Saturday Film Club #11: Antique Bakery

Director: Min Kyu-dong

Country of origin and year of release: South Korea, 2008

Adapted from a Japanese manga, Antique Bakery tells the story of wealthy, privileged Jin-hyeok (Ju Ji-hoon) who, after  having led something of a playboy lifestyle for much of his young life, announces to his family that he intends to settle down by opening a cake shop. His reasoning? Women like cakes, therefore he'll be able to meet lots of girls.

As you might expect, his reason for wanting to open a cake shop isn't as straight forward as all that. The audience is given to understand, very early on, that something terrible and traumatic happened to him as a young child. We don't know exactly what but the scene in which he violently vomits up the cake made by his patisserie chef, and the flashback to his adolescence, in which he equally violently rejects the clumsily expressed love of school boy Min Seon-woo (Kim Jae-wook) offer some kind of clue. He is, at least initially, and to some extent throughout the film, an obnoxious character, but he's also compelling and sympathetic in his quest to understand how he ended up the way he is. In the depiction of this central character and in the other three central characters in this film, Min Kyu-dong doesn't shy away from depicting male fragility and vulnerability alongside male bravado and machismo.

Min Seon-woo, Jin-hyeok's spurned schoolmate, is recruited by him as a patisserie chef and - despite having bounced back more than admirably following his crushing rejection by Jin-hyeok - his love god status contrasts with the blowback from some of his more impulsive sexual decisions. This has led to a certain amount of criticism for the film in that Min Seon-woo is proclaimed as "A gay of demonic charm" who can quite literally charm the pants off any man, suggesting the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous, predatory gay man.

Due to the wider complexities of Min Seon-woo's character, which quickly become apparent, I feel that the stereotype is exploited rather than confirmed to. Min Seon-woo might be enjoying an extremely robust sex life, but he's also regularly sacked from his various chef jobs, leaving behind him a trail of inconsolable kitchen staff who have fallen in love with him. While Min Seon-woo's sexual magnetism is largely played for laughs, it is also used to make important points: He was subjected to a volley of homophobic verbal abuse by Jin-hyeok when he made his clumsy confession of love and, rather than go home and cry about it, he instead went to a gay bar, got shitfaced, and had an epiphany that he didn't have to be another kind of gay stereotype: Emotionally tortured, alone, and isolated. 

The baby faced ex boxer Yang Ki-beom (Yoo Ah-In) soon joins the cake shop, Antique, as a cake obsessed trainee patisserie, under the watchful eye of Min Seon-woo. While he initially presents as a cheeky, greedy, brat it becomes apparent, following a confrontation with a customer, that he too has secrets he would rather not talk about. 

While the overall mood of Antique Bakery is often as light as the patisserie, verging on camp at times, it does - as I've already hinted - have a series of darker undertones. Central to this is an unfolding crime story that at first seems to have little to do with the antics at Antique but which, in the end, becomes firmly entwined with that establishment and its staff. 

We know that there is something lurking in Jin-hyeok's past that he clearly needs to deal with, and we know that it is tied up in some way with the constant presence of the fourth member of staff at Antique: Nam Su-yeong (Choi Ji-ho), a clumsy young man and supposed childhood friend of Jin-hyeok, who also appears to serve as his bodyguard. But who, or what, is being protected? And from whom?

While it has been said that the plot doesn't quite work, I'd say instead that this is a film that needs to be watched more than once. Not only will it make more sense on the second viewing but you will also take different things from it, and notice different things. For this is a film that improves with repeated viewing. 

Saturday Film Club #10: Kamikaze Girls

Kyôko Fukada and Anna Tsuchiya as Momoko and Ichigo

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 2004

Adapted from Novala Takemoto's novel, and known in Japan as Shimotsuma Story, Kamikaze Girls has been justly recognised as one of the main cultural channels for the popularisation of Japanese street fashions abroad, particularly the Lolita fashion trend. 

In this fast paced, inventively structured, vivid screwball comedy/female buddy movie, we are introduced to Momoko; a demure, dutiful, Rococco obsessed Lolita, and Ichigo; a loud, aggressive, gobbing motorbike obsessed Yanki. As fully paid up members of their respective fashion tribes, they should, by rights, have nothing to do with each other but - given that they live in the remote, rural rice paddy field dominated town of Shimotsuma in Ibaraki Prefecture - they are thrown together by virtue of being The Only Weirdos In The Village. 

