VIFF 2022: Septet: The Story of Hong Kong (Various, 2020)

October 6, 2022 ~ Sean Gilman

It’s hard to imagine how long I’ve been talking about the film that would eventually become Septet: The Story of Hong Kong. The first time I tweeted about it appears to have been August of 2017, although that tweet is phrased as a reminder, which means I must have retweeted something about it some time before that point. It’s possible the rumors go as far back as the summer of 2016, shortly after the release of Johnnie To’s feature Three. The story was that To was producing an omnibus film called 8 1/2, with contributions from a who’s who of Hong Kong film legends: Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-ping, and To himself. Somewhere along the way, Woo dropped out (it’s unclear why, I think I heard there may have been health reasons, but Ringo Lam died in December of 2018 and still managed to finish his section, so I don’t know) and the title was changed to Septet. The film was finally set to premiere at Cannes in 2020, when COVID delayed those plans. It eventually did begin making the festival rounds in the fall of that year (Busan in 2020, then the Hong Kong and Fantasia Film Festivals in 2021). It received a theatrical release in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong earlier this summer, and is now set to play at the Vancouver Film Festival.

The setup is simple enough: each director is given a decade and the films are separated by title cards and arranged chronologically. Together they tell not just the “Story of Hong Kong” but a story of Hong Kong film and the story of themselves, an irreplaceable generation of filmmakers looking back on the place they’ve lived and worked and come to define as much and for as long as any group of filmmakers ever has anywhere in the world. Each of these directors was born between 1945 and 1955. Tsui, Hui, and Lam were key figures in the Hong Kong New Wave; Hung and Yuen revolutionized the period martial arts film, modernizing the tropes established by the Shaw Brothers studio and melding slapstick comedy and outrageous stunt-work into some of the greatest spectacles in movie history; and Lam and To (and of course the absent Woo) were leading exponents of the Heroic Bloodshed genre that did as much as anything to establish Hong Kong cinema as a force in world film culture. Together, these filmmakers have produced some of the most vital art works of the last fifty years.

Watching Septet, I decided to see if I could guess which director was responsible for which segment (the director credits don’t pop up until the end of their short). I’m happy to say that I was right on all seven, which means that perhaps this whole The Chinese Cinema project and the last decade of my film critic life have not been entirely in vain. Some of them were much easier to guess than others, starting with the first one, which begins with the line, “I’m Sammo Hung.” It also stars Hung’s son Timmy, who looks exactly like a skinny version of his father. The short starts us off in the 1950s, at the Peking Opera school where Sammo was a student (along with many other future stars). Timmy plays the teacher, Yu Jim-yuen, a role Sammo himself played in Alex Law and Mabel Cheung’s excellent 1988 film Painted Faces. The genial story of childhood disobedience (whenever their teacher’s back is turned, the kids slack off on their exercises), concludes with Sammo’s punishment (as the eldest student, he’s expected to set an example). Forced to do a handstand for a couple of hours, he finally collapses and cuts his head. Then we cut to the present and a close-up of the scar on Sammo’s head, as he directly addresses the camera to say, “Time flies like an arrow, it only moves forward. The past is but a memory.” Statements which will set the tone for the remainder of the film.

All but one of the shorts to come will feature some kind of a leap in time. The film is of course an exercise in nostalgia, but one which nonetheless unfolds in an eternal present (that’s what film necessarily is: we always experience it now) where past and past-past mingle freely in the memory. Film is a place where a director can make a film where he recreates a moment from his past in which he is scolded by his teacher, and have that teacher be played by his son, such that the son is scolding his own father, who is a child.

Ann Hui’s story begins in the 1960s, following a couple of teachers at a more traditional kind of school, a kind yet ascetic headmaster and a thoughtful and lovely young woman. Then it leaps thirty years into the future (though still thirty years in our past) where we see a class reunion (very Ozuvian this) with the students from the first half now all grown up (in the blink of an edit). The headmaster is still alive, and wistfully recalls the teacher, who has since died. Unrequited emotions surface and may be resolved with a visit to a memorial, where a photo of the teacher lives — she still looks the same as she did 30 years earlier, while everyone else has grown old.

