Review: When Fall Is Coming and Dog on Trial

Posted on May 30, 2025 by philipbrasor

François Ozon’s films are as varied in tone and topic as Steven Soderbergh’s, but since he’s French that tone and those topics exude a European sensibility that doesn’t always export readily to other regions. The title of his latest, When Fall Is Coming (titled more cleverly When Autumn Falls in Anglophone countries aligned with British English), sounds like a gloss on Eric Rohmer, and for the first 15 minutes or so I expected one of Rohmer’s typically dialogue-driven morality tales, but once the spiky plot kicked in it occurred to me that Ozon has been spooked by the sudden international interest in the films of compatriot Alain Guiraudie and decided he could do that too. For much of the film, we’re not sure about the fraught relationship between the main character, an elderly woman named Michelle (Hélène Vincent) who lives comfortably by herself in the French countryside, and her daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier). Michelle exists for her sole grandchild, 10-year-old Lucas (Garlan Erlos), and as the film opens she is eagerly anticipating his arrival for the summer. However, an unfortunate culinary choice on Michelle’s part lands Valérie in the hospital, and, enraged, she decides to cancel Lucas’s summer vacation with Michelle, which devastates the older woman. There’s obviously bad blood between mother and daughter, but Ozon, like Guiraudie, withholds information until late in the movie.

The vehicle of exposition is Vincent (Pierre Lottin), the ne’er-do-well son of Michelle’s best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Ballasko), who has just been released from prison for an undisclosed crime. Michelle, in a gesture that at first seems like a favor to Marie-Claude, hires Vincent to work around her property and then offers him a “loan” to carry out what he really wants to do, open a bar, an enterprise that even Marie-Claude finds problematic given Vincent’s mercurial temperament. Michelle’s largesse becomes even more suspicious when tragedy strikes Valérie, who is going through a messy divorce from Lucas’s father and is having problems at work. Ozon provides plenty of hints that Vincent has something to do with the tragedy and various interested parties, including the viewer, can’t help but wonder if wheels aren’t being greased to bring about a mostly satisfying outcome for both Michelle and Vincent. Even the police get involved, but, like the audience, can’t quite penetrate the hazy veil of ostensibly good intentions that hangs between the known facts and the actual truth. Suffice to say that Michelle’s troubled relationship with Valérie is eventually explained with the kind of forthrightness that Guiraudie rarely exhibits. The movie could have been more accurately titled Secrets and Lies, except that Ozon is too coy to give us any indication of what we should accept as the truth.

He knows how to layer the story. In the end, the gestalt of the attendees at a funeral says more about the social milieu inhabited by Michelle and Marie-Claude than any specific plot point. But the movie throws so many red herrings in the story’s path that you may get the feeling Ozon is just trying to put you on. Michelle is a wonderful character—a truly adorable Gaullist grandma with a steady command of her ethical compass—and a simpler movie about her life would probably have been more appealing. 

One of the hallmarks of the above-mentioned French sensibility in terms of narrative presentation is humor that often feels off to non-Europeans. It’s present in Ozon’s film, but is much more pronounced in actor Laetitia Dosch’s directoral debut, Dog on Trial, which distills several actual cases regarding animal rights in Switzerland into a treatise on how legal arguments can and can’t be applied to situations involving non-human subjects. 

Dosch stars as Avril Lucciani, a self-styled “lawyer for lost causes,” whose boss wants her to be more realistic about the cases she takes, since her dedication to human rights never results in victory in court. Nevertheless, she decides to take on Cosmos, a sad-eyed mutt who has been accused of biting a woman on the face and causing a disfigurement requiring plastic surgery. It is apparently not Cosmos’s first offense and the trial will determine not only if his human companion, a poor, disabled, but spirited man named Dariuch (François Damiens), will have to pay compensation, but also if Cosmos is to be put down. The essential hurdle for Avril is that Swiss law designates animals as “things” without agency or rights, and thus the very idea of a dog being granted due process is not guaranteed, but eventually the timid judge (Mathieu Demy) agrees to hear the case. 

Though hilarity doesn’t immediately ensue, it’s not for want of trying. The lawyer for the plaintiff is a grandstanding demogogue running for mayor who refuses to countenance Avril’s brainy approach to her defense, which involves bringing in animal psychologists, professional dog trainers, and a decidedly ridiculous experiment in cross-examining Cosmos—which he, predictably, fails. Even religious experts are called to testify, leading to an interfaith discussion of the morality of castration. Several distracting subplots include Avril’s adolescent neighbor, Joachim (Tom Fiszelson), whom she believies is being abused by his parents, and Avril’s checkered love life. Dosch treats it all with a disarmingly light touch that can be funny when the mood suits the material, but since she’s addressing a genuine social issue—do domestic animals have rights?—many of the jokes feel flat-footed. Personally, I was quite shocked by Cosmos’s fate, since it was explained in such an offhanded way. The dog who played him certainly had the most expressive face of any of the actors. He deserved better. 

