What happened at the Main Slate of the Asian Film Festival in New York? – A lost retrospective

What happened to the main competition of the New York Asian Film Festival? Over the past 17 years, NYAFF has boasted of being one of the most unusual, unpredictable and daring festivals not only in New York, but also in the United States, putting the nose to the most audacious and weird standards. and the most uncomfortable movies that Asia has to offer. This year is no exception to the rule – from weird meta-horror comedies to steroids infiltration actions, their program is a real buffet of the weird and the fantastic. But much of this energy seems to have been highlighted for their annual jury prize. The films in this year's competition are among the dullest, whitest and safest of the entire festival.

Consider Japan's two competition films: the overwhelming mud, the other lukewarm retreat of genre tropes. First, we have the movie Eisuke Naitô's Liverleaf a film that can be described as an intimidating revenge movie. Every year, there is at least one NYAFF film demonstrating this distinctive blend of misanthropic nihilism from Southeast Asia that does not only hate the human race but hates the fact that you are alive first. place. They invariably involve graphic violence, usually towards children, adolescents, young women, and sometimes all three. Liverleaf fulfills this quota, focusing on Haruka (Anna Yamada), a new client emotionally cloistered in a snowy countryside village who is tormented by a group of bullies so high that they even make the meanest villains like Teletubbies. They steal his clothes, carve "Go Die" on his desk, leave dead birds in his business and even attack his father with spiked shoes. But bullies take things too far one day when they accidentally burned his house, killing his parents and hospitalizing his little sister. Traumatized so terribly she can literally not speak, she embodies his revenge by brutally murdering, painfully and graphically his tormentors.

Throughout Liverleaf the film takes a nauseating joy by portraying the horrible deaths of young teenagers as any slasher movie-we are here as much to watch these children suffer and die that we must experience all kinds of emotional catharsis. Unfortunately, Naitô makes the mistake of recruiting too many teenagers in the second act, forcing the film to pull the slide in the last 30 minutes by adding a secondary plot that suggests that pubescent lesbian jealousy was at the origin of everything. intimidation and murder. But that's wrong. Perhaps one could find beauty in the beautiful cinematography that brings out the best of Japan's winter rural landscapes or the bittersweet romantic nostalgia deeply buried under the carnage. But you will probably leave the movie feeling drained, upset, and depressed at the state of humanity – and not the amusing masochistic way favored by so many hardened intellectuals.

Kazuya Shiraishi The Blood of the Wolves will not do much for the initiated gangster movie fan because it is as deliberate and conscious as a return to the classic yakuza cinema as one can # 39; imagine. Set in the last days of the Showa era when yakuza were at their peak, the film follows two stereotypical Hiroshima gang gangs: Ogami (Koji Yakusho), a flagrant corrupt veteran apparently more eager to sleep with female witnesses and play the slots that do The job of the police, and Hioka (Tori Matsuzaka), a rookie in the right and right line, so insisting on due process, he refuses to defend himself against the violent perfs, even though he is a karate expert. It's noisy, muscular, misogynistic (the only women are prostitutes and one-dimensional love interests), prone to explosions of horrific carnage, and too concerned about the minutiae of gangster politics regarding the succession of leadership, rivalry between gangs and personal feuds. ] © 2018 THE WOLF OF THE WOLVES Production Society

As usual, Ogami, the bad cop, proves the most fascinating character of a cynical nihilist who predictably reveals a deep current of compassion and of righteousness – apart from the aforementioned witness – screwing and suspecting-torturing, that is. His attitude that the yakuza can not be stopped, but can not be "sterilized" by forcing him into a legal underworld where they can be removed from the war and more violent offenses is surprisingly refreshing for the genre. The film fails to address the ethical implications of police officers who become as bad or worse than yakuza in the name of containing them, ending with a glorification of the fair process and hitting the criminals before they fight back. There is not enough stylistic courage or narrative originality in The Blood of Wolves to justify such myopia as a by-product of creating entertainment harmless popcorn.

