Once Upon a Time in China First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Tsui Hark presents something of a glorious contradiction, the kind that nevertheless hewed closely to the norm in the crazed grandeur of Hong Kong during the latter half of the 20th century. From the anarchist upstart at the vanguard of the Hong Kong New Wave, to the overseer of a good chunk of the greatest films of the ‘80s and ‘90s as director and/or producer, to the shrewd helmer of some of the biggest mainland Chinese films ever, Tsui’s oeuvre has adapted to and defined each era of film in the area he’s worked in, mixing wild formal artistry with clever populism across a wide swath of genres. Once Upon a Time in China (1991), which spawned five sequels and a TV series in the following six years, is likely Tsui’s best known and most beloved work, and quite fittingly comes the closest to reconciling, or at least incorporating, all his seeming contradictions. In the process, it also forms one of the pivotal portrayals of the historical figure Wong Fei-hung, a physician and legendary practitioner of the Hung Ga martial arts style who lived in Guangzhou/Canton during the turn of the 20th century. His fame only grew after his death, thanks to the over 100 films and television series that have featured him; Kwan Tak-hing played Wong in the majority of these films, but other notable works include films by Lau Kar-leung that starred Gordon Liu and the subversively parodic Drunken Master films starring Jackie Chan. Here, Wong is played by Jet Li, and it’s worth comparing the dichotomy of the Chinese and English titles: Once Upon a Time in China puts the film in direct lineage with those epochal, nigh-mythical works of Leone, whereas the Chinese title, Wong Fei-hung, puts the folk hero at its center. The resulting film certainly has something of the sprawl of the former — running 135 minutes — and the ultimate focus upon the latter, but it also remains resolutely apart from those expectations, or indeed any preconceptions that might applied to it from either of the artistic/commercial axes. Even the question of the time in Once Upon a Time in China is in question: it takes place sometime in the late 19th century, and certainly before the fixed date of September 1895 that Tsui’s equally masterful Once Upon a Time in China II (1992) is set in, but otherwise its setting seems to float, taking place in a nondescript time of stasis within Wong’s native city of Foshan, where he trains disciples at his medical clinic Po Chi Lam. That stasis, of course, has come with more than its fair share of compromise, colonialism, and corruption: numerous foreign forces, including the British military, an American official, and Jesuit missionaries rub shoulders with the Chinese inhabitants. Within this diverse mix, a cascading series of character arcs fittingly comes to fruition. Chief among them is Leung Foon (the great Yuen Biao), who arrives in Foshan with aspirations of both acting in the troupe that he performs menial tasks for and bettering his martial arts skills. He provides something of a ballast for Wong’s character, who presents something of a conundrum for Once Upon a Time in China: for a film packed with so much incident, it presents little in the way of conventional narrative or development for its ostensible hero. True, Wong faces the encroaching forces of Western modernization in both the antagonists and his 13th Aunt Siu-kwan (Rosamund Kwan), who has returned after an extended time and has long been enamored with him. But the change in his perspective is in a sense inherited from the characters around him, a response that arises out of his steadfast, unyielding principles and commitment to a conception of China deeply rooted in ancient traditions. Those traditions are under attack from both without and within: the nominal principal antagonists are the Shaoho gang, who terrorize the local population and cause trouble for the local militia that Wong leads. Their mercenary aims lead them to ally with Jackson, the American official, agreeing to sell Chinese women as forced prostitutes for toiling Chinese laborers in America in exchange for Wong’s demise, and together the two form the forces of pure evil in contrast to Wong’s pure good. But in a certain light, Once Upon a Time in China’s most compelling dramatics revolve around a more indefinite approach to the changing tides, the little, even well-intended aggressions like the impromptu competition between restaurant performers and Christian priests to see who can perform louder. With the exception of Wong, each character to some degree represents this push-pull between tradition and modernization, steadfastness and capitulation. The most pointed example is penniless martial arts master Iron Vest Yim (Yen Shi-kwan), who eventually allies himself with the Shaoho gang and seeks to defeat and kill Wong to establish his social and economic position. Leung very nearly follows a similar path, and it’s in moments and arcs like these that Tsui’s commitment to his characters and the overarching issues they suggest come to the fore. The characters are allowed to be petty, conflicted, and even extremely morally questionable at times, and the horror of certain moments — especially one where British soldiers open fire on a crowd of innocent Chinese people — is lingered upon in a way that feels necessary to establish the political stakes in such a fraught climate. Of course, all of this happens in between some awe-inspiring action sequences, which are as notable for their virtuosity and grace as they are for their busyness — the famed ladder fight between Wong and Yim also finds the time to incorporate a bevy of Shaoho gang members who try to shoot Wong from an upper level. Tsui’s control of the rhythms here is key, frequently using longer swooping takes interspersed with both quick cutting and slow-motion that shows off the flowing nature of Li’s style, influenced by his mastery of wushu that reflects a different influence from the martial arts that the real Wong pioneered. That dichotomy almost mirrors the final moments of Once Upon a Time in China, where a balance is struck between the conflicting impulses that have flooded through the film at large. Redemption and adaption, not unlike Tsui’s own through the years, asserts itself with vigor, but the sentiment of nationalism and the hope for an end to colonialism remain as potent as ever.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) First Draft

