On June 16 the first petty bench of the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit brought by a business in the Kansai region against the government for denying it COVID-19 cash grants, which were distributed to companies during the pandemic so that they wouldn’t go out of business and their workers could keep their jobs while maintaining a decent living. The plaintiff is a “delivery health” company, which dispatches workers, invariably women, to places designated by clients in order to provide some kind of sexual gratification that does not involve penetration, since that would qualify as prostitution, which is illegal.
In an interview with the legal affairs website Bengoshidotcom News, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Yusuke Taira, said the Supreme Court “ignored the importance of the COVID grants and clearly discriminated against the workers represented by the suit because they were in the sex trade.” And while the Supreme Court’s ruling had been expected, as discussed in the Mainichi Shimbun on May 27, the majority opinion on the case was not. Taira said the court used terminology that has never been used in such a case or when discussing the legality of sex-oriented services. In their opinion, the majority of justices stated that the nature of the work involved—essentially touching customers in accordance with the customers’ demands—automatically “did damage to the workers’ dignity.”
Taira said this finding made no sense, and wondered how it could be used to justify a legal decision. The defendant, meaning the Japanese government, had never mentioned the workers’ “dignity.” Instead, it claimed that sex work “contradicts the sexual moral standards shared by the majority of citizens” and so it was “inappropriate” to support such businesses with public funds, without providing empirical proof of such a claim. As a matter of fact, Taira cited a survey used in one of the lower court trials that found the majority of respondents said it was OK to give COVID grants to sex workers. Nevertheless, the lower courts found the government’s exclusion reasonable and thus it did not qualify as discrimination.
If Britain’s Aardman has become the studio that has done the most to preserve the art of stop-motion animation, Australia’s Adam Elliot has been the artist who’s advanced it further in terms of visual inventiveness and narrative rigor. Like Jan Švankmajer, Elliot is not afraid of being gross (his movies are often R-rated), but his claymation creations serve more conventional cinematic sentiments like love and courage and family cohesiveness, even if his family units themselves are unconventional. Memoir of a Snail features one that is classically pathetic: twins whose mother died giving birth to them only to be raised by a parapalegic alcoholic French father who dies young, thus condemning them to separation in distant foster homes. The title refers to the structure of the film, since it is narrated by the female half of the sibling pair, Grace (Sarah Snook), who was born with a harelip and from a young age inherited her dead mother’s admiration for land crustaceans, adopting their always forward-moving purposefulness as a means of warding off the despair that continually trespasses into her emotional landscape.
This despair and the reactive “glass half-full” philosophy that rules Grace’s outlook isn’t presented in a gloomy fashion, however. Elliot has a knack for dark humor that matches his off-whack visual sense—lopsided bodies, squashed faces, and clutter with character. He’s also a master of contrasts. Whereas Grace is all sad-eyed hopefulness, her brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a dyed-in-the-wool cyno-pessimist with a thing for arson, though given his provenance and the neglect he suffers at the hands of his fundamentalist foster family, you give him not only the benefit of the doubt, but a good chunk of sympathy as he pledges to Grace through long-distance letters that they will eventually be reunited. Before that happens, however, Grace will experience a series of tragicomic misadventures before coming into contact with an iconoclastic old woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who becomes not so much the parent she always longed for, but the friend she always needed to prove her worth as a human being. Pinky allows Grace to be kind by protecting her from the rank cruelty of the world. Elliot’s imagination runs wild with Pinky’s extravagant back story, which includes two dead husbands, a slew of weird jobs, and lots of recreational drugs. Pinky’s late-career vocation is taking care of old people because she herself is entering that phase of her life. But then Grace finds sexual love with a neighbor named Ken, who eventually turns into yet another disappointment and she returns to Pinky, who is showing the first stages of the dementia she always dreaded.
