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.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: Tatsumi, Kubi, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

 

Tatsumi (Yuya Endo) works for an organized crime group as a cleaner - responsible for disposing dead bodies whenever one inevitably turns up in the course of their dirty work. One day, he is tasked to look for stolen drug money and the trail seems to lead him to his old friend Kyoko (Nanami Kameda) and her husband. It is there where he meets Kyoko's younger sister Aoi (Kokoro Morita), an irascible, brash woman who recognizes exactly zero authority. When tragedy befalls Kyoko and her husband, Tatsumi and Aoi find themselves on the run together, where they begin to form a strange relationship.

A relatively straightforward crime revenge drama, Shoji Hiroshi's Tatsumi is nevertheless well made, buoyed by excellent performances from an ensemble cast. Yuya Endo's Tatsumi is haunted by a tragic past, a good man driven to apathy by his circumstances. He finds himself drawn to Aoi, seeing something in his deceased brother in her. Kokoro Morita matches him beat for beat in that sense, her character evolving from a seemingly incorrigible punk to someone genuinely vulnerable and understood by only a few people. Among the rest of the ensemble, of particular note is Tomoyuki Kuramoto, who plays the film's primary antagonist Ryuji - a chaotic, menacing presence whenever he turns up.

The last act of the film ruminates on the nature of revenge itself - with a closing sequence not unlike films like Rae Red's Babae at Baril (2019) yet in a different context, its ambiguity something I particularly liked.

A headless corpse floating down a river and a small hill of severed heads bookend Kubi, Takeshi Kitano's retelling of the events surrounding the Honnoji incident - a series of events where Mitsuhide Akechi, retainer to the warlord Nobunaga Oda, betrays his lord and ends the demon king's rule. It is perhaps the film's tamest image, the entire film filled with severed heads. Yet at the same time, it is not nearly as serious as Kitano's other contemporary films - in many ways the film, perhaps Kitano's last, is a satirical deadpan comedy with tongue firmly in cheek, in this case, comedy that is pitch black. Indeed, in the credits Kitano uses his comedy stage name Beat Takeshi instead of his real name.

It is perfect that Kitano chose Hideyoshi Toyotomi as his character: as a retainer with a peasant background, Hideyoshi's perspective is unique - a commoner scoffing at the absurdities of samurai nobility - and by extension, perhaps Kitano himself looking at how jidaigeki of this era is portrayed. And absurd it is, often to insane degrees - this film's version of Nobunaga Oda, played by Ryo Kase, is chaos embodied, devious, perverse, often obsessed more with various hedonistic pursuits than actually ruling the land, treating his retainers like playthings - the head severed from the body in a figurative way, the head unaware of the body's machinations. 

Yet it could be argued that Kitano's avatar in this film is not merely Hideyoshi but Shinzaemon Sorori, a rakugoka associated with Hideyoshi. Here Shinzaemon is a former ninja, quitting that job and deciding to tell stories instead. In fact, near the end, he leaves the relevant battles entirely, reaching a rather unceremonious end. In fact, many of the characters of the film seem to reach their goals, only to have that attainment be pyrrhic in nature - Mitsuhide triumphs, but is later betrayed by Hideyoshi; Hideyoshi himself is triumphant, but his rule is soon ended by the next generation. Another peasant character, Mosuke, gains the status he so desperately wanted, only to reap the "benefits" of that new status as soon as it is achieved. All this can be seen as Kitano meditating on his own legacy (if he has one, at least in Kitano's view). In this case, the severed head gains a whole new meaning - in the context of the film, the severed head is a symbol of a duty completed, a success achieved. Hideyoshi (and by extension, Kitano) does not conclusively attain this. But perhaps in a moment of self reflection, Hideyoshi states that as long as he knows that his target is dead, it doesn't matter if he has a head or not. Kitano's decades-long career in the entertainment business may not end cleanly and not with whatever "ending" Kitano subconsciously thinks he needs, but he has done the work, and if Kubi does end up being his curtain call, his body of work, strange and funny and idiosyncratic, stands for itself.

