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It’s been said by wiser cinema-heads than I that the romcom is dead, killed off by a post-modern critical attitude that doesn’t appreciate the irony that once made the genre appealing. My own take is that the classic trappings of romantic comedies—middle class, middle-brow aesthetics tied to a belief in the transcendant values of monogamous heterosexual love—no longer apply in a world where constant connectivity breeds cynicism toward human relationships. And I’d say that was a shame if I believed in middle class, middle-brow aesthetics in the first place, but the romcoms I’ve always liked—Preston Sturges’ work, Shampoo come to mind—are already cynical, so maybe I was never the target. At the moment, Korean cinema and TV series are thriving on romcom stories, and for the most part they blend the kind of snark I appreciate with the wettest sentimentality you could possibly stand, an often toxic combination that nevertheless keeps you awake to the possibilities of a particular story.

Love Reset is what used to be called high concept, meaning it was pitched for its gimmick—married couple about to get divorced are in an accident that leaves them with amnesia and thus open to the possibility of falling in love all over again—and, as is often the case with any Korean romcom, the story is so unwieldy and imprecise that there’s bound to be something there you like, if only for a minute or two. The introduction is promising: Perpetual law student Jeong-yeol (Kan Ha-neul) is drinking himself into a stupor because the love of his life, Na-ra (Jung So-min), is getting married to somebody else. Though the two have dated for some time, Na-ra, from a well-to-do family, doesn’t think Jeong-yeol, who is going for his fourth or fifth run at the bar exam, is ever going to amount to much, but at the altar she has a Graduate moment and bolts the ceremony, arriving at the bar where Jeong-yeol is blotto to declare her intentions. From here, the movie veers widely away from the path a Western romcom would take, with Na-ra’s family, understanding there’s no point in fighting it, offers to support Jeong-yeol while he studies again for the test, a development that makes Na-ra question her own future with him, and after they marry she finds she can’t stand his spendthrift ways (he’s determined to pay back his in-laws) and purity of purpose. She goes the opposite way by drinking constantly and leaving a mess wherever she goes, and her freelance movie production work suffers for it.

What’s promising about the setup is that after the two lose their memories their families and friends reverse course and endeavor to make sure they don’t get back together again, thus creating a tension between the different intentions at play. A lot of the comedy is self-referential (“this is like something out of a movie”) and the scatological humor might be a bit too ripe for some tastes, but as a sour look at the state of matrimony in Korea and the class pressures that work to its disadvantage it’s often amusing in a broad, slapstick way. In any case, I can’t see how anyone would want to marry either of these clowns.

In Korean. Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-675-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Love Reset home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cinema Woollim, TH Story and Mindmark

As long as everyone is talking about Christopher Nolan, let’s look back at Memento, still my favorite movie by him because it’s such pure cinema, and not just in terms of what you see on the screen. The story is utterly cinematic as it deals with linearity in a way that wouldn’t make sense in any other medium, including the written word. After all, it’s about a guy who can’t remember more than a few minutes into the past and thus has to record and edit experience and save it for later reference. What makes Memento unique is that this looping of time moves backward. Shinji Araki’s similarly schematic Penalty Loop is more conventional, in that the repetitive time loops have a forward momentum, as they do in Groundhog Day. Araki’s protagonist, Jun (Ryuya Wakaba), keeps reliving the same day but changes up the key experience of that day with each successive repeat. If it’s closer in feeling to Nolan’s movie that’s because it’s about revenge, though with Penalty Loop the viewer has to decide in the end if the event that prompted the retribution actually happened.

Also like Groundhog the tone is essentially irreverent. Jun wakes up one day and goes to work where he kills a colleague named Mizoguchi (Yusuke Iseya), who he believes drowned his girlfriend. After disposing of the body and thinking he’s gotten away with the crime he returns home, only to wake up and discover it’s the same day and Mizoguchi is still alive—so he does it again. This scenario replays every time he wakes up, with Jun changing the m.o. in order to achieve closure, but the same day dawns and he has to take an entirely new tack. Eventually, like Bill Murray in Groundhog, he gets to the point where he realizes nothing he does will change matters and becomes almost casual in his approach to homicide. Moreover, his victim comes to expect the violence and even encourages it, adding a layer of comic absurdity that Araki doesn’t always know how to handle. 