There is more pain to come, including news that Gordon has died in a fire, but Eliot maintains a light comic touch. Though reportedly based somewhat on the filmmaker’s own life, Memoir of a Snail is suffused with enough fantastic elements to qualify as more of a dream than a biography, and Elliot makes the connection with his own career complete in the end with Grace’s self-fulfillment as an artist. In fact, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Snail would have been a title better suited to the film’s transgressive humor, but Elliot would be too proud to pinch somebody else’s idea.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
It goes without saying that movies don’t have to be perfect to be emotionally effective, and sometimes filmmakers who trust their instincts make better moves that those who strive for something sublime. This small drama about a middle aged blue collar worker whose outlook is changed significantly after participating in a performance of Romeo & Juliet features a few plot points that are a bit too on-the-nose, but the writer-directors, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, who were responsible for the equally intelligent 2020 abortion dramedy Saint Frances, focus more on the dramatic contours of grief and self-expression to sell their story.
It’s obvious from the beginning that Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer), though materially comfortable in a lower middle class American way, is not happy, but it takes a while before O’Sullivan and Thompson reveal the source of his troubles. His teenage daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), is acting out in increasingly aggressive ways, and his relationship with his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), seems fraught with tension. Dan and Sharon try to overcome their mutual anxiety by submerging themselves in daily routine, but it doesn’t seem to work. Then, one day, Dan, who supervises a team doing public works projects, stumbles upon a local theatrical troupe that is putting on a production of Romeo & Juliet. It’s difficult to say what it is about the project that piques his curiosity, and the filmmakers don’t force the issue. But the play’s producer-director, a small-time veteran of Broadway named Rita (Dolly De Leon), sees something in Dan that she wants to work with and convinces him to join. As he slowly gets into the production, and incomprehensibly snags the role of the teenage Romeo, the reasons for his despair are revealed, and they dovetail somewhat obviously with Shakespeare’s story.
What makes Ghostlight work is how O’Sullivan and Thompson contrast the niceties of the rehearsals with Dan’s suffering as he and his family navigate a legal process that doesn’t seem to be doing anybody any good, though it was Dan who initiated it. Dan takes rightful pride in his interpretation of the part he has taken on, and there is absolutely no loss of poetic power when he and the other amateur actors speak their lines. Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy that Dan needs to understand, and it lifts him up in ways the filmmakers let the audience explore for themselves. In the end, not forcing the issue proves to be the best way to achieve the sublime.
Opens June 27 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).
Sometimes the context of a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. Watching this well-made Jarmusch pastiche I kept asking myself about the Afghan diaspora and its immediate impact on the titular central California city. Quite a few obviously migrated there before and during the American stage of the war in their country, but the movie sits squarely on the case of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a former U.S. Army translator who, while sometimes thinking of comrades and family she left behind, is mainly occupied with the more quotidian aspects of her new life in the U.S. She often rubs up against fellow countrymen who have their own problems of adjusting, but the director, Babak Jalali (who was born in Iran), doesn’t seem as interested in them as he is in Donya’s very American fixation on her lack of a romantic relationship, a plot point that isn’t appararent until about halfway through this short black-and-white movie. Until then, Donya’s lack of expressiveness just comes across as a required indie cinema affectation.
Which isn’t to say Fremont is precious or pretentious. It’s well written and funny, but it seems to avoid matters that would make it more insightful or edifying. When Donya’s self-regarding therapist (Gregg Turkington) tries to get more out of her about her background she gives up the intelligence that “I just wanted to get out of there,” without betraying much in the way of desperation—all she wants from the doctor is a sleeping pill prescription—and when a compatriot mentions that his daughter, “a traitor,” is still back in Afghanistan you wait fruitlessly for more. Donya works at a fortune cookie factory in the Bay Area for a Chinese-American family whose voluble patriarch (Eddie Tang) is always mentioning how important their work is in imparting philosophical tidbits. When Donya herself is promoted to the job of writing the fortunes, she thinks first of herself and uses the fortune cookies to troll for dates. Eventually, she gets a nibble, but from someone who lives far away and thus has to borrow a friend’s car to get there. On the way, the car breaks down and she meets a mechanic, Daniel (Jeremy Allen White, probably before his breakout role in The Bear), who is every bit as disaffected as she is. Though not love at first sight, there’s enough curiosity there to justify a return trip to the garage.