When Fall Is Coming, in French, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

Dog on Trial, in French, now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

When Fall Is Coming home page in Japanese

Dog on Trial home page in Japanese

When Fall Is Coming photo (c) 2024-FOZ-France 2 Cinema-Playtime

Dog on Trial photo (c) Bande a Part-Atelier de Production-France 2 Cinema-RTS Radio Television Suisse-SRG SSR-2024

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Review: Sasquatch Sunset

Posted on May 23, 2025 by philipbrasor

As a comedy, this imagined recreation of what a family of the mythical Bigfoot species might do over the course of four seasons places its bets for laughs on behavior that we associate with the ruder persuasion of humanity. The difference, of course, is that sasquatch are by definition wild animals that only partly resemble humans, and the directors, David and Nathan Zellner, see this association as an opportunity to explore the human id for all it’s worth. They don’t give us much to work with—it’s difficult to distinguish the older child from the paterfamilias, though our prejudices tell us the one who consistently tries to rut with the obvious female is probably the dad, but that’s a prejudice I wouldn’t want to stake my life on, since at one point one of the presumed children makes a move on mom. (The actors include Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, but I couldn’t tell you which is which.)

Still, besides the visible genitalia, each of the four members does have an attribute that seems to be distinctive in a human-adjacent way, and which makes for some original slapstick. The younger child, for instance, likes to kiss other animals and earns his/her comeuppance when attempting to meet cute with a snapping turtle. A lot of the action is incomprehensible. Though they don’t possess what we would call language skills, their grunts and hoots do convey meaning of some sort, but the occasional rhythmic beating on trees doesn’t make much sense. I imagine it may be a means of trying to flush out others of their kind—it’s hard to imagine they won’t quickly become extinct given their rather poor decision-making capabilities. One consumes some magic mushrooms with unfortunate results, and another, playing on a log in a river, suffers the same fate as the father in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, but without the heroics. 

The weirdest scenes are those showing the sasquatch encountering human civilization. Happening upon a paved road, they freak out, pissing and shitting hysterically. Similarly, when they confront a vacant campsite it’s as they’d seen a ghost. The message seems to be that it’s tough to be hairy and bipedal, mainly because no one gives you much respect, including your fellow woodland creatures, most of whom ignore you or, if it’s convenient, eat you, but in all likelihood, the Zellners seem to say, you had it coming just by existing. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Sasquatch Sunset home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Cos Mor IV, LLC

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Review: The Substance

Posted on May 16, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though much has already been written about Coralie Fargeat’s body horror fantasia about the pitfalls of female self-esteem, not enough of the discussion has focused on Dennis Quaid’s performance as a TV producer named Harvey. Though Quaid’s male chauvinist caricature is repellently hilarious in ways you could imagine, it’s the subtext that grabbed me, since in the same year that Quaid played Harvey he also played Ronald Reagan in a decidedly MAGA-friendly biopic, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head during the scene where Harvey is introduced munching his salad in a particularly grotesque way. Though I would never gainsay Quaid’s acting chops in light of his politics (after all, he played the closeted gay husband in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven, though it feels like a million years ago), I really wonder what prompted Fargeat to cast him as this smug POS, who basically starts the plot moving by firing our protagonist, nominally over-the-hill Hollywood star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), from her long-time gig as the host of a fitness show in order to replace her with someone much younger. And while I wouldn’t assume that only blatant assholes like Harvey do these kinds of sexist things without a shred of regret (“You won an Oscar? For what? King Kong?”), the fact that it’s this guy sets a very specific tone for the rest of the movie.

The fun starts when Elizabeth, smarting keenly from the insult of losing her only livelihood, is turned on to the titular treatment, which she has to jump through hoops to obtain. The skinny is that the Substance will help you shed years, at least in terms of appearance, and Elizabeth is desperate to get her entertainment mojo back, even though the person who hips her to the treatment adds a warning proviso that Elizabeth doesn’t really hear. When she finally gets her hands on the generically labeled box, which promises to give her “a better version of yourself,” she may not take the usage directions as seriously as she should. She is so intent on getting where she’s going as soon as possible that she doesn’t absorb them. And once the effects kick in she literally emerges from her body as a much younger person who calls herself Sue and is played by Margaret Qualley. Sue proceeds to audition for Elizabeth’s old job as the fitness host and, naturally, nails it, because she knows exactly what’s expected of her from the standpoint of the producers. Consequently, Elizabeth/Sue must maintain a regimen of Substance intake that’s in “balance”—following a transformation she must rest her body, for one thing—otherwise things will go south, as they inevitably do. That’s because, while the invisible person behind the treatment insists that the two personalities are the same being, in reality they act differently for reasons that are instantly apparent: Elizabeth is working from knowledge that has been eating away at her self-confidence for years, while Sue still “feels” she has her life ahead of her. Their needs are totally different, and when those needs clash, things get squishy real fast.

