







Original trailer (English subtitles)

White Snake (白蛇：缘起, Zhao Ji & Amp Wong, 2019)

White Snake posterOne of the best known classical Chinese folktales, Madame White Snake has already inspired a host of cinematic adaptations, most famously Tsui Hark’s Green Snake. CGI animation White Snake (白蛇：缘起, Báishé: Yuánqǐ), co-produced by Warner Bros. in the US and China’s Light Chaser, takes a different tack in imagining a prequel to the original legend that hints at a wider destiny for the eponymous Bai Suzhen and the doctor Xu Xian. Like other similarly themed family films, White Snake is also a surprisingly progressive, if melancholy, love story which insists that love is love and does not, or should not, change if you discover the person that you love is a little different than you first thought – in this case, that she’s giant snake demon in beautiful human form.

A framing sequence opens with Bai Suzhen, here called Xiao Bai / Bianca, lamenting to her friend Xiao Qing / Verta (Tang Xiaoxi) that though she has meditated for 500 years she cannot achieve enlightenment and feels the block is due to a memory that she cannot recall. Xiao Qing then gives her a jade hairpin which casts us back 500 years to the Tang Dynasty and a time of chaos in which an evil general has ordered the mass killing of snakes in order to steal their energy for black magic purposes to improve his relationship with the emperor. The snake demons declare war and Xiao Bai is sent to assassinate the general but is injured before she can complete her mission. Washing up on a nearby shore, she is rescued by a local boy, Xuan (Yang Tianxiang), who happens to be a snake hunter. Having lost all her memories, Xiao Bai thinks she is human and bonds with Xuan as they team up to investigate her past with the hairpin as their first clue.

We are told that the land is in chaos and that the peasantry is cruelly oppressed by onerous loans and unjust treatment at the hands of the feudal lords. The general is forcing them to kill snakes and deliver them to him as a kind of tax incentive while threatening their livelihoods if they fail to comply. Despite participating in snake culls, however, Xuan is a kind and energetic young man who is also the village’s herbalist and dreams of becoming a doctor. Having rescued Xiao Bai, he does his best to help restore her memory and vows to be at her side protecting her no matter what. On figuring out that she is really a snake demon, his devotion doesn’t change and he stays with her all the same even knowing that she will be in danger if anyone else learns of her true identity.

Xuan may insist that your fate’s your fate but you can choose how you live, but he also acknowledges that “life is short and sorrows long”, affirming that it’s better to live in the moment making happy memories for less cheerful times. Then again, as Xiao Bai says, you can’t always do what you want and this is indeed a “heartless world” with rules which must be followed. As in any good fairytale, Xiao Bai and Xuan are divided by being on opposing sides of a supernatural plane with differing conceptions of time and eternity. As his song says, “this floating world is but a dream”, and Xiao Bai’s sojourn among the humans is likely to be a short one. Suspected of treachery, Xiao Bai’s good friend (or perhaps a little more than that) Xiao Qing volunteers to wear the Scale of Death, pledging her own life in place of Xiao Bai’s if she fails to fetch her back within three days only to immediately take against Xuan possibly for reasons unconnected to her distrust of humans who, she has been taught, are universally treacherous and hostile to snakes.

Of course, the original legend and the opening framing sequences are clues that this isn’t going to end happily but then with eternity to play with perhaps nothing is ever really as final as it seems. Beautifully animated with gorgeously rendered backgrounds and a melancholy romantic sensibility, White Snake is a huge step forward for Chinese animation which pays tribute the classic legend while creating a universe all of its own with sequel potential aplenty.

White Snake screens on 7th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screened in Montreal as part of the 2019 Fantasia Film Festival on 27th July.

Original trailer (Mandarin with English & Simplified Chinese subtitles)









Clip (English / simplified Chinese subtitles)

If You Are Happy (学区房72小时, Chen Xiaoming, 2019)

If you are happy poster 2“Win at the starting line” has become something of buzzword among parents eager to get their children the best start in the modern China where equality is no longer regarded as a social good. Even in the UK it’s not unusual for parents to go to great lengths to game the system so their children can get into the “better” state schools, but in China where educational background really can make or break a child’s future the stakes are obviously much higher. For the father at the centre of Chen Xiaoming’s biting debut, the ironically titled “If You Are Happy” (学区房72小时, X Fáng Xiǎoshí), the stakes are very high indeed as he bets pretty much everything – his family home, his career, and finally his integrity, on buying a grotty little flat in the rundown part of town where he grew up solely because it’s directly opposite the best primary school in the area.