Serendipity is often the main motivator in Amerindie cinema, and it can indicate laziness on the part of the filmmakers. That’s not the case with Fremont, but the narrative caution and laid-back vibe translate as attitude that’s all too familiar. This is Jalali’s fourth feature and his second set in the U.S. I’ll definitely check out his other work. It would be interesting to see what he does with something that’s more dramatically ambitious.
In English, Dari and Cantonese. Opens June 27 in Tokyo at Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), White Cine Quinto Shibuya (03-6712-7225).
Danny Boyle’s 2002 feature 28 Days Later is considered a watershed movie, since it reinvigorated the zombie genre with new ideas, the most potent of which was that the monsters moved fast and struck fast. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a zombie movie because the monsters were not reanimated dead people but rather living persons who had been bitten by others infected with a man-made “rage virus” who had turned into monsters in the blink of an eye, but the effect that 28 Days Later had on the horror movie landscape was incalculable—there would be no The Last of Us without it. Boyle and his scenarist, Alex Garland, return with the second sequel (though they were merely executive producers of 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007) and, like the original, it comes with plenty of subtext about how the human race has in essence devolved into violence and, specifically, how the UK, where it’s set, has lost its claim to the world’s most civilized character. Great Britain is now internationally quarantined and contains, presumably, the only beings infected with the rage virus. This subset of humanity has “evolved” in various ways that beg the question of their own right to life. The protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Spike (Alfie Williams), lives on Holy Island off the northeast coast of England in a fortress-like enclave that has returned to pre-modern technology and attitudes. The movie opens with Alfie’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson), taking him to the mainland for his “first kill,” using bows-and-arrows, in what is characterized as a rite of passage. To say that Spike is up for the adventure would be reading too much into it.
Bloodier and even more frantic than the first film, 28 Years Later has a lot on its mind—perhaps too much, given the way the story often lurches away from interesting ideas it might have explored more fully; and, in fact, they may be explored more fully, since Boyle and Garland have already said there will be two more installments. The infected, now naked and covered in sores, still dart around with deadly purpose but there is also a sub-species of bloated creatures that crawl along the ground consuming worms, as well as an “Alpha” who seems to have the intellectual faculties for planning ahead. This development suggests that the infected are indeed still human, a possibility that is put to the test when, late in the movie, as Spike revisits the mainland with his ill mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), to seek out a rumored physician who he hopes can cure her, they encounter an infected female going into labor. When they bring the baby to the doctor, an older man named Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), they come face-to-face with someone whose own humanity, as defined by his vocation, is at sharp odds with those of Jamie and the other inhabitants of Holy Island. Kelson believes all creatures have a right to exist, even the infected, and has erected huge monuments of bones and skulls as a means of giving them dignity in death.
Several side characters indicate that the world outside Britain is pretty similar to the one we live in now but is not necessarily more humane than the people of Holy Island. Boyle and Garland have made comments that 28 Years Later can be seen as a take on Brexit, but viewing it in that way compromises its dramatic power, which is based on our supposed capacity for mercy within the context of self-preservation in a social order that takes for granted the prerogatives of violence. Spike develops a new appreciation of nature and its bounty, including the monsters created by a technology whose purpose was to destroy.