The comedy springs from the extreme contrast between the beautiful lifestyle that Elizabeth live and aspires to—her sky-high apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows says it all—and the physiological decripitude that the Substance accelerates when misused, mainly by Sue, even though, in the end, it’s Elizabeth who suffers. Fargeat accentuates this contrast with a lot of nudity that, at first, is the sort of thing that normally gets the guys’ juices running, but those juices become a little too literal as the movie heads into the final, unbelievable stretch. You can say a lot about Fargeat’s overt fetishization of her female actors, and how easily the attractive surfaces rupture and split, but while you watch The Substance all you can think about is all that flesh and fluid and where the hell it came from. You’ll never look at a can of Diet Coke the same way again.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Substance home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Match Factory

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Review: The Girl with the Needle and Nosferatu

Posted on May 14, 2025 by philipbrasor

As a movie addressing the psychological torment that can accompany and follow the act of childbirth, Denmark’s most recent contender for an international feature Oscar doesn’t hold anything back, but because it’s set in a time and place that feels alien from our own—Copenhagen right after World War I—the horrors it presents seem like something out of a particularly nasty 19th century gothic novel. Filmed in high-contrast black-and-white, The Girl with the Needle constantly suggests a malevolent spirit at play. Nothing goes right for our protagonist, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), and we’re not made to expect anything different. In the very first scene, she’s evicted from her decrepit apartment for being behind in her rent. As it stands, she believes her husband has been killed in the war, though she can’t claim compensation because she doesn’t have a death certificate. She finds an even more decrepit apartment while working as a seamstress at an industrial apparel maker that’s hit the jackpot producing military uniforms. She begs the owner of the business, Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), for help in trying to wrest compensation from the authorities and he sincerely tries to help, and then invites her out for a walk and promptly has sex with her openly in an alleyway.

The director, Magnus von Horn, seems particularly drawn to bluntness of this sort, not so much because he believes it reflects the customs of the milieu he depicts, but because it makes the storytelling that much more relentless. Suffice to say that once Karoline finds herself pregnant, Jorgen steps up to do the right thing, but his imperious mother won’t have it, and Karoline attempts a self-abortion in a public bath. However, she is interrupted by an onlooker, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who proposes a different solution: have the baby and bring it to her. She will find a loving home for the child. Thus Karoline embarks on a journey of self-loathing and possible redemption, as she eventually becomes Dagmar’s assistant in placing unwanted babies in well-to-do homes, a racket that at first feels charitable (though the mothers are compelled to pay dearly) but which Karoline soon learns is anything but. 

Though The Girl with the Needle is based on a real historical crime, von Horn’s fantastical presentation makes it feel more like a parable, albeit one whose psychological implications speak directly to our basest fears. Sometimes the plot devices feel contrived, especially the sudden reappearance of Karoline’s husband with a hideous war injury, a development that feels shoehorned into the action; but the idea that women would be conflicted about bringing children into this horrid world is put across with uncommon power. It’s not just the abject poverty on display that drives the point home, but rather the whole idea that a mother’s feelings are constantly being manipulated by forces she can’t control. 

Nosferatu, a deliberate horror movie, has a similar mise en scene, though it takes place almost a century prior to the action in The Girl With the Needle. Based on the F.W. Murnau silent classic, which itself was an unauthorized ripoff of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this production by Robert Eggers feels even more expressionistic than the original. It’s a color film that looks black-and-white, mainly because it takes place either at night or under overcast skies. Eggers’ ouevre (The Witch, The Lighthouse) is obsessed with a past that’s mostly a product of his singular imagination, and while Nosferatu is an adaptation, it shoots off on tangents that only Eggers could come up with. 

