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I was finally given the tools I needed to register for online press screenings for the Busan International Film Festival. Obviously, I’m not there in person, but the organizers were kind enough to invite me to “attend” remotely, the benefit of which is that I get to see this year’s selections at home without having to hustle to a ticket booth and wait in line for something that everyone else usually wants to see. The disadvantage, at least this year, is that the online selection is limited, as it usually is in the video room where you can call up those films that don’t fit into your schedule—but only if the distributors or producers deign to make them available. This year, only about half the 200+ films being screened are available online, and most of the major ones, including the this-year-only “Cannes” section, are not on the list. These are films that were supposed to premier at the cancelled 2020 Cannes International Film Festival. Also, many of the big Japanese films, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy, are not available, which is not as big a deal as it seems since many have already opened in Japan or will shortly, but it would have been nice to see them here since I missed the domestic press screenings due to pandemic protocols. I’ve been informed that there was not enough foreign press interest expressed for the Gala films, so we won’t have access to the films or the press conferences save one, the American film Minari. Also, no Hong Sang-soo online, which already feels like a big hole for me; but, then again, I’ve become spoiled watching Hong movies with Korean audiences, who tend to laugh their asses off, so I’m sure it wouldn’t be the same watching The Woman Who Ran on my iMac. 

That still leaves a lot of movies that I can see, though. Choosing which ones might be a chore this time, since I don’t have ready, physical access to fellow press people who can recommend which ones are worth seeing and which ones to avoid. 

But there are a few no-brainers, one of which is Jia Zhangke’s Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, which I just finished watching. This is Jia’s third in a series of documentaries about the arts in China, and while I prefer Jia’s narrative films, the movie was engrossing in ways that the previous two installments weren’t, probably due to the subject matter. The first two films were about visual arts and fashion design, and mostly dealt with professionals who came of age during or after the 1990s. Swimming is about literature, and focuses on four writers who cover the entirety of the communist era. The impetus for the film was a literary festival that Jia attended in his home province of Shanxi. There he met three of China’s most celebrated poets/novelists, as well as the daughter of another, Ma Feng, a controversial figure who was central to the heroic style that the Party insisted on during its early years. 

All these artists are from Shanxi or nearby, and the common theme that runs through their ruminations is that you are nothing without the place that produced you. Even Ma had to return to his roots in order to produce works that people wanted to read. Jia juxtaposes static interviews with illustrative everyday scenes from Shanxi comprising 18 “chapters” that are supposed to “play like a symphony,” a metaphor made somewhat trite by the liberal use of classical music on the soundtrack, especially Shostakovich. Still, the witnesses prove their literary worth with stories that are both entertaining and enlightening about their respective artistic developments. Jia Pingwa explains how his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution, which means he grew up on a reeducation farm. But because he grew up on a reeducation farm he was urged by the authorities to attend university since they wanted more peasants to earn a higher education. There he was exposed to Western art and literature, which helped him hone his craft, even though he had to publish work that was acceptable to the Party. It wasn’t until after he moved back to the countryside that he found his real voice.

The most colorful figure is Yu Hua, who came of age in the late 70s. Though obsessed with literature, he couldn’t pass the university exam and so went to vocational school to become a dentist. Assigned to a hospital in a big city he noticed that people who worked for the Cultural Bureau just walked around town all day. “That’s for me,” he said, and started writing fiction. After years of rejection letters a Beijing publisher finally took him on and he was able to secure a position in the Cultural Bureau, but by then he was a real writer, and, like Jia, moved back to the countryside, where he became a bestselling novelist. The third writer, Liang Hong, did attend university in Beijing, where she majored in literature, but it was her impoverished upbringing and the unusual circumstances of her family life that informed her work, which is personal and tragic (“my family was the village soap opera”). The interview with her 14-year-old son is priceless, as he represents the next generation, and Jia is canny enough to leave any speculation to himself. The son says he wants to be a physicist, but his sly way with words definitely pegs him as his mother’s son.

