The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival takes place from July 10th to July 26th. For details and showtimes, click here.
As NYAFF synchronicities go this one might be a bit of a stretch, but bear with me: I Blew Out The Candles Before Making A Wish and Gamer Girls both take games as a jumping-off point of interest, but with very different approaches. Not so much about the games themselves but what they mean and how they affect the people involved, players and non-players alike.
To that end Candles is about games of chance, with a particular eye on the extent to which need and intentions might affect success. Gamer Girls is, to a certain extent, cut from the cloth of many a sports flick before it. But it’s ultimate interest lies far more in the culture around gaming, to fascinating ends. Both films stuck with me in ways I wasn’t anticipating from their beginnings.
Truth be told, it actually took most of the movie for me to warm to I Blew Out The Candles. It’s just a little too sedate, a bit too sleepy, for such a fun and interesting premise. But some unexpected plot turns (it would be too much to call them full on twists) in the home stretch really brought home the films ambitions and made me reconsider what came before.
That premise is simple enough: in the gambling mecca that is Macau, a little girl named Jojo (Mui Cheng In) has stumbled upon a massive cache of dead chips– that is, casino tokens that can be used to gamble but not exchanged for actual cash. Too young to be allowed into a casino herself, she searches out a proxy to gamble for her. Eventually she lands on Hua (beloved NYAFF staple Kai Ko), a would-be debt collector whose inherent half softness immediately marks him out as a poor fit for enforcement of any kind.
Reluctant at first, Hua eventually agrees as his part of the split will help him deal with a precarious housing situation involving him and his estranged wife. The dissolution of his marriage being yet another weight on his conscience, and another thing that ill-gotten gambling gains might finally fix. Jojo, meanwhile, has goals that are more wishcasting than practical; she hopes to earn enough able to pay off her father’s outstanding debts, in the hopes that if she does he will finally be able to return from wherever he’s been hiding since his bill came due… his father’s debts being the reason Jojo and Hua even crossed paths in the first place.
This is the essence of the story, presented in a fairly quiet, unadorned style; co-directors Yen Hu and Chao Koi Wang mostly stay out of the script by Wang and Chen Yu Ri. Things do get a bit more complicated when JoJo’s grandmother (Elaine Jin, also in the festival’s Bird of Paradise) falls ill and JoJo has to adjust her figures accordingly. But mostly it’s just a two-hander between Jojo and Hua, bonded by increasingly dire financial straits and slowly becoming something like a family, almost against both their wills. It’s a fairly simple story treated in a subdued manner that is alternately gratifying and a little dozy… or at least that seems like the case for the first two-thirds. A late stage revelation that recontextualizes some earlier moments lead to, in turn, some very interesting decisions on the part of our protagonists, Hua in particular, that give the proceedings a genuinely fascinating existential sheen. Up until then it felt like a perfectly decent if unexceptional watch. But by the end, I was far more invested in the outcome. And in that light, some of what initally seemed like flaws became stealth advantages. Namely, the jokes (when they come) are low-key, occasionally to the point of almost being obscure. But that also means the film rarely falls into the trap of going overboard with the melodramatics, which very easily could have been the case. It took me awhile to appreciate the sweet spot the film carves out for itself, but in the end it’s worth it.
Gamer Girls, on the other hand, has never even heard of subtlety. And if it has, it put in a truly remarkable effort to get as far away from it as possible. it starts big and broad with a delightfully daffy (yet still rousing) opener set inside a video game and never really pauses to push much further than the sugar rush aesthetics of that initial sequence. But being unsubtle isn’t the same as being silly or stupid, and for all its bigness the film still makes him very interesting points about a world both familiar and foreign.
Our heroine Summer (a winsome Angela Yuen) is chafing under their strains of her normal workaday life and pleasant but terminally normcore boyfriend (Cheuk-Hei Wu). She very clearly pines for the fun and freedom she experienced back when she and her team Dollhouse were champions of Esports. But things ended acrimoniously and everyone went their separate ways. Desperate to feel the fush of victory once more, Summer quits her job and sets off on a mission to get the band back together and compete again. But in this case winning might not be so much about defeating a rival so much as defeating both a pile of past resentments and the ultimate final boss: corporate interference.
It’s that second aspect that grabbed my attention, the thing that felt new and unexplored. From the opening scene on I had been expecting a video game driven version of a sports movie, where a rag tag team puts aside their differences and come from behind to win it all. But (without getting into spoilers) that aspect of the plot mostly resolves itself early on and the main character’s priority shift and interesting and unexpected ways.
Perhaps my interest is part and parcel to my lack of knowledge on the general culture of Esports, but I found the journey to be a very interesting one from ‘will our heroes win the championship?’ to ‘will our heroes be allowed to carve out their own space there will corporate interests devour them like they devour everything else?’ But even more interesting than that, asking what kind of considerations are necessary when the product of aspiration is a corporate construct in the first place?
These aren’t necessarily questions with easy answers and while Gamer Girls is at heart a crowd pleasing romp, it is to the film’s credit that they don’t entirely settle for easy answers to any of it.
Though she shares the directing credit with Sophie Yang the degree to which this film is Veronica Bassetto’s baby is kind of staggering. She may be merely the co-helmer but she has a story credit, the sole screenwriting credit, is the editor and even has a straight up credit for visual effects design (though the actual effects themselves are credited to Stay Hungry Keep Foolish Limited).
Pretty much the only credit of note that Bassetto doesn’t claim for herself is the exemplary art direction by Dorothy Lau. I mean, for crying out loud She even does voice over for the pitch perfect in-game narrator; the sort of tower defense game that is the focal point of everyone’s attentions (the perfectly named Dystopian Glory) is far beyond my cultural expertise, but I at least know enough to recognize that the delivery on her canned catchphrases are dead-on.
It’s a hell of a lot to take on, let alone for one’s filmmaking debut, as this is for Bassetto. That she does so with such deftness and flair is genuinely impressive. And, though it is by no means perfect, so is the movie.
Both movies, come to that.