My relationship as a fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto began when I was around 12 or 13, watching the WOWOW satellite channel in my grandmother's house. In a dull moment between other dull moments, I began to hear a musical piece that moved me like few other musical pieces did. It turned out to be a commercial for Sakamoto's Playing the Orchestra, and the musical piece was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the iconic theme from the 1983 film of the same name. I watched Playing the Orchestra, recorded it on VCR and watched it religiously over the years until the tape broke.

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In March of this year, Ryuichi Sakamoto died after a long fight with cancer. In his final months, he recorded a concert film along with his son Neo Sora, which would prove to be his last. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus to someone like me is more than a concert film - it is a final and tender goodbye to a man whose music has influenced me for the better part of 30 years.

The production is bare, stripped down, filmed in black and white - consisting only of Sakamoto, his piano, and a number of microphones. Sakamoto himself chose 20 songs to feature in this final performance, spanning all of his years from electronica, film soundtracks, and his later experimental and minimalist works.

The first third of the film consists of piano renditions from his later works: a couple of tracks from his 2017 album async and one from his iconic 1999 album BTTB, punctuated by the haunting main theme to the 2004 film Tony Takitani. For a moment I close my eyes and find myself at a Tower Records in Canada with my aunt and grandmother, buying a copy of BTTB and Sakamoto's concert album Discord. I ask the clerk if they have a copy of 1996 in stock; she tells me that the album is sold out. I spend nights listening to those two albums repeatedly.

The middle third of the film breaks my composure immediately, beginning with Bibo no Aozora, a track from his 1995 album Smoochy, whose orchestral version was famously used in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006). Tears began to fall from my eyes - Bibo no Aozora is perhaps my favorite of all of Sakamoto's songs. But something in this particular performance breaks me even more. Fans of Sakamoto know that in many instrumental renditions of Bibo no Aozora, there is a dissonant, improvisational segment. In this particular performance, Sakamoto struggles to find a chord he likes. He stops for a moment and tries again, He tries to squeeze out the chords he wants, but they aren't coming out. "Let's do it again," he says, but we move to another song. In many concert films there is an image of an artist at the peak of their powers, their performance perfect, iconic. But this is a concert film of an artist in his last days, exhausting his life force to will art into existence.

Bibo no Aozora is followed by another BTTB track: Aqua, the song to the iconic ending of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster. It's a melancholy yet hopeful piece. I gain my composure for the moment, though it cracks after reminiscing the devastating ending to that film.

After Aqua is the oldest of all the Sakamoto songs in this film: Tong Poo, a track he composed in his Yellow Magic Orchestra days. While the original track is fast and propulsive, this piano rendition is slow and elegiac. Sakamoto takes a few moments to play the opening part of this song, stops, then tries again. With the death of Sakamoto, of the three members of YMO, only Haruomi Hosono remains.

Sakamoto then goes into his greatest cinematic themes: his collaborations with controversial director Bernardo Bertolucci, themes from The Sheltering Sky (1990) and The Last Emperor (1987) and Peter Kosminsky's adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1992). These are interspersed with tracks from his later years. Of note is his piano rendition of Trioon, one of the songs he made along with German musician Alva Noto. In this rendition of Trioon, the electronica and glitches are absent: Sakamoto's piano feels so alone.

As his finale Sakamoto chooses the theme to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and I am 12 or 13 again, watching Sakamoto for the first time, entranced by his music. And I am in my 40s, crying in a Japanese theater, saying goodbye to a friend of sorts for the last time.

Opus' encore is the song of the same name from BTTB, a lilting, melancholic tune that is my favorite track from that album. And Neo Sora decides with his last frames to show that even without the man, the music will inevitably live on.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: On the Edge of Their Seats, Who Were We?

 

From a career making direct to video Pinku Eiga, Hideo Jojo has branched out to carve out a diverse filmography of everything from dramas to romantic films. Filmed and released on the cusp of the pandemic, Jojo's 2020 film On the Edge of their Seats is based on the play of the same name, and its theatrical elements are clearly evident in the final work. Taking place over the course of a baseball game we never see, the film follows four characters as they grapple with personal setbacks: Asuha (Rina Ono) is a member of the drama club, and her greatest dream to be able to participate in a national drama tournament has been derailed thanks to a classmate getting the flu right before the performance. Hikaru (Marin Nishimoto) is that classmate, and she's been thinking how to make it up to Asuha and the club. Fujio (Amon Hirai) left the baseball club realizing he'll never be selected to play for the team, even as classmates worse than him strive to do so and remain, and nerdy Miyashita (Shuri Nakamura) gets second place at the only thing she's good at - studying - as she is distracted by the team's star player.