Ryan Coogler’s much-lauded Sinners is another horror movie that subverts its genre elements in order to address a broader horror at large in society, except instead of zombies it’s vampires we have to deal with. Unlike Boyle, Coogler mostly adheres to the standard lore mandated by his chosen genre—stakes through the heart, invitations to enter an abode, avoiding daylight at all costs—and Sinners is way pulpier than 28 Years Later. Set in 1930s Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow, the movie literally sees white people as the devil. In the very first, scene, a bloodied, traumatized young blues singer and guitarist named Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) arrives at church on Sunday morning, where his preacher father reasserts his own admonition that when you play sinful music, the devil will follow you home. Later we’re introduced to the Smokestack Twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan), recently returned from Chicago where for years they worked for underworld elements. They hand a suitcase full of cash over to a stout Klan member in exchange for an old mill they plan to convert into a juke joint. Just as Quentin Tarantino framed the racial dynamic in Django Unchained, the white people in Sinners would just as soon kill a Black person as look at him and from that tension flows the whole logic of the narrative.
In fact, the vampire element doesn’t even appear until halfway through, when a person of Irish background named Remmick (Jack O’Donnell) shows up at the juke joint’s opening revelry with two confederates asking to be let in for a drink. The intentions of Remmick are self-avowedly multi-cultural. He loves the blues and wants to share in its enjoyment, a sentiment that automatically makes him suspicious to these native Southern Black people; but in a sense Remmick’s intentions are pure, because he wants to turn these Black folk into spirits of the night and join his “family,” which sees no color or creed but only worships blood. Better writers than I have already analyzed Coogler’s meaning here; that white people not only want to appropriate Black culture, but appropriate it while effectively erasing the tragic history that gave rise to that culture and which they had a hand in. Maybe the most chilling scene in Sinners is the one where Remmick’s newly turned Black followers join him in a spirited Irish jig.
Sinners‘ horror movie set pieces are more elaborate than those in 28 Years Later, and, again like Django, practically luxuriate in copious amounts of blood. While Coogler has problems trying to tie it all together in the end—there are two-count-’em-two post-credit codas—his penchant for indulging every cinematic impulse is justified by a sufficiently expansive imagination. It’s a great mainstream movie about a fitting subject, and unlike 28 Years Later it doesn’t rely on subtext to make it interesting. Coogler puts everything right there on the screen so that everyone understands exactly what he’s trying to say.
28 Years Later now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Sinners now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).
Nepo baby Jack Quaid has carved out a nice pop culture niche with his Hughie Campbell character on the hit Prime series The Boyz: milquetoasty on the outside but with the soul of a tiger when push comes to shove. He basically recreates the character in this high concept crime action film, where he plays Nathan Caine, who was born with a rare genetic disorder that deprives him of the means to feel pain. Much expository effort is expended early on to explain how this condition rules his life: he only consumes liquid food so as not to accidentally bite off his tongue; keeps a timed beeper that tells him when to pee so that his bladder doesn’t burst; and all manner of sharp corners in his apartment are buffered with sliced tennis balls. To cap the milquetoast image he’s the assistant manager at a SoCal credit union where he keeps to himself, so when a fetching new employee named Sherry (Amber Midthunder) starts flirting with him and invites him out for lunch, he’s not sure how much danger he’s in. As it turns out, it’s more than he possibly could have imagined.
Nate falls hard for Amber, and later, when the bank is robbed by a bunch of masked psychos, they take her hostage after killing the manager and forcing Nate to open the safe. Fueled up by love-released testosterone Nate decides to save Amber and his genetic condition gives him a de facto superpower, since no matter what they do to him he can’t feel discomfort, though he sure can bleed and bruise. The script practically writes itself at this point, and the directors, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, are careful to peg all the wince-inducing violence to jokes about how nothing really fazes Nate, who feigns suffering with mock dramatic vocal inflections in order to convince his attackers that their beatings and stabbings are having the desired effect, but he just keeps coming back for more.
There’s not much to the movie beyond the no-pain concept, and the story development alternates between multiple predictable plot twists and backstory that explains Nate’s mindset (naturally, he was bullied as a child, since other kids thought they could torture him without consequence). It does end with one of the most knock-down-drag-out fights in action movie history, so if you’re into that kind of thing this is the movie for you, but I wonder what kind of fun is that when every blow results in a wisecrack.
