Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù)

 

Writer/director Yeo Siew Hua

director on the set with Lee Kang-sheng

STRANGER EYES (Mò shì lù)                     B                                                              Singapore  Taiwan  France  USA  (126 mi)  2024  d: Yeo Siew Hua

You just have to watch someone close enough and keep your eyes on him.  At some point, even if he’s not a criminal, he will turn into one.                                                                                  —Officer Zheng (Pete Teo)

If you love peering through windows, then this is a film for you, using Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) scenario, but embellishing it in the modern age, becoming a moody, atmospheric psychological thriller that starts out as a conventional missing-child narrative to become a cerebral meditation on voyeurism, privacy, and digital surveillance in modern Singapore, emphasizing a theme that there is always someone watching.  Featuring legendary Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who broke onto the scene in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha) (1992), but was last seen in Days (Rizi) (2020), where the strength of his near-silent career in acting is in body language and in the power of his gaze, bringing an enigmatic quality and depth through silence, making him uniquely qualified to play a silent voyeur, typically viewed as the most interesting character precisely because he says the least.  Yet he actually speaks here, but just barely, bringing a rare interest to the film, as he’s literally grown up before our eyes in his screen roles, connecting him to a certain style of minimalist arthouse films, kind of an Asian version of French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud who did exactly the same during the 60’s and 70’s, both happening to meet onscreen in Tsai’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001).  Referencing other surveillance thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden) (2005), the abduction of an infant child is a gripping starting point for a mystery that explores societal isolation and loneliness as much as any police procedural investigation, where we might think Lee Kang-sheng is inhabiting the Peter Lorre role in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), but this unravels in multi-layered complexities that reveal themselves in surveillance footage.  After China, Singapore is the third most surveilled city in the world (Surveillance, 'Big Brother' government made Singapore ...), where the government also has access to the emails, telephone calls, and internet search histories of all its citizens, which might sound a bit spooky, but Singapore is also renowned for being one of the strictest and safest countries in the world, with zero tolerance for both violent and petty crimes, where its legal system relies on severe penalties, widespread surveillance, and swift enforcement to maintain one of the lowest crime rates globally.  This is the world that Singapore director Yeo Siew Hua, who curiously resides in Buenos Aires, chooses to explore, examining multiple secret lives among a group of interconnected characters, using a mostly Taiwanese cast, with extensive CCTV surveillance coverage becoming a central focus, shot by cinematographer Hideho Urata who beautifully captures the sterility of the screen.   

The first draft of this film dates back to 2012, but the filmmaker was unable to secure financing, shelving the project until he could return to it at a later date, recalling episode six of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), which was later expanded to A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), where the discourse surrounding surveillance has changed drastically over time.  Living in a densely populated area, it is now commonplace for neighbors in high rise buildings to be peering into the windows of other neighbors, becoming familiar with their schedules and routines, all part of a normal day, while at the same time the numerous government surveillance cameras are watching them as well, so they’re all part of a vicious circle.  At the heart of the film is a young couple, Junyang (Wu Jian-Ho) and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna), along with his mother (Vera Chen), who grow distraught when their infant daughter disappears from a public playground right in front of the father’s distracted eyes, which only grows more mysterious when strange DVD video recordings of the family’s daily activities, both before and after the kidnapping, start appearing at their doorstep, including months-old surveillance footage from a visit to the supermarket, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - ½ YouTube (1:51).  The film makes smart use of the song “Endless Love” by Tsai Chin from the Shaw Brothers movie LOVE WITHOUT END (1961), one of the foundational classics in Chinese cinema, Tsai Chin/Cai Qin-Endless Love/Love Without End/Bu Liao ... YouTube (3:19), initially heard in romanticized supermarket surveillance footage, repeating later in the picture with devastating results.  Reporting the crime to the police, Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) is a calm counterbalance, trusting established police procedures, exuding patience and calm, immediately installing a camera outside their door to capture whoever’s leaving these recordings, which leads them to a suspicious middle-aged neighbor living in an adjacent tower, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), who they begin following with an obsessive curiosity.  The protagonists and antagonists often exchange roles, like mirror images of one another, which begins a strange journey to uncover the truth, growing more and more layered and complex, as Wu’s identity is more complicated than it seems, where it’s often difficult to find one’s bearings in this unraveling web of differing intentions from each character.  This pattern only grows more ominous, trying the patience of viewers who are searching for relevant clues, as nothing jumps out at you, but becomes part of a long series of watching footage, sometimes at home, sometimes in the presence of the police, where the original score written by Thomas Foguenne only adds to the intrigue, offering a percussive Tindersticks-style (with a gamelan) undercurrent of restless contemplation. 

