San Diego Asian Film Festival Archives

SDAFF ’24: Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts + Stranger

November 29, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Norway, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

BEN AND SUZANNE: A REUNION IN 4 PARTS
***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Anastasia Olowin
written and directed by Shaun Seneviratne

STRANGER
局外⼈
**½/****
starring Jin Jing, Liguo Yuan, Baohe Xue
written and directed by Zhengfan Yang

by Walter Chaw There’s a sense of suspension in hotel rooms, a weight accrued from the parade of temporary occupants, somehow–cosmic luggage left behind. There’s possibility in hotel rooms. You can be who you want to be and someone else will clean up after you, make it seem like you were never really there, prime the pump for the next in line. There’s freedom in that, and threat, too, a practical reminder that you are temporary and once you have gone, the world will, by design, rush to fill the space you abandoned. Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts begins in a guest suite and ends in a series of hotel rooms as nebbish Ben (Sathya Sridharan) visits his girlfriend Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), who’s away on a three-month business trip in Sri Lanka. She works for a program that’s ostensibly for the development of small, women-run companies, but lately it’s devolved into the odious task of collecting loans for the bank. “I only went to the bank because of you,” says one of Suzanne’s clients as she’s asking for more time to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, and I thought of Darth Vader on Cloud City telling Lando to pray he doesn’t alter the terms of their agreement further. Suzanne’s task, already ugly, is made uglier by the fact that she’s a white woman and all of the women who trusted her are brown. This isn’t what the film is about, though in time you realize it’s at the base of what everything’s about.

SDAFF ’24: Viet and Nam

November 26, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Philippines, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Singapore, Vietnam

Trong lòng đất
****/****
starring Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng
written and directed by Trương Minh Quý

by Walter Chaw They find one another in the earth and the pitch black more by instinct, I think, than by feeling. Like animals born in the dark and orienting themselves towards heat. We are all born in the dark, guided by need and the mysterious vicissitudes of subterranean rivers and tides. Because Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a love story, it’s first about lovers meeting and then about how their identities flow into each other like mercury, in constant flux and only ever itself. When Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) are twined together, there’s a memory of wholeness they represent–a solidity their country has never really enjoyed, annexed and colonized as it has been since its inception. They are a memory of something that never was, a dream of completion. In the credits, they’re listed as “Viet/Nam,” and over the days we spend with them, they try to uproot themselves from the trauma and division of the ground that grew them. But disconnecting yourself from the place that is your history and culture is like learning to fly by lifting yourself in defiance of gravity.

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

November 20, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu

by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

November 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Wa Yang, Qu Kue, April Charlo, Gia Vang
written and directed by Vera Brunner-Sung

by Walter Chaw Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bitterroot opens with an epigraph in Hmong: “Please come back to your house spirits and no longer experience pain and sickness come as pure as water and as green as the forest,” it says, with the cadence and intimation of Yeats’s invocation to his peculiar muse in The Stolen Child. (“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”) The one is a plea for a child’s conditional homecoming, cured in the fire of experience and returned somehow to the state of purity the home and the hearth represent. The other is an invitation to oblivion, a rejection of experience into a state of perpetual ignorance–the promise of Eden as a malignant choice (more trick than choice, ultimately) between sentience and non-sentience. In both, there’s an irreducible tangle in the concept of home. Home is either where you are clean or where you learn you are not. I think it’s a matter for the individual to decide if it’s better to live knowing you will die and whether anyone will know you’ve come home after some time in the world.

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream

November 13, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
여행자의 필요
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

BY THE STREAM
수유천
**½/****
starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw At this point, it’s not that one watches a Hong Sang-soo joint so much as one sits with it companionably, like a chaperoned Victorian date, a slightly alcoholic drink in hand to lubricate the passage of unpredictable chunks of awkward chit-chat. Free of exposition or any narrative of consequence, his stuff is just suggestions of hints of scenarios given to his cast of regulars; then Master Hong sits back to watch how the various elements fall into place. There’s occasional magic among the literal obfuscations (one of his 2023 films, In Water, was shot entirely out of focus on purpose), those tiny sparks between people that define human attraction and other sundry frictions. You’re paying such close attention that a hitch of breath or glint in the eye can feel like revolutionary insight. More, you’re so desperate for meaning that you will attach it to gossamer inference, a will-o-the-wisp made of listlessness and… Is it boredom? It’s not free of boredom.

