The 25th annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 10 and July 26. For details and showtime, click here.
One underrated benefit of attending the NYAFF is how frequently it provides opportunities to find syncroncities. With such a wide range of movies on display, it feels like there’s an infinite variety of things to see and experience. And yet, because of the concentrated focus on a single continent, and the smaller, self-selecting film industries that comprise the entry pool, over the course of any given festival, you might see film that approach a similar premise from different angles, With new relases and repetory revisits you might wind up seeing the same actor in roles bridging two or three decades of cinematic history. Or, and frequently most rewardingly, you may be exposed to an up-and-coming star, or even an established star, in multiple films, giving us uninformed Americans an insight into their range and charisma.
And so it is with Sara Minami.
Minami (who wil be gracing the festival with her presence in promotion for her starring vehicle All Greens), has a supporting role in Chihiro Amano’s seriocomic caper Magical Secret Tour, and there’s an argument to be made that she’s actually the least developed of our three protagonists. But it might not occur to the viewer until after the fact, given the life and energy she invests in filling whatever gaps the screenplay itself leaves for her.
Instead, our clearly defined main charcater is Wakako, identifed by chyron as housewife, and married to a salaryman we see take a tumble frm a slot machine as the film opens. Our comatose Takashi turns out to have the exact combination of medical problems and poor/illegal financial decision making thatl leads people to resort to desperate measures like gold smuggling, as Wakako does. In the process, she meets Kiyoe (Haru Kuroki, chyron: researcher) and Mayu (Minami, chyron: hostess), both of whom find themselves in dire financial need and set down the smuggling path.
From the title and descritpion of the film I confess I was expecting something rather different. The film is a caper, without question. But I think I was expecting more of a comedic romp. What we get here instead is something a little more grounded, for better or for worse. You might exect huge twists and turns and increasing tension as the stakes raise ever higher, but… that really doesn’t happen here. While it would be a stretch to say the movie is completely serious, or that it’s utterly devoid of tension, for the most part the script by Amano and Madoka Kumagai is content to remain a fairly good natured character study with a simmering but unmistakable anger at the way women are treated bv Japanese society.
And with that in mind, the thing that the movie actually does far better than any film in recent memory is capture the giddy thrill of getting away with it. Whatever the film forgoes in terms of crafting suspensful set pieces, it more than makes up for in expresing the sheer endorphin rush of sucessfully pulling one over on The Man. Skirting the law, as it turns out, is easier than you’d think and a bit more fun than it looks.
Until it’s not.
Of course the Immutable Law of Cinematic Morality means that the good times can’t last, and sooner orater we’ll have to be reminded that Crime Doesn’t Really Pay… but until then, there’s a lot of fun to be had as our formerly oprrssed heroines take their future into their own hands and, however temporarily, reap the benefits.It is to the benefit of both film and audience then, that our trio of leads make the journey to an inevitable conclusion so appealing.
Amimura holds the center as Wakako, who manages to still come off as meek and unassuming while still masterminding an increasingly elaborate series of gold smuggling jobs. Her straits being the most dire, what with the ailing husband, massive debt and a runner involving the health care of her dying father (and her embittered mothers’ increasingly hostile demands for financial support), the highs she experiences feel hard earned, even as they run neck-and-neck with her ever mounting sense of desperation.
Minami, unfortunately, doesn’t have nearly as much to play but invests her newly pregnant good time gal with a fascinating mix of dreaminess and steely reserve. And the blonde hair and sense of style work wonders to make the part seem more substantial and memorable than it actually is.
But, rather unfortunately in an article intended to sing the praises of Sara Minami, I regret to inform that she can’t really hold a candle to the scene stealing energy of Haru Kuroki as Kiyoe. A scientsist who constantly finds her ambitions thwarted by her male co-workers, who range from indiferent to downright perfidious, Kiyoe takes solace in both booze and an obsessive love of J-Pop… even busting up some highly choreographed dance moves in a fit of frustration.