Momoko, we know from the start, had very different beginnings: The result of an inelegant, drunken one night stand between a night club hostess and a hopeless aspiring yakuza in a decidedly more gritty, gangster orientated town, she fell in love with Lolita fashions following a trip to the famous Baby The Stars Shine Bright boutique in the hippest part of Tokyo. Her evolving Lolita look was equally as at odds with the fashion trends in her hometown ("It was tracksuit country") as they are with the credulous locals in Shimotsuma, the quiet town she and her father are forced to flee to following his over ambitious adventures as a fashion counterfeiter. 

She meets Ichigo when, in an attempt to raise funds to feed her fashion habit, she begins quietly selling her fathers counterfeit Versace clothes. The two fail to hit it off and yet Ichigo returns, again and again, and attempts to befriend the aloof Lolita. Momoko, being more interested in Rococco France and embroidery, cannot understand why Ichigo keeps on coming back but it slowly becomes apparent to the audience, if not to Momoko, that Ichigo - despite her posturing - is, at heart, a friendly girl who has seen something in this curiously attired fellow misfit that she likes and admires. 

There follows a series of adventures involving Pachinko, embroidery, an unusually coiffed gangster, an odyssey to Tokyo's ultra hip Daikanyama district, and the entrusting of Ichigo's beloved Kamikaze coat (synonomous with her all girl biker gang tribe, The Ponytails) to Momoko. Somewhere along the way, a friendship is formed, and new loyalties and priorities develop, leading to difficult choices. 

One of the reasons why Kamikaze Girls is such a great watch is its penchant for breaking the fourth wall and messing with narrative structures. When Momoko feels the narrative might be getting a bit slow for the viewer, or there's going to be some backstory coming up, she often turns to camera and signposts the incoming hand break turn. Examples would include the story of her father being told in the form of a short tragi-comic documentary which is shown, to much hilarity, on a TV screen in the station waiting room as she awaits her train. Similarly, Ichigos back story is relayed in a helpful summary, voiced by Momoko, and there is even a short animation detailing the recent history of Ibaraki's girl biker gangs, shown as an intermission feature while Momoko and Ichigo are dining out at the unfeasibly named Forest of the Aristocrats. 

Despite her singularly lone wolf, hard boiled, independent character, Momoko is an oddly likeable character. Even when she's being bad, she's selfish rather than awful, and the final selfless act she commits to at the films climax is - while out of character - a choice that the viewer can fully support.

Similarly, while Tsuchiya's performance as Ichigo often feels over the top, it works because both she and Fukada are playing flamboyantly cartoonish stereotypes that they then, over the course of the film, imbue with humanity, complexity and likability. 

Somewhere in the hectic, technicolour joyride that follows, a very likeable screwball comedy emerges. 

Saturday Film Club #9: Pom Poko

Director: Isao Takahata

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 1994

Pom Poko features, at its heart, an environmental and conservation theme that is common to a number of Studio Ghibli productions, most notably the excellent Princess Mononoke. You can also see nods to it in Nausica, My Neighbour Totoro and Whisper Of The Heart, amongst others. 

It is best characterised as a nostalgia for pre-industrial age Japan, conveyed through a gentler way of life, and a sense of harmony with nature, often depicted in the form of wood spirits and similar creatures. On the other hand, nature is often shown to be untamable and unpredictable, while still needing protection. Often, as is the case with Princess Mononoke, there is depicted the ultimate destruction of nature, and a sense of intense sorrow and grief at that destruction.

In Pom Poko, the reason for this reoccurring theme quickly becomes apparent: The film takes place in the 1960s, at a time when Japan's industrial boom saw rapid industrialisation spread from cities such as Tokyo to the nearby countryside.

Much as Richard Adams Watership Down sought to depict the tragedy of rapid industrial growth at the expense of the environment through the eyes of rabbits, so Pom Poko tells the story of a similar tragedy through the eyes of raccoons. Like Adams' rabbits, their territory and homes are being destroyed by industrialisation but, unlike the rabbits, the raccoons elect to stay and fight. Specifically, through a number of schemes, they try to chase away the humans, to make them give up and let them stay on the land in peace. It is fair to say that it doesn't end well. 

As with Watership Down, there are mystical elements to the story, and - to a certain extent - collaboration and assistance with other animal species. There is also the game changing element that is the raccoon's ability to transform themselves into humans. 

Like a lot of Studio Ghibli, it's a film that is by turns funny and very sad. It also has an epic fantasy feel to the narrative that at times feels as though it might escape the confines of the story, but which it never does. In the raccoons story we see a tale that feels all too human in many ways, dealing as it does with themes such as unexpected and unwelcome change, things outside of our control, and grief. It is utterly absorbing. 