After two tales of school and the relations between students and teachers, Patrick Tam takes us into the 80s (the 70s are skipped, possibly this was Woo’s assignment?), for the first of two stories about late adolescence and the Handover of Hong Kong from the UK to the PRC. Two young people are in love with each other and poetry, but she and her family are emigrating to England sometime after the Joint Declaration, while his is staying behind. Our temporal perspective comes from sometime in the future, in a narration by an older version of the young man (this narration, plus a shot of an airplane flying over the Hong Kong sky, clues us in that this is Tam’s film, being extremely reminiscent of the work of his most accomplished protegé, Wong Kar-wai). The young couple spend one last day together, fighting through their desperate feelings of loss and abandonment and young love, and in the end, our perspective shifts such that it’s the young woman who narrates the conclusion. A joint memory for the time of the Joint Declaration.

The 90s brings us Yuen Woo-ping and the story of an elderly man (played by Yuen Wah, Sammo’s old classmate, now grown old, but not as old as the kids in the first film would have been in the 90s, rather as old as they are now, in the 2020s) and his granddaughter. Her family is moving away too (to Canada), just before the Handover, but she has to stick around with gramps for a few weeks to finish her exams. It’s a sweet story of a generation finding common ground (she helps him learn English and appreciate hamburgers; he teaches her how to defend herself with kung fu). Then she leaves, but returns three years later. He’s become more older, but more Westernized; she’s grown older and more patient, and tells him their family is back to stay. The short’s title is Homecoming, presenting a rather idealized vision of the Handover: people were afraid everything about Hong Kong was going to end. But it didn’t, and many of those who left (including directors like Woo, Lam, Tsui, and Yuen who went to work in Hollywood) came back.

The short for the 2000s, I will admit, was initially the toughest for me to place. But I finally got it and it in retrospect seemed blindingly obvious that it was the work of Johnnie To (a reference to Chasing Dream late in the film didn’t hurt). It’s set almost entirely in a restaurant over the course of a few key moments in the decade. Three young people are debating whether or not to invest in a tech stock. The price keeps going up while they argue, and it seems they’ve missed their opportunity, when all of a sudden it begins to plummet: the beginnings of the dot-com crash. A couple of years later, they have the opportunity to buy an apartment at a discount price, thanks to it being located at one of the centers of the SARS epidemic. They’re ultimately scared off, which an image of a 2000s era Windows screen informs us cost them dearly given the rapid inflation of the value of Hong Kong real estate. Finally, they have a chance to invest in some stocks around the time of the US mortgage crisis. But they accidentally switch the numbers of the stocks they want with the ones for the dishes they want to order (a classic bit of Johnnie To restaurant table-related comic mayhem), only to make money anyway. It turns out that buying stocks at random is just as effective, or more, than researching and debating them. Once again, in a Johnnie To film, chance and fate work in mysterious ways.

Ringo Lam’s film brings us into the present, or at least the present as of when the film was conceived and finished. It’s also the most heart-breaking, made almost unbearably poignant by our knowledge (from the future, which is our present) of the director’s death, which happened almost three years ago now. Simon Yam plays an elderly man who has come back to Hong Kong to visit his son (played by Lam’s own son). He’s lost in contemporary Hong Kong: all the landmarks he remembers (pointedly a movie theatre is as vital as a major industrial pier) have been transformed by time into something more glassy, less real. He holds old pictures up to the present reality; they can’t compare. His past bleeds into his present, reimagining time spent in these spaces with his own father, when he was the younger man, or with his wife. Inevitably, rushing to his family, he encounters an unexpected bus and disappears. Only his phone remains. But we move a while into the future, to see his family giving him a goodbye, scattering his ashes in the sea. His advice — don’t work so much, focus instead on your family and the people you love — reminds us that Lam himself spent more than a decade away from his work in order to spend time with his family, only returning to directing in 2015, once his son was grown. We didn’t get as many great films from him as we might have, but it definitely wasn’t time wasted.

