Watched/read

Watched/read

Feminine and feminist cinema.

House of Hummingbird: the main character, Eunhee, was in eighth grade in 1994, which is to say she – and Kim Bo-ra, the director – are nearly exactly my age. It’s a sensitive, Proustian evocation of a ‘90s South Korean female adolescence, parts of which I relate to (those pagers!), parts of which I knew nothing about (one date chyron I won’t spoiler, that drew gasps from the audience), and parts of which are evergreen (dysfunctional Asian families where the only love languages are verbal abuse and food, and emotional support is non-existent even for favoured first sons). The sporadic outbursts of domestic violence, in particular, are so true to life as to be triggering; it made me think of people IRL to whom I’d only recommend the film with a warning. The actors are all very good but the one I’ll think back to is Kim Sae-byuk, who plays Eunhee’s mysterious yet relatable Chinese tutor and imbues the supporting character with a vast sense of inner life. The camera watches her face and you feel what she’s feeling for this girl, from the other side of the unidirectional gulf that is the Tired Adult™ looking upon an eighth grader much like she once was.

21st Century Girl: a thematic omnibus of short films commissioned from emerging female Japanese filmmakers, each of which has to be about love, gender, or sexuality in some way. One does what one can with the running time: some oblique love stories, some LGBT themes, some in media res snippets of what might eventually end up as feature-lengths with a beginning and an end, lots and lots of photographic montage and manifestos in voiceover. I liked “Your Sheet,” a gender-fluid erotic story that was also the most successful bit of standalone short fiction, and the rom-com concept of “Sex-less Sex-friends.”

Dare to Stop Us: for once I would have liked a Q&A session with the director and writer, because I have questions. The film is a dramatization of the late ‘60s-early ‘70s imperial period of Wakamatsu Studios, the “pink film” (experimentally x-rated, but also raging leftist pink-o) outfit founded by Wakamatsu Koji, an enfant terrible of Japanese cinema who used to be yakuza and purportedly turned to film so he could kill off cops without getting arrested. The main character is Megumi, a hippie girl who joins the studio at the age of 21 and works her way up to first AD within the year, not least due to the other ADs quitting. Megumi comes off as a designated-naif entry-point POV, possibly – I thought – a composite of women who worked for Wakamatsu, and the arc of her story seemed to bend toward surviving (gender-neutral) workplace hazing and becoming a successful indie director in her own right, as Wakamatsu promises when he hires her. Spoilers: she is not a composite! She existed, and what happens to her is gut-wrenching! It’s a rug-pull, honestly, especially since the director Kazuya Shiraishi worked with Wakamatsu and the initial vibe is “feel-good biopic of characters and environment I have huge nostalgic affection for.” In retrospect, one has to conclude he was half making that movie, half interrogating how the guerrilla filmmaking milieu can chew up the people who love it most, and is particularly unforgiving to women even when their bosses and peers aren’t overtly sexist.

(I also have questions about the slickly urbane portrayal of Oshima Nagisa, sitting in a cafe with his sunglasses telling Wakamatsu not to push his pro-Palestinian documentary too hard because the film world is “run by Jews,” because hoo boy was that a Moment.)