth, the path to becoming a ghost is a tragic inevitability.

For this next film, I'm reminded of a quote from, of all things, The Haunting of Hill House:

"Ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings. But most times a ghost is a wish."

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a writer living alone in London. One day, he comes across his father (Jamie Bell) buying cigarettes in a store. But there's a problem: his parents have been gone for years, lost in a tragic accident. And yet here are his parents, apparently alive and as old as they were the year they were lost. At the same time, he meets his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), and starts a relationship with him.

As Adam navigates this new relationship, he can't help but tell his parents all about him and what has happened in all these intervening years. Though their mindset is still stuck in a time where gay men like Adam are discriminated against, they tentatively accept his identity with the love only a parent can give. And as Adam is drawn deeper back into the life he could have lived, he withdraws from everything else.

A lonely, 'ghostly' existence permeates the frames of Andrew Haigh's All of Us Are Strangers, its protagonists solitary stars in the sky, their existences bounded by light years, space and time. DP Jamie Ramsay frames Adam with a shallow depth of field, blurring everything (and everyone) around him. Even in the apartment building where he lives, it's like no one's around besides Adam: "there aren't even security guards around," Harry quips. He is too caught up with his own past regrets that he barely sees the beauty in things anymore, in what's in front of him.

And this is the central tragedy of the film: in shutting himself off from the rest of the world, in denying who he is, so much is lost to what ifs, to failed timelines. Sometimes the things that haunt us are what turn us into ghosts.

In this last film, 'ghosts' take on many forms: that of enduring, unresolved regret, of spirits tethered eternally to place and memory.

Ami (Mihaya Shirata) has been haunted by apparitions. Her Japanese mother (Mariko Tsutsui) left Singapore to help in the relief efforts after the 3/11 Tsunami, but never returned. Ami's father (Peter Yu) refuses to elaborate, saying that Ami's mother killed herself out of despair. Ami then discovers a set of tape recordings that say her mother might be alive, and she sets out to Japan to find her.

Quiet, contemplative and haunting, Last Shadow at First Light deals with things that linger, long after what caused them has faded away. Regret fuels this lingering: Ami's mother has regrets over being unable to save her own parents from the tsunami; Ami's uncle Isamu (Masatoshi Nagase) yearns for his dead wife whose body was never found and experiences survivor's guilt.

Isamu and Ami travel through the landscapes of Northern Japan, where at least at first, many traces of the tsunami's devastation no longer exist. While Isamu is at first reluctant to join his niece in her journey, he relents and faces his own regrets perhaps for the first time since his loss. Eventually they come across their family's old hometown, with abandoned buildings strewn all over, and with a seawall blocking sight of the waters. Even though they can hear the waves, they cannot see them - a metaphorical specter of that tragedy, if you will. 

The two eventually reach their respective destinations. The climactic scene - magical, elusive, ambiguous - sees both confronting their respective 'ghosts' head on, not necessarily to say goodbye, but to allay the waves of their regret. Such is grieving: those waves will never leave - we only live to swim with the current as time goes by.

QCinema 2023 | QCSea Shorts Short Reviews

 

The dystopian near-future of Stephen Lopez's Hito feels bizarre and unfamiliar at certain points, yet feels familiar in all the right ways: a raucously funny satire full of references from various forms of media (such as a Cowboy Bebop nod at the very end), the film shows us the dangers of forced mono-ideological thought, where unity for its own sake is meaningless, where the gold in the "golden age" is the golden color of shit.

I've been to a couple of parties in North America with immigrant family members, and with only small variations they've felt a lot like the party in Kayla Abuda Galang's When You Left Me on That Boulevard. The film radiates anxious energy - stemming from awkward social situations with drunk aunties to the awkwardness of navigating between two disparate, sometimes at-odds cultures.

Despite a slew of technical problems that turned the film into a slideshow, Khozy Rizal's Basri and Salma in a Never-Ending Comedy is one of my favorite shorts of the program. It adroitly portrays the struggles of a childless couple in very conservative Indonesia, where the social expectations and pressures to bear children affect not only the woman, but also the man - where having (many) children is considered a mark of virility and manhood.