Finally we have Tsui Hark’s contribution, which might be set in our now (2022) which would be the future from the film’s 2020 premiere, or possibly some as yet undefined future of our own as well as the film’s. It’s the funniest and weirdest and boldest of the shorts, as it should be considering Tsui is all of those things and more. Two men are arguing in what appears to be some kind of mental institution. The doctor asks the patient who he is, and he replies “Ann Hui”. When pressed on this (the gender congruity alone seems to belie the factuality of his assertion) he resorts first to “Ringo Lam” and then “Johnnie To” and then back to Ann Hui. After a few minutes of this farce, we pullback behind a mirror to find two doctors observing (played by director Lawrence Ah Mon and icon Lam Suet). They suggest that who we think is who is exactly backwards, part of a kind of therapy for a man who believes he’s a doctor. Then another shift reveals a big crowd behind another window, this one including Tsui himself along with Ann Hui and several other film figures. The tangle of identity: who is watching who, who is the director, who the audience, who exactly is calling the shots here, becomes impossible to sort. It’s the plight of the Hongkonger under the watchful eye of the PRC, as well as of the Hong Kong filmmaker who, like Tsui, strives to work within the censorship codes and regulations of the Mainland government, ostensibly giving them the propaganda they require, while struggling to remain their own, independent (Hongkonger) self. The struggle is real, the silliness, the joy in the jumble of it all, is the wisdom of perspective, of age, of a life lived in a Hong Kong that has changed so much, so wildly, in the span of these seven single lifetimes.

VIFF 2022: King of Wuxia (Lin Jing-jie, 2022)

October 3, 2022 ~ Sean Gilman

Joining the ever-expanding pantheon of great Chinese filmmakers given the full-length documentary treatment is King Hu, the man behind many of the most accomplished and influential action films of all-time. But while Johnnie To, Ann Hui, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke are still very much alive and working, and thus the films about them all feature extensive interviews with them and footage of them at work (and of course scenes of them drinking and/or singing karaoke), King Hu has been dead for 25 years. Director Lin Jing-jie thus takes an unusual approach: rather than using an interview as the spine of his story, having the director talk us through their life film by film, or big event by big event, he splits King of Wuxia into two parts. The first half, subtitled The Prophet Was Once Here, looks at the run of films Hu made from Come Drink with Me in 1966 through the pair of Legend of the Mountain and Raining in the Mountain in 1979. This is the core of Hu’s career, the masterpieces on which his reputation has been built. The second half, called The Heartbroken Man on the Horizon, takes a more biographical approach, covering Hu’s first days as a 17 year old refugee in Hong Kong in 1949 through his work as an actor in the mid-1950s, then skipping his successful years as a director ahead to the last 15 years or so of his life, marked by emigration to the United States and a series of professional disappointments.

The first section runs just over two hours and features a remarkable cast of talking heads: big directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, and Ann Hui are to be expected, as are appearances from frequent Hu actors Shih Chun, Cheng Pei-pei, and Hsu Feng. But Lin gives just as much attention to less famous names who nonetheless provide some of the most interesting insights to Hu’s work. A pair of Peking Opera actors recreate certain stunts to demonstrate the connection between Hu’s approach to screen fighting and the stage tradition, while two traditional musicians explain the link between Hu’s editing and music. Production designer Huang Mei-ching explains Hu’s exacting and painstaking approach to set decoration and costume design and color and the ways he’d use framing and editing to discover all kind of new and unusual spaces within his sets. Renowned critics like Shu Kei and Peggy Chiao explain all kinds of interesting things about his work, who he was influenced by and what made his films so influential. Everyone talks about how much he loved to fill his shots with smoke. Extensive clips from the movies are studied and used as examples, and also intercut with present-day scenes set in the same locations Hu shot at, with actor Shih Chun wandering around the landscapes, pointing out where they filmed, why Hu chose the locations he did, and how they’ve changed over the past 50 years.

All through the first half of the film, we only ever see Hu himself in still images. But early on in the second there are clips of him speaking about his early life. He was from a wealthy family in Beijing, though as the son of a concubine, he had a lower status than his many half-siblings. Arriving in Hong Kong as the Civil War drew to a close, he worked a variety of odd jobs before finding himself acting in several dozen films from the mid-1950s through early 60s. Most of these are difficult if not impossible to find in the West, so getting to see him act is one of the many pleasures of King of Wuxia. Just before he transitions into directing, however, the film skips ahead to the 1980s, and finds Hu living in Los Angeles, again working odd jobs (writing a magazine column, lecturing at universities) while trying and failing to scrape together film projects. The talking heads include most of the big names from the first half, but the emphasis is more on his circle of friends, including Chung Ling, Hu’s wife at the time (she had written Legend of the Mountain). We get some new insights into how Hu came to leave and/or be fired from the production of Tsui Hark’s The Swordsman in 1990, which is basically the story of the second half of his career in microcosm: his painstaking approach led to extremely long shooting periods for Hong Kong cinema of the time, and he refused to compromise on that, to the displeasure of the money people in charge of the production (how much Tsui did or did not agree with said money people remains an open question).