She doesn’t lok like an agent of chaos, but scratch the surface and it’s anarchy all the way down. How delightful.
Magical Secret Tour and All Greens share a lot in common: a trio of women, fed up with their circumstances, turn to crime– gold smuggling in Tour, weed dealing in Greens. Their initial success leads to an increase in ambition, and But here’s a slightly weirder one: delayed title drop.
The title for Magical Secret Tour doesn’t pop up until roughly fifteen minutes into the nearly two hour picture.
But All Greens?
It takes a full 45 minutes for that title drop.
In a 94 minute film.
While this is kind of a thing the two movies share, the way All Greens leans so hard into the irreverence is perhaps the clearest indicator that it’s far closer to what I was initally expecting from Tour. It’s way closer to being a romp… but if it one, it’s a romp with bite.
Upgraded from supporting to main, our Sara Minami undeniably takes the lead as Boku, an aspiring rapper desperate to make her escape from her village of Tokaimura… or perhaps more accurate, to get as far away from her belligerent abusive dad and hapless, inefectual mother as humanly possible. Her lyrical skils finagle her an audience with Nosfur-A2, a DJ/producer who takes an interest in her and offers to make her a beat. But given that she is istructed to wear her schoolgirl uniform to the meeting, it would probably be unwise to consider this her big break.
But Boku is nobody’s fool, and one thwarted sexual assault later, Nosfur-A2 finds himself in a comatose state and Boku finds herself in the possession of the contents of his prize safe: two bags of marijuana seeds. Enlisting the aid of a pair of equally disaffected fellow students, former mean girl/film nerd Milk (Natsuki Deguchi) and would-be manga artist Iwakuma (Mizuki Yoshida), the trio set out to sell enough weed to bankroll their escape from Tokaimura once and for all… which, obviously easier said than done, or there wouldn’t be a movie in the first place.
What with being the star and all, Minami gets quite a bit more to do than in Tour; there’s rapping, there’s scraping, and even a platonic romance of sorts with Kodai Kurosaki’s Jackie, a smitten friend whose sheepish demeanor elides a surprisingly rough bit of backstory… and a surprisingly dark payoff, but more on that in a bit. That none of this ultimately results in an actual romance (nor does Iwakawa’s relationship with a fellow aspiring manga artist turned co-conspiritor) speaks to the films investment in the ever evolving friendship of our errant heroines.
And here is where we find our most interesting contrast to Magical Secret Tour: in it’s overall approach to sisterhood. All Greens takes pains to demonstrate its heroines coming together, gradually learning to trust nd rely on one another. When the inevitale third act complications arrive, it doesn’t tear them apart so much as cast their bond in iron; if they go down, they go down together.Whereas the trio at the heart of Tour, older and more experience in life (and therefore perhaps more burnt out), never quite manage that level of solidarity.
Interestingly, for all the film is painfully aware of the bullshit society heaps onto women, the bond that Wakako, Kiyoe and Mayu forge is based less in shared anger at their mistreatment by the patriarchy and more in a generalized sense of class grievance. And so when their third act complcations arrive, they come apart with alarming speed and fury. And once broken, it’s a bond that can never fully be mended.
Maybe that’s part of the reason I wound up preferring All Greens in the end; both movies have determined that their heroines efforts are doomed to failure but writer-director Takashi Koyama injects a playful streak while recognizing that ultimately it’s more rewarding to watch people fail together than fall apart. All Greens in particular feels like it has a bit of a nasty streak on that front; one event in particular involving the aforementioned Jackie left a bad taste in my mouth. And the ‘where are they now’ tags at the end almost seem like a cyncial riposte to the idea that better things are possible.
That is, until a sardonic final line by Milk tweaks your ear on the way out, letting the audience know who’s really beeinn charge all along. It’s a cheeky, charming, just plain fun way to go out, and as festival starts go, not a bad one at all.
