"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.
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