Shiraishi's film was not the only good cop movie in the main competition this year. There is Namron's dramatic drama of Namur Crossroads: One Two Jaga a film with a more pronounced and heavier visual plume. The dominant image in the film is that of the plain shackle envelope. Time and time again, the camera leans to zoom in on these innocent-looking envelopes filled with bribes and protective payments as they exchange hands on the nasty streets of Kuala Lumpur. Cop, criminal, civil, it's the same – everyone has to pay. The greatest strength of the film is to portray this pervasiveness of corruption in Malaysian society as a plague reaching age, sex and social class. His failure, however, is to keep all these stories straight by sacrificing narrative clarity – arguably the most important piece of hyperlink narratives like this – in favor of a decoherence that would have could be a deliberate creative decision, but nevertheless crossroads a slog despite its 80 minutes of execution. There are three central scenarios, each with several characters that all have their own POV footage: an immigrant family trying to hide in Indonesia after their crooked employer confiscated their passport; the relationship between a hardened gangster and a boy who idolizes him as a big brother; and, of course, the aforementioned rookie-police and veteran bad-cop partnership. The film received early critical attention for the treatment of its illegal immigrant characters, and indeed Namron handles them with much attention without infantilizing them as helpless victims.

Oddly enough, it's the good-cop tired / bad-cop scenario that feels the most original, mainly because it reduces audience expectations by implying that it's all the time. is the good, overzealous cop who could be ruthless, dangerous and mentally unstable; it's the cop who takes bribes and organizes a protection racket with which we sympathize the most – at the very least, he does it for his family. Crossroads makes the fatal mistake of introducing too many characters in its first fifteen minutes and not to establish them properly; at the end of the film, I was still not sure of many of their names, a problem exacerbated by the author who gave a lot to those who had one (Sumiyati / Sugiman, Hussein / Hassan). Carrefour has a sinister power but its inconsistency prevents it from reaching its full potential.

Treb Monteras Respeto a story of a young Filipino rapper's adult life, also takes narrative risks but succeeds better than his Southeast Asian counterpart. Those who enter it in search of a Filipino 8 Mile will be very disappointed. Yes, it follows the struggles of an impoverished person making his bones in the world of illegal cyphers, but the similarities largely stop there. The story of Hendrix of Hendrix (Abra) – a street urchin who sells drugs for his abusive sister and boyfriend – is no longer a cross of Do the Right Thing (1989) and City of God ] (2002): a caustic, poetic and tragic examination of wounded masculinity and political unrest in a land of wonders of slums, alleys and rubbish. By the last act, the music almost disappears from the story as it instead questions the pain and pain that prompted Hendrix to rap in the first place and wonders if he will ever escape them. We learn that it does not hit because of a desire for wealth or women (although this is part of it); he strikes to meet a desperate need for recognition and "respeto", the Filipino word for "respect".

After being pioneered in the club with his boyfriend 's drug money, he is humiliated. rapper woman. When the boyfriend throws him out after discovering that he took their money, he gets caught stealing a secondhand bookstore by his owner Doc (Dido de la Paz), an old poet and former revolutionary. As Hendrix works at the store to make up for his flight, the two do not form a friendship as a combative co-dependency does not want to admit it. Although it's never mentioned by name, the film is constantly referring to a corrupt politician apparently inspired by current Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, a strong man known for sponsoring the extrajudicial killing of women. drug users and criminals. Political demonstrations and secret police haunt Hendrix shantytowns and Doc's nightmares, dragging both people into their lives and arms, suggesting that this shared trauma could be more important to a unified Filipino identity than any other musical or poetic movement. It's a heartbreaking conclusion, but that matches the equally heartbreaking end.

The Chinese selection for this year's media thriller, Yue Dong's meditative thriller The Looming Storm is equally heartbreaking. but his end leaves a deceived feeling. It masquerades as a deadly crime, but it's actually a worrying character study of a moldy mind by economic depression and inescapable rain. This rain is a constant in The threatening storm draining the countryside in which it is colored and agglomerating the villagers of the neighboring provinces with mud. The winter is approaching, and the cold rains force the old and the old in noodle shops and young people and get bored in brothels. It takes a while before the first woman is found nicked and mutilated under a bridge near the factory, and soon the authorities identify three others. Tired of his work and titillated by the mystery, the local security guard You Guowei (Duhan Yihong) undertakes to catch the murderer, to investigate the crime scenes and to reconstruct the killings with him. help from his assistant. The local police warned him, but he persists, his fascination becoming an obsession in its own right.