University professor Fu (Guan Xuan) is a doting father to little daughter Cheng, but as keen as he is to keep up the facade of success his private life is falling apart. His wife, Jiayuan (Fu Miao), is suffering from long term depression and though Cheng seems cheerful, the atmosphere at home is frosty at best with husband and wife barely speaking. Meanwhile, Fu has also been carrying on an illicit affair with one of his students, Hang (Tu Hua) – a wealthy young woman whose mother (Rong Rong) is keen to send her abroad for graduate school to improve her prospects. Hang doesn’t want to go, she says because she’s become attached to Fu, but there are also rumours all over school about teachers accepting bribes to change students’ grades and the jury’s out on whether Hang has ulterior motives.

The main source of stress in Fu’s life is however his ongoing quest to buy a flat in the catchment area of a prestigious primary school. After two years of dashed hopes, an old friend working as an estate agent has a promising lead on a place that’s actually right by where they both grew up. Though the flat is in a bad state and really too small for a family (assuming they actually meant to live there), Fu is loathed to give up the opportunity even though he doesn’t have the ready cash together to seal the deal. Despite his outrage at the teachers who take bribes, he tries to force his friend to pull some strings before coming to the conclusion he’ll have to sell his flat. Fu goes ahead and lists it with another estate agent before even talking to his wife who is understandably not keen to move, insisting that the school around the corner is fine, only for Fu to snobbishly tell her that it’s fine for kids like Tao – a naughty little boy at kindergarten who accidentally slashed Jiayuan’s hand when he somehow got hold of a kitchen knife. 

Fu’s snobbishness is perhaps his defining characteristic. Forced to sell his family home, he bristles when the maid mentions that her son is looking for a flat, coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why he shouldn’t be able to afford it before accepting that money’s money no matter who it comes from. Auntie Niu’s (Xu Xing) son Bao (Liu Xiaodi) has troubles of his own, as they discover when paying him a visit and finding him near suicidal because his fiancée is thinking of breaking things off as her family have refused their blessing for the marriage until Bao can get hold of a flat in a very specific area. Bao’s case is frustrated because he’s not originally from Shanghai and a new law prevents non-locals from owning property. Luckily his fiancée is a Shanghai native but he doesn’t have the money to buy in the escalating Shanghai property market and only has this shot with Fu because he is a “motivated seller” and needs the deposit as soon as possible to put down on the property near the school.

Along with a superiority complex, Fu is also something of a prig and makes a point of being upstanding and respectable, even trying to return a box of expensive tea gifted by Hang’s wealthy businesswoman mother in the hope of currying favour. When someone gazumps him on the flat, he has a minor meltdown insisting on legal action and lamenting the decline of morality in the modern society, but then he turns around and does exactly the same to Auntie Niu despite knowing exactly what the flat means for Bao and having given his solemn word when signing the papers. Such duplicity is too much for Jiayuan who finally finds herself gaining the strength to defy her domineering husband to side with Auntie Niu who really has gone and got a lawyer when betrayed by Fu.

How much getting Cheng into a good school is about Cheng and how much about Fu’s status anxiety is up for debate, but nominally at least all of this is supposed to be for his little girl even though the stress of Fu’s ongoing quest is quietly destroying the family home, has sent his wife into a debilitating depression, and finally robbed him of his personal integrity as he continues to debase himself all in the hope of getting his hands on a really horrible flat in an otherwise undesirable area. Chen closes with a series of (seemingly) real interviews with parents who’ve considered bankrupting themselves just to move into the catchment area of a good school. Most of them concede it isn’t worth it, but are tempted all the same even if they intensely resent the way their society is going. After all, shouldn’t all children be starting in the same place? Why should one school be better than another, and why should the children have to pay for being born to parents with fewer resources to help them? There may not be real answers for any of these questions, but they’re ones the modern China continues to grapple with as the egalitarian past gives way to the moral dubiousness of a consumerist future.