Ambiguous to the core, perhaps the biggest surprise is not a whodunit revelation, but the makings of a fractured marriage, where the strains of a kidnapped child and the endless hours of watched footage, revealing things they definitely would have preferred to remain hidden, where it’s not long before deeper secrets from their personal lives emerge and the foundation of their relationship completely disintegrates.  We follow Junyang’s strange, stalker-ish behavior, especially as he follows Wu, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - 2/2 YouTube (1:11), observed by his wife Peiying offering her own commentary, seemingly having her own connection to the stalker, yet we’re not initially sure who she’s speaking about, and how it is connected, which only adds to the mystery.  Each character seems to harbor their own secrets, with Wu developing a voyeuristic fixation on cameras and his own surveillance videos, while he spends just as much time simply watching and observing others, perhaps because he has no life of his own, so he lives vicariously through the lives of others.  Junyang mirrors his unorthodox behavior by following the parents of the children who were in the park on the day of the kidnapping, seeing how close he can come to abducting their children, desperately trying to enter the psychological mindset of the perpetrator, as in this way maybe he can better understand exactly what happened.  We also learn that Wu had started chatting shamelessly with Peiying long before the child disappeared, as she has a public persona she adopts as a live-streaming DJ.  By shifting the focus away from the police, however, and into the tangled lives of the affected family, we also get an understanding of what the kidnapper might have been thinking, like why they were targeted in the first place, as we hear the repeated phrase, “Some people aren’t meant to be parents.”  Rather than find answers, there are lengthy scenes that ruminate on each respective character’s existential loneliness, suggesting with newfound technology, we are all drifting apart into social isolation.   What’s unique about the film is the slow pace and how abstract concepts replace any standard narrative, with a meandering storyline with shifting perspectives and viewpoints, where viewers often wonder why a certain character is being watched or studied, but the filmmaker has his own agenda about shifting the tone of the movie from the mother’s manic desperation to a more contemplative examination of the interiority of the characters.  The father is shown to be frequently distracted, unfaithful, and even reckless in his parenting duties before the incident, but the later scenes show a transformed man, aware of his shortcomings and how it may have led to unintended consequences, where the act of watching others is fundamentally linked to self-discovery, ending on a surprisingly tender and more reflective note, which may be the biggest reveal in the entire film.  The missing child scenario is simply a framework to examine how modern society, technology, and constant surveillance alienate us from human connection, while highlighting themes of forgiveness and redemption.    

Happyend

 

how the security system sees the students

Writer/director Neo Sora

director on the set

Music Research Club

HAPPYEND              B                                                                                                           Japan  USA  Singapore  Great Britain  (113 mi)  2024  d: Neo Sora

The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo.  Something big is about to change.     —opening screen innertitle

One day, a school teacher                                                                                                    Lectured before his students                                                                                                        “If you don’t get 100 points in the test                                                                                            You won’t become worthy people”                                                                                                  Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                            Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                              The most important thing in the world is a computer.

