I finally saw Kokuho yesterday. I’m not on Toho’s mailing list so I wasn’t invited to any press screenings for the movie, and I didn’t catch it after it was released three months ago. I didn’t even know much about it until last month after it had stealthily risen on the Japanese box office chart to claim the top position, where it remains at this moment. Now it’s all the media talks about in Japan. It hasn’t been released here in Korea yet, but word-of-mouth is spreading, and Japanese films do pretty well here, which is both surprising and not surprising, so I assume it will be a hit here, too. I had heard mixed things about it from my friends in Japan, and, in a sense, it met whatever expectations I had of it. For those who aren’t familiar, the story, based on a famous novel, is about the son of a yakuza don who, in the 60s, is adopted by a renowned Kabuki actor and rises to the top of the Kabuki world as an onnagata (specialist in female roles), eventually overtaking the career of the Kabuki master’s own son and presumed heir. It’s supremely watchable and the Kabuki elements are incorporated smoothly and intelligently. It isn’t very deep, though, and mostly gets carried away with dramatic things that should be obvious, the most prominent being the treatment of seshu, or family succession. I would think that could be a topic ripe for extensive exploration in the Kabuki world, but the movie only skimmed the surface and approached the idea of an interloper dishonestly, because there are so many big stars in Kabuki who are adopted like Kikuo. Also, the script could have done so much more with the subtext of a Kabuki actor born into the criminal underworld, but it only used it as a plot point. 

At a completely different remove, Shin Suwon’s The Mutation demonstrated the director’s usual wily intelligence with a story that had a slightly fantastical edge, though in the end it was pretty conventional. I’ve always liked Shin’s work, especially her early, more daring stuff, like Pluto and Madonna; and her last movie, Hommage, was a genuine tour de force. The mutation of the title is a Black man named Se-oh, who was born and raised in Korea by Korean parents. He’s constantly mistaken for “an American or an African,” as he points out, but speaks no English and only knows Korea. His origin is the movie’s central mystery because his mother, before she died, always insisted she never slept with a Black man, so Se-oh must be a mutation of some kind. Constitutionally sullen, Se-oh embarks on a mystery journey and enlists the companionship of a woman named Sora, who is also recovering from a loss, the death of her female lover, who, we assume, committed suicide because of her own mother’s shock and resentment at her sexual orientation. The movie is quiet and doesn’t make a big deal out its characters’ disappointments, and I wish that the story didn’t feel so contrived in spots—epiphanies occur just when they are supposed to. I hope there’s an audience for it beyond Shin’s own devoted fan base.

The other two movies I saw were intense action films. The festival is showing the International Version of The Old Woman with the Knife, which has played a bunch of festivals this year to much acclaim. The premise is all there in the title: an old woman who is a legendary assassin. The world depicted in the movie is pure fantasy: the old woman, nicknamed Hornclaw, works for a secret corporation that carries out hits on contract. When the woman first joined the group as a young woman, the group only took cases to “exterminate pests,” meaning the victim had to be some kind of terrible person. Now, however, the group takes almost any job for money, which distresses Hornclaw but doesn’t make her want to quit. Then the group hires a young punk with considerable skills and a bloodthirsty attitude, who seems to have designs on Hornclaw. The action is predictably brutal and relentless, and the plot takes a few too many left turns on its way to an ending that doesn’t make as much sense as the director thinks it does.

The Furious, another kung fu battle movie that endeavors to revive the Hong Kong action genre, is extreme to the max. Though it’s the director’s feature debut, he’s worked as a stunt coordinator in Hong Kong for many years, and the experience shows in the intricate choreography. Even more surprising, the director, Kenji Tanigaki, is Japanese, a nationality that is pretty rare in the HK film industry. During the post-screening Q&A, Tanigaki expounded at length on the pedigree of his film, since it was made in Bangkok and filled with action stars from throughout Southeast Asia. The movie’s almost defensively generic action movie plot seems to be almost a joke, and Tanigaki was keen to suggest that it doesn’t really matter. Basically, a big corporation headed by an evil Japanese guy runs a human trafficking operation that targets children. When a Chinese handyman living in the unnamed Southeast Asian city discovers his daughter had been abducted, he goes to any length to get her back, and that includes single-handedly vanquishing hordes of goons with knives, pipes, and axes. Actually, he’s helped by a guy whose wife was investigating the abductions as a journalist and goes missing. The fight scenes are so fast, intricate, and complicated—and long!—that the audience at the screening erupted in cheers several times, and at the end of the film they practically gave Tanigaki a standing ovation, something I’ve never seen at Busan and probably never will, but this was the closest.