CIFF ’15: The Laundryman

It is both his cover and euphemism for what he does. Ostensibly, he works for a neighborhood laundry service, but he specializes in removing “stains” from clients’ lives. He is a coolly dispassionate hitman, with support staff to help with the cleaning. However, he will have to seek professional help of a different sort when his recent victims start haunting him in Lee Chung’s The Laundryman (trailer here), which screens during the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.

His boss A-gu is the rainmaker and he does the dirty work. For years, this arrangement has worked for “No. 1, Chingtian Street.” Yes, that is what he is known as, to the few who know the contract killer (it is a long story that will be revealed in due time). He leads a rather solitary life, but that makes it easy for the stunningly beautiful A-gu to manipulate him. They go way back, in an ambiguous way. When he finds himself genuinely haunted, she refers him to nightclub psychic Lin Hsiang. Despite her hipster style, she is legitimate enough to see the abusive self-styled ladies’ man he just offed and the old couple he whacked before him. However, he has no idea who the silent young woman ghost is or was.

With Lin’s help, he will track down the customers who paid for their hits, in order to satisfy their curiosity and hopefully move them along into the spirit realm. Complicating matters, a sinister party seems to be trying to thwart them. The resulting chaos also attracts the attention of a soon to retire police inspector. It gets to the point where a hitman doesn’t know who to trust.

Although Laundryman starts out as a comedy, it gets real serious, real fast. Lee and Chen Yu-hsun have written a surprisingly complex tale of betrayal and dark secrets from the past, freely incorporating all kinds of genre elements cafeteria-style. It is a wild ride, but they keep us safely buckled into the roller coaster.

Rising star Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan has the perfect brooding physicality for No. 1, Chingtian Street, not unlike his quietly ominous work in Soul. He also develops some radically different but equally credible chemistry with Sonia Sui Tang as the particularly fatal femme fatale A-gu and Wan Qian’s Lin, the increasingly sober and freaked out party girl psychic. These are not your standard genre film types, even before Lee thoroughly disrupts their worlds.

Lee fully capitalizes on the cinematic creepiness of A-gu’s laundry facility, settling into a zone best described as supernatural noir. Yet, despite the general moodiness (heightened by Yao Hung-i’s eerie cinematography), he maintains a vigorous pace. Frankly, The Laundryman is exactly the sort of foreign film that feels ripe for a wildly inferior Hollywood remake, but it would be especially daunting to follow in Sui’s compulsively scene-stealing footprints. Highly recommended as a first class supernatural mystery, The Laundryman screens Friday (10/16) and Tuesday (10/20), as part of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.

Women Who Flirt: Just Friends with Zhou Xun?

Considering she looks like Zhou Xun, Angie really shouldn’t have to resort to a lot of game-playing. Unfortunately, she has carried a torch for Marco, her colleague and former classmate so long, he now takes her for granted. When a flirty game-player stakes a claim to the oblivious platonic friend, Angie will have to learn how to fight fire with fire. The battle will be joined in Pang Ho-cheung’s Women Who Flirt (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Shocked to learn her longtime best friend is suddenly serious about a woman who is not herself, Angie calls on her eye-lash batting chum May to form a kitchen cabinet of proud Shanghai flirters to advise her. However, she finds their recommended baby talk and helpless damsel-in-distress routines absolutely vapid. She is just not equipped for this fight and her rival Hailey knows it. Still, if she can get dumb old Marco alone for a romantic getaway in Taiwan, she just might have a puncher’s chance.

Yes, there are similarities between Flirt and My Best Friend’s Wedding and its tragically romantic Chinese-Korean reconfiguration, A Wedding Invitation, but Zhou’s Angie is a protagonist we can really get behind. Her withering stares and palpable disgust at the Sex in the City antics going on around her are often quite funny and highly sympathetic. Frankly, she is just too cool for everyone else in the film.

Of course, Flirt will eventually settle into a sentimental rom-com, but at least it takes a rainy day trip to the Ju Ming Museum, which looks incredible (so good tourist tip there). In fact, Zhou and Ju are just about enough to carry the film across the finish line. Sonia Sui certainly looks like a deceptively cute femme fatale and shows some convincing claws when the time comes. Still, it is hard to see why they would fight over a blockhead like Marco, played rather woodenly by Huang Xiaoming. In contrast, Xie Yilin constantly kicks up the energy while inhaling scenery as May, the Obiwan of flirters.

 

Pang’s films certainly come in a variety of flavors. Instead of a naughty screwball comedy like Vulgaria, a gory satire like Dream Home, or a sensitive family drama like Aberdeen, Flirt is most closely akin to his reasonably mature rom-coms, such as Love in the Buff. It is too bad this one does not depart further from genre conventions, because Zhou and her character deserve something more outside-the-box. Regardless, she still commands the screen. Recommended for fans of Zhou and romantic comedy in general, Women Who Flirt opens this Wednesday (11/26) in New York at the AMC Empire, from China Lion Entertainment.

AAIFF ’13: Together

The teenaged Xiao Yang is not exactly Cyrano de Bergerac.  Nevertheless, he will do his best to recycle both love letters and lovers.  The course of true love never runs smooth, but he will sometimes help it along in Hsu Chao-jen’s multi-character rom-com, Together (trailer here), which screens this Saturday during the 2013 Asian American International Film Festival.

Scooping up his classmate’s discarded love letter, Xiao Yang is determined to put it to good use.  Perhaps his buddy Ma Chih-hao can re-purpose it.  Having just dumped his girlfriend, Ma pines for the cute cashier working at their favorite bakery, whose manager in turn nurses a crush on Xiao Yang’s older sister.  Of course, she is already involved with a rich jerk, who does not think much of Xiao Yang.

Yes, this is the sort of film where viewers could use a flowchart to keep track of who like whom.  However, his parents’ relationship is easy to pick-up on. The magic has left the easy going Bin’s marriage to more assertive Min-min.  Ironically, the print shop proprietor soon finds himself producing wedding invitations as his own marriage takes a chilly turn.  The free-spirited Lily has recently returned to their Taipei neighborhood to marry Haru, the staid owner of the local Japanese bookstore.  Yet, the strangely ambiguous chemistry between her and Bin is still there.

Despite all the romantic confusion, the tone of Together is much more bittersweet than cutesy.  In fact, for domestic audiences, it is downright nostalgic, given the casting of Kenny Bee and Lee Lieh as Xiao Yang’s parents, who were amongst the break-out co-stars of the classic melodrama The Story of a Small Town. Of course, it is all headed towards a happy place, but there are more surprises and less sentimentality in the third act than one might expect.

Happily, Huang Shao-yang’s Xiao Yang grows on viewers over time, as his character starts using his brattiness for good rather than ill.  His presence somewhat suggests a young Taiwanese Leonardo DiCaprio, except he is already considerably more manly (as is everyone else in the cast).  Bee remains charismatic in middle age, nicely crooning the film’s signature love song. Supermodel-actress Sonia Sui lights up the screen as Lily, while developing some reasonably believable chemistry with the significantly older Bee.  Lee Lieh also does her best to punch-up Min-min, despite her somewhat problematic scoldiness.

Indeed, Hsu definitely favors Bee’s Bin over the rest of the large ensemble. Still, he invests the film with a forgiving vibe that is rather endearing.  His unhurried pace might be a bit too languid for slavishly conventional viewers, but Hsu has a good eye for composition and Blaire Ko’s slightly latin-ish score helps it all go down quite smoothly.  Recommended with a fair degree of affection for those who enjoy slightly offbeat love stories and family dramas, Together screens this Saturday (7/27) at the New York Institute of Technology, as part of this year’s AAIFF.