17th Raindance Film Festival

Date: 30 September-11 October 2009

Venue: Apollo Cinema, London

Title: Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives

Part of a Raindance strand on Japanese Women Directors

Director: Momoko Ando

Based on the manga by: Erica Sakurazawa

Cast: Hikari Mitsushima, Eriko Nakamura

Japan 2008

Raindance website

Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives does what its title suggests. Kakera presents a slice of life. No grand narrative; no neatly conceived conclusions; just a segment of a relationship between two women, Haru and Riko, as they define their feelings for each other. Shooting with a microscopic attention to detail, first-time director Momoko Ando creates a thoroughly compelling world – beautiful, surreal, romantic and personal – aided by an excellent soundtrack and strong visual sense.

Rumpled and gamine, Haru is an especially engrossing heroine. All expressive eyes and otherworldly charm, she belongs to the Amélie school of little-girl-lost. Just starting out at university, Haru is growing more and more detached from her two-timing, loutish boyfriend, when she meets Riko, a self-assured medical artist working for Tanaka prosthetics. The film follows Haru’s sexual confusion as she tries to decide between Riko and her increasingly obnoxious boyfriend. As a young director (she was born in 1982), Ando perfectly captures the intensity of the women’s age and the excitement of their first, stumbling conversations. But while Amélie praised naive, kooky heroines in a nauseatingly self-congratulatory fashion, Kakera presents the reality of living with Haru’s dreamy drifting. The film explores both the allure of the inexperienced girls and their sometimes hurtful, self-centred behaviour.

The self-absorption of youth is beautifully played out in a subtle scene when a disinterested, distracted Haru leaves a university lecture discussing the oppression of women, only to be confronted with her boyfriend arm-in-arm with another girl. Gender and what it means to be a woman is an important theme underlying the entire film and one of the reasons the work is to premiere at this year’s Raindance Festival, as part of a special strand devoted to women in Japanese cinema. Again, Ando chooses not to present us with a coherent theory but prefers fragmented, conflicting ideas and discussions. Riko, for example, gives a beautiful initial speech on the arbitrariness of gender but later becomes irrationally hostile towards men. Beautiful fireworks enjoyed by Riko and Haru are echoed by aggressive, masculine explosions on television in Haru’s boyfriend’s flat. When the two women first meet, Haru has accidentally given herself a milk moustache while drinking a mug of cocoa while later in the film Haru’s boyfriend is unkind about the hair on her upper lip.

Kakera is all about the pieces that make up the whole: from the prosthetic body parts made by Riko to the chromosomes that determine the difference between men and women. When a distraught Haru eats too many marshmallows, she is advised ‘not to over-eat the food you love. Favourite foods are better eaten a little at a time’. Kakera takes each character little by little, each life slice by slice, allowing us the luxury to come to our own conclusions.

Eleanor McKeown

Kakera is part of a strand on Japanese women directors at Raindance. Director Momoko Ando will attend the festival, as well as pink director Sachi Hamano, the most prolific female director in Japan, who will present her 2001 non-pink title Lily Festival. Also showing are the rarely seen Hotaru by the critically-garlanded Naomi Kawase and Yukiko Sode’s distinctive and promising debut Mime-Mime. More information on the Raindance website.

Format: Cinema

Screened as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Director: Zero Chou

Writer: Singing Chen

Original title: Ci qing

Cast: Rainie Yang, Isabella Leong, John Shen, Jay Shih

Taiwan 2007

94 mins

A soft and tender tale of queer love and loneliness in modern Taiwan, Zero Chou’s second feature Spider Lilies was screened as part of this year’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, only a few weeks after her latest and strongest film to date, Drifting Flowers, premiered at the Berlinale. Though beautifully shot and acted, both films are far from being perfect. But nor would one, perhaps, want them to be. Their weaknesses and flaws indicate a thoughtful and promising filmmaker who gradually improves with every new production and consistently displays a marvellous sensitivity towards her characters.

Fuelled by metaphors and layered symbolism, Spider Lilies is essentially a film about desire in all its twisted complexity and the fleeting line between reality and imagination that goes with it. Jade (Rainie Yang) is a sweet and cheerful 18-year-old who lives with her senile grandmother. At the centre of her life is a webcam, which she operates out of her bedroom to make money in a soft-core chatroom, but which also allows her to escape from the drab monotony of real life into a brightly coloured fantasy world.

The film’s opening sequences detail Jade’s utter isolation. Using her webcam to create some sort of interactive diary, she carries on conversations with the dolls in her room or her internet clients, jumping in and out of the frame according to her fancy. Each time she moves out of sight though, one gets a glimpse of the grey loneliness that is looming at the boundaries of her faked, fluffy wonderland. When she meets tattoo artist Takeko (Isabella Leong), Jade recalls the crush she had on her as a child, and helplessly falls for her again.

Takeko is just as lonely as Jade, but while Jade’s loneliness merely seems to be a temporary stage she is eager to break out of, Takeko’s is an existential condition. The most notable evidence is her spider lily tattoo – copied from her father’s, who died in an earthquake. An important link between father and daughter, the image also becomes vital to Jade, who wants it tattooed on her own body as a mark of her undying love for Takeko.

Although it is explicitly about the tentative romance between two young women, Spider Lilies touches upon the polarities that underlie all human relationships: honesty and dishonesty, trust and distrust, concession and repression. But Chou explores these issues through a tangled storyline, and with no qualms about using somewhat tired clichés – a sensitive undercover police agent starts sympathising with Jade instead of tracking her down; Takeko has a cute younger brother traumatized by their father’s death. Although it offers a fantastic ride through the lush imagination and emotionally loaded memories of the protagonists, the problematic script eventually undermines the film’s potential impact.

Nevertheless, the film has a dreamlike quality that makes it an original, strangely fascinating and self-assured work. Some viewers might be put off by Jade’s excessively girlish attitude or Takeko’s meditative character and taciturn caginess, but for those willing to enter Jade’s candy-coloured webcam universe, Spider Lilies is nothing short of mesmerising.

Pamela Jahn