If You Are Happy screens on 3rd July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English/Simplified Chinese subtitles)

Wushu Orphan (武林孤儿, Huang Huang, 2018)

Wushu orphan poster 1Anti-intellectualism comes in for a subtle kicking in Huang Huang’s whimsical ‘90s drama Wushu Orphan (武林孤儿, Wǔlín ér). Less a tale of martial arts, Huang’s poetic debut suggests that perhaps brawn is always going to win over brain, but as brain has the moral high ground it needs to keep fighting all the same even if all it can do is mentally resist. Set in the modernising China of the late ‘90s, Wushu Orphan conjures an achingly nostalgic picture of sleepy rural life, burdened as it is by visions of the past as the next generation pin their hopes on becoming the new Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li all while neglecting their studies in expectation of martial arts glory.

Our hero, Lu Youhong (Jin Jingcheng), has just transferred to Zhige Wushu Academy to take up a post as their new Chinese teacher. In actuality, Youhong doesn’t have much of an education himself. He has no degree and is almost entirely self-taught which is why he’s wound up here after being turned down by everyone else. In fact, he only got this job because his uncle (Ma Zhongshan), who works at the school, has brought him in as a “catfish” to stir up the otherwise stagnant educational environment which is mainly inhabited by meat headed martial arts fanatics.

Unfortunately for Youhong, no one is very interested in education. All the kids just want to be the next Bruce Lee, and you don’t need to memorise the story of Mulan to become a martial arts master. Zheng Cuishan (Hou Yunxiao), however, has already memorised Mulan, and all the other poems in their reader too. He read them in their entirety when they were first assigned. The problem is, that Zheng Cuishan has been labelled a “special case”. With no aptitude for wushu, he’s mercilessly bullied by his classmates and is forever trying to run away. All he wants is to go home to his family, but they’re fishermen and Zheng Cuishan is afraid of the water so they can’t take him with them on their boat.

As might be assumed, the nerdy, bespectacled Youhong quickly notices an affinity with the obviously bright Cuishan who effortlessly aces all his tests and outright refuses to engage in violence. During one of his earliest lectures, Yuhoung breaks down the character in the name of their school which means “wushu”, explaining that it’s made up of the characters for “stop” and “weapons” because the point of martial arts is to preserve “peace”. His rationale provokes only bored stares from boys who’d rather be outside and a cynical laugh from feckless headmaster’s son Qin (Shi Zhi), lurking outside the window, while he struggles to impress upon his pupils the importance of knowledge as a compliment to physicality.

Going through their tests one day, after being unexpectedly asked to teach maths (and English) after the other teachers quit, Youhong notices that one of the boys got all the questions right but erased his answers before turning in the paper. Confused, he turns to his uncle for an explanation only to be told not to press the issue. This is a martial arts school. It’s considered deeply uncool to be seen succeeding in anything that’s not wushu, as if that were somehow a betrayal or a sign that one has not dedicated oneself entirely to martial arts. That’s one reason Cuishan is so mercilessly bullied, because he’s the intellectual holdout in a school full of meat headed cowards too afraid to buck the system or too brainwashed to know why they should.

In a moment of madness, Youhong snaps, cruelly crushing the dreams of his young charges when he tells them that martial arts are useless in the modern world. They’ll never be the next Bruce Lee, all they can hope for is a life of petty crime and street performance. Predictably he’s silenced by a fist headed straight for his face as if to say that violence is always going to win over rational thought, but Youhong refuses to be beaten. Even if he cannot “fight” these ideas he can still resist them by sticking to his principles and refusing to go along with the inherent weirdness of the school.

In this Cuishan follows him, no longer quite so afraid of the water and one step closer to achieving his dream of learning to swim. Perhaps if Youhoung has encouraged one mind away from the groupthink he’s done enough, emerging with a new conviction as he bravely stands up to a rude woman and her son “threatening” him with a toy gun on the train. Meanwhile, a 70-year-old martial arts master gets of out prison and pointlessly tracks down his geriatric rivals in order to prove himself the master of masters. Filled with nostalgic ‘90s Mandopop and an evocative retro score, Huang Huang’s debut is a visually striking tribute to the solidarity of outsiders swimming against the tide as they strive to keep hold of themselves in the oppressive groupthink of a relentlessly conformist society.