The central character is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a frail woman with prescient proclivities who we see right from the start is in the grip of some force beyond her understanding. Her new husband, Thomas (Nicolas Hoult), is solicitous of her fears but nevertheless leaves her alone for an indefinite period while he carries out an assignment for his real estate broker boss, Knock (Simon McBurney), which entails rugged travel on horseback to the crumbling Romanian castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who wants to buy an estate in Thomas’s German city. Thomas goes through quite a gauntlet of terror while in Orlok’s company but manages to escape with his life. At this point, the word “vampire” hasn’t even been muttered (though the spirited banter among the Roma residents near the castle obviously allude to their neighbor’s evil tendencies), and I found it refreshing that Eggers downplayed the requisite undead lore; but what freaks Thomas out isn’t so much the mysterious puncture marks on his breast but rather Orlok’s almost cartoonish dialect, which is a grossly breathy Slavic rumble that shakes the flatware. Meanwhile, back in Germany, Ellen’s nightmares of a shadowy figure entering her room become more intense, thus summoning the attention of her best friend, Anna (Emma Corrin), and her fatuous husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who believe she has lost her mind and call the doctor (Ralph Ineson), who can do nothing for her and thus in turn contacts a colleague who has studied the black arts, von Franz (Willem Dafoe). It is he who first says the word “vampire,” though he prefers the proper noun “Nosferatu.”

Matters come to a head when Orlok arrives in town by sarcophagus on a ship teeming with rats, which spread plague throughout the city. Knock reveals himself as Orlok’s secret sharer and Thomas returns just in time to learn that his wife was raped by Orlok as a child—and that the count is here to reclaim her. It’s a lot to process and I didn’t bother, but while Eggers’ intention is to shock rather than horrify, his methods inadvertently pump up the inherent melodrama of the material. I found myself giggling on occasion at the arch literary dialogue (“We have been blinded by the gaseous light of science!”) and a sound design that exaggerates every slurp and gulp. It’s not your fanboy brother’s idea of a vampire movie, but it makes sense in its own sick way. 

The Girl with the Needle, in Danish, opens May 16 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly, Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho, White Cine Quinto Shibuya.

Nosferatu, in English, Romanian, and Romany, opens May 16 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Girl with the Needle home page in Japanese

Nosferatu home page in Japanese

The Girl with the Needle photo (c) Nordisk Film Production/Lava Films/Nordisk Film Production Sverige 2024

Nosferatu photo (c) 2025 Universal Studios

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Media watch: The spouses’ tax and pension exemption faces its reckoning

Posted on May 10, 2025 by philipbrasor

Every five years the government reviews the national pension system, which, like national health insurance, is roughly divided into two plans: one for regular salaried employees and another for everybody else. However, the pension system for salaried employees, known as kosei nenkin, has an attached feature for a salaried employee’s spouse, which is known as the “number 3” system. Spouses of salaried employees get their own pensions without having to pay premiums, as long as they don’t make above a certain level of income. Essentially, it applies to spouses who qualify as full dependents on the breadwinners’ tax returns.

Though the system has only been in effect since the 1980s, it was obviously fashioned at a time when many wives of salaried male employees were so-called full-time homemakers, meaning they kept house and raised children on their own. But since the high asset bubble burst in the early 90s and the employment structure changed, many wives have had to go out and work in order to make ends meet. Nevertheless, the number 3 system has been maintained by the government, and the long-term result has been a perversion of the original purpose of the program. Because of the income ceiling for number 3 dependents, the women who benefit (and they are all women) limit the amount of work they do so as not to exceed that limit and thus remain qualified for the pension and other benefits enjoyed by dependents. 

As everyone knows, Japan is going through a labor shortage right now, with employers desperate for workers, especially at the lower end of the income pyramid. One result is that wages have gone up for this demographic, and since a lot of part-time workers are number 3 dependent wives, they are reluctant to work as many hours as their employers want them to work. Moreover, because their pay has actually increased in recent years, they feel they have to work even less since they reach their ceiling for the year more quickly than they did in the past. 

On May 5, the Asahi Shimbun ran a fairly long article about this dilemma, since the government plans to submit pension-related bills during the current Diet session. The income ceiling has become a topic of discussion in the media lately due to its influence on the employment situation, so Asahi profiled several women who are affected. One woman in her 40s from Mie Prefecture, raising two secondary school-age children, told Asahi that she is “bitter” about the income ceiling. She married in 2007 and worked some temp jobs for a while until she became pregnant. Home finances were tight and she wanted to go back to work and put her child in daycare, but her husband disapproved. He said he would provide for the family and wanted her to remain home doing housework and looking after their child, adding that these were tasks he would never do. Nevertheless, once the child and a second one had entered kindergarten she started working part-time at a construction company. She calculated that she couldn’t make more than ¥80,000 a month, otherwise she would lose her tax exempt dependent status and have to start paying into the pension system. The income ceiling was ¥1.6 million a year for the tax exemption and ¥1.3 million a year for the number 3 pension status. 