Loop movies have a built-in hazard, which is that repetition can quickly become…well, repetitious. Araki keeps the action fresh, but the other shoe has to drop at some point, and while the rationale behind Jun’s seeming predicament is clever, Araki seems reluctant to spell it out in terms that would trace a clear through-line from Jun’s girlfriend’s death to Jun’s murderous intent, a process that, along the way, has been affected by technology and commercial protocols. Though not particularly deep, Penalty Loop is one of those movies that encourages post-viewing discussions to help the viewer reach some understanding of what it’s supposed to mean (spoiler: the flyer provides a strong clue), so I would suggest that you see it with someone who likes to talk about movies.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa (03-3986-3713).

Penalty Loop home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Penalty Loop Film Partners

Originally released in 1999, Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary was another in the directors’ explorations of gay history and themes, with The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), The Celluloid Closet (1995), and the Oscar-winning Common Threads (1989) being their best known works. The title, Paragraph 175, refers to the German penal code that forbade homosexuality, though as the script, soberly narrated by Rupert Everett, points out, the law almost exclusively targeted gay men, as they tended to represent everything the Nazi sensibility seemed to abhor by “depriving Germany of the children they need.” (Lesbians were considered “curable” in that they were capable of giving birth.) 

As someone whose adolescent eyes were opened to the wider possibilities of sexual freedom by Cabaret, I found it fascinating to learn how vibrant the gay community was in Berlin between the wars. “So much joy!” as one witness remembers it. For the most part, the gay denizens of Berlin waved off anti-sodomy laws and the authorities tolerated their free spirits. There was a campaign to abolish paragraph 175 that seemed destined to succeed until the 30s rolled around and Hitler took over. Aryan purity became the thing. Abstinence was a virtue, and the new order looked askance at trendy youth movements that advocated for nudism (“nature and friendship”) and Zionism. Ironically, one of Hitler’s right-hand men was a well-known homosexual who actually organized the Storm Troopers. Hitler ignored his sexual predilection while he was useful and then arrested him when that usefulness ended, and he was put to death. The regime destroyed one of the most advanced research centers for sexual studies after the Reichstag fire and then the SS targeted every gay meeting place in the country, rounding up all the men they found and sending them off to the newly established archipelago of concentration camps. Because homosexuals weren’t always labeled as such, statistics were difficult to nail down, but it’s estimated that 100,000 were arrested and up to 15,000 were locked up in camps, where many perished. 

The story is mostly explicated by the dozen survivors that the directors located. Almost all are men who don’t necessarily trust their interlocutors. “You have to see this romantically,” one insists, and goes on to describe how the terrors of Nazism and the war in general brought these men (and boys—the movie isn’t squeamish about the love between minors and adult men) together. “We had sex on the train,” another says forcefully when the interviewer fails to get his drift. A French nonagenarian reveals he still can’t talk to anyone with a German background. The archival footage is extensive and remarkably evocative, but it’s the descriptions that carry the film. One man recalls the “singing forest” where Nazis captured gay men and tied them to trees, torturing them to death. Another admits to enlisting in the German Army because that’s where all the men were. Many survived the war only to end up in prison for violating paragraph 175, which wasn’t rescinded until 1969. (For a more dramatic recreation of that postwar milieu, see the Austrian film, Great Freedom.) There is even one woman who tells the heartbreaking story of receiving a precious travel permit to England from her lover, a woman who “looked like Marlene Dietrich.” Though the witnesses are probably dead by now, this topic can never be exhausted. 

In English, German and French. Now playing in Tokyo until March 29 at Shinjuku K’s Cinema.

Paragraph 175 home page in Japanese

As James Brown would always say to his audience at a show, “Give the drummer some,” and this documentary attempts to do just that, though its range of appreciation is fairly narrow. For one thing, none of JB’s drummers, who practically invented modern funk, are even mentioned in the film. In fact, the only Black drummers cited are jazz innovators like Art Blakey and Max Roach, which means no Clyde Stubblefield, no Benny Benjamin, no Bernard Purdie (and his seminal “Purdie shuffle”), no Questlove. Props to the producers for highlighting currently active female drummers like Jess Bowen and Cindy Blackman, but even in those cases the focus is on rock, and rock of a certain type. This focus makes sense when you check out the provenance of the film, which is the UK. Though lots of famous drummers are interviewed and each offers insight into the profession and musical interpretation in general, the core through-line is the history of rock drumming from Ringo to Watts to Baker to Moon to Bonham. Except for a few detours by way of people like the Clash’s Topper Headon, who ably describes punk’s reduction of everything to rhythm, it’s mostly the 1960s British male rock drummer who is considered the template for an entire industry.

