A couple of years ago, Third Window Films released a rather crazy film, “The Legend of the Stardust Brothers” which was shot in 1985 but was considered lost. It seems though, that Macoto Tezka's movie was not the only crazy one to have disappeared during the era, as Masashi Yamamoto also shot “What's Up Connection” in 1990, a rare bilingual Japan-Hong Kong co-production, which is equally preposterous and also considered lost up until now. Thankfully, it has recently been restored from 35mm elements and has its international premiere in Fantasia.
“What's Up Connection” is screening on Fantasia International Film Festival
A family of poor swindlers that live in the slums of the secluded fishing village of Po Toi O, find one day that they have won multiple holiday prizes to travel abroad, in different Asian countries. The oldest son, teenager Chi Gau Shin ends up in Tokyo by way of Kamagasaki, the so-called slums of Osaka, where he meets a Japanese tour guide with the tendency to scream and an eccentric old thief, with the two women eventually accompanying him back to Hong Kong, after a crazy tour to various aspects of life in Japan. Upon his return, though, the family finds out that a Japanese developer has discovered their village and wants to build multinational office buildings there, taking advantage of the upcoming Handover. The family members need to find what they want to do while fixing their interpersonal relationships which have become even more complicated with the newcomers' presence.
Masashi Yamamoto directs a truly crazy movie, which functions more like a collage of absurd ideas than a compact narrative, since the main premise is rather thin, and the number of different scenes, locations, and characters truly extravagant. As such, changes from a documentary/mockumentary, to a tour guide, to a music video, to a family drama, to a comedy, to a romance, and everything in between, happen constantly and with lightning speed.
At the same time, the whole narrative is coated with a distinct sense of ironic humor and mockery of every cliche about both the Japanese and the Hong Kongese. Japanese street food peddlers who give receipts in pieces of paper, neighborhoods filled with colors in Osaka, poor thieves, a tour guide who speaks lousy Cantonese, a Japanese contractor who wants to bring in the blood Americans and the f**king Russians, young hackers, bossy housewives, the concept of the handover, and a number of other ludicrous characters and concepts are all presented here, in torrenting fashion. At the same time, as eventually almost everyone is revealed to be some kind of conman, Yamamoto depicts a comment about human nature, which, as everything else here, is lost inside the narrative and audiovisual chaos.
Expectedly, the audiovisual approach, with a score by avant-garde trumpeter Toshinori Kondo and the overall combination of cinematography and production design are dominated by a preposterous maximalism, which actually seems to engulf all of the movie's aesthetics, along with the over-the top acting.
The overall result, when one factors in the frantic editing by Chikako Fukuda, is definitely not addressed to epileptics, or people who search for coherence, calmness and realism. Those who embrace the 2-hour chaos that is “What's Up Connection”, however, will definitely have a blast here.