Complete first draft for Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

What makes The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) such an extraordinary work of experimental filmmaking exists on multiple levels simultaneously. At once, its truly rare scale — running an even eight hours — and quotidian focus seem to speak for themselves; such is the verisimilitude of the actions, conversations, and natural environs that this could be easily seen as “pure” non-fiction. But C.W. Winter and Anders Edström are after something much knottier, for the film is not the straightforward documentary it may appear to be. It is instead a series of reenactments, allowing Shiojiri to replay the last year of her husband’s life, in order to provide her the space and time to say and do the things she wished she could have achieved. Such space and time, of course, maps onto and is virtually indistinguishable from the space and time used to make this film, and as surprisingly frequently as the veil of artifice is pierced — with, say, a ghostly dissolve or a sequence where a monologue plays out solely in subtitles — there is still a palpable sense of fully-inhabited life playing out in every moment. That life comes most vividly in the form of nature: so much time is given over to shots of plants and wind, and what would be seen typically as establishing shots or moments of contemplation in a more typical narrative film comes to the forefront as its own strand of reckoning and beauty. The Works and Days is indeed monumental, but it is also inviting, each layered soundscape and naturally-lit image — both on the verge of abstraction at times — another element in a shimmering mosaic, whose beauty only further contextualizes and deepens the memories of melancholy and resilience at its center.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature, Werewolf (2016), already suggested a talent to watch in its refracted take on the addiction/relationship drama. While its dramatic sense felt stuck in rote beats, the formal sense was considerably more invigorating, with an extensive use of handheld to isolate body parts and constantly suggest a sense of the outside world’s pressure on two lovers. With her second feature, Queens of the Qing Dynasty, which is playing at this year’s Berlinale Encounters section, McKenzie has both developed and totally altered her aesthetic to form something considerably more focused and transfixing. Running 40 minutes longer than its predecessor, Queens of the Qing Dynasty operates on merely a slightly more complex plot. Another two-hander, it principally follows Star (Sarah Walker), a young woman on the cusp of 19 with mental disabilities, including bipolar disorder and ADHD. On one of her semi-common attempted-suicide hospitalizations, she comes into contact with a queer Chinese immigrant caretaker (Zheng Ziyin) — credited as An, though at one point in their texts Star refers to them as Anne, and in general their conception of their gender remains compellingly ambiguous. Apart from a clear bisection, with the first half taking place almost exclusively inside the hospital and the second floating in between various temporary residences for Star, including a mental hospital, Queens of the Qing Dynasty operates within a slippery, amorphous structure, continually building a captivating portrait of these two outsiders. An specifically likens their status as a queer immigrant — and as perhaps a “woman in a man’s body” — to Star’s fraught existence, recently orphaned and unable to live on her own. In this context, the eponymous queens are presented by McKenzie in a knowingly Orientalist fashion, as an unreachable ideal for An, who longs to be one of the imperial concubines who didn’t have to do any work but could wield immense power with their feminine wiles. This desire cuts both ways; An’s long and perfectly polished fingernails and consciously exotic presentation in certain moments dovetails with Star’s recurring fantasies of herself in ancient dress with gold talons. It’s fair to say that Queens of the Qing Dynasty (made by a White filmmaker) exists both within and outside of the Chinese-Canadian culture it glancingly tries to depict; Star ultimately remains the viewpoint character, but several scenes conducted in Mandarin with An and their female friends retain a deliciously catty and genuine feeling, altering the balance and lend a further nuance to an already shape-shifting film. Aside from the aforementioned fantasies and other aesthetic breaks, like an exquisite VR reverie, recurring use of crude animation, an apparently unsimulated endoscope scene, and a moment of strobing colors closely attuned to Star’s shifting attention, Queens of the Qing Dynasty trades in Werewolf’s handheld for extraordinarily controlled extreme close-ups, typically in shallow focus, which sharpen the viewer’s attention to minute details. Particular attention is paid to Walker’s eyes and her pupils, which seem to constantly expand and contract in a way that perfectly suits the somewhat unnerving yet largely intimate tone that McKenzie strikes. The ending, with its embrace of the ambiguous, odd relationship that the two develop over a brief period of time, includes a scene in a Chinese restaurant that eventually unfolds over a series of totally disjunctive jump cuts, placing both Star and An in the same place in front of an arch. That simultaneous melding and differentiation of bodies and personalities epitomizes Queens of the Qing Dynasty in all its eerie, morphing explorations.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs First Draft

