Asia's New Cinematic Values
There couldn't have been a more promising year for the Hong Kong Film Festival. Cinema is in full bloom throughout Asia. Post-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese films are probably the world's hottest—and Hong Kong is Chinese cinema's incandescent crucible. The good news is that the festival was a smorgasbord of experimental work from China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and the Philippines, much of it shot in video format, with an ultra-tight focus on youth and their contradictory (and sometimes tragic) need to belong in society and simultaneously forge individual identities. The unhappy news is that an overwhelming number of the films were more trial than triumph, explorations of anxiety, guilt and alienation that inspired in the viewer alienation and a recurring anxiety that something has gone terribly wrong with the direction of Asian cinema.
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Chinese director Zhang Ming's Weekend Plot was typical. Five friends from Beijing hang out in swimsuits on the Yangtze for about 45 minutes doing nothing. And then for the second half of the film, they do the same. Not a syllable of wit, a whisper of titillation. Jeong Jae Eun's Take Care of My Cat was similarly somnambulant in its treatment of the impending womanhood of five teenaged Koreans. Actress Bae Doo Na, who so lit up last year's Barking Dogs Never Bite, wastes her talent in this cinematic Sargasso Sea that sloshes but never gets roiling as the director seems content to let the camera whirr as his girls do, well, nothing.
Over the past five years, Asian filmmakers have become cinematic darlings in the West, and now too many of them seem to want to highlight their Asian-ness rather than the character development, coherent narrative and compelling dialogue that make for great movies. The pictures crawl and the stories sag under the weight of ponderous orientalism and languorous panoramas reminding us we are in Asia—you know, the land of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But filmmakers like Zhu Wen and Jeong would do well to remember that just because a film is Chinese or Korean, this doesn't automatically make it interesting.
If any nation almost saved the festival it was Japan, which comes as a pleasant surprise: the supine performance of the Japanese film industry during much of the past decade was one of the big factors driving China's recent ascendance. Japan's directors took dead aim at real-life subject matter, not shying away from the darker parts of society and keeping clear of any self-conscious Japan-o-philia. In a country where school bullying, teenage prostitution and youth crime increasingly make headlines, Japan's directors and writers certainly have stories to tell. (Not to mention a large captive audience: one thing disaffected teens still manage to do is go to the movies.) But they've also got a style that is frenetic, and ultimately commercial.
Three filmmakers suggest that Japan's rising sun is about to climb a little higher. Shunji Iwai has got pop-culture sensibility down pat and, in All About Lily Chou-Chou, his lens finds the gritty underside of young Japan. Yuichi, (Ichihara Hayato) a shy teen, is bullied by schoolmate Hoshino, (Oshinara Shugo). Among other trials, he is forced to masturbate in front of five other boys. For solace, Yuichi listens to pop idol Lily Chou-Chou and constructs his own identity in an online chat room devoted to her. Yuichi befriends a pianist named Yoko (Ayumi Ito) and she becomes his real-life Lily. But at bully Hoshino's command, Yoko is raped by a gang of the boys. She strips herself of femininity by shaving her head and wearing a coarse tweed cap to school, and Yuichi invests himself ever more deeply in the Lily website. "Like an endless loop I keep on falling. I hate everyone, but I like it here," he writes. "It's a place to belong."
Toyoda Toshiaki's Blue Spring also takes on adolescence through an all-boys school. Though dressed up as celluloid eye candy, the film is seethingly bitter at its core. The setting is a young-yakuza breeding ground where everybody wants to join someone else's gang or start his own. Boys kill each other at school. Authority is a distant rumor. The boys' only respite comes through playing a heart-stopping variant on the game of chicken: they stand at ledges 30 meters above the concrete and see how many times they can clap their hands before grabbing at the railings to keep from falling.
As in Lily, Toshiaki's world is a soul-less wasteland in which hero worship is the only way out. The icon in Blue Spring comes in the form of Kujo (Matsuda Ryuhei), the cool, aloof, recluse of the school. If you were reborn as a camera lens, you'd want to be pointed at Matsuda: he's rapture, he's angelic, he's to-die-for. And Aoki (Arai Hirofumi) does. Aoki's role in the relationship goes from subservient to rebellious. Kujo spurns Aoki and the latter, stripped of his sense of worth, makes the ultimate sacrifice. In the final showstopping scene, Aoki waits for Kujo to appear on the roof and, the moment he does, he lets go of the metal rail and falls to his death.
A similar descent takes hero Kakihara, (Japanese renaissance everyman Tadanobu Asano) to a blissful death in Ichi the Killer; in the modern Japanese cinema, death seems the only way out. This all-star gathering of evildoers unites ultraviolent comic artist Hideo Yamamoto, from whose manga the film was created, and screen violence helmer Miike Takahashi, who created last year's cult sensation Audition. Kakihara is a sado-masochistic punk gangster caught up in an underworld where dysfunction speaks louder than love. When his yakuza boss mysteriously disappears, Kakihara hunts for his abductor. In the process, he turns a mansion into a phantasmagorical torture chamber. Then he meets Ichi (Naori Omori), a schizophrenic hit man tormented by the pleasure he takes in ultraviolent killing. Director Miike obviously wants to signpost Japanese society's ills and does so with a broad and bloody brush. Ichi dispatches his victims with a large rotating metal blade that flicks out of his sneaker. Heads, legs and arms erupt amid geysers of blood from his almost every encounter. A woman's nipples are sliced off; one male victim, suspended naked in midair by wires, comes close to losing his family allowance. In all this Miike's slick and self-aware technique serves to accentuate the mental problems of his characters and their emotional disfunction—the occasional child's sobs off screen are intended to remind the audience that these are the acts of sick children produced by the twisted society Japan has become. Miike doesn't always make you understand, but he sure knows how to make you feel.
Hazy Life, a loving indulgence of slacker society by first-time director Yamashita Nobuhiro, strips away all visual pyrotechnics and simply narrates the relationship between two homeless men who never went to school and whom society cares nothing about. Their one indulgence is to dub and star in adult videos. Nihilistic, simple and moving, it does what the other Asian fare at Hong Kong's festival didn't: it tells a story.
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