Cold Eyes If there’s a theme to this year’s festival, it’s surveillance. Almost all of the big-budget blockbusters on display are post-Snowden artifacts, in which police work is a matter of having enough eyes in the sky. The Korean thriller Cold Eyes remakes the 2007 Hong Kong hit Eye in the Sky, about a Special Crimes Unit surveillance team that is tracking down a ghostly team of heisters. The unit is like an all-seeing organism that circulates through the city streets ever expanding its vision, its anonymous members valorized as silent sentinels of justice. The opening is a corker, thrusting the viewer into a near-wordless tracking operation that wends its way from subway car to street to café. It’s not even clear who is following who—the fun lies in following the eye-line matches to suss out the tracker from the prey. Kenneth Bi’s Control is more skeptical of the modern surveillance society. A Mabuse-like villain in a futuristic Chinese metropolis has seized operation of the city’s security cameras, and forces a randomly selected ordinary citizen, an insurance salesman, to do his dirty bidding. Even dirtier is Andy Lau’s cop in the bombastic action spectacular Firestorm 3D, who uses and abuses the surveillance tools at his disposal. The outrageous final-act battle rivals Commando for sheer body count.
Why Don’t You Play in Hell? In Sion Sono’s propulsive Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (which is co-presented by Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema), it’s not the law that’s documenting your every move, but the DIY film club called “The Fuck Bombers.” This group of ne’er-do-well teens in the Japan suburbs hangs out at their local shuttered movie theater and dream of making the next martial arts masterpiece. Consumer-video cameras constantly whirring—film is a luxury they desire but can’t afford—they try to turn their lives into their art, and they succeed when they get stuck in the middle of a bloody yakuza war. It’s a mournful, madcap, and cartoonishly violent ode to 35mm and the guerrilla filmmaking spirit, one that collapses the distance between filmmaking and film loving. It is as wild, joyful and unpredictable as his upskirt-photography epic Love Exposure (08), and will receive a theatrical release later this year from Drafthouse Films. The other big name Japanese auteur on display is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. After four years of inactivity following his art-house drama Tokyo Sonata (08), he directed the television series Penance, and in 2013 made two features. The first, REAL, was an inert lump of psychical sci-fi, but NYAFF selection Seventh Code is a slender and delightful tale of Japanese spies in Russia. Only an hour long, and starring pop star Atsuko Maeda, it’s his most unusual feature since Bright Future (03). Maeda plays Akiko, a seemingly heartbroken girl who follows the dashing Mr. Matsunaga (Ryohei Suzuki) all around Vladivostok in order to win him back. It soon becomes clear that Matsunaga is involved in shady dealings with Russian mobsters, with Akiko hiding secrets of her own. The film then shifts under your feet from sad-sack romance to conspiratorial spy film. With all its open-air game playing, it recalls Jacques Rivette’s debut Paris Belongs to Us, and hopefully represents a creative reset for the enormously talented director.
Apolitical Romance The cheekily titled Apolitical Romance is the romantic comedy which Seventh Code initially appears to be. A satisfying take on the nerdy guy/wacky girl formula popularized by Jae-young Kwak’s My Sassy Girl, it throws together Taiwanese Gundam nerd Chen (Bryan Chang) with aggressive Mainlander Chin (Huang Lu), who is searching for her grandmother’s first love. The Taiwanese production gets a lot of mileage out of the political tensions, with Chin repeatedly calling Taiwan a “province” and singing a children’s song about Mao in front of a statue of Chiang Kai-shek. Nicely balancing the abrasive and the sweet, including several tender portraits of the elderly Taipei community, Apolitical Romance shows that the genre still has some life left in it. The same could be said for two well-mounted dramas, the coming-of-age film Au revoir l’été and the middlebrow tearjerker The Great Passage. Plotwise Au revoir l’été is the standard-issue wayward-teen drama, but it works on atmosphere and the central performance of wide-eyed loner Fumi Nikaido (also essential to Why Don’t You Play in Hell?). Setting the story in a podunk seaside town, director Koji Fukada captures the grimy plasticine look of a “love hotel” as well as the cozy nooks of a bourgeois academic’s home.
Au revoir l’été The Great Passage, an irresistible drama about the editing of a dictionary, was engineered to win prizes, and it dutifully swept the Japanese Academy Awards. A sage old editor wants to make a dictionary “of the moment,” one that captures a language in development, with all the slang and argot that is heard on the streets. An epic undertaking that is also constantly shifting with the times, the book absorbs the lives of its obsessive editors and researchers. The movie hits all the expected beats, but director Yuya Ishii (who also made the wonderful Sawako Decides), gets fine, underplayed performances from his cast of curmudgeonly character actors. And it performs the remarkable feat of making five rounds of proofreading into one of the tensest sequences of the festival. No Man’s Land is more shocking than any typo. A pessimistic neonoir set in the desert provinces of China, the film was shot in 2009 and shelved by the country’s censors. Perhaps because actor-director Ning Hao has become very popular in the interim, it was finally released into Mainland theaters in 2013, and was a sizable hit (for more on the film’s circuitous path to theaters, see Grady Hendrix’s Kaiju Shakedown entry). One can see why the authorities objected. Ning Hao’s relentlessly cynical portrait of capitalism run amok follows a slick lawyer into the Northwest borderlands, where he gets mixed up with a sociopathic falcon poacher and a demented family of gas-station extortionists. Each successive character is more reprehensible than the last, cutting out their pounds of flesh until there’s nothing left but cash and bones.