—Eat Shit and Die, a protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu, 1969

Made by the son of legendary film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sora was born in New York, raised in both New York and Tokyo, graduating from Philosophy and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, he is a filmmaker and installation artist, where this film grew out of a writer’s workshop at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Director’s Lab.  Having gone to a Quaker school from fourth grade through high school, Sora was anything but a rebel, so this subject may have held a special appeal for him.  Something of a throwback to Takeshi Kitano’s KIDS RETURN (1996), Toshiaki Toyoda’s Blue Spring (Aoi haru) (2001), or Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), though not really a marked improvement on any of those films, while more recently Japanese films have offered political critiques through social realism, like Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) (2018), or South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho with his Oscar-winning Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019).  Yet this is a colder more sterile existence of a high school film set in the near future of a dystopian Tokyo, where the streets are always eerily empty, continually under the constant threat of emergency earthquake alerts, with a familiar student musical chant reminding us, “The most important thing in the world is a computer,” which is part of the Eat Shit and Die protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu that was banned in the late 60’s for its political content.  Basically a film that shows what it means to be a young person growing up in Japan today, this technologically forward world is a reminder of how easily it is to lose our humanity in the advancing pursuit of progress, as we tend to forget the bonds that tie us all together.  This film is far more politicized, though viewed from a disgruntled youth point of view, where authority figures tend to be far-right with fascist and xenophobic tendencies, demeaning foreigners as not really being Japanese, which has an overly divisive way of being racist and demeaning, with the government projecting messages onto the clouds, where the sky itself is turned into an advertising billboard.  While policy decisions start at the top, they have a way of being felt even in high school, which is a social stratosphere unto itself, with the film challenging the commonly held assumptions about Japan as harmonious, homogeneous, and traditional, where there’s a sense of dread and doom that pervades the film mixed with the joy and energy of youth.  Essentially a coming-of-age story as we follow two high school students on the verge of graduation, as the film's plot revolves around the personal friendship between two characters who struggle over their differences on how they view the world around them, the mischievous Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), always wearing headphones around his neck, who comes from a more privileged background, and the brooding Kou (model and track and field athlete Yukito Hidaka), who is a “Special Permanent Resident,” a 4th generation Zainichi Korean living in Japan (Zainichi Koreans in Japan: Exploring the Ethnic Minority's ...), two childhood friends since kindergarten that go everywhere together.  With aspirations of becoming a DJ, often seen stealing school musical equipment, they hang with a musically-inspired clique of five that includes class clown Ata-Chan (Yûta Hayashi) and half-Chinese Ming (Shina Peng), who eventually become a couple, and a lone black character in Tomu (Arazi), rare in Asian films, whose father was black American, becoming something of a diplomatic peacemaker in all their squabbles before heading off to college in America and reluctantly leaving his friends behind.

Coming from a director who has shown an admiration for films like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), Sora takes his own read on the contemporary sociopolitical climate through the emotional turbulence of late adolescence, and in doing so captures the intensity of teenage angst.  After sneaking into a nightclub to witness a muscular DJ in action (Yousuke Yukimatsu), where we find ourselves in the middle of an exhilarating light sequence for pulsating techno music until the police arrive and shut the place down, but Yuta and Kou aren’t done, as they decide to sneak past the guards in the middle of the night to play their own edgy techno music in a room they’ve designated as their “Music Research Club” (with a total of five members), creating even more havoc afterwards with an ingenious school prank, turning the Principal’s prized yellow sports car on its end like an obelisk, where it appears like an avant garde art display the next morning, with students surrounding it in awe and astonishment, wondering how they did it, and by who, many of them laughing with glee while taking pictures with their phones.  An infuriated Principal (Shirō Sano), a cartoonish, one-dimensional character who appears more like a villain, describes this as an act of terrorism (which he doesn’t really believe, but he uses this to justify his own nefarious inclinations), sending all of the students to homeroom for police questioning.  Curiously enough, the boys conveniently show up without their phones (hidden in a student’s desk), so their whereabouts on the previous evening could not be tracked.  It’s hard to make a rebellious youth movie with all the students dressed exactly alike in standard uniforms, dark pants or skirts and white shirts or blouses, where conformity is a behavior modification to produce obedience and acceptance of the prevailing moral order, but students always find creative ways to resist authority.  With Ata-Chan joking that he might want to grow up as a cop, as there will always be delinquents around, like Yuta and Kou, this produces an element of seriousness, as one of the more radicalized students, Fumi (Kilala Inori), offers a surprising comeback that leaves them speechless, “The cops are bureaucrats with weapons who protect the wealth of a country and its rich.”  This viewpoint appears aimed at the nation’s government, as the Prime Minister (Shunsaku Yajima) routinely goes on television with false catastrophic warnings of coming earthquakes, which is an authoritarian way of controlling the behavior of the public through fear, basically ingraining obedience, where schools use a similar technique, as Japan prides itself on how safe it keeps its society.  In response to the incident, the school installs a sophisticated, AI facial recognition surveillance system capable of identifying students and their behavior, capturing everything from dress code violations, leaving classrooms early, smoking, or even getting too close to another student, like holding hands or kissing, which is instantly reported on a huge screen in the building’s courtyard so everyone can see, students and teachers alike, immediately issuing point deductions which ring up like a video game, yet can prevent graduation or lead to expulsion.