At the time, she felt these exemptions were “benefits,” but now she feels differently. Firstly, she recognized how the system effectively enforced gender roles, which her husband strongly supported. This became a point of contention between them, and eventually they separated and then divorced, with her gaining custody of the children. She is now looking for work that she can do from home so that she still has time for taking care of her children. But as she points out, because she “had to consider my husband’s feelings,” she did not work continuously in the past and thus accumulated no bankable job experience. Deep into middle age, she is only qualified for low paying jobs that have no chance of advancement. 

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Review: Queer and Lee

Posted on May 9, 2025 by philipbrasor

Daniel Craig doesn’t look anything like William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation author whose autobiographical novel is the source for Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty drama, but he does attempt to mimic Burroughs’ laconic Midwestern drone, albeit with a slight lisp. The effect is both disconcerting and slightly titillating, since both actor and subject have such distinctive images in whatever public imaginations they reign over. Having never read the book, I don’t have any particular investment in the story as Guadagnino adapts it, but his casting, at least, feels inventive in a kind of make-or-break way. Jason Schwartzman is also on hand as someone I hear is supposed to be Allen Ginsberg, and neither Schwartzman nor Guadagnino tries to make the connection clear, so Schwartzman is free to do what he wants with the character, and he’s certainly the most entertaining thing about Queer, if entertainment is something Guadagnino is trying to achieve. The script’s main hurdle is convincing the viewer that these guys are expat writers; the expat part is easy, since they are so obviously ugly Americans taking advantage of Mexico City’s rough trade in the years after the war (Burroughs wrote the novel between 1951 and 1953, though it wasn’t published until 1985), and Guadagnino has to make a concerted effort to show us how dedicated a scribe Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee, is with long, languorous shots of his messy apartment, filled with chaotic notebooks and two-count-em-two typewriters. There’s also the startlingly out-in-the-open drug paraphernalia, which plays more of a role in the story than pens and pencils do.

If the title is meant to sound transgressive, Guadagnino reinforces the intention by making the sexual politics coarse and exploitative. The homosexual Americans in town express their privilege in the grossest ways, thus contrasting Lee’s romantic longings with the object of his desire’s more passive defiance. Fellow American Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) arrives rippling with allure, a handsome young man who obviously has class and position—he was an intelligence officer during the war—and while Lee picks up on his homoerotic vibes early on, Allerton plays hard to get in an almost Hollywood way. Consequently, when sparks eventually fly and the pair hits the sheets, the sex runs hot, as if it were all being filtered through Lee’s literary sensibility, meaning the graphic grappling looks more like an aesthetic choice than a depiction of some kind of realism. What makes it all suspect is how easily Allerton gives in despite his acknowledgment of Lee’s addiction and tendency toward the fatalistic and fantastic. When Lee suggests a road trip to the jungle to find some kind of mind-altering plant, Allerton goes along as if it were a jaunt. Of course, it turns out to be anything but, and as the stakes get hairier at the lair of a Kurtz-like mountain botanist named Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville, definitively unrecognizable), the movie takes on its most Burroughs-like attributes. But it’s become a different movie by that point, less a study in decadent lassitude than an exercise in psychedelic style. 

Guadagino keeps the atmosphere ripe with anachronistic music (Sinead O’Connor singing Nirvana, that sort of thing) and supporting characters that you love to deride—or feel sorry for. The Mexicans, in particular, are treated like victims of their northern neighbors’ withering whims. I’ll admit I was moved by the melodramatic ending, where Lee, having lost everything he believes he loved, including his penchant for prose, breaks down big time. If only it weren’t James Bond doing the wailing I might have given myself up to it completely, but some impressions just can’t be overcome.

The titular protagonist of Lee (no relation) is also based on a real life libertine, though the intentions here are strictly biographical, which means you’re encouraged to take the implied veracity with a handful of salt. American Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) was a fashion model in Europe before World War II who worked with surrealist photographer Man Ray and herself became a noted photographer. She managed to talk the editor of British Vogue, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), into sponsoring her as a battle photographer after the war started, an assignment that produced some of the most indelible images of that conflict, including coverage of the opening of the death camps and intimate views of Hitler’s bunker. 

The latter included a stunt, a famous photo of Miller herself taking a bath in Der Fuhrer’s tub, which did much to feed into her reputation as an iconoclast with questionable taste, and the movie takes its measure of her pursuit of sensual satisfaction in all things she put her mind to, including a number of high-profile but strictly casual affairs. Framed as an interview with Miller in 1977, the movie sets itself up as an autobiography, which makes the aforementioned veracity even more suspect, but there’s plenty of witty dialogue and risqué behavior to offset the brutal carnage that Miller witnessed. Winslet is convincing as always, but it’s the supporting players, including Andy Samberg as Miller’s closest reporter pal, Marion Cotillard as the editor of French Vogue, and Alexander Skarsgard as Miller’s often confused British husband, who bring the verisimilitude. It really looks like what you imagine mid-century Europe was. 