The pain in the trashy erotic thriller Hidden Face is all of the emotional type and affects each of the three principals in different ways and at different times. Set in the world of high-rent classical music, the movie’s characters are types that only exist in this sort of Korean drama, where Schubert is shorthand for iconoclasm and artistic ambition is inseparable from status-seeking. The moody, elitist cellist Soo-yeon (Cho Yeo-jeong) leaves a video message for her fiancee, conductor Seong-jin (Song Seung-heon), saying she’s taking some time off without mentioning what that means and for how long. It’s a problem because she’s one of the chief soloists for the orchestra Seong-jin directs and they’re working on a cello concerto. Under pressure from Soo-yeon’s rich mother, who also runs the orchestra, Seong-jin has to find a replacement and hits on a former fellow student of his fiancee’s named Mi-joo (Park Ji-hun), who happens to have the right qualifications.
Soon enough, Seong-jin and Mi-joo are getting it on in the finely appointed new house that Soo-yeon’s mother bought for them and which used to be owned by Soo-yeon’s and Mi-joo’s former teacher. Soon enough we learn what has happened to Soo-yeon, and it isn’t nice. In fact, Mi-joo seems to be punishing her, and as the story, which is based on a 2011 Colombian movie, reveals itself through flashbacks and flash-forwards, the various subterfuges of all the characters are revealed. Unsurprisingly, given the amount of money on display and the narrow range of moral rectitude evident among all the main characters, there’s no one to cheer for as they do their best to hurt one another to their own individual advantage.
It’s nasty fun while it lasts, and the sex is pretty graphic for a mainstream Korean feature, but the motivations are mechanical and the dark humor isn’t pointed enough to burst through the slimy coating of venality for venality’s sake. Hidden Face is a well-made genre exercise without many original ideas.
Novocaine opens today in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Hidden Face, in Korean, opens today in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Often when tragedy strikes we are unprepared for it. The work of addressing it thus becomes fraught with circumstance and time seems to press in like a great weight. There’s no time to stand back and collect your faculties. The Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson knows how to convey this feeling, though he’s greatly helped by his actors, who miraculously remain in the cinematic moment, presumably take after take after take. Unfolding from one dusk to another, the movie pegs its temporal effect on the way Iceland’s sky changes color and mood over the course of a full day. We open with university students Una (Elín Hall) and Diddi (Baldur Einarsson) sitting at the edge of the water watching the sun set, their affection for each other palpable and deep. “Let’s make babies together,” Diddi says offhandedly, but the intent is clear, and strikingly tender. They walk home and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
There is already a measure of discomfort in the interaction, because in the morning Diddi is fly to his home town, where he will break up with his girlfriend. Over the course of this eventful day, we will learn that Una and Diddi’s romance has been long gestating; that they started out as bandmates at their school and eventually fell in love. But because he has maintained a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), the tryst is hidden from almost all Diddi’s and Una’s acquaintances except Diddi’s brother, Gunni (Mikael Kaaber). On the way to the airport, Diddi’s taxi is involved in a tunnel fire that kills many motorists, including him. By the time Una wakes up it has become a national tragedy. Now, she is yet another member of the mourning party of people who knew Diddi. When Klara arrives later that day, devastated, how is Una to handle it? At first she avoids the other woman as if by instinct, but it’s no use. Klara knows that Una was close to Diddi without understanding the true nature of that closeness, and she is intractably drawn to her.
Through a day of compensatory but somehow celebratory drinking, Diddi’s friends deal with his loss while Rúnarsson keeps his focus on Una. The viewer is privy to how each emotionally charged human response to the tragedy affects her and her hesitantly budding friendship with Klara, and the development offers both tension and release, usually at the same time. The movie is all amorphous feeling, like something conceived through the filter of a hangover, and by the next sunset Una and Klara have forged a connection born not of grief but of spiritual kinship. They know things about Diddi his other friends and family never could, and thus they know each other.