A very different mother-son combination is explored in Kim Ui-seok’s Empty Body, part of the Korean Cinema Today-Panorama section. The Korean selections are mostly grouped into two categories: Panorama, which are generally movies by established directors, and Vision, which showcases new Korean filmmakers. Empty Body doesn’t come across as either, really. It’s Kim’s second film, following his well-regarded debut, After My Death. Empty Body is obtuse speculative fiction. Moon So-ri plays a rich, seemingly single woman whose 23-year-old son dies in a car wreck and the police can’t determine if it was accidental or deliberate. The mother opts to transplant the son’s brain into a made-to-order android that eventually “deletes” the son’s consciousness. There’s a weird court trial to decide if the android effectively “murdered” its “owner,” and the android repeatedly assures the mother that her son wanted to die and resented that she forced him “back to life.” There’s a lot of existential heavy lifting going on, and the mood is depressingly, relentlessly bleak. Supposedly, the 90-minute film was expanded from a 50-minute TV broadcast, and the padding shows, mostly in the over-use of long takes filled with uncomfortable silences. It doesn’t have a lot going for it in terms of entertainment or thematic originality. It’s essentially high-concept art house cinema that runs off the rails. 

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about universal basic income. As pointed out in the column, Heizo Takenaka, who is counterintuitively promoting a basic income plan for Japan, is one of the country’s staunchest neoliberals, and, in a sense, his ¥70,000 monthly payout for every man, woman, and child in Japan is basically another baramaki (helicopter money) scheme. Baramaki is one of the least imaginative moves in the neoliberal playbook, a quick means of stimulating consumption that, in Japan at least, tends to backfire because people whose income is above a certain lever simply sock the money away, thus effectively removing it from circulation. In his own scheme for fortifying basic services, rival economist Eisaku Ide proposes adjusting various tax rates to pay for these services, essentially by raising corporate taxes and income taxes for higher earners, and boosting the consumption tax, which may be the most controversial part of his plan.

Actually, increasing the consumption tax shouldn’t be that controversial. After all, in Europe, where basic services are more available, sales taxes and VATs hover around the 20 percent range. Ide says if you tax income and corporate profits more reasonably, you could pay for free basic services with a consumption tax rate of “only” 16 percent. But raising the consumption tax any further than it is now is anathema politically. In fact, some of the opposition parties are keen on reducing the consumption tax, and all in the name of countering neoliberalism. Yukio Edano, head of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, has announced that he is, essentially, Japan’s main nemesis of neoliberal dogma, but as de facto leader of the opposition he somehow also has to be the standard bearer for reducing the consumption tax, a stance that Ide finds self-defeating. The opposition holds that the consumption tax is broadly discriminatory toward lower income people, since they have to spend money on essential goods and services and are thus taxed accordingly. But if basic services such as health care, old age pensions, education, and childcare are free, much of that burden is already removed from the backs of the poor, and rich people, who spend more money by definition, will contribute more through the consumption tax. Consequently, tax revenues are more evenly redistributed. In Ide’s eyes, Edano should not be advocating for lower consumption tax, and he knows his stance contradicts his rejection of neoliberalism, but he sees that stance as central to his political survival. Partly, this is the media’s fault, which has never bothered to explain to the public what neoliberalism really means and how the consumption tax works. The real problem with Japan’s so-called welfare system is that welfare is grossly mismanaged. In accordance with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s determination to bolster “self-reliance,” social services will become even more stigmatized. As it is, only 20 percent of people eligible for unemployment benefits apply for them, not because they don’t need them, but because it’s too much trouble and/or they feel guilty about it. The same goes for government assistance, which is given out so grudgingly that some people would seem to rather starve than ask for help. For sure, universal basic income could solve these two problems immediately, but as envisioned by Takenaka, it would also force people to take any job they could in order to cover the basic services they might lose as a result. Ide’s means-based approach only sounds difficult. Compared to what we have now, it would probably be a piece of cake. 

