SMALL SPOILER MAY BE AHEAD

This feature came to mind when I was thinking about the screening I attended for After This Our Exile at the San Francisco Film Festival. For those not in the know, After This Our Exile tells the story of how a family breaks down due to the actions of an irresponsible father, played by Aaron Kwok, who may be the worst father in Asian cinema since Takeshi Kitano’s character in Blood and Bones. A majority of the audience was non-Asian (or the couple of Asian people I heard talking seemed to sound quite Americanized), and they were just thoroughly shocked at what this guy is capable of. They gasp whenever he hits the kid, when he takes out a knife threatening to cut his fingers off, they even gasp sometimes when he says something bad to the kid. This blogger even calls it a “grueling film to watch.”

But for me, I felt it was actually one of the more gripping Hong Kong dramas in recent years because of the route it takes. Amongst the artsy fartsy Asian dramas coming out these days, I thought After This Our Exile is great in how it finds that balance between entertainment and art. So what’s so grueling about it?

For Asian audiences, one of the bigger surprises was probably how director Patrick Tam transformed this guy:

into this wreck of a man:

Kwok’s character of the father drives the actions of the film - from his wife abandoning her family to his new environment to his son’s final predicament. He is essentially the central character, and of course, he’s the one that’s most hated and feared by the audience. This in itself is already a problem - you have three characters: a mother who abandons her son to live the good life, a father that gambles too much and can’t take care of his own family, and a kid that should probably have known better. By default, the audience probably side with the kid because he’s too young to know better. In Western parenting, a parent ought to be supportive of the kids. Any type of abuse on a child is frowned upon, period. Of course, these basic values are universal, but - and I’m trying to not make a blanket statement about my own race here - there are some exceptions to the rule in the world of Asian parenting.

The biggest form of abuse by the father in the film is verbal abuse - the father yelling at the son whenever he pisses him off, calling the kid “stupid” and many other variations of it. The truth is, kids are raised that way all the time. There’s a familiarity in the way the father acts towards his son because to a far lesser extent, even I got this type of verbal attacks all the time. In Cantonese, a rather popular phrase parents say to the slacker kids is “giving birth to a BBQ pork would be better than giving birth to you.” I know, it seems a lot worse translated, doesn’t it? In fact, almost all the verbal abuse the father throws at the kid seems extremely harsh in English, but they are all familiar insults if you’ve ever grown up under Cantonese-speaking parents who’s lived the hard life.

As for the physical abuse, even the kid gets tired of it and yells back. Was he really getting hurt? Probably, but not as bad as the beating he gets by someone else that’s not his father towards the end of the film. I’m not saying it’s OK to beat a child, but to an Asian audience, smacking the kid upside the head isn’t really anything new in their lives.

What the film shows is an extreme case of such impatient parenting - a way of parenting that hopes to use the idea of conditioning to teach a child how to live. Let the kid make the mistakes, then they’d learn not to do it again to avoid negative punishment. Am I saying it’s the best way for parenting? No. Having been raised on a far lesser version of that, would I call it a traumatic way to raise a child? I would say no to that as well.

My point is this: An Asian audience (and I’m not saying this as a race thing, but as a regional thing) would have an easier time sitting through this film because the abuse shown doesn’t have a real impact on them. To them, the kid isn’t even getting beaten all that badly, or the stuff his father is saying isn’t really as nasty as it could’ve been. In fact, an Asian audience may even find the abuse a little too exaggerated to be taken seriously(Give credit to Kwok to take on such a role, but I thought he was overacting a little bit myself). However, they would still be able to find the film emotionally charged because the father really does some terrible things, but they are much more from his actions towards the end of the film that lead to their final predicaments rather than from the abuse.

But in the West, where child abuse is such a taboo subject on the screen, audiences might be shocked simply at what they’re watching (one person at the Q&A asks whether the kid suffered any psychological trauma from being in the film) right from the get go. And if they can’t get past that, how can they handle the father’s further shenanigans at the end? After This Our Exile is not a film to be taken lightly, that much is true. But is it grueling and hard to watch? That really depends on where you’re from.

After a small break yesterday, it’s time to catch up - in a big way.

- As always, let’s start with box office reports. Japan had the beginning of its Golden Week holiday this past weekend (Tuesday and Wednesday are technically business days, but people take them off anyway), so obviously numbers are gonna be pretty huge. However, Box Office Mojo doesn’t have their charts updated yet, so I’m relying on audience ranking for now. The big battle for this Golden Week weekend is the highly anticipated-Babel (due to the Academy Award nominated performance of Rinko Kikuchi) and the classic cartoon adaptation “Gegege Kitaro.” And the winner is…..neither. Conan the child detective film won the weekend at number 1, while “Gegege” does win the duel at number 2, and Babel still manages a number 3 opening. All the other top 10 movies stayed pretty close to their rankings last week, but expect Spiderman 3, which already opened today Japan time, to come and wipe them all out this coming weekend. Hell, its first day already attracted 400,000 people, which far surpassed the opening days of the last two films (248,000 for the first film, 301,000 for the second film). That’s OK, Babel was never meant to be a crowd-pleasing hit anyway.