The death of someone close to the protagonist also figures prominently in Chie Hayakawa’s second feature, Renoir. The protagonist is an 11-year-old girl, Fuki (Yui Suzuki), and the death is that of her father, Keiji (Lily Franky), though it is slow and drawn out since he has terminal cancer. Just as Rúnarsson tried to show how people react to a loved one’s sudden death, Hayakawa explores how people get used to the idea of a known impending one. As it stands, Fuki is left to pursue her own interests, regardless of how frivolous they are, as her working mother (Hikari Ishida) is busy moving her father in and out of the hospital. Death is not an abstraction to Fuki, but something that must be gotten through, and Renoir is essentially a study in adolescent distraction.
The movie is at least partly autobiographical and set during the heady days of the 80s bubble, but unlike a lot of Japanese directors Hayakawa doesn’t rub your nose in it. Nostalgic touches are kept to a minimum so as to concentrate on a young girl’s keeping her head as her family loses theirs. Set against her mother’s need for emotional stability and her father’s desire for physical stasis, Fuki is free to form her own connections, whether through a potentially dangerous dating hotline, a rich classmate with family problems of their own, or her English teacher, who recognizes something special in the girl, something the audience is meant to recognize as well. She is also free to fantasize about better things, but that goes without saying for someone her age.
Though the movie is eventful in an episodic way, its slow pacing stalls the overall momentum. When death arrives it’s a relief, a response that’s natural given how tortuous Keiji’s treatment had become, but one that leaves Fuki in a conundrum Hayakawa can barely conjure. Unlike her debut work, the chillingly prescient Plan 75, which confronted death from a much different perspective, Renoir feels overly cautious and tentative, as if the director doesn’t entirely trust what she remembered.
When the Light Breaks, in Icelandic, opens June 20 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
Renoir, in Japanese, opens June 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Euro Space (03-3461-0211).
When the Light Breaks photo (c) Compass Films & Halibut, in coproduction with Revolver Amsterdam, MP Filmska Produccija, Eaux Vives Productions, Jour2Fete, with The Party Film Sales
Renoir photo (c) 2025 Renoir Seisaku Iinkai + International Partners
Given the often self-contradicting comments attending Francis Ford Coppola’s late-career magnum opus since its premiere at Cannes last year, it’s difficult to determine if anyone thinks it’s a movie with “appeal.” Though not nearly as long as it could have been, the movie’s multiple storylines and complex themes makes the two-hour-plus running time feel like a chore, even for arthouse freaks. The general opinion is that it’s good in that it’s ambitious and well-made, but hardly a classic in the way one might think a Coppola late-career magnum opus should be. Though no one expects another Godfather or Apocalypse Now, Coppola has made some good movies since the 70s, and this comes across as merely a huge project without many elements that stick in the imagination.
The central hangup is the fantasy-derived nature of the story. Set in an alternative version of New York called New Rome, the film relies on allegory that is heavily representational right from the start, centered on a Howard Roark-like architect, Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), whose vision is grand, self-inflating, and at odds with the conventional sensibilities of the powers-that-be, including the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), and the city’s reigning billionaire Robert Moses type, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Catalina has visions of greatness that he believes mere mortals cannot comprehend and thus is unremitting in his determination to see them realized, but for the most part the obstacles in his way are tabloidy in texture: sex scandals, inter-family squabbles that turn murderous, and pots of money being spilled all over the place. Apropos the city’s name, decadence is the default narrative mode, and each elaborately designed character stands for some facet of civilizational decline. There are plots and subplots that make sense, but they aren’t coordinated so much as attached to pre-existing literary ideas, including bits of Hamlet and pseudo-hippie tracts like Siddhartha. If the big problem is that the establishment doesn’t want to recognize Catalina’s genius, then there has to be better ways to convey that genius than long, grammatically correct soliloquys.