A lot of lip service is given to gear, which isn’t to imply that the producers have something to sell, but rather that in the movie’s chosen context drummers are more associated with their instruments and their technical skills than with their inventiveness and, dare I say, soul. Even more lip service is lent to concepts like groove and swing, but it’s Bonham who epitomizes the film’s purview since, as more than one drum-head here comments, he was the master of “power and speed.” At one point, when the history lesson veers into new wave and post-punk, Stewart Copeland, probably the most articulate practitioner on display, avers that pop and rock drumming “became more African,” though the movie doesn’t really take that cue to the next logical level (or, for that matter, the previous logical level). Instead, it goes into the realm of drum machines, a technology that the film suggests set drumming as a vocation back ten years; that is, until Dave Grohl recaptured the mojo with his monk-like mindset about always being in the hard rock zone with Nirvana, which looked particularly dynamic on MTV. 

The most derided cliche in classic rock is the 10-minute drum solo, which the people who put together Count Me In probably think of as the ultimate test of skill and showmanship. To those of us who dig songs over everything else, long rock drum solos are a distraction that only make sense when you’re in a large venue and high on drugs, an insight the movie overlooks in favor of other cliches, like driving your parents and neighbors crazy after you get your first kit for Christmas and later achieving success through “conviction and hard work,” which in the end make it a typically didactic American documentary.

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Count Me In home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Split Prism Media Ltd. 

Lee Sol-hui’s impressive debut feature is formally characterized by ellipses. Though initially presented as a psychological drama about the fragile bonds of family, Lee’s concerted habit of leaving out crucial plot information has the effect of turning the story into a thriller, and while this device in the end gets away from the director, the movie does accumulate a potent mood of comic dread. In fact, it might have been more effective had Lee played up those elements that come across as cosmic jokes and made them into real jokes, but I imagine she thought of the story from the beginning as a thriller, with every decision turning on the notion of intensifying the creep factor.

The overarching joke may be the best: Life has dealt our protagonist, Moon-jung (Kim Seo-hyung), a truly miserable hand. Kim is squatting alone in an agricultural greenhouse until she can get enough money together to rent an apartment for her and her teenage son, who is about to be released from a juvenile detention center where he is confined for an unnamed offense. The boy, Jung-woo (Kim Geon), initially seems ambivalent about living with his mother, who suffers from occasional emotional flare-ups that manifest as self-harming behavior. Unable to afford the one-on-one psychiatric care she needs, she joins a free therapy group for similarly afflicted people whose weirdly upbeat leader treats each meeting as if it were a personal accomplishment, and against her better judgement Moon-jung befriends another member, a young deluded woman named Soon-nam (Ahn So-yo), who turns out to be a bit too clingy and is in an abusive relationship with her former doctor. In order to earn money to rent an apartment, Moon-jung works as a caregiver for an elderly, well-off couple—near-blind Tae-kang (Yang Jae-sung) and his senile and paranoid wife Hwa-ok (Shin Yun-sook). Moon-jung becomes a kind of daughter to Tae-kang, who, understanding that he’s entered the early stages of Alzheimer’s, offers to help her with the money needed for the deposit on the apartment. As it stands, his own son, Kyu-sang (Seo Hong-seok), seems indifferent to his worsening condition and Moon-jung’s mother, Choon-hwa (Won Mi-won), is herself confined to a facility for people with severe cognitive dysfunction. 

The movie’s strong suit is how it supplies credible emotional connections among these various disparate characters, but, as already pointed out, Lee doesn’t give the viewer much basic background on the actual physical connections among them, which means situations play out in ways that require us to draw our own conclusions about how those connections came about without much in the way of clues. As Moon-jung’s plans fall apart and she exacerbates her problems with a subterfuge that is too laughably foolish to take seriously—not a cosmic joke, but one she inadvertently plays on herself—the viewer has to trust to inertia to get to the shocking climax in one piece. It’s still an impressive feat, because at any given moment the movie’s train of thought seems as if it’s about to run off the rails, and I suppose in the end it does, but by then the big crash is Moon-jung’s already volatile state of mind. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Greenhouse home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Korean Film Council