The Thing About Aliens and Their Skincare makes its metaphors quite clear, complete with cute explainer about how our LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters and nonbinary siblings are just normal people trying to get by, even as segments of society treat them differently. It's a very simple, sweet film. However, though the understanding that we gain in the film isn't extended to the characters in the film who do not understand, and things remain more or less at status quo near the end.

In learning certain kinds of relationship dynamics, important things to know would be who is in control, who is using who, and what the rules of the relationship are. In The Mop, that knowledge is made ambiguous; learning these dynamics becomes a game that takes its audience in many different and unexpected directions.

Sometimes we learn how small and unimportant we actually are in the grand scheme of things - The Altar meditates on that thought, on how we are often buffeted from all sides by forces beyond our control and understanding. It is also a confession as much as it is a meditation, with its invisible narrator whispering to us the details of their 'sin.'

Buoyant starts with the discovery of a mermaid at a sea market - and through dance, tells the tale of freedom of various sorts, borne through empathy and acceptance. It's quirky and ends in a very cute fashion.

The title of Cross My Heart and Hope to Die implies a promise - but in an overly exploitative capitalist society where everyone uses everyone else in an endless chain of exploitation, such promises hold no water, such relationships find their foundation built on lies. Jorrybell Agoto's working class protagonist finds herself exploited in more ways than one - caught up in the machinations of men who employ her, or men who seek to use her for their own means.

Families can sometimes be complicated, their histories built on unspoken pain and unshared feelings. Director Giselle Lin explores the complicated relationships between herself, her four sisters and their estranged parents in I Look Into the Mirror and Repeat to Myself, where she unearths shared traumas and experiences that solidified - and broke apart - their bonds as siblings. 

And finally, while I get the sentiment behind Dominion - an exploration of colonialist legacies in settled lands through old pictures, I am not fully sold on the execution. While providing context through (subtitled) narration is okay, why not show the pictures themselves? The visuals and narration doesn't always line up, and much of what is narrated could be better off shown instead, allowing us to take in their power first hand instead of a second hand description through text. Like the Tenacious D song, it's not the greatest (short) in the world - it's just a tribute.

QCinema 2023 | Poor Things, Perfect Days

 

Yorgos Lanthimos is a pretty funny guy.

Or at least, he's a guy that makes funny films, whose humor stems from either leaning into the absurdity that results from breaking a state of 'normalcy', or from the inherent weirdness of the way things are. In this case, a loose adaptation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, it's a little bit of both.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) starts the film as quite the peculiar character. Talking mostly in single words and animal sounds, the new "daughter" of the scientist and anatomist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a bit of an enigma. It turns out that she's the product of the older Baxter's mad scientist experiments: he fished her dead, pregnant corpse near the bridge where she committed suicide, transplanted her still-alive fetus' brain in her head and reanimated her.

The newly reanimated Bella has no conception of "polite society", and navigates it with a naivete not unlike the titular character of Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), though this journey takes a much more R-18 (and arguably better) turn. As Bella seeks to whet her ferocious sexual appetites, she meets a number of individuals who seek either to help her or to take advantage of her. Indeed, the film can be seen as how the men (and sometimes women) of that polite society react to such a disruption, and the hilarity that ensues when that woman would go her own way regardless.

As the film goes on, Bella grows (and Emma Stone, in what is perhaps the performance of her career, brings this across beautifully) and she learns, much as you or I would learn, about how the world is not all sunshine and rainbows and even in such a society, there are structures and hierarchies to be followed. Yet, even with that knowledge, is perhaps what's most important: is that Bella makes all of these decisions by her own free will and carves out a space for herself regardless. And if she gets to do whatever she wants and goes wherever she needs to be, whether it be in Greece, France, or back in her home, what's wrong with that? What's funny about that?

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) cleans toilets for a living. It's not exactly one of the most glamorous jobs out there, as an early interaction with a woman and her child makes it clear. But without fail, he gets up to the sound of a streetsweeper in the morning, goes through the motions of his work, and reads a few pages from a collection of books in the evening. It's a simple life and honest work, and Hirayama likes it that way.