It’s thus hard to recommend as a movie, even if much of it is visually fantastic and dramatically intriguing. There’s a lot of money up there on the screen and it shows, and the cast alone may be worth your while just to see how all these actors deal with their weird characters and knotty lines. In addition to the aforementioned stars there’s Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzmann, and even Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire (playing Jon Voight’s mother!). If you think of it as a spectacle rather than a film, you’re halfway to deciding whether you might want to see it.
Opens June 20 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).
The topic of how to address an elderly parent’s impending death is common in Asian arthouse cinema, and there are very few new angles from which to approach it. Chinese director Chen Xiaoyu’s debut feature, Gone With the Boat, takes matters slowly and cautiously, and while it’s affecting in its own quiet way it doesn’t make any kind of distinct impression. The elderly person in question is 72-year-old Zhou Jin (Ge Zhaomei), who has lived by herself in a riverside village since her carpenter husband recently died and seems entirely self-sufficient. She has two adult children, the tense, ambitious Jenny (Liu Dan), who runs an English language school in Shanghai with her American husband; and Qin (We Zhoukai), who doesn’t seem to have any kind of fixed job or residence. They rarely visit their mother, and when they do they don’t stay long. But once Jin is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor they are forced to face their filial responsibilities and be by her side, choices that invariably lead to friction, not only with their mother, but with each other.
Initially the conflict is over their mother’s treatment. Jenny wants Jin to take advantage of aggressive methods, but Jin sees it as being pointless and would prefer dying at home. Qin takes his mother’s side, and the two siblings alternate staying with Jin as she enters her final weeks, though Jenny’s school is having serious financial problems that demand her attention. Qin has no such obstacles and nothing better to do, and so he spends the bulk of his time with Jin. Gradually, Chen reveals the source of the family’s troubled interrelationships. There was an older son who died young, plunging his parents into remorse over how they forced him to take over the father’s business, and so they encouraged their two later children to go out into the world. Moreover, Jin was either orphaned or given up by her parents to an adoptive family, who expected her to marry their son when she was old enough, but wed another instead. Consequently, she has never had a family to fall back on—her adoptive brother visits, intent on putting Jin’s affairs in order, but she rejects his help—and has only her children, grandchildren, and the house she made into a home. She wants a simple funeral, a wish that perplexes her neighbors.
Chen does a good job of weaving these various personal enmities into a believable family saga, and maintains enough mystery to keep the viewer intrigued. Qin seems to have a constitutional repulsion to marriage (it’s hinted he might be gay); and Jenny is estranged from her older teenage son, who left school and home to pursue a career as an actor, with the implication that his father is not the same man as the father of Jenny’s younger daughter, Sue. As a leitmotif, the director makes frequent references to the boats required by residents of the village, as if they provided more stability than an actual house. It’s an odd metaphor for a movie that’s so formally stolid and narratively inert.
Thai director Pat Boonnitipat’s How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is, as suggested by its title, a less serious movie about the same subject, though in its own way it really isn’t that different. Opening in a comic mode with various family members kissing up to their widowed matriarch, Grandma Menju (Usha “Taew” Seamkhum), who owns a nice piece of property in the Chinatown section of Bangkok, the story sets up a classic cynical dilemma: Who deserves to inherit her legacy? From the get-go it appears that the least likely benefactor would be her college dropout grandson, M (Putthipong “Billkin” Assaratanakul), whose interest in life starts and ends with his collection of video games. Boonnitipat’s aims are made clear by how he presents the various family members. Everyone, including M’s parents, cousins (one of whom makes a living through Only Fans), uncles, and aunts, present themselves as worthy heirs. Grandma, who is good-natured to a fault, takes it all in stride. M has designs, but he keeps them hidden.