In contrast to the usually hopeful and optimistic characters of these youth dramas, the characters of On the Edge of Their Seats are trapped by their own personal demons cynically declaring that the effort is simply not worth it. Ironically, it's the adults who engage in this unabashed optimism - or rather, dogged determination - embodied by the tea ceremony coach with dreams of baseball stardom, who screams himself hoarse trying to cheer on the school's baseball team.

In the end, these characters realize that a setback doesn't have to mean the end of the road, and an epilogue puts this in context, showing how insignificant these problems really are. Much like the ending of 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the titular character may not have gotten what he wanted, but the world keeps on spinning regardless.

A woman (Nana Komatsu) wakes up in the abandoned gold mines in the island of Sado, in Niigata. She does not know her name or even how she got there. She meets others like herself and chooses a new name: Midori (Green). Some time passes and she meets a man (Ryuhei Matsuda) who has arrived under the same circumstances. He calles himself Ao (Blue.) The two feel a strange connection, but are unsure what that connection is. As the two go about their motions around the island, they meet more people like them. One in particular, Murasaki (Shizuka Ishibashi,) feels a strange connection to Ao...

At one point in Tetsuya Tomina's Who Were We? the camera pans to what looks like a Noh performer wearing a mask denoting his status as a spirit. And that's basically what the film is: a modern-day, arthouse Noh play about two spirits who find themselves finding each other again in a limbo, denoted by the boxy 4:3 frame that imprisons them. It's rather appropriate that Tomina chose these mines as the place of their meeting and incarceration; the Sado mines were historically a place where criminals and other undesirables were made to work, until their death a prison that was physical as much as it was spiritual.

That said, in this tale of love divorced from memory, that disconnection in itself is the film's greatest weakness. We never do find out the answer to the question Who Were We? - indeed, the ending of the film posits that an answer is unnecessary. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to attach to the two central characters, despite the enormous talents of both Komatsu and Matsuda. At least for the two of them, the proceedings feel sterile and cold. Instead of concerning itself with the circumstances behind Midori and Ao's past, most of the film's languid running time concerns itself with the question Are We Even Alive? even though that question has already been answered half an hour in. Instead, the film's strengths lie in its side stories, where memory is far more evident: an elderly woman (Shinobu Otake) serves as Midori's mentor and works as a cleaning lady, perhaps living and reliving the last thing she ever did; and a young boy, Toru (Kabuki actor Sennosuke Kataoka) was driven to death for being effeminate, wishes to be reborn as a woman but is unable to die a second time to be reincarnated.

Ironically, even as the film declares that love is enough, memories of a relationship, of a place now abandoned, of things left unsaid, give that love meaning. While I appreciate the intent of Who Were We? it tends to be too elusive for its own good.

Japan Musings 2023

I've come back to Japan for the first time since the pandemic started. This was not an unplanned on the whim moment; circa 2019, my then-fiancée and I wanted to get married and go here for our honeymoon. We'd saved up the money after a few years of frugal living. The planned dates would have been March 2020 for the wedding (no lavish ceremonies, just a small gathering) and October for the honeymoon. Guess how that went.

Here are a few things I did before going to this year's Tokyo International Film Festival:

My relationship with the movies of Shunji Iwai began with me watching his 1996 film Swallowtail on the Japanese satellite channel WOWOW with no subtitles. Chunks of the film were in English and the story was relatively easy to understand, so even for Japanese illiterate me in the early 2000s it was not a problem. More than two decades later, with a slightly higher level of Japanese and still with no subtitles, I watched his latest film, Kyrie no Uta (or simply Kyrie) in a Osaka cinema.