Complete first draft for Film Comment.

Dominik Graf represents nothing less than an alternate vision of modern German cinema. Far from the rarified heights of the loose collective of filmmakers like Maren Ade, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec that make up the Berlin School, or even the more popular but still politics-forward work of the New German Cinema, Graf has staked his claim as the foremost purveyor of genre films. Since his ambitious crime epic The Invincibles (1994), whose bleak outlook was rejected by a post-unified Germany unwilling to engage with the corruption already set within the system, he has worked mostly in television, having directed more than seventy films over a forty-three year career. Whether it be standalone works or contributions to long-running series like Tatort or its ex-East German counterpart Polizeiruf 110, Graf has consistently applied a singularly dynamic style that goes hand-in-hand with his ever-shifting command of character relationships, incorporating motifs and images that resonate across not only the film at hand, but his prolific body of work at large. Owing partly to financing reasons and partly to his own preference for television, which offers him an outlet to explore genre amid the conventions of a crime series, Graf frequently goes years without making a theatrical film. His most recent effort, Fabian: Going to the Dogs, is his first since Beloved Sisters (2014), probably his most famous work internationally; both are almost-three-hour period films that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, a platform rarely available for his crime television movies. Fabian is an adaptation of the 1931 novel by Erich Kästner, which was released under the originally intended title (and the film’s subtitle) in 2013, a telling alteration that speaks directly to the changing currents that would run towards Nazism. Jakob Fabian himself (Tom Schilling) represents one of the sticks in the mud, an aspiring writer living in 1931 Berlin mired in unemployment. Fabian revolves around his relationships with his lover, Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Rosendahl), an international film lawyer seeking to become an actress, and his close friend Stephan Labude, a son of a wealthy lawyer who is attempting to become a professor while also remaining enmeshed in political agitation. Like many Graf films, including Beloved Sisters, his contribution to the Dreileben TV film trilogy alongside Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler, and his Henry James television adaptation The Friends of the Friends (2002), it situates itself along this quasi-love triangle; while, as in the latter film, the third end of the triangle only fleeting meets the object of desire, the implicit link between them in their ties to the main character provides a crucial structure to the film, two separate points of focus that Graf moves fluidly between. For Fabian, in typical Graf fashion, resonates as both a fully fleshed-out (in multiple senses of the world) personal drama and a grand portrait of the times, observing as a Weimar Germany still reeling from World War I descends into moral decay ready to be seized upon by the forces of fascism. Graf’s work is distinguished from that of Petzold, perhaps his closest internationally known compatriot, by dint of his full-fledged commitment to the former, allowing the subtext to flow freely from the text, which, despite the length, comes across as raucously as any of his past films. His handheld, rapid-cutting style is augmented here by extensive use of archival footage, an intervention that widens the film’s world as surely as Graf’s assured handling of supporting characters, who unexpectedly dance in and out of prominence. The extended ending hearkens back to both Beloved Sisters and The Friends of the Friends, while the historical coda, a chapter closing on dreams deferred, is Fabian’s own; the juxtaposition of these two elements gets to the core of Graf’s still underexplored brilliance.