SDAFF ’23: New Strains

November 20, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Sci-Fi

***½/****
starring Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan
written and directed by Artemis Shaw & Prashanth Kamalakanthan

by Walter Chaw Prasanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s New Strains is perhaps the definitive film about the COVID shutdown, addressing it both straight-on and metaphorically in adopting the central conceit of Michael Tolkin’s dystopian novel NK3, in which a world-ending virus has as its primary symptom the infantilization of the infected. “New Strains” refers to both viral evolution and the manifold tensions introduced into the new romantic relationship of vacationing couple Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan), who land in the Big Apple right when the world shuts down. Trapped in a well-appointed, centrally-located flat, they bicker, watch television, have spiritless sex, and disagree over how seriously to take the risks of infection. Kallia, giving off some Lena Dunham vibes, is loose about masking and decontaminating when entering the living space. Ram, notably more uptight, freaks out a time or two in response to her laxness. It doesn’t help that she deals with strife through giggling and taunting. Indeed, for all of Ram’s irritating quirks–his fastidiousness and jealousy–I instantly despised Kallia for her schoolyard cruelty.

SDAFF ’23: Grounded

November 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Time Travel

***/****
starring Whit K. Lee, Katherine Leidlein, Angela Chew, Alfredo de Guzman
written and directed by Justin Chan

by Walter Chaw Justin Chan’s Grounded is triggering for me. It opens with a sunny prologue in which William (Whit K. Lee) proposes to longtime girlfriend Mackenzie (Katherine Leidlein). She accepts–with the caveat that he must finally introduce her to his parents (Angela Chew and Alfredo De Guzman) after three years of dating. If that seems like a long time, well, he’s Asian-American, and she’s happy to say how often she’s mistaken for Nicole Kidman. My wife and I share the same racial dynamic with William and Mackenzie, though I had no problem introducing her to my parents, because a large part of me hoped they would disapprove of her and I could complete my divorce from them. I mean, I did care, but I was angry and looking for the fight. I wanted them to present me an ultimatum so I could choose not-them. Grounded made my blood-pressure rise immediately–the ol’ fight-or-flight closer to my surfaces than I thought possible after all this time. The danger of films like this lies in how I will struggle to find any distance between it and my exposed nerves; Grounded cleaves so close to the bone I thought about tapping out a few times. I’m glad I stuck with it.

SDAFF ’23: Day Off

November 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

Ben ri gong xiu
本日公休
½*/****
starring Lu Hsiao-fen, Fu Meng-po, Annie Chen, Shih Ming Shuai
written and directed by Fu Tien-Yu

by Walter Chaw Fu Tien-Yu’s Day Off is heartfelt pap in the Garry Marshall style: soft-focused, episodic, sprawled like a drunken floozy across a flight of stairs in a Tennessee Williams melodrama. It’s a movie scored, every inch of it, with the kind of music honey and treacle would make if they had sticky little tentacles. The film is insinuating, probing for soft spots to geek for uncontrollable emotional gag reflexes: dying fathers, generational trauma, reunions, separations, triumphs… You know that minor chord you learned in your first guitar lesson? Think about a sad day and play that chord. Play each of the strings individually. Slowly. Close your eyes. You want a job, kid? Day Off is genuinely awful. It shares a personality with Precious Moments figurines. Moreover, it shares a vibe with the lonesome old lady you somehow got trapped in a conversation with who is shoving her Precious Moments figurines in your face and asking what you think. “This is A Decade of Dreams Come True, isn’t it sweet? And this is My Heart Beats For You, isn’t that adorable? ISN’T IT?” It isn’t. It’s sad, a lonesome transference of underdeveloped and frustrated social longing onto a plaster mold of literal children pretending to be adults.

SDAFF ’23: The Secret Art of Human Flight

November 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Maggie Grace
written by Jesse Orenshein
directed by H.P. Mendoza

by Walter Chaw Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) isn’t doing very well. He writes children’s books with his wife (Reina Hardesty), but she just died of an allergic reaction; all those arguments they used to have seem so stupid now. H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight is about being grateful for what you have while you have it–which isn’t novel, you’ll agree. One night, while doom-scrolling through TikTok, Ben watches what appears to be footage of a guy killing himself but is, in fact, footage of a guy who has taught himself to fly, blasting off from the edge of a cliff. Why he needs to jump in order to fly is what I think liberal arts majors call a “metaphor.” Also a metaphor is how Ben gets on the Dark Web to buy the multi-step process through which he, too, might learn to fly. What he doesn’t know is his five grand is buying the personal attention of flight inventor Mealworm (Paul Raci), who, with a combination of unctuous Peter Coyote cult-leader charisma, puts Ben through his paces. It’s that kind of movie.

SDAFF ’23: Quiz Lady

November 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, Will Ferrell
written by Jen D’Angelo
directed by Jessica Yu

by Walter Chaw I don’t hold any particular rancour for Jessica Yu’s confused, miscast Quiz Lady. No bile, even when it seems to be trafficking in racist tropes rather than satirizing them, even when its feeble attempts at wit and timing fall shrilly by the wayside. It’s always a minefield for me to review a film by an Asian American this negatively, especially an Asian American woman working from a script by a (white) woman, but there’s a point at which our community should be allowed to make disasterpieces and still get another shot, if equality is the real goal. There’s a point, too, where pulling punches or pretending not to have seen something becomes patronizing and an act of making a work invisible, which is what we’re often complaining about in the first place. I’ll allow that Quiz Lady likely has an audience and that this film exists at exactly the wrong frequency for me to tolerate, much less appreciate; I do worry, however, that the range in which it vibrates is the one in which people who like to laugh at my people live.