Queer now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-30119, Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), White Cine Quinto Shibuya (03-6712-7225), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Lee now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Queer home page in Japanese

Lee home page in Japanese

Queer photo (c) 2024 The Apartment S.r.L., Fremantle Media North America, Inc., Frenesy Film Company S.r.L./Yannis Drakoulidis

Lee photo (c) Brouhaha Lee Limited 2023

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Review: Caught by the Tides

Posted on May 8, 2025 by philipbrasor

Made during the pandemic, Jia Zhangke’s latest is a clever collage of used and unused footage from previous features, as well as new footage that was shot under strict circumstances. The result is a film that attempts to review the last 20-odd years of Chinese economic development through Jia’s typically skeptical perspective and structure it as a kind of romantic tragedy. Jia’s partner, Zhao Tao, plays Qiaoqiao, a dancer-model in the northern city of Datong in 2001, the same character she played in perhaps Jia’s best film, Unknown Pleasures. Her boyfriend, Bin, a ne’er-do-well played by Li Zhubin, who was also in Unknown Pleasures and other Jia films, decides to leave town and try to take advantage of the projected economic boom. Eventually, Qiaoqiao goes looking for him, visiting various places that Jia covered in his intervening body of work, in particular Still Life. 

The story is about how these two people, whose love affair in Datong is depicted as being tempestuous, drift apart over the years without actually ever forgetting that they were once in love. Jia doesn’t go deep into their lives, something he rarely does with his characters anyway, but he gets more momentum out of his peculiar retread methodology than you might expect. When Qiaoqiao arrives in Fengjie, a city undergoing huge changes in 2006 due to the construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam, she uses the local authorities to track down Bin as a “missing person,” a gambit he doesn’t appreciate because he’s working semi-legally as a demolition project manager for a developer who has to leave town because she’s embezzled her investors’ money. Jia doesn’t make much of this intrigue, but nevertheless uses it effectively to show how Qiaoqiao’s mission to reconnect is a nuisance for Bin under present circumstances. But given the makeshift mechanism of the plotting, the device also tells us more than we need to know about Bin without revealing much about Qiaoqiao, who is definitely the more interesting character.

The film’s structure is necessarily loose and free-form, moving from documentary realism to semi-staged dramatic tableaux and impromptu musical numbers. The music, in fact, whether incidental or central to the action, is impressively utilized, adding a more complete sense of time passing as the movie updates to 2022 by the end. But while I’ve seen it twice now and think Jia succeeded admirably in what he set out to do, Caught by the Tides didn’t move me as much as some of his previous films have, probably because the ongoing narrative lacks an organic consistency that’s necessary to pull the viewer into its world. In the end, when Bin returns to Datong because he’s run out of hustles and disabled by a stroke, it feels anticlimactic, even after he reconnects with Qiaoqiao, who seems to prefer jogging to catching up with an old lover. Naturalism was never so matter-of-fact. 

In Mandarin. Opens May 9 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Caught by the Tides home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 X Stream Pictures

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Review: Paddington in Peru

Posted on May 7, 2025 by philipbrasor

It would be difficult to outdo Paddington 2 for comic inventiveness, especially since the third installment of the series doesn’t feature Hugh Grant (spoiler: he shows up in a brief post-credits bit) or Sally Hawkins, who has so far played the soft-spoken marmalade-scoffing bear’s adoptive materfamilias, Mrs. Brown, and here is replaced by Emily Mortimer. In addition, director Paul King, who helmed the first two movies, has given up the chair to big screen neophyte Dougal Wilson. The most important change, however, is that the movie doesn’t take place in England, whose special cultural atmosphere and, more significantly, manners were so integral to the jokes and warm feelings that are central to Paddington’s story. But the brand is so indelible that all the filmmakers really need to do is trust their instincts: What would Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw, as always) do if his beloved Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) started acting very peculiar at the Home for Retired Bears back in Paddington’s native Peru? Of course, he would go there to make sure everything is all right, and bring the whole Brown clan with him for the adventure.

It’s the adventure that poses the biggest challenge, and Wilson and his three screenwriters keep things even lighter than they were in the first two movies. Musical cues and Olivia Colman’s way with a smirk hint that the Reverend Mother who runs the retirement home, which the British crew soon learns Aunt Lucy has disappeared from, can’t be trusted; but it’s the other big name guest, Antonio Banderas, as Hunter Cabot, the gold-obsessed river boat captain who offers to take Paddington and the Browns up the Amazon to follow Aunt Lucy’s trail, that keeps the humor chugging. Like Grant’s faded movie star in the last movie, Cabot is a narcissist, but not a toxic one. His most obvious failing is a deluded confidence in his own ability to overcome any obstacle, including violent river rapids and ghostly visitations from his treasure-hunting ancestors (all played by Banderas). Since clues left behind at the retirement home indicate Aunt Lucy may be on the way to the fabled city of El Dorado, Cabot’s involvement seems pre-ordained, and that’s the mystery that Paddington and the Browns have to unravel in order to locate the old girl. 