The final stages of the documentary are heartbreaking, as Hu finally seems to be able to put his dream project, an epic about Chinese laborers in California, into production, with financiers on board, John Woo producing, Sammo Hung choreographing, and Chow Yun-fat starring, only for him to die due to complications during an angioplasty mere weeks before shooting was set to begin. It’s devastating, as are his friends’ and colleagues’ reminiscences of him, clearly still pained by their loss though it’s been 25 years. The most crushing scene, for me at least, comes somewhat earlier, as critic Shu Kei is discussing the commercial failure of Legend of the Mountain, a film that he now understands to be one of Hu’s greatest achievements. The money people pulled the three hour long Legend out of theatres and demanded Hu recut it to mangable length. Shu recalls Hu calling him in, helplessly asking how to do it. He can’t remember what he said (though he does say Tony Rayns cheerfully suggested “you need to cut here and here and here and you don’t need this or that, etc etc”), but he’s overcome with guilt over the fact that he even thought he should be cut at all, to the point that he breaks down in tears. They aren’t the only tears shed in King of Wuxia, but they are the only ones that aren’t necessarily about the person who’s life was cut short, but about the art that we all lost because we weren’t able, or willing, to support it in the way it could and should have been supported.

VIFF 2022: Riverside Mukolitta (Naoko Ogigami)

September 27, 2022September 30, 2022 ~ Jhon Hernandez

Part of the deal as an auteurist is that we will follow the director from film to film, keeping an open mind The relationship is the point. The director reaches out to us, and we hope to reach back and embrace their new film. Will it make us understand something new? Will it deepen a certain aspect of their art? Will it set off in new directions? Will it disappoint us? Each film is a new encounter. And so we take out our notebooks and begin to revise our notes, our ideas.

There is currently a video on Youtube titled “Naoko Ogigami: Japan’s Comfiest Filmmaker.” It’s around 25 minutes long and goes in-depth into Ogigami’s career and background, combing through her interviews to provide insight into her process and her films. It’s worth watching. But this title of “Japan’s Comfiest Filmmaker” cannot be ignored. At first blush, it is understandable. But it’s also somewhat insidious. Ogigami’s films are undeniably gentle and whimsical. Their surfaces are placid and calm. More than anything else, her cinema is welcoming. But this only describes her cinema up to a point. And it doesn’t quite work to describe the achievement of her latest films, 2017’s Close-Knit and 2021’s Riverside Mukolitta. In these two films, she is pushing her art further and further – her films will always be gentle and inviting, but now these same surfaces are used to invite you to wade into darker and darker undercurrents.

How do you live?
Riverside Mukolitta is a work steeped in death. All the major characters are touched by it, ruined by it. But Ogigami does not film dourly She does not film to wallow in her character’s misery. Her cinema provides an alternative. Kenichi Matsuyama plays Yamada, a young man recently released from prison. He finds a job slicing up squid at a small factory; repetitive work that his boss says has driven people to quit after a day or two. But Yamada has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. His boss helps him find a room at an old apartment building where he soon meets his colorful neighbors.

Part of Ogigami’s universe will always be, on some level, filled with quirkiness and whimsy. But whereas in previous films, like Kamome Diner, this revealed itself as a way to celebrate the oddity of all its characters, in Riverside Mukolitta, tries to marry the oddball nature of her characters to their desperate struggle to find a way to live. Ogigami always makes community pictures. So Yamada’s neighbor invites himself into his apartment, over and over, first to use his bath, and then to eat his food – anything to stave off the loneliness. Another of Yamada’s neighbors takes his young son to sell tombstones door to door, both of them wearing identical suits, which at first registers like a too-cute joke, but soon makes sense as another aspect of the film’s relationship to death. Once Yamada is able to afford some food and finds a fan in the garbage heap, life begins to be somewhat bearable.

How is community built? How is it formed? Ogigami’s cinema is built of small gestures, mundane domestic rituals. Characters share meals with each other, they help tend to each other’s gardens, they walk to the local temple to cool down. One of the film’s funniest scenes occurs as more and more neighbors invite themselves to a meal, popping up by the door, as they prepare their sukiyaki. Perhaps they complain, but deep down it is nice to have company. Each interaction builds on the last, and soon an unmistakable fond is formed, impossible to ignore.