As with most groups referred to as “indigenous,” Japan’s Ainu, who tend to be associated with the northern island of Hokkaido, are greatly misunderstood and mostly marginalized by their non-indigenous fellow citizens. The tricky part of this dynamic is that, more often than not, the indigenous people are relatively ambivalent about being understood, because if being understood means a constant attention that trivializes the cultural aspects of one’s everyday life, then it might be better to just be left alone, but, of course, that tends to be impossible everywhere. In the case of the Ainu, the government of Japan has restricted their activities in such a way that traditional hunting and fishing practices are significantly curtailed, and since those practices are central to their culture, the culture struggles to survive. 

But even if reduced, the culture endures and people adapt the best they can. Filmmaker Takeshi Fukunaga, who is not Ainu, made the bold move to try to tell a story about an adolescent who has grown up in an Ainu community and what that might be like. Unsurprisingly, the boy, named Kanto (Kanto Shimokura), isn’t completely happy with his circumstances, but much of that dissatisfaction has to do with normal teenage angst. His father having recently died, he is being raised by his suddenly single mother, who works at a tourist gift shop in the Ainu enclave of Akan Kotan, a UNESCO World Heritage site that sometimes seems more like a theme park than a village with its own heritage and history. Since the film doesn’t range outside this village very much, there’s little opportunity to sample the kind of discrimination that the Ainu are famously subjected to, but you get the idea that their existence is, at the very least, a curiosity to the rest of Japan. At one point, a tourist marvels that Kanto’s mother  actually speaks Japanese.

Kanto himself seems to find more fulfillment playing Western rock’n’roll in his middle school combo than he does learning about his own heritage and traditions, and the stifling situation of always being reminded that one belongs to a “tribe” becomes too much. He tells his school counselor he wants to get out as soon as possible, another common reaction to small town living that you’ll find among adolescents the world over, but one Fukunaga presents with special poignance; and for a while during this economical film, you get the feeeling that the director’s purpose is to say, “Look, growing up in an indigenous culture is really no different,” though he knows enough to make what is different bittersweet in the grander scheme of things.

But matters change when Kanto is mentored by a man named Debo (Debo Akibe), who comes across as a middle aged hippie in that he is fully invested in Ainu lore and culture—i.e., a friend of the earth before being a friend of man. At first, Debo is the father figure Kanto desires, but as he learns more intimately about his heritage and what it actually means, he starts to grow up, at least mentally. The connection to Ainu culture gives him his first experience with a living philosophy, one that connects his life not only with the world around him, but with those who came before him. His trust is rewarded with a task, which is to take care of a bear cub that Debo is raising for a specific reason. However, when Kanto finds out what the reason is, he is thrust back into doubt, and having had a taste of belonging to something larger than himself, he struggles with the seeming contradictions.

Though I’m not completely sure I buy the equivocation implicit in Kanto’s moral dilemma, Fukunaga handles it with a clear understanding of its dramatic imperative. Those of us who live outside the Ainu community cannot rightly judge this dilemma, but we can see what it means to those who do live inside at this particular moment in time. It’s no small accomplishment. 

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

Ainu Mosir home page in Japanese

photo (c) Ainu Mosir LLC/Booster Project

Though I haven’t read Cho Nam-joo’s international bestseller, Kim Do-young’s film adaptation of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 apparently differs in several significant ways. For one thing, much of the novel is presented as a case study of a patient, and the psychiatrist writing the study and treating the patient is a man. Here, the therapist is a woman, and she doesn’t figure that much into the story, at least in terms of screen time. I’m assuming that the director, who is a woman, decided that the audience would be more comfortable with a woman treating another woman, since the psychological problem at hand springs from a sense of desperation born of the patient’s status as a woman in Korean society. Kim Ji-young (Jung Yu-mi) is a full-time mother/homemaker when she is introduced in the movie, standing in a park with her 2-year-old daughter eavesdropping on a conversation among a group of office workers on their lunch break complaining about “roaches,” a derisive term for stay-at-home moms who have lots of free time and disposable money to lay around. It sets Ji-young’s neuroses off, since she did have a full-time job and career goals but circumstances eventually conspired to place her in her current situation, which is causing her confusion and frustration. 