Since everyone, including Mortimer and Hugh Bonneville as her husband Henry, is encouraged to act out in a big way, Paddington in Peru never lacks for the kind of silliness that the series counts on to contrast with the stiff upper lipisms it so energetically lampoons, and Paddington/Whishaw’s measured unflappability keeps it all grounded in what can only be called the comfort of polite behavior. The rub is we don’t see any Peruvians in Peru nor hear a lick of Spanish, so, in a sense, moving the setting out of the U.K. was never going to be a big deal. Wherever Paddington goes, he brings his adopted home and its idiosyncrasies with him. 

Opens May 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Paddington in Peru home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Studiocanal Films Ltd.-Kinoshita Group Co., Ltd. 

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Review: Cesium Fallout

Posted on May 2, 2025 by philipbrasor

It says something about the ambitions behind China/Hong Kong’s most recent developments as a commercial movie power that this star-studded actioner is being promoted as the territory’s first “radiation disaster blockbuster,” as if it were a kind of requisite milestone on the road to becoming Hollywood’s equal in terms of box office stature; and who am I to say it isn’t, even if the box office in question is domestic only? The money is all there up on the screen, mainly in the form of special effects that were already considered passé in the U.S. after Independence Day. What’s more interesting is how the disaster itself is treated. Beijing would probably balk at the idea of depicting a nuclear radiation incident in Hong Kong because of what it might suggest about the responsibility of the Communist government, but by setting the action between 1996, the year before the British handed over the city to China, and 2007 the movie lets the current authorities off the hook. Consequently, the filmmakers can go hog wild throwing blame for the mess at any number of evil or corrupted actors who have nothing to do with the Party. 

The movie opens at the fictional Asian Financial Forum, where the finance minister, Simon Fan (Andy Lau), celebrates the passage of a new law that will ease inspections of cargo coming into the port of Hong Kong so as to boost its appeal to international shippers. On hand are a pack of well-groomed foreigners representing multinationals who obviously have nefarious intentions for this new access, and the bad results are almost immediate. A fire breaks out in the cargo yard where illegal materials have somehow made it into the territory thanks to laxer inspection protocols, and several firefighters die in the conflagration, including Fan’s wife, whose brother, fellow firefighter Kit (Bai Yu), never forgives his brother-in-law for her death. Fan, accepting his responsibility, quits politics and throws himself into the study of environmental science, in particular the effects of nuclear radiation, because he knows that those nefarious actors are using Hong Kong port to smuggle more illegal waste from the so-called Developed World to the so-called Undeveloped World, which recycles such waste at a much cheaper rate. Ten years later, the expected disaster takes place, when a storage container holding medical equipment is threatened by another fire in a recycling yard and Fan is called upon by the government for advice on what to do. Once he finds out the problem—the medical equipment contains Cesium-137, one of the most toxic substances on the planet—he calls on the government to evacuate almost the entire city, lest everybody be wiped out. Meanwhile, Kit is on site with his faithful crew fighting the fire up close.

A lot happens in Cesium Fallout, and at a breakneck pace. Sticking to true disaster movie formulas, the writers keep following up one terrible situation with an even worse one, until it gets to the point where the viewer can’t see any possible outcome except mass death and destruction. There are various subplots in addition to the bad blood between Fan and Kit, including two romantic intrigues among the firefighters, the acting chief executive’s (Karen Mok) husband’s under-the-table connections to the multinational that is doing the smuggling, and Fan’s troubled relationship with his own teenage daughter. There are also undocumented foreign worker victims, self-sacrificing first responders, and duplicitous bureaucrats whose own hastily sketched stories are rendered in the starkest terms, so as a disaster blockbuster Cesium Fallout provides a sufficient measure of thrills and spills while highlighting a problem that is still a huge threat to anyone who lives near such ports and recycling yards. The production is too simplistic to make much of an impression as a cautionary tale, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that this kind of catastrophe is well within the range of possibility.

In Cantonese and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

Cesium Fallout home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Edko Films Limited and Beijing Alibaba PIctures Culture Co., Ltd. 

