Part 4 of our report on the always outstanding 2007 Subway Cinema New York Asian Film Festival, which runs until July 8 (schedule here):

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Freesia: Bullets Over Tears
AKA: Furijia
Dir: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri (Japan 2007)
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (good)
Review by: David Austin

Director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri makes a specialty out of crafting the bleakest possible scenarios. Kichiku was positively brutal, and 2004’s Antenna saw Ryo Kase chewing into his own arm during dominatrix therapy for childhood traumas. Now, in Freesia, we are given characters whose emotions and sensations literally have been frosted out of them. Freesia takes place in a future Japan – not quite post-apocalyptic, but certainly well on its way. The country is militarized, and vendetta – revenge killings – against criminals have been legalized. Tetsuji Tamayama plays Kano, a mild-mannered apparatchik hitman whose feelings accidentally were destroyed in a military test of a weapon designed to freeze enemy combatants. He takes his assignments from Higuchi (Tsugumi), a similarly crippled woman who eventually manipulates her position to gain her own vengeance against those responsible for the bomb.

Superficially, Freesia is one of Kumakiri’s most commercial films, based as it is on a manga and containing sci-fi and violence elements. However, Freesia is far too cold-blooded to aspire to the popcorn film status that a plot description might indicate. The legalized killings serve a secondary purpose in the plot – as in Robert Sheckley’s The Tenth Victim (though with a far different tone), we do not openly explore the origin or morality of the hunt, but rather the minds of the players. Kumakiri is far more interested in exploring the scars on his protagonists’ psyches.

That said, the action sequences are well-conceived and executed, with Kano opposing both the conflicted individuals responsible for his condition, and the mysterious “Ghost” (Hiroshi Oguchi), a government authorized bodyguard for those targeted for death. Kano’s associates, a polite salaryman (Emoto Tasuku) and a wild man who is the precise opposite of chilly Kano (Miura Masaki), are equally engaging. Overall, Freesia is a flawed but interesting work from Kumakiri, a director worth watching.

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I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK
AKA: Saibogujiman kwenchana
Dir: Park Chan-wook (South Korea 2006)
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars (average)
Review by: David Austin

I must say, I’m all in favor of Park Chan-wook branching out and trying something. When I saw that he was following up his well-received “vengeance” trilogy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance with a romantic comedy, my first thought was “this should be interesting.” Well, one the one hand, Park certainly has delivered a fairly unorthodox rom-com, with its focus on delusional, asylum-bound lovers. Cha Young-goon (played by a disturbingly blonde-eyebrowed Lim Su-jeong) is convinced that she is a cyborg and prone to homicidal Terminator-esque fantasies where she deals mechanized death to asylum staffers. The other, Park Il-sun (musical idol Rain), is a disturbed kleptomaniac who spends his time in a homemade mask playing ping-pong.

On the other hand, I’m a Cyborg is simply not very good. The film veritably reeks of forced whimsy. I’ve always had an instinctive dislike for the “cute, wacky, crazy people” subgenre typified by films like The Dream Team, and Park has not changed my mind here. The characters’ quirks and foibles grate almost on first exposure, and I never felt enough of a connection to the leads to care about their unconventional romance. Overall, aside from some excellent visualizations of Young-goon’s delusions, and a committed performance by Lim Su-jeong, I’m a Cyborg falls into the “interesting failure” category.

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Additional Links:
::: The official Subway Cinema NYAFF 2007 website
::: CSB Coverage of NYAFF 2006
::: CSB Coverage of NYAFF 2005