Wushu Orphan screens as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival on June 30.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Jinpa (撞死了一只羊, Pema Tseden, 2018)

Jinpa poster 1Dreams, reality, and memory intertwine in Pema Tseden’s surrealist Tibetan western Jinpa (撞死了一只羊, Zhuàng le Yī ZYáng). Cycles of revenge and regret, killings accidental and deliberate, lost love, and inescapable karma bind two men or two parts of one whole as two travellers meet each other on the road, part, and then are perhaps reunited if in a more spiritual sense than literal. Moving away from the realism of Tharlo into mystical abstraction, Pema Tseden’s sixth feature is as obtuse as it is beguiling.

The titular Jinpa is an ultra cool truck driver in black leather and sunshades whose main jam is, incongruously enough, a Tibetan cover of O Sole Mio. Out on the road one day and distracted by the swooping flight a nearby bird, he accidentally hits and kills a sheep. Remorseful, Jinpa bundles the poor creature’s body into his cab, only to have to shift it into the back when he gets another passenger – a young wanderer (Genden Phuntsok) who later abandons his silence to explain that his name is also “Jinpa” and he’s on a quest for revenge against the man who killed his father 20 years ago. A decade long search has led him to Sanak where he hopes to find the man he’s looking for.

The men part company at the next turning, but the older Jinpa can’t seem to forget about his strange encounter. He takes the sheep for a proper funeral (before stocking up on lamb from a street stall), and pays a visit to lover where he unable to perform to anyone’s satisfaction. Jinpa hits the road again to look for his hitcher, either eager to prevent a crime which may add to his own karma, or simply to discover the end to the mystery.

Jinpa’s accidental slaughter of a sheep and the younger man’s quite deliberate quest for blood become somehow linked. Tracking the other Jinpa he finds himself at a tavern with a flirtatious barmaid (Sonam Wangmo) who gives him a few more clues, most particularly a possible identification of the man the other Jinpa might have been looking for but her tale is a strange one. The tavern goers’ background conversation is identical to the present moment, implying this is either one very boring spotlight hogger or that events are somehow occupying the same temporal space.

Shifting into hazy black and white for his flashbacks, Pema Tseden hints at the malleability of memory – as if one figure could easy be swapped out for another, past and present uncomfortably overlapping with memory as the unstable glue at their centre. The younger Jinpa’s prospective target, we discover, also has a son. Would he grow up to seek revenge against the man who killed his father? One circle closes, but another envelopes it just as quickly. A man kills a sheep, by accident, but perhaps there’s more that he’s atoning for than simply inattentive driving.

“If I involve you, it becomes your dream too” the opening text tells us citing a Tibetan proverb. Could the older Jinpa simply be dreaming a version of himself, or are the two men somehow inhabiting the same dreamscape? Events repeat, the two men walk the same path at different times, diverging and reuniting as they make their way towards whichever realisation is lying in wait for them.

Played by real life poet and actor himself called “Jinpa”, the eponymous hero oozes cool in his edgy rockstar getup and ever present sunshades, embodying the stranger in town a little too consciously as he wanders in search of his younger self. Produced by Wong Kar-wai and adapting Tsering Norbu’s novel The Slayer, as well as the director’s I Ran Over a Sheep, Jinpa is an unabashed exercise in style and mood, swapping the washed out iciness of the road for the colourful warmth of taverns, stores, and temples while memory remains a blur of radiating black and white frustratingly difficult to see in its entirety. Jinpa’s circular travels mimic his life, caught between cycles of violence and regret but hoping for forgiveness and eventual release. Abstract and inscrutable, Jinpa’s mythic fable nevertheless retains its strange power as its hero(es) attempt to free themselves from an inescapable spiral of existential despair.