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Review: Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming)

Posted on April 26, 2025 by philipbrasor

Earlier this week, in a review for another movie, I wrote that Chinese fiction films rarely tackle work as a central theme. In a sense, Wang Bing’s monumental three-part documentary, Youth, says probably everything that needs to be said about the situation surrounding labor in today’s China. Wang’s incredibly long and detailed films have so far mostly dealt with historical matters, in particular the long-term social consequences of the Cultural Revolution; but Youth, which he filmed in the industrial city of Zhili from 2014 to just before the pandemic, feels up-to-the-minute. Part one, Spring, was released in Japan last year, and acted mainly as a primer for how to watch the whole series. It showed the textile workers in Zhili, almost all people in their early 20s, trying to get by in an incredibly competitive environment, since they work on a piece-rate basis without contracts. We saw how they relaxed, what they spent their money on, their romantic intrigues, their fights and rivalries; and in doing so we acquired a real sense of young people’s values in China at the moment.

Part two, Hard Times, goes deeper into the occupational dynamic of Zhili, with its myriad workshops run by marginally solvent entrepreneurs, some of whom disappear in the middle of the night when their debts become too much. Once you get past how skilled these workers are—the most exciting scene in Spring was a contest between two men to see who could sew the fastest—you marvel at how easily they are exploited. Quotas are difficult to meet when machinery breaks down and the slightest mistake is grounds for withholding pay. Wang hangs around various workers who are having cash-flow problems because of delayed paydays. When they confront their employers in their various ways they are met with resistance. One irresponsible young man has apparently mislaid his pay book, a matter his boss uses against him—no pay book, no pay. When another worker gets pushy in his demand for compensation, he is physically attacked by the shop manager and the employer himself ends up in jail, a situation that directly affects the aggrieved worker’s colleagues since they won’t get paid either. Moreover, if the government labor office gets involved the shop may be shut down and they will lose their lodgings, so they try to organize, a somewhat hapless enterprise that leads to incoherent bargaining sessions and the incursion of opportunists who try to buy the shop’s machinery at cut-rate prices. Even some of the workers break into their workplaces to see if they can sell loose parts just to make up their lost pay.

Wang’s completist approach to his subject means focusing on so many individual situations that he can’t properly cover all of them with the thoroughness they deserve. And because none of these young people can articulate their hopes and dreams beyond satisfying their most immediate needs, he doesn’t provide any analysis of what is wrong with the system and how it could possibly be fixed. An exception is one worker who describes a personal history of protest that involved being railroaded by the authorities—he barely escaped a prison term—all for the sake of workers’ rights, which should be guaranteed in a nominally socialist country. Everybody else is just thinking of their next meal or iPhone, the money they need to get married, or how they’re going to get back to their home towns when the holiday arrives, because almost all are migrant workers, a truth that dominates the labor market in China, as Wang so clearly points out in his selection of subjects.

In fact, the transient nature of Chinese labor is the theme of the concluding part of the trilogy, Homecoming. At the end of Hard Times we see several workers, some with their significant others (many married couples work together in Zhili) making the arduous journey back to their home towns and villages for the New Year’s break. At the beginning of Homecoming Wang sticks close to several of these workers as they reconnect with family and friends and ponder what their lives have become and whether the work they do has any meaning for their future. Some of these workers haven’t been paid in months and have to scrounge off elderly parents they had hoped to support. 

Unlike the drudgery of Zhili, provincial life affords a level of freedom that some of these young people can’t handle. Gambling is a constant distraction, at least for the men, whose partners seem to have given up on them in that regard. In a rare instance where Wang actually talks to one of his subjects, a young woman, she explains with abrupt frankness that she’s come to realize her husband is “worthless.” In another scene, a woman berates her spouse for being ineffectual, meaning he leaves all daily matters to her. “Marry a man with an education, they said,” she screams as she throws something at him, thus implying that his time in university has just made him a discouraged layabout. In contrast, Wang records an elaborate wedding ceremony in which the couple is exhausted by the rituals. It’s easy to wonder how their marriage will survive once they return to Zhili and have to rely on each other. 

Wang doesn’t let us off the hook, since he returns to Zhili and the uncertainty of these people’s lives. The first thing many have to do is scramble for work, since they quit in a huff when they left, perhaps hoping they wouldn’t have to come back; but they do. After nine hours of watching the youth of China trying to make sense of a semi-capitalist system of hand-to-mouth industrial exploitation, you may feel more enlightened than you want to be about the Chinese textile business. The only thing that keeps you from despairing is the natural energy of Wang’s subjects, which he captures with extraordinary skill and sensitivity. 

In Mandarin. Both films now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) home page in Japanese

photos (c) 2023 Gladys Glover-House On Fire-CS Production-Arte France Cinema-Les Films Fauves-Volya Films-Wang Bing

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