SDAFF ’23: In Water

November 7, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

물안에서
Mul-an-e-seo
***/****
starring Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun, Shin Seokho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately, It’s the time of year when he died, and though I’m terrible with dates, my body seems to remember. I usually think my moods must have something to do with autumn and the change in the weather–but I love the autumn, the smell of rotten leaves, the halo around the moon, the chill. And then I remember. Korean master Hong Sang-soo reminds me of my dad, too. It’s how he’s so irritatingly self-assured, I think. So mulishly iconoclastic. My dad never really listened to anything anyone else told him. Sometimes that worked out for him; often it didn’t. But the path of his life was defiantly his. My dad was learned, extraordinarily well-read in books written in languages I can’t read, and tortured. He’s been gone twenty years this year. Is it the “china” anniversary for death, as it is for marriage? Are the traditions the same, or do we fail to memorialize loss in the same way? My dad’s death is almost old enough to drink. When I was much younger, I would ask him big questions–life, the universe, everything–and he would answer with quotations and philosophies: aphorisms, fables, poems. I don’t remember anything about them except that they made me feel frustrated, mocked a little, and left to worry my thoughts alone like a cat with a tail of yarn. And now he’s gone.

SDAFF ’23: Cobweb

November 6, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

거미집
Geomijip
**½/****
starring Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Song Kang-ho
written by Kim Jee-woon, Yeon-Shick Shin
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw Kim Jee-woon is such a fine technical director that, for a while, the slapdash of his behind-the-scenes, Living in Oblivion insider piece feels like a meticulously orchestrated machine where every piece hits its mark instead of what I think is intended: silly slapstick arising from sloppy improvisation. There might be a path charted for this picture, but it all plays a little like Calvinball. What I like least is how many edits are timed to various shrieks: the last refuge of the desperate and the wayward. Screams of comic frustration, screams of theatrical fear, screams of manufactured ecstasy, screams of the righteous artist at war with a corporate machine trying to grind him down. Such is the plight of Kim (Song Kang-ho), a director labelled as a peddler of pop “content” who, wounded for the last time by a table of smug film critics, rewrites the ending to his latest endlessly-replicable soaper and, swimming upstream, seeks to wring two extra days from a fickle cast under the nose of state regulators suspicious about the sudden change in direction in a state- approved and financed picture. Kim Jee-woon handles the meta, film-within-a-film conceit by shooting Director Kim’s magnum opus in Universal Horror black-and-white while leaving his studio-bound escapades in vivid, drawing-room colour. The picture he’s making looks to be a Hitchcockian thriller of some kind–a metaphor for the labyrinthine cobweb the truly inspired must navigate in order to realize their vision.

SDAFF ’23: Monster

November 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: No Bears

November 8, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Iran, Pseudo-Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is about imprisonment–a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker’s heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran’s fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course–good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He’s directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza’s earbuds. “It’s not the same without you,” Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can’t pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn’t one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they’ve said. I’ve seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too–letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

November 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

SDAFF ’22: Riceboy Sleeps

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Choi Seung-yoon, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang
written and directed by Anthony Shim

by Walter Chaw Anthony Shim’s emotionally lacerating memoir-cum-melodrama is an intimately observed cultural piece molded around a Mildred Pierce framework. There’s nothing it doesn’t do reasonably well, even switching aspect ratios to reflect expanding consciousness and experience in a way that’s useful rather than simply distracting, yet there’s a certain tidiness to it all that makes it feel calculated. I think it ultimately fails to do what it most wants to do, that is, express the fullness of the immigrant experience as one based as much on hopeful aspiration as on struggle and generational trauma. I got the sad part to the extent the film is willing to go there in an honest way. The other part? Not so much. Maybe moments of connection and love would clash with the typical blue stateliness that defines the Canadian film industry: self-seriousness undermined by the picture’s slavishness to prestige formula. One part defiant individualism, one part obvious insecurity. Or maybe there isn’t a non-traumatic aspect to immigration and the challenges of assimilation, and Riceboy Sleeps is acknowledgment that life for perpetual aliens is just unrelieved–indeed, unrelievable–pain. I think, really, the problem with Riceboy Sleeps is that it arrives after watermarks like Minari, Columbus, Spa Night, Driveways, The Farewell, and Everything Everywhere All at Once–films that provide a fuller portrait of the Asian-American experience while also covering the key trigger points this one covers. If it were the first rather than the latest, it would be closer to revelation than to parody.

SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

SDAFF ’21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

November 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo’s films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo–and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can’t get out of his head anymore. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren’t necessarily invited.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.