- Speaking of Babel, after the negative press it got earlier in the year when the deaf community in Japan rightfully complained the lack of Japanese subtitles made the film hard to understand for them, the film is under fire again for making people sick. In one theater in Nagoya (funny how the press is only covering one of the some-300 screens it’s playing at), several moviegoers complained of feeling sick during the club scene, which features strobe lights. I rewatched the film recently, and having seen it on the big screen, I can see why that scene would be a problem, especially for those sensitive to such effects. But when I got uncomfortable, I just turned away for a second, which I think any sensible person would do….right?

Of course, it’s funny to see how comments on various Japan blogs that carry the story would go off-topic and take the opportunity to blast the film.

- Another weak weekend at the South Korean box office, as Paradise Murdered rules again. My Tutor Friend 2 (which I hear has nothing to do with My Tutor Friend 1, which I wished I enjoyed more, but didn’t) is a flop.

- I had thought that Election 2 (renamed Triad Election in the United States) would not do very well, even in a cinephile city like New York. But look - at 71st place, it actually made a very impressive $10,811 on just one screen! I wonder if the theater is counting Election and Election 2 as one film, and since the two films require separate admission, it just happened that people stuck around for both films, thus inflating the gross? Who cares, the numbers look good either way.

- The Tarantino/Rodridguez flop Grindhouse was originally going to be released as a double feature in many European regions (apparently, Asia doesn’t “get” the idea of double features.). Looks like the Weinsteins are changing their tune now.

- Someone correct me if I get this wrong, but looks like both the big Japanese comedies expected this summer - Takeshi Kitano’s “Kantoku Banzai” and Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “Dai Nipponjin” - are both going to Cannes. “Kantoku” was previously reported to be in competition, and “Dai Nipponjin” had just been invited into the Director’s Week lineup. According to the report, Matsumoto was not intending to join the Cannes lineup, but seems to be changing his mind now.

- Twitch reports 2 upcoming DVD releases - the region 1 DVD for Katsuhito Ishii’s A Taste of Tea, which I marked down as a film I should have saw when I was in Japan, but just couldn’t get the motivation to rent the damn thing (or was it because the rental DVD didn’t have English subtitles?) on July 3rd, and Danny Pang’s Forest of Death (LoveHKFilm review) on May 10th.

- The Udine Far East Film Festival wrapped up on Saturday, and the Korean film No Mercy For the Rude won the audience prize, with After This, Our Exile at 2nd place and Memories of Matsuko at 3rd.

- With that, Variety Asia also covers the Udine Far East Festival as part of a trend that’s seeing Asian films penetrating into the mainstream market in Europe.

- File this under “idiotic Asian pop decisions”: The huge Taiwanese boy pop group F4 (the F stands for Flower), which got its name from their drama Meteor Garden, which was based on the Japanese comic Hana Yori Dango anyway (still following me?), is now changing their name to…..you ready for this? JVKV. The new name is comprised of the first letters of the members’ respective names - Jerry, Vic, Ken, and Vanness (which is a name I’ll never take seriously, seeing how we have a Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco). Just because I filed this under humor, don’t think that I made it up. I totally didn’t.

- And file this one under “bad gimmicks”: The second trailer for Takeshi Miike’s so-called “Sukiyaki Western” film “Django” is on the website (I suggest watching the Windows Media Player version), and it honestly looks pretty bad. The trailer itself is ridden with horrible English narration (I swear it sounds like it comes from a mock Grindhouse trailer), and the trailer shows that the film is actually completely in English (The problem lies in that the film has an all-Japanese cast). Yikes.

- Professor David Bordwell and Dr. Kristin Thompson go to Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival (which apparently will be renamed Ebertfest next year), where Ebert himself made an appearance, despite his recent condition. Oh, and they watch a couple of movies too.

- This is nothing new, but the U.S. decides to remind which Asian countries suck at protecting copyright.

- Daniel Wu and the alive boys really DID show up at the San Francisco International Film Festival. And SF360 has an interview with them that the Hong Kong media might have a field day with.

An interesting thing to note - there were quite a few Chinese people at the After This, Our Exile screening on Sunday, but at 22, I think I was the youngest person in the entire screening. As I was leaving, the line for The Heavenly Kings rush tickets, which was to be shown in about half an hour after that, was forming. Instead of the mature crowd that was at my screening, the people in line were much younger in comparison. I could see it already: screaming ABC girls as Daniel Wu comes out to introduce the film. That wouldn’t have been very pleasant. Who knows, there’s still one more chance to see the Alive boys….nah, probably not.

Instead of the song of the day, there will be a feature coming up.