Spanning more than a decade, the film intercuts between at least four separate timelines: in the present day, Kyrie (Aina the End) is a homeless busker living life hand to mouth. She meets Ikko (Suzu Hirose), an old friend who decides to become her manager and give her a break in showbiz. Many years ago, Kyrie and Ikko were friends, but with different names; Kyrie was Luca and Ikko was Maori. Both are connected with Natsuhiko (Hokuto Matsumura), who himself is connected with another Kyrie - Luca's sister, who was his girlfriend prior to an unspeakable tragedy that would upend all of their lives.

Each character deals with that tragedy, whose shockwaves reverberate across the years. While soft-spoken Kyrie expresses her grief through song, Natsuhiko can't even express it much at all, and Ikko withdraws in another way, living a relatively carefree life without abandon. It's all told in the sort of dark fairytale Iwai's been known for, with quirky characters in the vein of Swallowtail, fractured temporally in the vein of his 2001 opus All About Lily Chou Chou, yet done as a musical chronicle of struggling artists, much in the vein of his 2010 screenwriting effort Bandage and examination of personal and national traumas as in his documentary Friends After 3.11 (2011). Indeed, this is perhaps Iwai's first true musical, with former idol group member Aina the End at times sounding like a huskier, vulnerable Chara with songs composed and produced by frequent Iwai collaborator Takeshi Kobayashi.

That said, this is perhaps one of Iwai's weaker contemporary offerings. The three hour cut of the film feels slight despite its length; some segues feel more like bloat rather than worldbuilding, and based on the impressions of the two hour cut of the film, it seems like the editing of the film was a persistent problem. 

Still, the last few sequences are magic, filled with the energy and emotion that I love so much from Iwai. Kyrie and Ikko travel to the beach where the tragedy began. "Are you afraid of the tsunami?" Ikko asks her friend. Kyrie says no. The grief is still there in some form, but the fear and anger has all but washed away.

Ever since I heard about Toei Kyoto Studio Park, I've always wanted to go. The theme park is also a large film set, used in many Jidai-geki (period dramas) and even music videos. Parts of the park were even used to film scenes from the live action Rurouni Kenshin movies. For a fee, visitors can dress up in colorful costumes and roam around the park and take pictures.

I'm not usually a fan of cosplay and dressing up, but I had to take this chance. There are also other attractions in the park, including a showcase of Kamen Rider costumes from the Heisei era onwards, a museum of Toei productions from the fifties onward, and an expansive movie library of Toei films. For movie lovers, it's worth a whole day trip.

Here's a costume worn by legendary actress Misora Hibari:

Here's a wall of posters

And finally, in the old Japanese capital of Kamakura, my wife and I watched some Noh and Kyogen in a small theater. Many of the readers of this blog probably know what Noh is: one of the oldest forms of theater in the world still being practiced today, it is a play based on traditional Japanese literature, often depicting a spirit, ghost or otherwise supernatural being. Kyogen is a separate art form to Noh, mostly comedic vignettes meant as interludes in between Noh performances.

The performance we watched consisted of one Noh play and one Kyogen performance. The Kyogen performance, Futari Daimyo, is a short tale about two Daimyo or feudal lords who go out on a walk. They force what seems like a hapless man to carry their swords for them, even though the man has his own business to attend to. As a sort of revenge, the man takes matters into his own hands in rather comedic fashion.

The Noh play performed was called Shunzei Tadanori. Taira no Tadanori was a poet and general during the Heian period of Japan. If you've read this blog a certain amount, or have some knowledge of Japanese history, you'd know that the Taira were all but annihilated by the end of the Genpei War by the Minamoto clan. The play recounts his defeat at the hands of Okabe no Rokuyata and the discovery of his body, identified by a poem attached to his quiver. Okabe visits Tadanori's teacher, the poet Fujiwara Shunzei, to deliver the news, when Tadanori's spirit visits him.

Noh plays often depict tragic events, and in my view, here it seems to be the fear of one's second death via forgetting, and living on via one's art. Tadanori begs Shunzei to include his poems, this time without the mark of anonymity, so that he can live on. In a way, even if the body has passed on and decayed, Tadanori will be remembered, just like in his famous poem:

In ruins now, the old capital Shiga by the waves,
yet the wild cherries of Naga still bloom as before.