There's something I wrote earlier this year for another (similarly themed) film that I wish to replicate here, because it captures my feelings about Wim Wenders' Perfect Days... perfectly:

There is something incredibly comforting about routine: something safe in ordinariness, in the idea that no matter how drastically our lives may change, we return to familiar motions. It is also through routine and ritual that we observe the ephemera of living (in Japanese - mono no aware), of the impermanence of all things. Routine, thus, is a quiet act of rebellion then, a way of fighting back the chaos of life.

Through (comforting) repetition Wenders shows us the life of a man who has learned not to wander through the chaos of life, but to stand still and behold it - to see wonder in mundane things we'd usually otherwise ignore. With his rickety camera he takes a picture of the same tree almost every day, with the sun filtering through the clouds, with no other purpose than to admire its beauty. Instead of reacting to life, he merely observes and lets things pass him by.

At many points, however, Hirayama comes across several challenges to his chosen way of life. He gets a glimpse of sharing his life with a companion, or a loved one - or at least someone who shares his own desires or tends to his wants and needs. Later on, someone from his past visits him, showing him glimpses of the life he once lived, and the life he could have lived. At certain parts of the film, he catches sight of the same vagrant - someone who perhaps represents the purest form of his way of life, or an inevitable conclusion to a man who has lived invisibly, alone. And finally, he confronts his own mortality, and the notion that at the end of this journey, he will have lived his life with many things undone, with many things unknown.

But Hirayama's response to that succinctly encapsulates his life view: next time is next time. Now is now. If there's something that needs to be known, find out. If there's something that needs to be done, do it. Though it is a film about a man who stands still, it's definitely not about a man who has stopped dreaming. There's something beautiful in that, I think.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: Godzilla Minus One (Closing Film)

 

In the final days of the Second World War, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands on a remote island in Japan. As the crew tends to his plane, the lead mechanic (Munetaka Aoki) figures out that he's a failed Kamikaze pilot. Before they manage to resolve that, however, the resident god of the island attacks - and he's a god that many of us are familiar with, because this is Odo Island, and the god visiting the island is none other than Godzilla...

Intended as a remake of the 1954 original film, Godzilla Minus One recontextualizes its titular monster and shifts the story to an even earlier period in postwar Japan. Most of the first half of the film centers on Shikishima (having barely escaped Odo Island with his life) discovering the effects of the war on his country and on his family - or rather what's left of it, as most of them are killed during the war's last days. Shikishima tries to live a new life with his trauma and discovers something of a found family - fellow survivor Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) and another survivor, a young orphan whose parents were killed in an allied bombing. After years of PTSD and survivor's guilt, he begins to feel a sense of normalcy, that is, until Godzilla returns.

In the original 1954 film, there were very obvious parallels to the titular monster and the beginning of the atomic age - Godzilla was as much a victim as the people he terrorized, a hibakusha in every sense of the word. The device used to defeat him was also a weapon of mass destruction, perhaps an even more fearsome one than the bombs that mutated and deformed the original monster, and much of the original film is about the scientist who created that weapon grappling with the monstrosity of his creation.

However, in this reimagining, Godzilla becomes more a metaphor for the specter of war itself, of the deep psychological and emotional wounds suffered by everyone involved in war. Noriko repeatedly asks Shikishima if he's finished fighting his war, and she refers not to his battle against Godzilla, but his own internal battle, the battle to prove to himself that he deserves to live. In this film, many of the survivors of the war dealt with their own pain in different ways - perhaps because they fought in something they didn't believe in, or because they felt that the government didn't care for them enough, or simply because that they lost. (Not necessarily reckoning the things that they did in that war, that process is still going on today.) The (very different) plan to defeat Godzilla serves not as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction; it now becomes a metaphor for the wasted talents and expertise of people who were co-opted in the service of an imperialist war machine.

Indeed, the Japanese government is all but absent in the film, having exhausted their limited resources in the initial defense of Tokyo. The Americans are all but absent as well, though their atomic tests still catalyze Godzilla's transformation, their carelessness the source of most of the film's problems. What emerges is something contrary to the themes of this film's direct predecessor, Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla (2016): in that film a functioning bureaucracy, and not necessarily the absence of one, is the key to a nation's success. In this one, sans bureaucracy of any kind (mostly), it is a nation's people that will ultimately uplift it. Cognizant of the wastefulness and meaninglessness of war, the group that eventually faces off against Godzilla do so in order to use their talents for something positive for a change, something truly worth fighting for.

