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I’m sitting in Gimhae Airport now waiting for my flight, which is very early, meaning I’ll get home before lunch. As I think I mentioned last year (the year before?), several years ago the festival stopped providing transportation between the airport and the Haeundae resort area, where they put people up, and it’s been a blessing in disguise, because although I have to pay my own way now, I take the subway, which is much more relaxing and reliable than the limousine bus they put me on. Invariably the bus always gets stuck in Busan’s nearly 24-hour traffic, thus adding an extra layer of stress that I don’t need. I know exactly how long it takes for the train to get to where I need to go. 

Another blessing in disguise was the fact that Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) is screening after I leave the festival. I surely would have felt obliged to see it, since I think he’s one of the best documentary filmmakers working today, but this year he has two at BIFF and, as you probably know, they’re invariably marathons. Today I sat through the second part of his supposed trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), which is 3 hours and 45 minutes, and while I enjoyed it, I don’t know if I could sit through another one like it, though Homecoming is considerably shorter. I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the trilogy, Youth (Spring), when I saw it at BIFF, mainly because it was so action-packed. Hard Times deals with the same textile factories in Zhili, China, but has more of a focus on the difficulties the workers encounter with their employers, and as such is less interested in only young people. Though the majority of these migrant workers are under 25, there are still quite a few people as old as 41 (Wang introduces each worker as he goes along with the person’s name, home province, and age), so it isn’t chiefly occupied with “youth” the way the first movie was. He also has a tighter hold on “stories” he picks up since they have built-in drama: a somewhat irresponsible kid loses his paybook, which gives his boss an excuse to withhold pay, an action that leads to some offscreen violence and the kid landing in the local jail; an employer who, faced with his own police inquiry after beating up an unpaid supplier who’s demanding his money, skips town without paying his workers, prompting said workers to commandeer the rented factory space and selling off all the equipment to make up for their lost wages; and a protracted negotiation between management and a bunch of workers who think the per-piece rate their getting is a ripoff. I only dozed off once, which is saying something.

From my perch, the buzz movie of the festival this year (outside of the streaming series previews, which were the biggest attraction among press people) has been The Height of the Coconut Trees, a Japanese film directed by the busy Chinese cinematographer Du Jie. Various reports explain that Du and his family settled in Yokohama in 2020 when they couldn’t return to China because of the pandemic. Looking to make the kind of personal film he probably wouldn’t have been able to make in China, he adapted his writing to Japanese characters, settings, and situations. The overall movie isn’t that coherent (a friend informed me that in its earlier incarnations it was even more incoherent) but it does make sense as a film, and is beautifully shot and scored. It’s mostly about two young couples whose relationships founder for entirely different reasons, and contemplates suicide in a very sedate manner. There’s some gorgeous imagery and intriguing use of nonlinear plot development, though in one crucial scene Du relies too much on monologues to explain things that don’t need that much explanation. His vagueness is actually his strength.

The high point of my Saturday at the festival was interviewing Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar, the directors of the Competition Documentary entry, A Fly on the Wall, which is about a friend of theirs, Chika Kapadia, who, after being diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer and given less than two months to live, decided to undergo assisted suicide in Switzerland and invited the filmmakers to record his last days, including his death. The movie has a certain rough appeal in that the two directors, who had never made a documentary before, knew they couldn’t plan what would happen, though they tried their best to at least be prepared for anything. The difficulties started from the get-go. Bose has dual citizenship, India and US, while Maniyar has only Indian citizenship, and Switzerland requires Indian nationals to apply for a visa, which took time that Kapadia didn’t have, so while Bose stayed with Kapadia for the rest of his days and is the co-center of the film, Maniyar stayed behind in India and directed remotely, sifting through the recordings Bose made on her iPhone. Several times during this recording, Kapadia almost called it off for one reason or another—family objections, his own doubts as to the ethics of the project (he took seriously one commenter on his blog accusing him of being “elitist and judgmental”). But while he and Bose talk at great length about the right to end one’s own life, a view that offends many people, the overall documentary is less an issue film than one about an extraordinary individual who, in line with his outlook on life, was very determined in his choice of how and when to die. Kapadia was trained as an electrical engineer, which made him semi-wealthy, and then threw it all away to become a standup comedian, and later, being a dedicated diver, abandoned that line of work to move to Bali and become a professional scuba diver. While such a person’s dedication and ambition is certainly admirable, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that such a person can also be arrogant, and much of the drama in the film is derived from his attitude and how it clashed with Bose, who was trying at once to satisfy his wishes and make a film that had meaning, because it wasn’t as if she’d have any chances of doing retakes. After I return from Busan, I will transcribe the interview and post it on this blog. It was a remarkable conversation.

The other films I saw yesterday were less impressive, but I don’t know if that was a matter of contrast. Certainly, I was disappointed with Jia Zhang-ke’s newest film, Caught by the Tides, which I had been looking forward to probably the most. Made during the pandemic, the movie is a clever collage of used and unused footage from previous features, as well as new footage that could be shot under rather strict circumstances. The result is a film that attempts to review the last 20-odd years of Chinese economic development through Jia’s jaundiced eye and structure it as a kind of romantic tragedy. Zhao Tao plays a dancer-entertainer in Datong in 2001, the same character she played in Unknown Pleasures, whose boyfriend, a ne’er-do-well played by Li Zhubin, decides to leave town and try to take advantage of the coming economic boom. Eventually, Zhao goes looking for him, taking her to various places that Jia covered in his intervening body of work. The film’s structure is necessarily loose and free-form, moving from documentary realism to semi-staged dramatic tableaux and slightly stylized musical numbers (the music, I will have to say, is impressively used). And while Jia succeeded in what he set out to do, the film didn’t move me, probably because the connecting plot never felt organic enough to pull me in. In the end, when Li just returns to Datong because he’s tired and disabled by a stroke, it feels anticlimactic. 

The assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979 has received a lot of cinematic attention in South Korea recently, as if some kind of floodgates were opened. Several years ago there was The Man Who Stood Next, which thoroughly probed the background of the killing, and last year there was the box office hit 12.12 The Day, which is also being screened at this year’s festival. A third film, Land of Happiness, opened two months ago in Korea and mainly focuses on the court martial of one army office who participated in the assassination. Curiously, it’s being shown at the festival as part of a Special Program dedicated to the films of actor Lee Sun-kyun, who committed suicide last year. It was Lee’s last film, and while he does play the soldier in question, he’s not the star, which is Cho Jung-seok, the actor who plays his lawyer. It’s quite a workout, in fact, and given Lee’s typically sullen acting demeanor, it surely overshadows the late actor’s performance. As for the film, it’s well made and jerks sufficient tears, but it seems the story has been over-fictionalized just for that purpose. More interesting is the casting of Yoo Jae-myung as General Chun Do-hwan, the man who led the post-assassination coup that is the story of 12.12, and as in 12.12 the producers decided to change his name, though everybody knows who he’s supposed to be. In that movie he was played by Hwang Jung-min as a mad villain, whereas Yoo sees him as a slick mafia figure whose evil is more sedate and cunning. It’s quite a contrast, and only proves how much the Korean film industry is willing to manipulate history in accordance with its aims. 

Evil of very different stripe is manifest in Black Box Diaries, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito’s documentary about the legal and psychological ordeal that followed her 2015 rape by veteran journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi. Ito decided to direct the documentary herself, and while I’m not sure that was the best idea, she keeps the various facts and lines of development clear and incisive. Though most of the movie is in Japanese, the narration and titles are all in English, thus reflecting the fact that the producers are American and that it isn’t entirely certain the movie will have a Japanese audience. I spoke to the producer on Wednesday and he said that it would likely open in Japan in December, though Ito also told me there’s no guarantee yet, as if she’ll believe it when she sees it. The heart of the dramatic element is the police decision to not carry out the arrest warrant for Yamaguchi at the last minute, and the anonymous investigator who was in charge of the case tells Ito plainly that it was due to “pressure from above,” most likely Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose hagiography, which Yamaguchi wrote, was scheduled to be published the same week as the arrest was to take place. Ito had no choice but to pursue a civil suit against Yamaguchi, which she eventually won, but it wasn’t easy, and she does an admirable job of explaining the nuts and bolts of her team’s legal strategy. 

The Hindi title translates as something like “lost” ladies, though technically speaking the two females in question are misplaced by dint of negligence, a notion that makes this otherwise strained comedy interesting in terms of what it has to say about the status of women and the institution of matrimony in India. Though the plot device of two brides being switched out accidentally has a certain Restoration comedy feel to it, here it manages to make sense within the context of traditional arranged marriages, which still holds sway in certain parts of India. The fact that the story takes place in 2001 lends more creedence to a plot that some will find absurd, but it probably had more to do with the available technology, since early model cell phones and the absence of widespread internet figure into the workings of the story. In a nutshell, two brides from different weddings get on the same train to travel to their respective husbands’ home towns. They are both veiled in very similar outfits (as are quite a few other women on the train—it’s apparently the auspicious season for weddings), the train is crowded, and the journey long, so when one of the husbands yanks his wife off the train to get off at their stop, he pulls the wrong hand. His real bride continues on, unaccompanied, until the end of the line.

Once the husband, Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava), discovers his mistake, it becomes imperative to find what happened to his real bride, Phool (Nitanshi Goel), who, it turns out, is in a distant village on her own. More to the point, Jaya (Pratubha Ranta), the woman Deepak pulled off the train, provokes suspicion in the village, especially that of the conniving police chief (Ravi Kishan), who wonders why she doesn’t seem all that much bothered by her predicament. Is she the “bandit bride” who’s been swindling innocent men on a crime spree? Given that this is an Indian production and is clearly aimed at a general audience, director Kiran Rao allows the various storylines plenty of time to develop, so as Phool is adopted by the impoverished demimonde of the town she finds herself in, and thus comes to understand the true value of friendship, Jaya insinuates herself into the life of Deepak’s village where her academic knowledge of agriculture is utilized to help save the local rice crop. Meanwhile, the police chief endeavors to get to the bottom of Jaya’s providence in order to extract some sort of monetary gain. 

Though the twists and turns are predictable and the comedy uneven, the feminist undercurrents are effective given the current situation in India. Phool learns about being self-reliant while Jaya’s situation (spoiler!) is such that she is perfectly justified in trying to escape her marital fate, since the man she is betrothed to is a widower whose first wife met a horrible end. And because the better jokes revolve around traditional gender-based beliefs, especially with regard to things like face coverings, the value of “girls’ education,” and whether a wife has to obey a husband who doesn’t have her best interests at heart, the movie maintains its ability to surprise until the end. 

In Hindi. Opens Oct. 4 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Laapataa Ladies home page in Japanese

photo (c) Aamir Khan Films LLP 2024