All of Ogigami’s films are essentially manuals on how to go about life. Her early films such as Kamome Diner and Glasses built up small little communities, they preach tolerance, inclusiveness, relaxation, rest. In Rent-a-cat, the main character lets people rent her cats so they can find healing and comfort. Perhaps, on some level, they deal with issues of self-care. But in her last two films, she has left behind these characters who don’t have too many conflicts to show characters who genuinely struggle through life. Ogigami’s search in how to deal with these characters lends the films a lot of their interest. How do you live becomes how do you film.

Eat your bones
When writing about Ogigami’s Close-Knit, I wrote that the camera was always at right distance, every time. Due to the nature of the film’s subject, she had to confront intolerance and at points approached melodrama. But in Mukolitta, her staging is a little unclear. The film registers as a reformulation of her approach to character, to drama. Everything is more internal, a little more abstract. Sometimes she falls back to her wide shots, letting the action play out from a distance. But then the camera moves in for a medium shot, hand-held for some reason, and the staging feels a little haphazard, like it has not been blocked out all the way, which is not something I would’ve ever felt about Ogigami’s cinema before.

The question becomes how to integrate death into her cinema, how to represent it. Perhaps adapting her own novel has forced her to dig deeper into metaphor. Giving images to her words is already something difficult, but to make them feel alive, new… All the characters are surrounded by death. Early on, Yamada is told that his father has died, all alone, in a nearby apartment. He goes to pick up his remains and is told that his father’s Adam’s apple survived cremation intact. But now what does he do with these remains? What kind of relationship does he hope to have with his father now that he’s dead? His neighbor reveals that he had a son and then lost him. He then asks him to forget he said that. His landlord, Hikari Matsushima, lost her husband a few years ago. He sees a ghost, tending to the garden, and everyone agrees that, yes, that was the old lady who used to live at the apartments.

Death is not abstract. Ogigami makes the experience of it literal. The death of a body is not the end. The living must deal with what remains, a body, bones. For Matsushima’s landlord, she visits the grave of her husband, buried by a tree. While on the way back, the taxi driver remarks that he took the remains of his wife, ground them up, and put them in a firework, shooting her up in the sky. And this leads to the most striking sequence of the film, and Ogigami’s cinema so far. Matsushima, alone in her room, takes out the remains of her husband, proceeds to nibble at the bones, take a few hesitant bites, and then uses it to fondle herself. Ogigami has never quite filmed something like this. She’s not really a director that places a premium on sensuality. But in here she takes a fairly big swing, connecting the desire to commune spiritually with the dead to a somewhat erotic exploration, hesitant, awkward, a moment that’s mystifying, even to the character.

Watching Riverside Mukolitta, we witness a director test the boundaries of what her cinema will allow. Ogigami makes hangout films, she does not film complex scenarios. So she must look for new images and often this can a beautiful and awkward struggle. She does not forget her quirky touches, such as that garbage dump in between the train tracks, where the characters congregate. It’s here where that little boy in the suit fiddles with a melodica while Yamada watches, or where he gathers all the rotary phones he can find while he waits for a call from an alien. It’s precious, it’s twee. But this is important to understand, it is not naïve. The image of the alien in the sky in a lesser film would be joyful. Ogigami immediately complicates it but showing by showing the despair it triggers.

Part of the evolution in Ogigami’s cinema has necessitated an engagement with melodrama. At first, her films resisted outbursts of emotion. But now her films seem to demand it. Part of the journey of the film is from Matsuyama’s early reticence to show any display of emotion to the overwhelming breakdown at film’s end. Ogigami’s films are ultimately healing. Her gaze seeks to shelter and protect her characters. She films her characters to heal them. But the process has become more complicated, more fraught. As Yamada’s tears fall and mix with his father’s bones, Ogigami makes clear that both are necessary to move forward. The final images perfectly express this sentiment. Death is now all around them, in the air, in their room, in their clothes. But also the joy of being able to move forward, to smile, to live another day. In this new encounter with Ogigami’s cinema, we register the joy of seeing the boundaries of her cinema, reaching its limits, and then pushing forward with new images and new approaches.

Riverside Mukolitta is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival