What We’re Watching – June 2023

Asian cinema takes the forefront in June’s edition of our What We’re Watching column, comprising four of the five films shared. In particular, both films of obscure South Korean director Bae Yong-kyun captured the interest of one of our critics. Read below for a number of great recommendations we have in store for you this month. You’re in for a treat.

The Masseurs and a Woman (1938)

Atop the mountain of Japanese cinema, there are four names often regarded as towering above the rest and standing at the summit of the nation’s finest cinematic contributions. Those four names comprise Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, and Naruse — the all but official Mount Rushmore of Japanese cinema, names held in high esteem near unanimously by anyone with a reverence for the nation’s history of film. And yet, the recognition of this cherished cinematic quartet is a rather recent development. It is one in part shaped by the availability of international distribution as well as the evolving discourse of foreign critics. For many years, Naruse was entirely omitted from the conversation; his works were unknown to the world, difficult to find even natively in Japan, and to this day — despite contemporary reappraisals — he remains the most obscure member by a wide margin. Even Kurosawa, the most prolific internationally, has historically been subject to harsh criticisms, denoted as “too Westernized” in his approach, a quality ascribed by native detractors but also spearheaded in the West by French critics (the lingering effects of which can still be felt as recent as Ryusuke Hamaguchi remarking that Naruse should replace any mention of Kurosawa in discussions of the greatest Japanese filmmakers). This ultimately begs the question of Hiroshi Shimizu, a filmmaker who currently occupies a position not dissimilar to that of Naruse in the not-so-distant past. 

Like Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse, Shimizu — a filmmaker known best for his pre-war era — was responsible for many of the venerated masterpieces of Japanese cinema across the ‘30s and ‘40s. In the words of Mizoguchi himself, “people like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius”. He has all the markings of a filmmaker primed for contemporary reappraisal, one that, had there been better distribution, would be heralded a master of the medium. After having run the gauntlet of several of his most prolific films — he sure is something, to say the least. While I was immediately swept away by his postwar Children of the Beehive, a beautiful landscape film that spoke with the rugged humanism of Kiarostami, the two that have grown increasingly in my estimation are Ornamental Hairpin and The Masseurs and a Woman. Those latter two along with his most famous Mr. Thank You form a trilogy of unexpected studies of the human condition occurring in unassuming locations with temporary communities (whether through the passengers of a bus or customers at a spa). They are films that, while ostensibly comedic and wholesome, subtly traverse the palette of life—done especially well in Hairpin, which is often regarded as his richest and most complex work. Though, Masseurs may be my favourite and I think it is just as rich; they share many similarities and it predates Hairpin, which can be seen as a postscript. The former is about a pair of masseurs employed at a spa and explores the network of interactions they have with a few central customers: a city woman seeking to escape a past life as well as a man and his nephew. But what anchors it down is that the central masseurs are both blind. And what unravels is a fascinating story delivered with exquisite formal rigor where much of the emotional drama is conveyed not so much interpersonally (in the face-to-face sense) but through environmental senses (e.g., slight gestures like the smell of a scent). It is here that Shimizu asks the viewer to feel through non-visual means, to put themselves in the shoes of the masseurs and to likewise augment those alternative senses, to experience the full scope of richness and complexity that the film offers. – Timan Zheng

A Touch of Zen (1971)

A Touch of Zen is a wuxia film (martial arts films in the Chinese language often based on the popular genre of novels of the same name) that exists in a fascinating liminal space of high fantasy and spiritualism. The struggles that the hero goes through are not just intellectual and physical but spiritual as well. Gu (Shih Chun), an unambitious painter, befriends a fugitive female warrior Yang (Hsu Feng) who is trying to escape the clutches of a corrupt eunuch who had her father killed. Though Yang is a formidable warrior, so are the guards and bounty hunters who pursue her, and she is forced to depend on the seemingly modest Gu with whom she has an affair.