Even when things slide into melodrama, the film manages to create some amazing setpieces that I will not spoil here. Yamazaki has toyed with the idea of Godzilla before, creating a dream sequence featuring the titular monster, a prototype perhaps, in the second part of his Always: Sunset on Third Street series. In recent years there's been a sort of emotional distance in the destruction Godzilla wreaks upon Tokyo - but here that destruction is personal and deeply felt.

It's quite a refreshing take on the venerable monster and his 70 year legacy, and it's one that I highly recommend.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: (Ab)normal Desire, Gospel of the Beast

 

There's a clever bit of wordplay in the original title of Yoshiyuki Kishi's (Ab)normal Desire: Seiyoku (性欲) means sexual desire, but the first kanji, Sei (性), is replaced by the kanji for "correct," (正), also read as Sei. And in a culturally rigid society like Japan, anything that strays from that "correct" desire is met with contempt, derision and fear.

Natsuki (Yui Aragaki) has a strange relationship with water. Once in the past, she shared that relationship with an old classmate, Sasaki (Hayato Isomura,) but they haven't seen each other in years. A class reunion brought out by a wedding draws the two together again, leading to a rediscovery of sorts. Meanwhile, a policeman (Goro Inagaki) grapples with his son's decision to stop school and become a content creator, wary of living anything other than what he sees is the "correct" way of doing things.

Natsuki and Sasaki's desires serve as a metaphor for sexual and social minorities, their paraphilias alienating them in a place they cannot call home. "I feel like I'm an alien living a short stay on Earth," one character muses. It's done with much nuance, with tittilation all but absent in the entire film. There's also the visual metaphor of the fish trapped alone inside an aquarium. To find a person who understands these desires and even shares them provides so much relief to our protagonists, because the existence of like-minded people means that they aren't alone. That loneliness is articulated so well in scenes where either Natsuki or Sasaki engage socially with other people but don't feel "normal", or feel like they fit in. Subtle pressures from coworkers and family members to live a set existence is suffocating to them, leading them to withdraw and lash out in different ways.

Water in itself holds a special metaphorical meaning in (Ab)normal Desire: in that while it signifies life and it flows and does not hold one state, it also signifies a raging force that can cause harm. Paraphilias are benign as long as they do not harm others, but when they do, society tends to conflate the harmful and harmless, and that leads to inevitable tragedy.

An engaging watch from start to finish, (Ab)normal Desire is perhaps Kishi's most layered, complex work.

Mateo (Jansen Magpusao) is an ordinary schoolboy who messes around in class. During one particular instance, he accidentally kills a classmate in a fit of anger. Desperate to hide his crime, he turns to his godfather (Ronnie Lazaro), who works as a hitman for an influential person. As he lives out his days under his employ and works his way up the ranks, his faith begins to shake.

People usually do not leave the womb as killers - we may instinctively act out in violent ways, but systematic, purposeful violence is taught, or it permeates so deeply in a society so as to make people accept that this is the way things are. Sheron Dayoc's The Gospel of the Beast shows a Philippines where violence is so entrenched in our consciousness that when we commit it, the instinct is not to become accountable, but to rationalize it, to find ways to make it more efficient, to escape from its consequences. 

While Mateo is himself partly religious - near the start of the film, he prays as his colleagues bury a corpse - his beliefs change gradually as time goes on. His empathy begins to waver, and as he dehumanizes the people he helps kill, he himself loses his humanity. The beast's religion is violence, the act of killing becomes his prayer. He becomes a tool for others to use for the means of other, equally violent but far more powerful men. Jansen Magpusao's second feature role after Cinemalaya's John Denver Trending (2019) cements him as one of the country's foremost young talents, perfectly embodying Mateo's descent into beasthood.

There is, however, hope at the ambiguous end of the film, that there is a chance for humanity to be regained, for violence to be unlearned. But it will take a lot of time, effort and a cultural shift that we as a country might not yet be ready to undertake.