Dominik Graf

1. Tatort: Frau Bu lacht (1995)
2. Dreileben: Don't Follow Me Around (2011)
3. Beloved Sisters (2014)
4. Die Katze (1988)
5. Fabian, or Going to the Dogs (2021)
6. The Friends of the Friends (2002)
7. The Invincibles (1994)
8. Polizeiruf 110: Smoke on the Water (2014)

1. Tatort: Frau Bu lacht (1995)
2. Dreileben: Don't Follow Me Around (2011)
3. Beloved Sisters (2014)
4. Die Katze (1988)
5. Fabian, or Going to the Dogs (2021)
6. The Friends of the Friends (2002)
7. The Invincibles (1994)
8. Polizeiruf 110: Smoke on the Water (2014)

Takahata Isao

1. Pom Poko (1994)
2. Only Yesterday (1991)
3. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
5. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1. Pom Poko (1994)
2. Only Yesterday (1991)
3. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
5. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

Complete first draft for Hyperallergic.

At this point, it’s almost a moot point to discuss the development of Zhang Yimou’s career, certainly one of the most willfully contradictory yet often inspired — or at least beautiful — oeuvres in film history, one indelibly tied up in the politics and socioeconomics of the People’s Republic of China. After serving as cinematographer on Chen Kaige’s landmark film Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang burst out as the international face of the Fifth Generation, the movement that downplayed Cultural Revolution-era social realism filmmaking in favor of more lavish works, frequently set in the past and infusing its melodramas with a profusion of style. Zhang’s professional and personal relationship with Gong Li formed the first part of his career, which stretched from Red Sorghum (1987) to Shanghai Triad (1995) and represented a flourish of recognition of mainland China’s artistic possibility on the world stage, even and perhaps especially because these films were routinely banned in his country. After a brief turn to full-on neorealism at the turn of the century, Zhang’s Hero established him as a newfound director of action-driven spectacle, and his work ever since has effectively alternated between his smaller-scale dramas and historical action. Consequently, he has found great favor with the Chinese government, though this can vary from film to film: One Second (2020), intended as a heartfelt love-letter to cinema, had its international and domestic premieres canceled multiple times before being released unceremoniously in multiplexes. Nevertheless, he clearly stands as not only one of the most prominent mainland Chinese directors, but also one who has a particularly malleable political outlook in his work; unlike, say, Jia Zhangke, who has formed something of an oppositional but still well-recognized output, his films in both modes seem to build out of the internal drama first, involving exterior forces only insofar as they feel germane to the narrative at hand. While it would be too much to read Zhang’s cinema as a reflection of evolving political involvement, his films tend to cater to the status quo, whatever that may be. Such clear gifts for color and scale, and crucially not any direct political statements, were likely the main reasons that Zhang was picked to helm the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Prior to 2008, it would be inaccurate to say that there was a lack of ambition, but the “artistic section,” first truly instituted at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, had been mainly directed by people whose main artistic domain lay in theater. While Zhang himself has had substantial experience in stage work, he was the first film director to lead an Olympics opening ceremony. What he turned in still ranks among the great modern spectacles, an epic that led at least the next two opening ceremonies to hire similar metteurs en scènes: Danny Boyle for 2012 in London and Fernando Meirelles in 2016 for Rio. But Zhang’s epic still stands alone, not merely for the extravagant use of 15,000 performers and their awe-inspiring tradition, or the heavy invocations of one of the oldest and most auspicious cultures and nations in the world, or the dramatic LED scroll that connected past, present, and future. What many justified raves failed to point out that the performances weren’t completely perfect: a missed cue here, a light left on there, little moments that popped out of what could have been a uniform, if thoroughly impressive mass. While it’s true that no live performance could ever be totally airtight, it rings as a reminder that these are still actual human beings, all linked together in a grand endeavor to honor something much bigger than themselves; that it so fluidly moved from innovation to innovation, cultural strand to cultural strand, made it all the more moving and vibrant. All of this is to say that Zhang’s return to direct the 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, once again in Beijing, comes as an enormous let-down in comparison. True, the Winter Olympics generally carry considerably less of a global cachet compared to their Summer counterparts, and consequently the opening ceremonies are not required to carry such a fanfare. COVID still remains an enormous concern as well, and it would have probably been far too much to expect Zhang to top his greatest achievement. But everything that distinguished his artistic contributions in 2008 feels either lacking or missing altogether, not only because the initial artistic section lasted less than 20 minutes, close to an hour shorter than 2008. For one, while 2008 used short films as brief interstitial moments, 2022 opened with one, a three-minute countdown that moved backwards through the 24 solar terms in the Chinese calendar as a commemoration of the then-ongoing Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. Each term is represented by glossy, frequently slow-motion images, intended to showcase each spray of snow and ice in a manner far removed from the simplicity of the paper-making video in 2008. That reliance on technology to the detriment of the actual performers and cultural intentions was greatly magnified in the first physical act: 400 performers carried LED sticks to represent the lifecycle of the dandelion, a lovely image of long, waving green stalks that was thoroughly upstaged by what the dancers were standing on: the world’s largest LED screen that covered the entirety of the Bird’s Nest stadium floor, where 2,008 drummers were pounding away less than 14 years before. As the stalks waved, green and yellow rays emanated out, neither subsuming the physical stalks nor truly enhancing them: because the screen stayed as a static floor, the uncanny effect was created of a seemingly bottomless pit of light and bombast that existed in contrast to the image of purported delicacy and harmony that was trying to be conveyed. Due to the paucity of actual acts, the presentation of the Chinese flag ended up effectively as the second part of the artistic program, a long passing of the flag across people from the 56 different ethnic groups of China — here, as elsewhere, the NBC Olympics crew could not resist an extended discussion of the terrible treatment of the Uyghurs, which would ring less hollow if such attention was paid with the same consistency to the plight of the oppressed in every single country that has hosted the Olympics to date. The final part of the initial artistic portion (before the Parade of Nations) was another LED extravaganza, mutating the water into a block of ice that displayed the dates and locations of the previous Winter Olympics in a light show projected on a digital block of ice, followed by human ice skaters miming hitting a LED hockey puck that whizzed into and broke the block to form the Olympic rings, another moment that offered precious little in terms of Chinese specificity; while the Yellow River that formed the ice block might have carried some resonance, it was in the service of a show that felt truly conventional, and totally lacking in the humanity that 2008 had so vividly carried. There were some more aspects of the artistic portion woven throughout the rest, including the introduction of a snowflake motif, a line of people walking across the screen to showcase images of community amid the pandemic, and, of all things, another group of ice skaters moving across the screen to a cover of “Imagine.” But all of that — and Zhang’s decision to use the Olympic torch itself as the Olympic cauldron to encourage environmental sustainability — paled in comparison to the thorniness of a decision that could not have been Zhang’s: to have Dinigeer Yilamujiang, an Uyghur skier, to co-light the cauldron. Such an overtly political act only threw into relief the passive and technology-obsessed displays that had preceded it. While the temptation is to blame Zhang, he has largely resisted the increasing bloat that has gripped Chinese popular filmmaking in the past few decades: his two most recent films, One Second and Cliff Walkers (2021), a taut and violent World War II spy thriller, almost prided themselves on their relatively stripped-down scale. Instead, if Zhang, as per the NBC broadcast, sought to make a more “introspective, thought-provoking” ceremony that emphasized unity, it’s more likely the case that he just missed the mark, unable to bring out these qualities in the face of the drive for innovation and spectacle that he himself helped usher in.