Ji-young’s husband, Dae-hyon (Gong Yoo), is not a sexist creep. He’s fully supportive of his wife and despairs that he may not be doing enough to help her around the house and raise their child. But it’s difficult for him to break out of his self-image as a breadwinner and head-of-household, since it’s one that was constantly instilled in him growing up. He is the one who first notices that Ji-young occasionally falls into dissociative episodes where she suddenly becomes someone else (usually from her past), and he tries to get her to see a therapist. At one point he breaks down in front of her, feeling guilty that he may have been the cause of his wife’s problems, and says he will do more to “help” her. She looks at him and asks why he thinks he needs to “help” her? This is his home, too. That toddler is his daughter, too. They are in this together.

Ji-young’s problem is easy to diagnose. She belonged to the first generation of South Korean women who entered university and later the work force ostensibly on an equal footing with men. Unfortunately, the social environment didn’t keep up with this progressive ideal. The story contrasts Ji-young’s situation with that of her mother (Kim Me-kyung), who gave up her own dream of becoming a school teacher because she had to work full-time as a teenager in order to make money to help her two older brothers go to college. When Ji-young gets a job with a prestigious ad agency after graduating, her mother cheers the loudest. But when Ji-young marries she becomes the daughter-in-law to a woman with more conventional views of family like. Initially, Ji-young and Dae-hyon decide not to have children, but pressure from their parents eventually turns that around, and once the baby is born Ji-young finds that the pressure to conform only gets stronger. She’s the victim of countless micro-aggressions from everyone around her to put her child above her career, and after trying to balance the two she quits her job.

But while the story hits all the proper notes (sexual harassment, pay gap, male defensiveness) with great care and thoughtfulness, the movie itself never fully commits to the darkness in Ji-young’s soul, which, again, seems to have been one of the reasons for the novel being such a powerful indictment of Korean (and, by extension, world) society. The scenes are like a parade of passive-aggressive demonstrations occasionally punctuated by rays of sunshine so as not to get too bleak and hopeless. And I wonder if Ji-young’s eventual turn to writing herself, first as a form of self-therapy and then as a financial gambit, was in the novel. From what I understand, Cho wrote the book in a period of several weeks out of a sense of frustration, so it makes a certain amount of sense, but as it’s presented it seems more like a convenient way to tie up loose plot ends. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Lotte Entertainment

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the media’s role in helping Yoshihide Suga attain the premiership. As implied in the column, the press didn’t actively boost Suga but rather stood aside and just let the Liberal Democratic Party propaganda machine do its thing. Their laissez faire attitude sprung from both familiarity with Suga and a feeling of intimidation cultivated over his long stint as Shinzo Abe’s spokesperson, and from all indications that style of spin will continue unchanged during Suga’s own term as prime minister. What will be interesting—not to mention frustrating—is Suga’s penchant for reticence, which he developed quickly as chief cabinet secretary. When he first assumed the post he reportedly was more sincere in trying to answer reporters’ questions, but then found he wasn’t cut out for the kind of spontaneous expansiveness that is necessary for a public figure who is asked to explain policy and other niceties of government. As with many Japanese politicians (and journalists, for that matter), he is lost without a script, and soon succumbed to this reality by becoming tight-lipped and pugnacious. During a discussion of the matter on the web program Democracy Times, several reporters related Suga’s favorite two rejoinders during press conferences: “I don’t have to answer your question” and “I already talked about that.” Since these interactions mostly took place out of the public’s sight, they didn’t cause problems and Suga got away with them. It remains to be seen if he can maintain such behavior out in the open as prime minister.