Saturday Film Club #8: Sucker Punch

Director: Zack Snyder

Country of origin and year of release: US, 2011

In this frankly mind boggling film, Zack Snyder - a man more known for superhero and zombie films than for psychological thrillers - applies the styles, codes and conventions of the superhero film to what can only be described as a 21st Century take on the Victorian era incarceration of difficult women and girls story. Think Avengers meets The Woman In White. 

It only just comes off and the main reason it works is because Snyder applies the same superhero action codes and conventions to the modern day incarceration of difficult girl protagonist bit of the plot as he does to the fantasy sequences, meaning the whole thing is incredibly high octane, over the top, and stylised to the hilt from the minute the film opens.

Baby Doll (all the characters have names like this - you just have to go with it...) has just lost her mother, has been abused by her stepfather (who, it is implied, was probably complicit in her mothers death) and has accidentally shot and killed the younger sister she was trying to protect from said stepfather. In shock, she is driven to a suitably gothic looking hospital where she is drugged, money changes hands, and she is admitted as a patient, having been declared insane. This all happens in the first five minutes.

Once inside the hospital, she finds herself performing menial work alongside a group of other young women who - like her - seem as sane as the next person. 

Then, it gets weird.

Instead of finding ourselves in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest territory, our heroine instead finds herself in some high stakes version of Moulan Rouge.

No, I still don't get that bit either.

Anyway, suspend your disbelief and strap in for the ride because it's about to get weirder still.

When Baby Doll is forced to dance for the various sleazy blokes who pay to be entertained by the mental hospital patients, she goes on a journey inside her head to make it bearable, taking the viewer with her. 

In her head, she goes on a series of quests, in which she needs to face various perils and defeat various foes in order to retrieve the items she and the other girls will need in order to escape the hospital. Initially she is fighting alone but, as she persuades the other inmates to help her, they also join her in her fantasy adventures. There's a standard samurai fantasy to begin with, then later a steampunk take on WWII, then a high stakes explosives on a train task. Not all of the quests occur without costs, and the reality behind the fantasy is often hard to take, especially when it goes wrong. 

On one level, you have to admire the sheer audacity of the plot, but there are aspects of it that do feel a bit queasy. There is the essential incarcerations of difficult women plot, and how it plays out, up to and including the way in which toxic masculinity, itself a form of madness, is allowed to roam unfettered within the hospital. There are many victims here, and the film skips lightly over a number of the many deaths that occur. Similarly, its very much up to the viewer to decide if the female characters are purely there to be viewed as sex objects by the viewer, as much as by the men who pay to exploit them within the film, or if they are fully rounded characters who, while exploited, are given agency and heroic characteristics. It is hard to form a consensus on that. 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the film, or simply the moment when it lapses into poor taste, is the closing credits sequence. We have, quite literally, watched a man run rampant through an entire enclosed community, terrorising, exploiting, killing and profiting from multiple women. He has even forged signatures and caused medical procedures to take place illegally on a number of patients. How then is it OK to have that character dancing and lip syncing with the doctor, who he has undermined and taken advantage of professionally and (possibly) personally throughout the film as though this was a comedy? What The Actual Fuck?! As the young people say.

I have watched Sucker Punch about three or four times now, and every time the closing credits sequence has felt like a slap in the face. I think it's because, without it, the film would make a kind of sense and have a sense of resolution, however harrowing, but with it... it feels like the sucker punch of the films title. 

Sucker Punch is a film that does benefit from being watched more than once, and it does have a lot of style, a great soundtrack, cleverly executed and beautifully filmed moments within the narrative, as well as interesting things to say about power, control and madness. But it's fair to say that any aspect of the film that troubles you on the first watch will most likely still trouble you on future watches. 

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Saturday Film Club #7: Girl

Dominque Swain and Tara Reid as Andrea and Cybil

Director: Jonathan Kahn

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1998

I would never have encountered Girl (which has the feel of a straight-to-video release) had it not been for regularly watching it's trailer on a long forgotten VHS tape. I was intrigued by the films seemingly slapstick take on the 1990s grunge scene, and the perennial teenage coming of age film structure holding it all together.

Starring a post-Lolita Dominique Swain, Girl tells the story of Andrea Marr, a fairly quiet, strait-laced much loved only child of older, very over protective parents. Undistinguished and largely unnoticed at high school, Andrea is, in short, A Geek. 