Curiously, the mystery of central murder fades away as we look deeper and deeper into the life of You. All this slow drama juxtaposes nicely the occasional spasms of tension and action – like a brilliant sequence where you chase a hooded suspect through an abandoned train station – which highlights the evil boredom of life in a center. moribund industrialist. A storm does not come only in the city of You: we have already arrived, carrying away the remains of its past – vestiges like the Party exemplarizes you. The Looming Storm largely relies on a third-act plot that puts into context the rest of the film. Your mileage will depend heavily if you think Dong won the twist or not. But it's not organized as meticulously as many smuggling thrillers from South Korea, the current industry standard for unpredictable genre cinema.

Speaking of South Korea, their film this year was the quietest and most discreet of all. the bunch: the first director of Jeon Go-woon Microhabitat a minor drama that has just been delayed and produces a sweet melancholy glow. It follows Miso (Esom) who would like nothing more than to remain a happily irresponsible lazy fellow the rest of his life. Clinging to a tiny apartment and working in cleaning, she savored the happy contentment of perpetual laziness. The little money that she does not spend on rent, she happily wastes cigarettes and whiskey between two episodes of sex with her cartoonist friend Han-sol (Ahn Jae-hong). But his perfectly manicured life shatter on New Year's Day 2015 when a new government sales tax increases the price of his favorite cigarettes and his owner decides to increase the rent. Scribbling her expenses on a notepad, she realizes that she has to give something. So she makes the logical decision to keep the whiskey, keep the cigarettes, keep the boyfriend out of direction and deny her apartment.

After moving, Miso reconnects with the five members of his former college band, drifting from one apartment to the other in his search for a permanent place to crush. Although on the surface each of these friends seems to have a respectable life, Miso discovers that they are all paralyzed in one way or another by insecurities, social pressures, failed relationships and expectations in ruins. Each of these characters seems to be an interrogation of various South Korean social anxieties – they have all transcended Miso's personal immaturity, but none has really acquired the supposed benefits of adulthood. No wonder Miso is so reluctant to grow up; but to grow, she must. Go-woon misleadingly directs Microhabitat the tightrope toward childish misery or misery misery, creating instead a pretty portrait of a life in painful but necessary transition with all the l & # 39; humor, drama, and the tragedy that accompanies it. But the film is undeniably light. It's as soft as the breeze, and just as substantial.

The best film of this year is the Hong Chan offer of Sunny Chan Men on the Dragon a drama comedy group of middle-aged schlubs overcoming mid-life crises to go collectively at the distance. After facing impending layoffs, four telecommunications employees join their company's dragon boat team in a desperate effort to attract the favors of the highest ranking officers. Each of them also deals with personal struggles at home that the race allows them to exorcise.

There is the usual emotional pablum because these men find value in working toward a common goal. the exhaustion of the initial training, the psychological horror of the preparation of their first race, the psychological exaltation of not being disqualified in this first race, the promise of glory, l & # 39; The agony of defeat, the sadness of the team, the joy of coming together, and the hope bubbling and burning as they prepare for the grand finale. What sets Men on the Dragon apart from so many other tired sports dramas is its charm and sincerely easy warmth. It's hard not to like a movie so, well, nice. The film remains stubbornly predictable and at no time do we imagine that the team does not win in the end, the protagonists do not move away from their personal miseries, the end not culminating in a sweetness syrupy. For all his endearing kindness, it's minor and ultimately insignificant. It is absurd to imagine that it is the film that was chosen to represent Hong Kong.

But then, all the films in the main list seem to be safe choices for their respective countries – even Liverleaf seems sure in its own way as the festival's obligatory concession to their transgressive roots. Consider instead the following substitutions:

Japan
– Instead of Liverleaf or The Blood of the Wolves Try the weird horror of Shin's # 19459007 ichirô Ueda whatchamacallit One Cut of the Dead perhaps the most formally bold film of the festival with a mind-blowing concept that will leave you with the biggest and most awkward smile once you understand it.

Malaysia
– Instead of Crossroads: One Two Jaga Try Dain Said's "True Crime" Horror Thriller Dukun A Fascinating Crossover between a judicial drama and a police procedure prohibited for more than a decade in his native country for offensive content.

Phillippines
– Instead of Respeto try the action film of Erik Matti BuyBust -is-plus-is-more camp.

Mainland C hina
– Instead of The Impending Storm Try the operation of Dante Lam . Yeah, it's maybe a uncomplicated Chinese naval propaganda, but it's like Michael Bay who directed the lover of Black Hawk Down and Mad Max : Fury Road .