How do Aceh and Japan, two places that seem unrelated, separated by a vast distance of land and sea, connect on the personal and historical level?
The Man From The Sea. Busan Int Film Festival
For one, they both have been hit by a tsunami -- Aceh in the massive tragedy that struck many parts of Southeast Asia in 2004 and Japan in 2011. Going back further, the Japanese Imperial Army was in Aceh during World War II. The ghost of those two momentous events still haunt the Indonesian province, and that ghost -- that combined force of history and nature -- is what The Man From The Sea is trying to explore.
The Japanese film by director Koji Fukada (whose previous film Harmonium, a chilling revenge tale, was released in Bangkok) takes place entirely in Aceh, an unlikely setting for a film with a very Japanese sensibility. It opens with a mysterious incident when a naked man is washed ashore on the northern tip of Sumatra, and the true identity of this man is the film's central conceit. While authorities figure out what to do with him, a Japanese woman, Takako, who's lived in Aceh for years and her half-Japanese, half-Indonesian son, Takashi, take the man home. Soon a Japanese teenager, Sachiko, arrives at Atsuko's house on a vacation, and she begins hanging out with Takashi and his Indonesian friends, Ilma and Chris.
The search for the man's origin is intercut with the budding romance between Sachiko, Chris, Takashi and Ilman. A straightforward drama of young love and conflicting identities -- Takashi speaks Bahasa and considers himself more Indonesian than Japanese -- takes on a transcendental note when the mysterious man begins to show a miraculous healing power, including the ability to conjure up a ball of water out of thin air to save from a girl from dying.
In its unhurried fashion, the film reels out a stack of metaphors about natural force and Japan's relationships with the world -- the pleasant and unpleasant relationships of the present and the past. The mention of the 2004 tsunami that laid waste to Aceh and left indelible scars on its people is somehow crossed with the vestiges of anger over Japan's World War activities, still remembered by some locals. The mysterious man appears at first as a saviour, but his power -- is it natural power or unnatural power? -- can also be disturbing and destructive, like the tidal waves, or like Japan itself. The Man From The Sea may not have the wide-reaching appeal as Harmonium, but it's a film that tries to understand how some strands of history will never be broken either by time or by geography. Let's hope it will find a way to Bangkok at our Asean Film Festival next year.
Fly By Night
A Malaysian heist thriller isn't something we see on a weekly basis, either in multiplexes or film festivals. Fly By Night by Zahir Omar sticks to the genre playbook -- a motley extortion gang, a heist gone wrong, a cop with a dark past -- and transposes it on the street of Kuala Lumpur. In the end, the film may overstretch itself, and the plot is littered with holes. But at the same time Fly By Night is driven by brash energy grounded in the authentic Southeast Asian milieu.
The gang is made up of streetwise taxi drivers who, with the help of a scout positioned at an airport, blackmail wealthy clients with sensitive information and outright threat. They're small-time crooks basically, until one member gets big-headed and tries to pull off a major score off a jewellery businessman, which drags in a local godfather with a sadistic inclination. Soon a charismatic cop turns up to ask questions, and the film takes a surprisingly dark turn and the light caper becomes a violent crime thriller with the kind of fatalism rarely seen in films from this part of the world.
The intricacy of the heist may not be on the par with Danny Ocean, and Fly By Night relies too much on coincidences. But this is a good example of a commercial film that has a market potential in Southeast Asia, something that deserves to have a wider reach than in its home soil of Malaysia.
Alpha, The Right To Kill. Photos courtesy of Busan Int Film Festival
Alpha, The Right To Kill
Brillante Mendoza, astride on top of the Philippines filmmaking pyramid, continues to delve into the foul grime of his land, especially energised by the controversial war on drugs. Now, it's said that Mendoza admires President Duterte, though admiration can be a complicated feeling. The prolific director's latest offering, Alpha, The Right To Kill, is a continuation of his Netflix crime series Amo, which is set entirely in Metro Manila's zinc-roof slums where small-time dealers navigate their ways through a dirty maze while cops -- honest, corrupt, murderous -- put on a hot pursuit.
Is this a pro-Duterte story? Absolutely not. Alpha, like Amo, confronts the disturbing reality of the drug war in which everyone has blood on their hands. The film centres on a crooked detective, Espino, and his informant Elijah, as they try to unload a big supply of drug seized as evidence in a big raid. The setting is what we've seen in most of Mendoza's film from the mid-2000s: urban shantytowns, chaotic, dusty, with a forest of skyscrapers so close yet so far away.
While Alpha will take some time to arrive here (probably the next Asean Film Festival?) I suggest you try Amo on Netflix to understand the ground reality of contemporary Philippines and the harsh, maddening rush of its people to stay float from poverty and death.