JFF+ Independent CInema Reviews: A Muse Never Drowns, Bachiranun, Follow the Light

 

Art binds us together in many different ways. It helps us experience times and places long gone, it helps us move on, it helps us communicate feelings that are deeply held. Nozomi Asao’s debut feature film is a love story, yes, but perhaps not in the way one expects.

A Muse Never Drowns begins with a frustrated Sakuko (Miku Uehara), a student who aspires to go to an art college. The problem is, she isn’t finding much inspiration with her drawings. Sakuko is accidentally pushed by a classmate as she draws on a pier, and the image of a soaked Sakuko catches the eye of art prodigy Saibara (Kogarashi Wakasugi), who eternalizes the moment into an (in)famous painting. Of course, Saibara has her own reasons for drawing Sakuko in the first place.

Many have drawn comparisons with this film and Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2018) in terms of its story similarities and its exploration of gaze. But this film diverges from those similarities in significant ways – it can be said that A Muse Never Drowns concerns itself with artists and art: that is, in how we draw upon our own lives in the creation of art. Sakuko may not be an experienced painter, but in response to the many impending changes in her life – a new sibling and an impending relocation that threatens to separate her from her friends – she begins to sculpt a boat out of junk lying at home. She appropriates various things, takes them apart and puts them together, and it brings her joy. And of course, boats are hardy, able to withstand even the strongest typhoons, able to move from place to place. “She’s always been a tinkerer,” her father tells his wife. Sakuko isn’t a bad artist, she’s just suited for a different medium. 

Saibara’s motivations, on the other hand, fall more into her own unexplored feelings for Sakuko and the insane pressure she has put upon herself after her first painting. Her own doubts and insecurities are preventing her from accepting her art, blemishing an otherwise perfect work. “I can’t make anyone happy,” she tells a mutual friend.

It is when Sakuko and Saibara come to terms with their own reasons for taking up art – either to find one’s self or just to find something to do – that they overcome their insecurities on why they want to do what they want in the first place. Sakuko later asks her father if doing a hobby for a living, asking if artistic pursuits contribute to anything meaningful. He answers her that hey, “it’s got to be worth a try.”

A Muse Never Drowns is a wonderful love story where art itself is the object of affection – in creating it, in finding your own meaning in it, in sharing that meaning with the one you love.

Yonaguni is the westernmost inhabited island of Japan, only a short distance away from Taiwan. It has a language that is distinct from Japanese and is spoken by around a few hundred people. 

In the Yonaguni language (Dunan Munui), "bachiranun" means "never forget." And in Yonaguni native Aika Higashimori's debut film of the same name, she takes that phrase to heart: devoid of plot and composed mainly of various scenes and vignettes of island life, Bachiranun exists as a memory of a place slowly fading. 

Higashimori blends documentary footage of Yonaguni island residents going about their day with fictional elements and striking visuals: a post box in the middle of a river, delivering life-giving water. Bones in a hollow pit. Tattoos passing from one hand to another - the "torch" of memory lighting another. "I wonder if you will remember us," one woman tells the other. It's a question left up in the air, though this film itself, as an externalization of memory, may be the answer.

There are also accounts by various Yonaguni islanders, including Higashimori's grandmother, of a history of oppression and how disparate cultures are marginalized and homogenized into the whole. "Our people are on the verge of death," she sings. They used to do rituals all the time, but the younger generation no longer does such things. The idea brings Higashimori to tears.

Near Yonaguni Island, under its bountiful waters, there is a stone monument or pyramid.  Near that is one shaped like a turtle, perhaps a deity once worshipped and now long forgotten. Turtles feature prominently in Bachiranun, a symbol of the enduring presence of the divine even when no one remembers. Near the end, a woman tells the turtle, "remember that the road has holes and gravel; we have no choice but to walk." It's a hopeful statement, one that considers the act of remembering as an earnest, perseverant prayer; a dream of one's self, etched forever.

How do we face the inevitable death of a dying land? Do we escape from it and hide in our own fantasies? Do we give in and let the light fade out? Or do we keep the flame burning, no matter how faint?