Framing Agnes First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Framing Agnes — the second feature-length documentary directed by Chase Joynt, who also co-directed No Ordinary Man (2020) — lays the vast bulk of its most interesting elements and a good deal of its many flaws at the feet of its central conceit. The Agnes of the title is a near-legendary figure among the trans community, who lied about elements of her physical development to UCLA researchers in order to obtain hormones and surgery and then informed them of her deception. In the course of trying to do research on this mythical and misunderstood figure, researchers also found the records and interviews concerning a number of other trans people interviewed in the same study, whose predicaments carried significantly less notoriety. To capture this, Framing Agnes leans into an askew form of the historical reenactment: Joynt himself plays a talk show host (seemingly patterned after Mike Wallace) interviewing each of these people as they sit across from each other at a small desk with a large old-fashioned microphone, all of which is rendered in black-and-white with rounded televisual corners. The rationalization given in the film is that the talk show in the late 1950s, when the study took place, served as the default public forum for people to express themselves, and that staging the reenacted conversations in such a manner flips the script of the power dynamics of the clinical interview. It is also pointedly populated by trans people: Joynt, along with historian Jules Gill-Peterson, writer Morgan M. Page, and the actors in the reeanactments including Angelica Ross, Max Wolf Valerio, and Zackary Drucker as Agnes; the only person on screen who isn’t trans is sociologist Kristen Schilt. But the gulf between good intentions and shortsighted execution can be great, and such is the case with Framing Agnes. While the interviews are drawn from the actual transcripts, a certain overt performativity, as encouraged by Joynt’s grandstanding talk show host, clashes with what ought to be cagy and considered replies to questions that can verge on flippant. The distancing of these moments through the relative stylization of black-and-white would also rankle less were it not for the implicit suggestion that it was depicting a different time, one less enlightened than our modern sensibilities, despite the inclusion of news footage of Christine Jorgensen which features interviewers arguably talking more respectfully than the majority of the American public would for decades. But the viewer is never allowed to sit with Framing Agnes’s interviews, which might take up less than half of the actual film. Instead, there are reams of interviews with the actors themselves, often shot in a way that bizarrely attempts to foreground the recording apparatus — Joynt and Schilt interviewing Gill-Peterson in profile, a camera and C-stand plainly visible; Ross interviewed in a church with a long-shot in profile showing the entire lighting setup and boom microphone; there’s even the intrusion of contemporary 16mm footage with visible sprocket holes, one of the true plagues of this year’s Sundance film festival. Though the film arguably deserves to be in the NEXT section for its genuine attempt to reach for something different in nonfiction filmmaking (though it, the weakest film in competition, won both prizes), it seems to lose its nerve, or at least much of its ability to commit to its thorniest and most potentially insightful elements. I must say here that I don’t have the ability to comment on the specific offenses that trans writers like Esther Rosenfield and Willow Maclay have raised with this film, but the inability to dig deeper into a subject ripe for further study is plain to see to the discerning viewer.

Every Day in Kaimukī First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Perhaps because artists are so often misfits, unable to fit in to the normal currents of society, the slacker remains one of cinema’s enduring subjects. Every Day in Kaimukī, the feature debut of Alika Tengan, finds its own layabout in Naz Kawakami, a radio DJ who lives in the eponymous neighborhood of Honolulu, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The film very much belongs to a recent substrand of docufiction, in which non-actors play themselves in lightly fictionalized scenarios: here, as in real life, Naz has lived in Hawaiʻi his whole life and is contemplating a move to New York. It is populated mostly by Naz’s actual friends and acquaintances, with two exceptions: his new radio station protégé Kaden (Holden Mandrial-Santos) and his long-term girlfriend Sloane (Rina White), whose acceptance into a sculpting graduate arts program in New York is providing the latest impetus in a long line of chances for Naz to leave home for the first time. Every Day in Kaimukī thus operates somewhere in the register of a hangout film, flitting from interaction to interaction as Naz goes skateboarding with his friends and Kaden, has earnest but often wary conversations with Sloane, and makes preparations for leaving, whether by giving away possessions around the house to random people or calling airline representatives to try to figure out how to fly his cat to New York. Particular emphasis is paid to both his genuine passion and skills — his hosting skills are quite engaging, especially signaled by the superb soundtrack largely culled from his actual experience in radio — and his frequent shortsightedness, wherein things seem to happen to him more often than the opposite, and he frequently forgets to help out around the apartment. The rotating emphasis on certain friends or friend groups, largely for the better, takes away the more expected focus on Naz and Sloane’s relationship and instead orients Every Day in Kaimukī around both the allure and dissatisfaction that Naz has towards Hawaiʻi. The film itself clearly loves Honolulu, dedicating a good deal of time to simply observing Naz traveling along the streets by day and night, while also recognizing Naz’s legitimate desire to leave while he still can, before he gets further into a rut of routine and contentment. That push-pull between discovery and contentment is further heightened by the pandemic-era setting, which makes the prospect of staying all the more attractive to Sloane and functions as a primary source of conflict. Every Day in Kaimukī’s narrative can sometimes feel a little bit too pointed, ushering Naz along the path to where he can feel comfortable setting out for New York on his own, but it’s balanced out by Tengan’s feel for mood, for the rhythm of interactions and images that verge on dreaminess. The largely handheld cinematography is digital but takes place in the Academy ratio and has the general warmth and haziness of 16mm; one especially well-judged tracking shot alternately sticks with and pulls away from Naz as he makes several trips from his apartment to his car and back. Such moments capture the fluidity that the film has in its best stretches, especially in a single night where Naz goes on a tear of drunken insults against nearly every major character previously seen. The resolution to all of this, including his relationship with Sloane, is rather unexpectedly generous and compassionate, a series of moments that cements the film’s feeling for its characters and their place; even the unreasonably cold New York is given its own warmth in both the new (a friendly roommate) and the old (the cat), a dichotomy perfectly in sync with its protagonist’s point of view.