Invariably, the other shoe drops and M tells Grandma that she has cancer, a diagnosis everyone else has kept hidden from her. Impressed by his candor, Grandma takes more interest in M to her other relatives’ chagrin, and M moves in as a full-time caregiver. For a time, M’s mercenary mission seems obvious, especially to the other family members, but as he gets closer to Grandma and learns her story he inadvertently sees what kind of a world exists beyond the computer screen and can’t help but get caught up in it. Consequently, he draws closer to Grandma than either of her own two children, M’s striving mother Sew (Sarinrat “Jear” Thomas) and gambling-addicted Uncle Kiang (Sanya “Duu” Kunakurn).
Boonnitipat uses M’s naivete to show the audience this world, which is not that different from the one conveyed in Gone With the Boat, but the director expresses a much keener enthusiasm for his images and sounds, and the movie makes this corner of the Thai capital, with its rich ethnic heritage and unique history, vivid and fascinating. Though predictably sentimental—it is one of the decade’s highest-grossing films not only in Thailand but throughout Southeast Asia—it’s also rigorously honest about the process of dying slowly. We know M will somehow reap the inheritance his relatives covet, but by actually being present, emotionally as well as physically, he realizes what that legacy is worth and acts conscientiously, not only toward his grandmother, but to everyone else in his family, whether they like it or not.
Gone With the Boat, in Chinese and English, now playing in Tokyo at Grand Cinema Sunshine Ikebukuro (03-6915-2722).
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, in Thai, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Though American in tone, the plot mechanics of this nominally Armenian feature scan Eastern European to a fault. Tragedy is played for laughs, at least at first, while the characters are shamelessly played as broad stereotypes that reinforce the black comic mode. The hero is a classic schlub, and, in fact, is nicknamed Charlie Chaplin by his tormentors as more than just an insult. His name actually is Charlie, and as played by Armenian-American writer-director Michael Goorjian, he’s preternatually naive. It’s 1948, and Stalin has invited all Armenians who escaped the World War I Turkish-led genocide to repatriate in what is now Soviet territory. Charlie, an orphan who was smuggled out of Armenia as a little boy and made it to the U.S., has recently lost his wife and takes Stalin up on his offer, expecting to reclaim his heritage. He arrives with only a smattering of the language and, in the train station, helps a woman retrieve her son who has gotten lost in a crowd of people. The woman happens to be the Armenian wife of a local Russian official, and she asks her husband to help Charlie get a job. Instead, the husband, miffed by this stranger’s grating American attitude, no matter how benign the intent, has him arrested and thrown in prison.
Fooled into signing a confession he can’t read, Charlie is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia but, due to damage caused by a fortuitous earthquake, all prisoners set for transfer are kept on site to repair the walls. Charlie settles into a daily grind of backbreaking work and occasional beatings meted out just for the hell of it. To pass the time, he sits at the window of his cell and spies on the neighbors, a young couple the husband of which is one of the tower guards at the prison and who has a knack for painting that his wife doesn’t seem to appreciate. It’s like a kinder version of Rear Window: Over months and even years, Charlie’s fascination with this couple turns into an obsession, as he loses himself in the drama of their everyday existence, even if he has to make up his own dialogue. The script is just clever enough to paper over the more obvious plot holes and contradictions, and Goorjian knows how to modulate the emotional temperature to keep the viewer interested, but if you’ve seen any Eastern European tragicomedies of this ilk you can predict not only where the story is going, but how it will get there, and the last half hour, while compelling, feels often like a retread of something that was probably better.
The film is saved by its skillful editing and the supporting Armenian and Russian cast, whose caricatures turn out to be deeper than what first impressions might imply, especially in the way they differentiate between the two national outlooks. The old guy who constantly lectures Charlie on the greatness of Armenian culture is a running joke that never flags.
In Armenian, Russian and English. Opens June 13 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).
philipbrasor.com 