Akira (Tsubasa Nakagawa) feels like an alien, a stranger in a strange land. Following the failure of his father's musical career in Tokyo and a messy divorce, father and son return to their hometown in Akita to start anew. Akira has trouble fitting in, and his classmates won't be there for long: because of rampant rural depopulation, the only middle school in the area closing in a month, give or take. During one aimless day, he comes across a mysterious girl (Itsuki Nagasawa) standing on a rooftop. He meets and forms a connection with the girl, Maki, and finds out more behind her strange circumstances.

The appearance of a UFO serves as the catalyst to the events of Yoichi Narita's Follow the Light. Its mysterious light reaches people all throughout the sleepy town in which it is set: Akira's teacher (Rina Ikoma) feels helpless towards her students as the town grows even more desolate - during a tense nomikai, her distraught coworkers cannot help but lament the end of their school. Maki's uncle and adoptive father is on the verge of selling his land and farming equipment because there simply isn't any profit to gain from it, and Akira's own father becomes a public servant to give a fighting chance to the people of the town, even though opportunities are growing scarce.

Follow the Light is a tribute to the idea of furusato - a word that connotes one's hometown mixed with a warm feeling of nostalgia... Or rather than just a tribute, perhaps a tribute to the idea of furusato persevering - in the memories of those who leave, and through the actions of those who stay. Even in the bleakest of times, even when the end seems inevitable - as long as one "follows the light" and lives on, it's more than enough.

Thematically the film shares many facets with the earlier Bachiranun - in that while the film's ending has its characters facing an uncertain future, it's also full of hope. And while all things inevitably pass into memory, that "place" will always remain in the hearts of the people who lived there and shared that moment together.

***

The JFF+ Independent Cinema Festival is available, for free at: https://jff.jpf.go.jp/watch/ic2023/films/ until the end of October.

A Very Good Girl, a review

 

Note: I am going to spoil most of A Very Good Girl in this review, so if you haven't seen it yet, don't read this. Or just don't read this in the first place, that's also okay lol.

I've often thought of the idea of the revenge film, in that they manage to reveal something about ourselves in the way in which we react to how the revenge is played out. We often expect catharsis from the outcome, where justice is served and everyone gets their just desserts. On the other hand, some filmmakers seek to subvert this paradigm and deny us our catharsis, and it is in this subversion where a film is made or unmade. Petersen Vargas' A Very Good Girl straddles the line between these two outcomes and gives us a conclusion that is frankly more than a bit frustrating - a shame given that the film features career-best performances by many of its actors.

We first see Mercy (Kathryn Bernardo) having outbid mall mogul Molly (Dolly De Leon) for a totem during a fundraiser auction. Its outline is clearly phallic but another view shows that the other side has a distinctly feminine shape. It's a symbol of power and control, and from the get go it seems that Mercy has the upper hand. She quickly tries to insinuate herself into Molly's day by going on a shopping spree.

It quickly becomes clear that Mercy is playing Molly, or at least toying with her in order to exact her revenge. She has struggled for many days to try to earn the money to don the illusion of riches in order to get closer to Molly. And then, slowly but surely, Mercy will dismantle everything that makes Molly what she is.

The energy of this first act strays more towards comedy, leaning into wacky, even campy moments as Mercy enacts her plan. Vargas may be trying to break the mold a little due to his choice of genre and story, but there are some elements that feel very much in the Star Cinema mold, at least in this part.

Mercy achieves a level of success with her plan, but her schemes to endear herself to Molly work a little too well, and the two of them form a twisted mother-daughter dynamic. While multi-award winning actress Dolly De Leon does an outstanding job as the irredeemably evil Molly, Kathryn Bernardo manages to keep up with the veteran actress with a career-best performance. Some of the juiciest bits of the film are of the two confronting each other, with the audience trying to parse if they know that the other party knows, and vice versa. In addition, the other cast members are equally impressive - shout out to Kaori Oinuma for a small but substantial supporting role.

In the course of her success, Mercy leaves a trail of human wreckage in her wake. It's inevitable that in  her quest to destroy Molly, people will get hurt, but it seems that Mercy is unprepared for some of the consequences this vengeance entails. It is here where the film enters its last and most frustrating act.