That is until she meets Todd Sparrow (Sean Patrick Flanery), singer in local grunge band The Colour Green (surely a choice that would be firmly at the bottom of anyone's band name list, but still...), and develops such a severe crush on him that it borders on stalking. Her bass playing friend Cybil (Tara Reid) is unsurprisingly cynical about Andrea's sudden transformation from geek to aspiring grunge queen, and Andrea's (admittedly boring) friend Darcy (Selma Blair) is abandoned with little thought or consequence. Andrea's entree into the local grunge scene comes from Rebecca (Summer Phoenix), a lone grunge girl in her class at school, who knows all the cool bands and all the best venues, and essentially takes the unworldly Andrea in hand. On her way to snagging the weirdly uncharismatic Todd, Andrea falls into the path of Kevin (Channon Roe), a journalism student who provides her with her first (deeply unsatisfying) sexual experience. She also meets Todd's sister, Carla (Portia de Rossi), an effortlessly cool grunge queen who tells Andrea straight up that Todd is not for her: "You're too good for him; he doesn't deserve a girl like you." 

This grunge story has its roots in a serialised story of the same name, which first appeared in Sassy magazine before being published as a novel in 1994. The book's writer, Blake Nelson, later adapted the novel for screen, during which process the previously un-academic and un-motivated Andrea suddenly became Ivy League material, giving the inevitable relationship with Todd an extra layer of built in destruction that greatly enhances the plot.

Although the book Girl was written prior to cult US coming of age series My So-Called Life, the film Girl compares unfavourably to Winnie Holtzman's series. Tara Reid's Cybil is no Rayanne Graff and Swain's Andrea Marr is no Angela Chase. And yet the film does have some genuinely funny moments: 

A post coital and confused Andrea visiting the school counsellor's office to try and make sense of her first sexual encounter with Todd Sparrow is one, as is the first gig scene, which quite rightly eschews realism for atmosphere and comes away with a clumsy sense of charm in the process. In a related note, Summer Phoenix as Rebecca gets most of the best lines, including her introductory speech in which she accurately skewers musical sub genre snobbery. 

There are some interesting performances here, including de Rossi as the effortlessly cool Carla, and the aforementioned Phoenix as Rebecca, who would have made a much more interesting lead character than Swain's Andrea. 

Swain herself has a tendency to come across as whiney at moments when the viewer is meant to feel sympathy for her, but Reid as Cybil is at least periodically interesting in her performance, and Blair as the abandoned Darcy is... OK. Sadly, pretty much all of the male characters, up to and including Todd and Kevin, feel woefully underwritten. 

It would be an interesting 'What if?' to imagine what Girl would have been like had Phoenix's Rebecca been the lead character instead of Swain's Andrea. It would have made for a very different film, especially as Rebecca would have been far less likely to put up with Kevin's pseudo intellectual music journalist bollocks, and probably would have been clear headed enough, and had enough self esteem, to stay away from Todd Sparrow. It's unlikely that Hollywood would have been interested in that story though, and the result would probably have been closer to Daria than My So-Called Life, which would have been no bad thing.

Saturday Film Club #6: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Director: Gus Van Sant

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1993

Even at the time, Gus Van Sant's adaptation of Tom Robbins cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues seems to have upset people. Mainly, it seems, for the unforgivable sin of not being My Own Private Idaho.

There are always going to be problems with managing expectation when it comes to adapting a well loved book, especially one that was structured in such a way that adapting it for screen would be a challenge. But these problems were clearly added to by the success of the aforementioned Van Sant directed My Own Private Idaho three years earlier. 

Like MOPI, ECGTB features a member of the Phoenix clan. Rain in this case, not River, who had died the year prior to this films release. I'm not sure whether this raised expectations or not, but the many perceived failings of ECGTB cannot be laid at Rain Phoenix's feet as she is clearly playing a blinder as the teenage cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean, love interest to Uma Thurman's hitch hiking model Sissy Hankshaw.

Robbin's presumably didn't take too much issue with what Van Sant did to his book as he appears as the narrater, but there are clear differences between book and film, including the cutting of almost all of the plot involving Julian Gitche (played by a much underused Keanu Reeves). Like the book, the film is fairly all over the place, meandering here and there at a gentle, picturesque pace that reflects its origins in the counterculture of the 1970s. There are aspects of the story that wouldn't stand scrutiny today, including a self proclaimed mystic to the counter culture known only as The Chink (played by Pat Morita).

When taken in the context of the mid 1990s, the film was refreshing for providing rare portrayals of LGBT+ characters; from the bi curious rich bohemian set who attempt to seduce Sissy into a threesome following her disastrous first meeting with Julian, to John Hurt's majestic The Countess, not to mention the all-female community of the cowgirls. As with the depictions of the counterculture though, it's likely that viewers opinions of these characters, and their motives, will have changed since the book was written and the film was made. None the least because the depictions of trans and lesbian characters in the book and the film were constructed in entirely different cultural contexts than today. 

