The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2019: Her Love Boils Bathwater (2016)

I love Japanese cinema. There, I've said it. Putting "love" in this year's theme for the Japan Foundation's TouringFilm Programme ("People Still Call it Love: Passion, Affection andDestruction in Japanese Cinema") should have been a sure-fire hit for me then. Sadly, my love for other things as well meant I only committed to watching two films of this year's selection.

As the title suggests, love in Japanese cinema is very much a double-edged sword, having seen many a life destroyed by it on the screen over the years. As such, I imagine we can expect many a moment of over-acting, pain and struggle...

So, from one of two, "Her Love Boils Bathwater"...

It's funny how some coincidences happen. Just before going to watch Ryota Nakano's "Her Love Boils Bathwater" I read Mark Schilling's review of Seijiro Koyama's "Sakura" from his book "Contemporary Japanese Film". To start, he quote Donald Richie with whom he watched the film: "Now that was a Japanese movie." This is a statement that could be lodged firmly at the start of any review for Nakano's film.

So I went there. Featuring a cast of people you have definitely seen in other films, this is a classic Japanese movie of a constant barrage of turmoil heaved our heroine's way, forcing her to dig deep to overcome adversity, with a big dollop of "we can succeed if we all pull together" spirit.

Futaba (Rie Miyazawa) is a single mother to her sole daughter Azumi (Hana Sugisaki). Living at their now defunct public bathhouse - the owner, her husband, having "disappeared like steam" - she works in a bakery while Azumi struggles with bullying at school. On learning she has terminal pancreatic cancer, she feels it's time to re-ignite an old flame.

Having located her husband Kazuhiro (man of hair Joe Odagiri), via a Japanese staple PI (Taro Suruga), she drags him, and his illegitimate daughter Ayuko (Aoi Ito), back to the bathhouse to open its doors once more. As Futaba's illness worsens, so do Azumi's school troubles, but tears provoke strength in her daughter to overcome the bullies and take on her share of responsibility for the bathhouse.

Planning one final road trip with the girls to see Mount Fuji, Futaba has one final revelation for Azumi: she is not her real mother. It is following this that Futaba's health takes a turn for the worse, seeing out her final days in a hospital bed while her family keep the bathhouse waters running.

In the world of "Her Love Boils Bathwater", the turmoil that needs to be overcome seems to be that of abandoning mothers: Ayuko has been abandoned by her mother, left with her loafing buffoon of a father; PI Takimoto is always accompanied by his young daughter after his wife died in childbirth; and as we discover, Azumi is not Futaba's daughter, but the child of the deaf-mute ex-wife of Kazuhiro.

All of these young women find a surrogate mother-figure in Futaba, showing her strength of character to help raise and comfort them, despite, as we learn, having been abandoned by her own mother when a young child. All this doesn't exactly paint a great image of mothers, but also makes Miyazawa and her relationships with her fellow cast members the strength of the film.

Nakano tried to build close relationships between the cast during shooting, creating an almost temporary family among them. And this works. The young "daughters" respond well to Futaba when she's at both her most strict and caring, and grow as Futaba declines. This is a far cry from Odagiri's performance as the seemingly apathetic Kazuhiro. He seems to perpetually play the role of an eighteen year-old boyfriend responding to his girlfriend's calls to meet her parents, while smoking a cigarette, but he does this with an effortless cool; the perfect foil to Futaba's strength.

But while the acting and character relations are strong, the Japanese movie Richie was referring to perhaps sends this film into overkill territory. Adversity is slapped around our faces like a wet fish, with tears thrown straight into our eyes by the bucket-load. This somewhat detracts from the power of Futaba's struggle, with certain elements that could have been removed. Poignancy can come a little more subtly.

When I watched Akio Kondo's"Eclair" I was perhaps somewhat naive in my conclusions. While indentifying the over-sentimentality on display, I should have perhaps been more aware of the staple diet of Japanese commercial cinema and its need to tick boxes. You simply must have someone give someone a bike ride. The "all pulling together" spirit of the film's conclusion is as cheesy as it is sickly sweet.

Put forward as Japan's 2017 Oscar submission, this is a film that certainly represents Japanese film. The fact that it wasn't put forward for nomination, however, reflects its overall quality.

BFI 61st London Film Festival: The White Girl

Twenty years on since the hand-over of Hong Kong from British rule to China with a fifty year period of autonomy until 2047 and a number of films have been made regarding the anxieties faced by the natives, notably Wong Kar-wai's Cannes-winning "Happy Together". Recent times have seen a growing number of films along these lines - some subversive, others looking more at the practicalities - alongside periods of protest at the impending loss of a way of life.

Jenny Suen's debut feature is along the subversive lines, teaming-up with Wong's cinematographer on "Happy Together", Christopher Doyle. Set around the last fishing village in Hong Kong, to summarise the plot for "The White Girl" is difficult. The characters largely nameless, the titular "The White Girl" (Angela Yuen) is a student in a class of various ages. Living with her father, a fisherman, she is treated as his servant and told she is allergic to sunlight, like her estranged mother, whose whereabouts are unknown. A singer who made some recordings, she listens to her mother's songs, asking her father as to her story; something he's unwilling to discuss.

Wandering at night when she feels safer to go out, she spends her time at a bay in her underwear, where she meets an equally enigmatic Japanese man (Joe Odagiri), who is living in a watch tower above the village where he is able to project images from the village on to a wall. The Japanese himself befriends a local boy (Jeff Yiu) who helps him set-up his new home.

While these three loaners meet, the local "Village Chief" is making secret plans with a trio from mainland China to bulldoze and concrete the tiny fishing port and build new luxury apartments and entertainment complexes. However, only a limited amount of time is dedicated to the development of this story. Instead, the main focus is on the chance encounters between the three leads and their slow meanders around the village.

There are a number of problems with this film, but let's start with the positives. As you'd expect with cinematography from co-director Christopher Doyle, there are some very interesting shots of blurred focus against dilapidated backdrops. But herein lies a problem. Audiences will no doubt be attracted to Doyle as cinematographer, but working with a complex narrative with a novice director, these shots simply become a pretty visual to overall confusion.

Working with more established directors, Doyle's camerawork is an enhancement of well-constructed filmmaking and storytelling. But having less experience, Suen is unable to construct these shots into a cohesive narrative. Doyle himself a relative novice as a director - limited to documentary, segments and the challenging watches of "Away with Words" and "Warsaw Dark" - is unable to provide mentoring for cohesion either.

The emphasis seems to be on the cinematography over the storytelling: the two leads moving at a slow pace whenever on screen together; their communicating in broken English slow and awkward, with a script that offers few explanations either. As such, much of the film has the surface-level enigma of a fragrance commercial, with meaning left open and little in the way of depth within the characters, with only hints ever provided as to "The White Girl's" story.

Perhaps there are too many ideas working at once here, creating confusion, leaving the audience to wonder if this symbolises that, and that symbolises this. While open ends are always welcome, as there are many ideas, each not fully explored, there are simply too many things to consider, leaving little satisfaction by the film's conclusion. The "Village Chief" and his companions accompanied by music harking back to comedy from the Seventies and Eighties feels out-of-place alongside the slow nature of the rest of the film, and further this sense.

You can see some of the ideas at play here, but over-indulgence has hindered their impact. Perhaps working alongside other young directors, fully developing one of the concepts as a short, à la "Ten Years" would have been a better way to tell the story. As such, "The White Girl" will have limited appeal; something of a pretty mess.