A Touch of Zen is a more complex film than what most Western audiences may be used to seeing. Though the fighting is impressive and balletic as in the best of the genre, much of the fighting is defensive, since Yang and her allies are fighting an almost impossible force. Also, much of the action is meant to be more metaphorical than purely confrontational as seen in a confrontation between one of the eunuch’s main officers and a sympathetic monk. Their duel is just as much a battle between loyalty to institutions and loyalty to one’s own morality. Yet as philosophical as the conflicts can be in A Touch of Zen, it is also highly entertaining and humorous, the source of which is the unassuming Gu and how seemingly outmatched he is by everyone around him…until he’s not. A more modern film with the same concerns of spiritualism is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The director King Hu would influence many wuxia films that would be be made in Taiwan, and it is certainly not a stretch to imagine the Taiwanese-born Ang Lee deriving inspiration for his own masterpiece. – Eugene Kang

Angel (1982)

Neil Jordan’s first feature is a noir that sees its hero go deeper and deeper into nihilism even as he gets closer and closer to figuring out who blew up the dancehall he was performing at and killed a deaf and mute young woman with whom he had a brief spark. Stephen Rea plays Danny, a saxophone player who embarks on this dark journey, and his hangdog demeanor is the perfect contrast to the alarming escalation in violence that he partakes in.

Even with this first feature, Jordan showed that he was a more than competent director. He knows how to place the camera and film action. He also has a sharp eye for striking compositions with light and bodies. The scenes within the nightclubs that Rea’s character and his band frequent are dreamy netherworlds while the scenes in the countryside seem harsh and grating even though they are filmed mostly in natural light. Jordan’s fascination with figures who are at the fringes or even completely outside of society is apparent here as he unflinchingly shows Danny unraveling. There are also plenty of moments of dark humor, such as the absurd pink suit Danny is wearing while hunting down one of the killers. Angel is a bit rough around the edges in terms of its storytelling, but it was clear that Jordan clearly had much to offer in his first feature. – Eugene Kang

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East (1989)

With the exception of fanatics about South Korean cinema, the odds that the name Bae Yong-kyun holds any significance to or evokes any recognition in the mind of the average cinephile are fairly slim. A painter by trade who now occupies a low-profile position as an art professor at Dongguk University; he is a forgotten filmmaker of a bygone era—and that seems to have been just the way he wanted it. Anyone familiar with Bae’s work as a filmmaker has almost certainly become so owing to his debut feature, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?, the first of two films constituting a curiously quick and short-lived career (one hardly imposed by a lack of opportunity). Reputed as a major achievement in Korean cinema, particularly Korean Buddhist cinema, it is also an interesting case in terms of its accolades as one of the first Korean films to leave a notable impression overseas. Bodhi-Dharma screened at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, won the Golden Leopard award at the 1989 Locarno Film Festival, and was the first Korean film to theatrically release in the United States—and yet, it was also the first Korean film to controversially release abroad before ever screening domestically. (It was toured across Europe before ever being accessible on native shores). 

The actual film itself concerns an ostensibly simple story of three monks, each representative of distinct generations and stages in life—a young orphaned boy, an adult monk, and an elderly zen master monk. It is primarily set in the mountains of South Korea and focuses on the adult monk’s venture to a monastery in the area where he begins to live with the elder monk who, alongside the orphaned boy, resides in the temple. In Buddhist fashion, the purpose of this journey is to seek wisdom with regards to achieving peace and enlightenment from an elder who has presumably attained it. The elder, who—in his old age—recognizes his impending death, decides to dedicate his final days as a lesson to the younger monk, who actively struggles with the social and materialistic life he once lived. Meanwhile, the child experiences his own revelation on mortality after nursing and caring for a bird that he callously injured.

What unravels is a sort of existential filmic koan, a spiritual contemplation on the cyclical nature of existence, portraying life as an endless and intangible feedback loop of birth and death, where death is less the stifling of life’s flame but the liberation and reintegration of one’s soul. To no surprise, it’s a very meditative and demanding film, moving at a gradual pace that has drawn comparisons to filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Andrei Tarkovsky. Though, the filmmaker who I was most reminded of the most in watching Bodhi-Dharma was Lisandro Alonso, given the warmth for nature but also how much time and care Bae allocates to the performance of menial tasks (the scenes of the young monk chopping wood were straight out of La Libertad). Bae’s skills as a painter shine through in the naturalist beauty of the film and the gorgeous compositions that make the lack of any proper restoration all the more bitter. And it’s all the more impressive given that Bae worked on this film by himself over the course of the decade — displaying dedication much like a monk — directing non-professional actors as well as shooting, editing, lighting, and designing it without any prior experience, simply learning it all from books. While the film garnered great success and received a positive critical reception, prompting a flood of international studio offers and media attention, Bae fittingly rejected it all in favor of a private life and would only go on to direct one final film. – Timan Zheng

The People in White (1995)

The only other and final film of the obscure South Korean filmmaker Bae Yong-kyun is one that was — up until a few months ago, from what I understand — practically inaccessible to anyone interested in seeing it. That excludes the exception of the scenario where the interested party happened to be in Seoul at the right time, was fluent in Korean, and just happened to catch an extremely rare screening at the Korean Federation of Film Archives. (Keep in mind that this film was only ever theatrically released natively in Korea — which was perhaps a petty gibe at international audiences as payback for the controversial release ordering of Bae’s previous film). Thankfully, some good samaritan was able to sneak out a copy, digitize it, and upload it onto the internet. Then, just about three months ago, another good samaritan, and whoever else assisted in the project, went through the painstaking effort of translating every line of the film into English, timing the subtitles, and then releasing that for the rest of the English-speaking world. Now, it is available in all its glory on YouTube—the only drawback being that the quality is kind of abysmal, but that’s a small price to pay for this cinematic salvation.

And what a shame it is that The People in White was unknown to much of the world for so long. To describe this film in comparative terms, it is as if someone filtered a Pedro Costa film through the stylistic sensibilities of Andrei Tarkovsky, coupled with the aesthetic flare of much of the Slavic post-nuclear fallout cinema (e.g., O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization). Had it been properly released, this would almost surely have gone down as a cult classic and staple of Korean cinema.

The film tells the story about a middle-aged man, freshly released from a mental asylum, returning to the village of his birth only to discover that little of it remains intact—with it having been supplanted by a mysterious factory. That man is simply referred to as “H” and H ends up staying overnight at an inn at a village known as Hacheon village, which also happens to be under martial law. From there, he converses with the inn’s housekeeper and begins to speak about his past, revealing his actual name to be Alex Kaufman, oddly anglicized, but more and more details of his past unravel as well as discussions of memory, dreams, and time that the material reality of the film becomes a subject of question. As more of the world is revealed and additional characters enter the frame and discuss their past—evidently serving as analogous stand-ins for the hardships that Korea as a nation experienced throughout history—Bae’s intentions become more clear.

Like Yu Hyun-Muk’s Aimless Bullet or Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy, The People in White follows in the tradition of Korean films that use cinema as a tool to navigate their nation’s history and comment on the state of their national identity. Bae does so by directly invoking the shared experiences and traumatic memories of the country’s people across generations by way of those characters, or rather ghosts, that H encounters. H’s search for his childhood village—an overt lamentation of the loss of heritage to industrialization and the changing of times—is effectively the Korean people’s search for their past and the film is an attempt to reconcile both past and present histories such that their traumas can be reconciled in a manner that the Korean people may finally be able to not necessarily forget but accept and move forwards in spite of their deep wounds. 

It’s fascinating to see it all play out, the way that Bae toys around with memory and dreams, blurring the reality in the process—it reminded me much of Costa’s work in Horse Money but Bae’s vision is singular and uniquely his own. Fit with murky colours and textures that etch a sense of perpetual decay as well as beautiful if dreary and often outright insane imagery—much like the case of his prior film—it makes one lament the lack of any proper restoration. The People in White is a special film and hopefully, in time, it will find its audience in the digital age. – Timan Zheng