Aside from this wider point about representation, there are some genuinely good performances in the film: The aforementioned Rain Phoenix, who brings a cheeky exuberance to her portrayal of Jellybean, but also - perhaps surprisingly - Roseanne Arnold in an hilarious cameo as a the fortune teller Madame Zoe, who is faced with the unenviable task of telling the child Sissy's increasingly desperate mother that Everything Is Going To Be OK. When faced with the child's unfeasibly large thumbs, she breaks character and exclaims in horror "Jesus fucking Christ..."

 "A husband" mutters Sissy's mother, frantically pushing wads of money towards Madame Zoe, "Is she going to find a husband?"

Zoe, knowing which side her bread is buttered, draws herself up into a suitably mystic trance. "I see men in your life" she says brightly, looking over at the young girl "I also see... women: Lots and lots of women"

At which point Sissy's horrified mother drags the wide eyed child out of the fortune telling booth.

The grown up Sissy, aided by her large thumbs, takes to hitchhiking like the proverbial duck to water, living exclusively on the road and treating it as a way of life. She is talent spotted by The Countess, who hires her as a model to pedal his vaginal douches and other feminine hygiene products, recognising in the unworldly Sissy the perfect ingenue. 

As the role of The Chink suggests, there were elements of the 1970s counter culture that might feel more troubling today than they would have done at the time. As well as the personality cults of the 1970s, this character also shows the hippies fetishisation of other cultures, just as Sissy's interest in the Native American community hints at a possible, more well intentioned, fetishisation as well as America's deeply troubled and problematic relationship with that community. Similarly, it's fair to say that the past is a different country when it comes to attitudes to women, and that the counterculture's attitude towards women no longer seems as forward thinking as it was portrayed at the time. 

This is by no means a perfect film. It is deeply flawed in a number of ways, and at a number of levels, and yet it is a film that you can return to and find new things in. As well as Phoenix's performance, we also have some fantastically over the top scenery chewing scenes from Lorraine Bracco as Delores Del Ruby, the cowgirls peyote guzzling seer. Thurman's own performance is less good, but it's not as terrible as it's sometimes portrayed. Arguably, she can do comedy, but the role of Sissy Hankshaw falls somewhere between comedy and drama, and it's for this reason, and because of the overall strangeness of the films narrative in general, that she struggles a bit. 

Watch it for Phoenix, but expect Rain, not River. 

Saturday Film Club #5: Whisper Of The Heart

Seiji and Shizuku

Director: Yoshifumi Kondō

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 1995

Perhaps not one of the best known Studio Ghibli films, Whisper Of The Heart (adapted from Aoi Hiiragi's 1989 manga of the same name) tells the story of fourteen year old Shizuku Tsukishima, a book loving, library haunting girl with a clearly established love of reading and highly developed imagination. 

Over the course of the summer holidays, she becomes fascinated by the identity of the mysterious Seiji Amasawa, whose name keeps appearing in the list of borrowers for every library book she takes out.*

At the same time, she is becoming increasingly irked by her repeated chance encounters with a rude and sardonic boy of the same age, who always seems to meet her at her worst: Forgetting her dad's lunch box, leaving her lyrical re-working of John Denver's 'Take Me Home Country Road' on a park bench... 

Inevitably, he turns out to be Seiji Amasawa. 

While clearly written as a coming of age story of friendship and first love, Whisper Of The Heart is a beautiful anime not just because of the vividly evocative quality of the animation, nor even because of the central coming of age/romance storyline. It's beautiful for the way it celebrates the value of reading and imagination, and the importance of following your dreams: Shizuku and Seiji want different things. He wants to be a violin maker, she wants to be a writer and when Seiji gets the chance to travel to Cromona in Italy to try out as an apprentice, Shizuku is inspired by his dedication to attempt to write her first novel. It is not an unqualified success, but then neither is Seiji's visit to Cromona. What's important is that they tried, and that they both learnt something. 

Equally as important are minor characters, such as Shizuku's best friend Yuki and Sugimura, a sports loving boy known to Shizuku, who Yuki has a crush on. One of the most affecting scenes concerns the discovery of an unwitting love triangle between these three characters. 

There is also the mysterious cat statue, the Baron, owned by Seiji's uncle, whose story inspires Shizuku's literary efforts. The character of the Baron, along with the train travelling, dog baiting, cat Muta, would later return in the aptly titled The Cat Returns in 2002. 

Whisper Of The Heart is a sweet film which isn't overly sentimental, and which is complex and well developed enough to be compelling watching for all ages. Younger viewers will enjoy the cats, older viewers will be reminded of their own teenage dreams and aspirations, as well as the pangs and pains of first love. 

*Sadly a pleasure that was surely lost as soon as library management systems became computerised in the 1990s