title: “Festivals Nyaff” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-29” author: “Carmen Ocampo”
City on Fire Nearing its 15-year anniversary, the New York Asian Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center has established itself as a cultural subverter. Eschewing the art-house fare that populates the prestige fests, the NYAFF promotes the artistry of genre, giving slots to martial-arts badminton movies (Full Strike), hip-hop musicals (Tokyo Tribe), and classic Hong Kong bullet ballets (City on Fire, with Ringo Lam in town to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award). These are the types of films promoted in NYAFF’s promotional trailers and that have driven its continued success. But hidden within this year’s 54-feature lineup are a group of serious-minded, adult-themed dramas that were some of the strongest titles available to preview—the kind of films it’s now difficult to make in Hollywood. These are movies too mainstream to premiere at Cannes and too tame to appeal to the VOD/DTV market, and therefore unlikely to get distribution beyond their borders. La La La at Rock Bottom is the latest bittersweet drama from Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita, a wry chronicler of wayward youth. Best known for the girl-band adrenaline spike Linda Linda Linda (05), he has been capturing the empty, in-between moments of extended adolescence since Hazy Life (99), in which his aimless protags spend their time copying amateur porn onto VHS tapes. Yamashita has edged closer to the mainstream with each film, adapting popular mangas (like A Gentle Breeze in the Village, 07) without losing his talent for depicting indecision. La La La at Rock Bottom concerns an amnesiac with a killer voice (J-pop idol Subaru Shibutani) who is nursed back to health by a young recording studio manager (Fumi Nikaido). The scenario by Tomoe Kanno could easily have devolved into schmaltz, but Yamashita never softens the characters’ hard edges. The duo doesn’t get romantic, but instead bonds over their mutual depression, agreeing that the only way to stave off the darkness is to get on stage and perform, night after night.
Cart There is no hesitation or uncertainty in Cart, Boo Ji-young’s powerful 2014 drama about a group of female short-term employees who unionize and go on strike at a big box store, just as they are about to be fired and replaced by outsourced labor. Based on a real 512-day strike in 2007 against the Homever chain, it maintains a relentless pace as it documents the year-and-a-half long struggle, from the communitarian highs of unionization to the long, hard grind of the strike itself. Cart is screening in the sidebar for “Myung Films: Pioneers and Women Behind the Camera in Korean Film”, singling out the efforts of producer Shim Jae-myung, the leader of Myung Films, to give opportunities to female Korean filmmakers. Also included is The Whistleblower (14), directed by Yim Soon-rye, a ripped-from-the-headlines procedural about the 2006 hoax when Seoul National University scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have cloned human embryonic stem cells.
Pale Moon Pale Moon (14) is another intriguing social-issue drama, set against Japan’s economic collapse in 1994. A banker (stage actress Rie Miyazawa) gets tired of the glass ceiling at work and her milquetoast husband at home, and begins embezzling money to fund her affair with a young college student. It’s adapted from a novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta, who writes best-selling novels about the role of middle-aged women in Japanese society. Though the story can meander, it is anchored by Miyazawa’s delicately graded performance, registering the shift from middle-class respectability to white-collar criminality through the tremors in her lips. If you are attending NYAFF for pure genre kicks, the centerpiece should be Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe (14), a film beyond the realm of taste or good sense. Performed almost entirely in rap by the film’s baby-faced cast, Sono’s latest is a hip-hop spin on The Warriors with a splash of Escape From New York, with Tokyo split up into separate districts lorded over by warring gangs. It explodes with cartoonish violence as tribes led by Buppa (who looks like a boiled Burger King mascot) and Merra (a nearly nude psychopathic Adonis) join forces to dominate the city. It’s up to the Masushinu Saru gang to unite the remaining tribes and avoid being ruled by maniacs. I was lulled by its smoothly weaving Steadicam shots through an enflamed postapocalyptic Tokyo, and continually bemused by the choppy rhythm of its mix of professional and nonprofessional rappers. It is rap as exposition, not art, but some of its singsong quality will stick in your head and not let go. Much like the rest of this irresistible monstrosity.
Second Chance The badminton martial-arts movie Full Strike was not available for preview (alas), but the other sports film of note was Second Chance, an appealing by-the-numbers tournament film—the sport of choice being nine-ball. Billiards is the second-most-popular sport in Taiwan (next to baseball), so it was only a matter of time before local studios tried to capitalize. This redemption story follows former nine-ball champion Feng (Wen Yang-shi, from Taiwanese rock band Mayday), as he drags himself up from an alcoholic stupor to train his talented niece Shine (Peijia Huang) to win the women’s world nine-ball tournament and save their family’s pool hall. It’s an enjoyable take on the formula that evinces a real love for the game, and features cameos by various female pool legends including Allison “The Duchess of Doom” Fisher. One of the great doomed characters in Asian cinema is Chow Yun Fat in Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (87). Chow is at his most charismatic as an undercover cop stuck in the middle of a botched jewelry heist. He is a swaggering, light-footed prankster who seems to have equal sympathy for cop and crook alike. The geometry of Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong keeps imprisoning him in shootouts until it squeezes the last drop of blood out of him. City on Fire ought to be just as famous as Reservoir Dogs, which took Lam’s film as its model. Lam is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s festival, and his first film in 12 years, Wild City, will be released in China later this summer (and has a U.S. distributor, Well Go USA).
The Taking of Tiger Mountain The New York Asian Film Festival contains multitudes. Too much, anyway, for one person to take in. I haven’t even mentioned the 3-D screening of Tsui Hark’s swashbuckling spectacle The Taking of Tiger Mountain, which came out here only in 2-D (in a blink-and-miss-it January release). But one must choose anyway, and the path I wandered took in a number of strong dramas for adults—the kind of thing U.S. critics constantly pine for when they review the latest in blockbuster gigantism. If you’re interested in a summer break from superhero spandex, NYAFF is there for you. The New York Asian Film Festival runs June 26 to July 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and July 9 to 11 at the SVA Theater.