Mercy lives up to her name and ultimately does not enact her revenge. That's one point that bothered me long after the film ended; when the ruling classes are using every dirty tactic in their arsenal to oppress us, should our concern still be that we still have the moral high ground? Mercy doesn't even have that, given that she's already ruined a dozen lives prior to their final confrontation! Also, if we are to dismiss even that, the film doesn't stand by that idea either! It's not that everyone gets their just deserts (everyone does,) but it is done via deus ex machina. Mercy doesn't have to live with the guilt of killing the person who wronged her; Jesus does her a solid and makes it someone else's problem. Poor driver just had a very bad day. Heck, I half expected for our lord and savior to high five Mercy as she ascended just before the end credits.

When we are oppressed, the last thing we should do to seek justice is to leave it to karma. Justice ultimately lies in our own hands, because God can't help those who can't help themselves. It's like if at the end of Lino Brocka's Bona (1980), instead of pouring boiling water on Philip Salvador, Nora Aunor instead leaves the house and prays to God to have him struck by lightning, hopefully in the next fifty years. Committing to the act of vengeance (or to the act of not committing vengeance) is paramount to the construction of a revenge film. For a revenge film to step back from revenge in such a way kinda defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

What really is a "good girl?" Is it someone who shies away from fighting back because it isn't the "good" thing to do? Is it someone who doesn't hold people accountable for their deeds? Is it someone who walks away from punishing a truly evil person because legally and practically there's no way to hurt them? A Very Good Girl seems to lean into a Nietzschean notion of a man who stares into the abyss too long, but in my opinion, becoming the monster is what we sometimes have to be.

Reviews (?) of Blind Soldiers and Huling Sayaw

I'm currently in the process of writing a critical part my book so I'm not as active recently, but despite that I saw a bunch of films over the weekend. Here are a bunch of thoughts on three films in particular:

When I saw posters for this movie and read the synopsis, I expected something very serious. It reads like a great concept: during WWII, five Teduray men decide to join the USAFFE and help out in the war effort. What we actually get is a film that zigzags between abject silliness, outright slapstick comedy and somewhat semi-serious drama.

If you find the director's name familiar, that's probably because Ronald Adamat is a former congressman and current CHED commissioner. It also has to be said that last year, Adamat and a few other people were ordered dismissed from service by the Ombudsman for alleged corrupt practices. It looks like he's still a commissioner, so it's unclear what happened to those allegations.

Ronald Adamat also plays one of the "blind soldiers" - the real life basis of this film, his own grandfather, Tuy. Perhaps you'd expect scenes of these five men doing meaningful things against the Japanese invaders, but there are only one or two major firefights in the film, and most of the "blind soldiers" either get killed or do not do much of anything in battle. The sole exception is Tuy, who uses his sharpshooter skills to down a Japanese fighter plane... and that's it. They give up after the US surrender and go home and wait until the Americans return. Perhaps you'd expect very serious scenes of these men thinking about the war, but instead we have a scene where Adamat and Long Mejia get into a farting competition over a roasted chicken. (Spoiler, Mejia wins, but only because Adamat farts too much.)

According to interviews, the film's message or theme is that "education is important", given that the five soldiers are mostly illiterate and had difficulty training as soldiers due to this aspect. It also tracks given that the director is from CHED. On the other hand, based on the "what happened to the five soldiers" epilogue, the film inadvertently gives the additional lesson of "don't die in war, or your children will die in poverty." lol

Dan (Bugoy Cariño) is leaving his quiet little hometown in Genguet and is going to Manila to study. We know this because he tells it to everyone he comes across. He goes to Manila with the help of his uncle and proceeds to figuratively shit his pants: he gets into the wrong crowd, they do underage drinking, and he leeches off his former friend to get her to do academic work for him in order to not get kicked out because he's an idiot. Oh, and I guess he dances or something.

If you're watching this film (filmed pre-pandemic) for Belle Mariano, don't bother: she has like 10-15 minutes of screentime in this, tops, and even though she's the best part of the film, your time is best spent elsewhere.

This is supposed to be a dancing film, but there isn't a lot of dancing to be seen - most of the dancing scenes are filmed in two locations and the editing doesn't help the dances pop out. Instead, the film dwells on melodrama and sudden dramatic reveals that, while interesting in the moment, are largely forgettable and would not change a thing had they been omitted from the final product.

Let's also not forget this little tidbit. What the hell is up with movies premiering this week!?