Jinpa screens as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival on June 29.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Complicity (コンプリシティ, Kei Chikaura, 2018)

Complicity posterWith an ageing population and an economy trapped in a long period of stagnation, Japan has found itself in an awkward moment of possible crisis as it begins to realise it will need to embrace immigration or face a serious labour shortage. Like many nations, unfortunately, much of Japan remains uncomfortable with the idea of overseas labour especially when it comes to “low skilled” work in construction, manufacturing, and casual jobs such those in restaurants and convenience stores. Given government intransigence and pressing need, workers from other areas of Asia are often employed illegally and subject to exploitation by gangs or unscrupulous employers.

The hero of Kei Chikaura’s Complicty (コンプリシテ), Chen Liang (Lu Yulai), finds himself in just this position as he leaves his sickly mother and feisty grandma alone in rural China in the hope of making enough money in Japan to come home and restart the family business. What he discovers, however, is that he’s essentially been trafficked as cheap labour and is already in hock for an ID card he was conned into paying three times the going rate for on the pretext it was “safer”. Now living under the name Liu Wei, Chen Liang is disturbed to receive calls on his new phone intended for his namesake but is tempted when Liu Wei receives a job offer from an employment agency. Passing himself off as his cover identity, Chen Liang takes the job only latterly realising it’s the rather incongruous position of a trainee chef in a family-owned soba restaurant.

Against expectation, ageing soba chef Hiroshi (Tatsuya Fuji) and his daughter Kaori (Kio Matsumoto) are warm and welcoming people who are actually a little bit excited that someone from China wants to learn about soba. Taken in almost as a member of the family, Chen Liang begins to feel conflicted – he is after all lying to them, at least about his name and circumstances, and his presence in their home might cause them trouble if he is ever found out. Meanwhile, he also strikes up a friendship with an artist who is learning Mandarin but has to lie to her too, pretending they may one day meet up in Beijing when in reality he has never even been there.

His burgeoning romance with Hazuki (Sayo Akasaka) is what precipitates his downfall as she, unaware he is undocumented, reports his stolen wallet to the police. The lies do not stop there – Chen Liang is also lying to his worried mother back at home who thinks he’s working in an office, while she is simultaneously lying to him in pretending everything’s fine in order to facilitate his “happy” life in Japan where he is supposed to make lots of money and come back a wealthy man. In order to make his dream succeed, Chen Liang must become Liu Wei at the exclusion of all else, forsaking his life as Chen Liang and living carefully as if he has nothing to fear.

Chen Liang is onto a good thing and has fared much better than some of his friends who either got themselves picked up by the police for doing the gang’s dirty work or found themselves out in the cold with no feasible way to get back “home”. Hiroshi’s son, with whom he seems to have some kind of bad family history, looks down on Chen Liang unable to understand why his father employed someone from China when the business is on the rocks. His attitude seems to be one shared by many (though not the universally supportive customers in Hiroshi’s soba shop) who see only difference rather than commonality. Despite the language barrier, Hiroshi and Chen Liang are often able to communicate through written characters, while another poignant moment of bonding sees Chen Liang sing the Mandarin lyrics over the top of Hazuki’s cheerful refrain of a popular Japanese song by Teresa Teng beloved all across Asia. Hiroshi himself was born in Beijing at the end of the war – a painful reminder of the complicated history between the two nations, but also one of how much they are interconnected and how little place of birth has to do with cultural identity.

Emphasising how much they have in common rather than the various ways in which Chen Liang differs from the world around him, Chikaura paints a much more sympathetic portrait of a migrant worker than the one usually found in the media. Filling the void left behind by Hiroshi’s own resentful son, Chen Liang becomes a valued and trusted member of the family who are in a sense “harbouring” him but to protect rather than exploit. Pushed to go to Japan despite his misgivings and drifting into the soba shop job through accidental opportunism, Chen Liang had in a sense abandoned his identity in avoiding making concrete decisions. Being Liu Wei was also a way to hide from his insecurities and fears for the future, but only through the unconditional love he received under false pretences is he finally able to reclaim his name, fugitive but free at last. A powerful plea for empathy and cross cultural connection, Complicity is a beautifully drawn character study in which kindness and compassion eventually open new paths for a conflicted young man trying to find his place in an often hostile world.

Complicity was screened as part of the 2019 Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Teresa Teng’s – Toki no Nagare ni Mi wo Makase

Mandarin version – I Only Care About You