Students react differently to the surveillance intrusion, with some instantly mocking it, while others simply ignore its presence and the over-controlling ramifications, where the film essentially becomes a collective struggle on the loss of freedom and the struggle for human rights against a repressive authority represented by their school, police, and digital surveillance.  When a Self-Defense Force military instructor arrives to a classroom, anyone who is not a Japanese citizen is forced to leave, like Kou, Ming, and Tomu, an overtly xenophobic act of discrimination, mirroring the views of the government, which relentlessly blames crime rates on non-citizens, recalling the Kantō Massacre of 1923 which followed a massive earthquake one hundred years earlier, targeting mainly ethnic Koreans who were accused of poisoning water wells, with roaming murderous lynch mobs fueled by Korean dehumanization and false government rumors.  In an act of solidarity, the Japanese student Fumi leaves the classroom with those excluded, openly defying the rigid authority, while organizing student protests that Kou suddenly takes an interest in, as he grows quieter and more pensive with the realization that his life is directly affected by the country’s anti-immigrant policies, where his family can’t even vote in Japanese elections.  Yuta, on the other hand, having all the economic and social advantages, defers, not wanting to derail his secured future, wanting things to stay as they are.  In this way, these two kids who have been inseparable forever, are on opposite sides, with Kou questioning why Yuta would never change or grow up, remaining emotionally stunted, coasting along on the privileges he possesses.  What’s happening within the school walls echoes the rise of an authoritarian police state developing in the world outside with the Japanese Prime Minister using the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake to grant himself emergency powers and seize more absolute control.  Fumi provides a list of grievances to present to the principal about the surveillance infringement of their rights, culminating in a long, protracted sit-in, where a standoffish battle of wills develops as increasing temperatures soar, where she is determined not to break ranks, even refusing the food generously offered by the principal, but instead he is humiliated into eating a wasteful banquet of food alone, with the students completely undermining his authority by ordering their own feast.  In this dystopian world, where the practice of reading books in their original form is considered archaic and old-fashioned, the film lacks edge and raw emotion, with no real distinctive look or provocative music, as the swelling, nostalgia-themed, 80’s style synth-driven orchestral music by Brooklyn-based Lia Ouyang Rusli, perhaps an indirect tribute to his late father, feels like a huge miss, never really capturing the rebellious theme or drawing audiences into what’s uniquely relevant about this fabricated society.  Despite the challenges new technology can bring into our lives, where it literally takes over, replacing human interactions, the ramifications only come more readily into focus in the scenes featuring Fumi, who is not even part of the original clique of five, who drew all the early focus, yet she is the most politically self-aware of the students, where her challenge to authority speaks to what audiences may be thinking, wondering how this could all come about so quickly, and with so little public resistance, calling attention to the global rise of authoritarian fascism (yes, even in America) in what were once considered the most respected and influential democratic societies on the global stage.   

Note

While the title may refer to the ambiguously optimistic ending, the band Happy End in 1970 was also the first Japanese rock band to sing in Japanese.