It seems as if he at least is going to try. He avoided debating Shigeru Ishiba, a skilled talker, during the campaign for LDP president because he knew he would look bad in comparison. Reportedly, NHK was quite angry when he pulled out of a TV debate at the last minute, saying that he had to be on standby because of an approaching typhoon. Reporters invariably describe him as even more authoritarian than Abe is, a function of his discomfort with delegating responsibilities. He doesn’t have much of an imagination and has trouble thinking of the big picture in terms of policy, but once the party reaches some kind of conclusion about a matter he knows exactly how to make things work in their favor. That’s why he’s cultivated the media so diligently over the past 8 years and why he’s so shameless in bending the bureaucracy to his will. (He’s set up a system in which he can unilaterally have a civil servant transferred out of a powerful post if he does something to displease Suga) Shigeaki Koga, the former METI official who is now a full-time government critic, has said that it was Suga who got him let go from his regular pundit position at TV Asahi’s “Hodo Station.” Supposedly, he also was instrumental in getting Hiroko Kuniya, the long-time host of NHK’s popular news show “Closeup Gendai,” removed after she asked him questions on air that he wasn’t prepared for. That, of course, is the thing that Suga hates the most, and he will continue avoiding any confrontations that require him to speak off the top of his head. That may sound difficult to pull off, but Abe successfully created an environment where the prime minister was shielded from potentially embarrassing encounters, unlike Junichiro Koizumi who, as prime minister, was happy to chat with reporters and show off his limited but nevertheless pointed erudition. Now that Suga has both the bureaucracy and the media in his pocket, he knows he doesn’t have to answer directly to anyone, which is why he was so bold in his rejection of those 6 scholars who were nominated to the Science Council of Japan because they opposed certain government policies in the past. It’s also why he can appoint a journalist who has been critical of the administration to his inner circle. Keep your friends close but your (potential) enemies even closer. 

The true story of photographer Masashi Asada and his Mie Prefecture family, who were and presumably still are the main subject of his award-winning pictures, provides such a smooth dramatic arc for a movie that early on you begin to wonder how much was elided. As played by Kazunari Ninomiya, Asada is an amiable iconoclast, someone who is passionate about his art but not particularly intent on the work involved. His success is more or less accidental since he doesn’t actively apply himself to getting his photographs out there, and the viewer develops the feeling that he relies on his family for subject matter simply because it’s easier. Director Ryota Nakano depicts Masashi’s progress as a creative soul with the kind of comic aloofness you’d expect from someone like Robert Zemeckis, if we were to use a Hollywood cognate. If that seems like a cheap reductionist rhetorical gambit, it’s important to note that the aforementioned dramatic arc was something that Hollywood perfected in its heyday, if not outright invented. 

So Masashi’s mildly antisocial bona fides are conveyed by his tattoos and, reactively, by his brother Yukihiro’s (Satoshi Tsumabuki) relentlessly disapproving comments. Yukihiro is the killjoy, the scold who walks the straight and narrow and had little confidence in Masashi’s ability to make a living from his art. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love him. His parents (Jun Fubuki, Mitsuru Hirata), on the other hand, couldn’t care less about his putaro attitude, and love getting dressed up as gangsters and firefighters and sick people for his staged tableaux. Predictably, publishers of photo books — a rarefied but seemingly active subsection of the Tokyo publishing business — aren’t interested in “family photos” and it falls to an equally iconoclastic small press to finally bring out his book, which is simply called “Asadake” (The Asada Family). It sells next to nothing, but it does win a prestigious award, so you could say that Masashi is on his way, even if he relies on his girlfriend, Wakana (Haru Kuroki), for financial support.

But if his book isn’t exactly flying off shelves, it does give him a certain rep, and he starts a niche business taking photographs of other families at their request. This activity takes him all over Japan and eventually to Fukushima, where he makes friends. When the quake and tsunami strike, he rushes back to see how he can help, and eventually gets caught up in a project to reunite families with the photos and albums they lost in the flood.

The completion of Masashi’s journey not only as a photographer but also as a character worthy of cinematic recognition is so airtight that the movie as a whole is stifling. While there are a few well-staged scenes in Fukushima involving victims and loss that are emotionally affecting, overall the story feels as safe as milk. It’s an extremely comforting two hours in that you never once sense that, as a viewer, you will be confronted with anything that could be described as disturbing. Families are wonderful things, of course, but they make better movie subjects when there’s a bit of friction. 

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

The Asadas home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 “Asadake”Seisaku Iinkai