The New York Asian Film Festival began the same weekend as my wedding, but as soon as I got back from zero gravity, I started hitting the theaters!

Antique

New York Premiere
Running Time: 112 minutes

This delightful Korean film is based on the manga Antique Bakery by Fumi Yoshinaga, as reviewed by Kate Dacey here. The manga won a Kodansha Manga Award, boasts a scratch-and-sniff cover in DMP’s English release, and has been adopted into a live-action Japanese drama series as well as an anime series. The Korean feature film version takes place in Korea and stars hot Korean drama actors, but otherwise closely follows the manga plotline.

Kim Jin (formerly Keisuke Tachibana) is a 30-year-old from a rich family who suddenly decides to open a cake shop, despite his dislike of sweets. He hires Min Seon (Yusuke Ono), as the master pastry chef. Min Seon is a “gay of demonic charms,” and this is played up to hilarious effect in the film. Although Kim Jin doesn’t remember it at first, Min Seon confessed his love for Kim Jin in high school and was rudely rejected, causing him to become suicidal. Kim Jin also hires Yang Ki (Eiji Kanda), a young retired boxer with retina problems and a sweet tooth, and childhood friend Nam Soo (Chikage Kobayakawa), a kind-hearted idiot who always wears sunglasses. Chikage’s daughter is absent from the film.

Kim Jin is played by Joo Ji Hoon, of The Princess Hours and another K-drama called The Devil. Accurate to the manga, Kim Jin would be totally cute if he shaved off his trashy mustache. Min Seon is played by Kim Jae Wook, a hottie who starred in Coffee Prince (at one time, the series was available from Right Stuf). Choi Ji Ho as Nam Soo stole my heart—he really looks really adorable in sunglasses. The real “gay of demonic charm” in the film is not Min Seon, but Andy Gillet, who plays Jean-Baptise Evan, Min Seon’s French boyfriend. Gillet has been in some French films, but nothing I’ve ever seen. Gillet is smoking hot.

Relentlessly true to the spirit of the books, Antique is not a film for heterosexual males. This is a comedy about hot guys baking delicious desserts and consequently stopping a serial murderer. There are a few fantasy dance sequences early in the film that were absent from the original manga—these scenes are a little like the abstract bowling dance numbers in The Big Lebowski.

The camera (and the plot) are all over the place, with strange close-ups and endless baking montages. If the film is uneven, it seems intentional, like some kind of rich and varied dessert. There’s a light layer of physical comedy, like whipped cream over the dark and serious moments of psychological trauma which might be the dark chocolate of the film? It all seems to work together in the end.

If wikipedia is to be believed, Antique is one of the most successful films ever at the Korean box office. Hopefully a clever American distributor will pick up this psychedelic dessert film. There’s no way you could lose money on this (yaoi sells so well!) unless the Korean distributors really gouge you for the rights.

Snakes and Earrings

North American Premiere
Running Time: 124 minutes

Based on a novel available from Penguin Books, Snakes and Earrings is more or less a horror movie of parent’s nightmares.

Nineteen-year-old protagonist Lui (her age isn’t stated in the film, only in the trailer) makes a series of terrifying and impulsive decisions that are not for the squeamish. She kicks off the film by sleeping with a punk she just met in a nightclub who has a forked tongue—like a snake. Bifurcation is a real form of extreme body modification. “Ama” wiggles his tongue at Lui, and each fork moves independently. “Are you interested in body modification?” Ama asks, and Lui replies that she is. In fact, she’d like to get her tongue pierced tomorrow.

Not fifteen minutes into the film, Lui’s tongue is pierced by Shiba (played by Arata, the villain in 20th Century Boys), a scary looking dude with crazy nose piercings that look like bones. He pierces Lui’s tongue with a needle in the store’s dank basement. I’ve never watched the Saw series of films, but I assume this is scarier. Unlike any of my own tattooed and pierced friends, Lui does no comparison shopping. She doesn’t think about it for 24 hours—she just impulsively gets a tongue stud. She is every parent’s nightmare.

On their second date, Ama brutally beats a man and gives Lui two of his teeth as a souvenir. Later the toothless yakuza dies of his injuries. “You’re not a kid,” the deeply concerned Lui says to Ama. “You’ll go to jail.” Ama’s alarming response is, “Oh, I’m still a minor!”

“So am I,” Lui responds. Twenty is the age of adulthood in Japan, but despite their age, Lui and Ama drink at bars, get tattoos and piercing, and are never once carded over the course of the film. It’s not until much, much later that Lui learns important details about Ama, details like his real name and where he works. Despite living together for months, Lui fails to find out everything my mother would demand to any guy I was dating.

Lui quickly decides on a large tattoo design for her back—a dragon and a kirin (misspelled “kilin” in the subtitles). She asks Shiba how much it’ll cost. “One fuck,” he replies, and in an apparent up-front payment they have sadistic sex in the empty tattoo parlor immediately. At each stage of the tattoo Lui cheats on Ama with Shiba, who says a lot of red-flag things like “More tears” during sex. He also openly expresses his desire to kill her.

The film does an excellent job at detailing the process of piercing and tattoos, showing in close-up the needles, tools, ink and gauze. It’s very visceral, and if you’ve had a tattoo or a piercing, it’s probably even harder to watch. At times the film is more or less pornographic. Shiba and Lui’s sex scenes are particularly explicit as they bang away on the tattoo chair. Lui spends a lot of film in her underwear.

Although the film is certainly compelling, in no small part because it’s filled with violent sex, I was unsatisfied with the ending. Lui kneels in the street in Shibuya and the movie just kind of stops, unresolved.

I’m glad I saw this once, and I might read the book eventually (I’m sure the book is better), but I think I would’ve enjoyed it more when I was nineteen. This film is an easy sell for distribution because of all the sex. I could totally see it playing on IFC someday, late at night… or Cinemax.