New York Asian Film Festival 2021 Part Two: THE CON-HEARTIST, A LEG, RAGING FIRE

The 2021 New York Asian Film Festival is winding down, but there are still plenty of films from this year’s lineup that I recommend seeking out even after the festival ends. Below are some highlights, including a wacky heist rom-com from Thailand, a dark comedy about mourning and identity from Taiwan, and an intense cop thriller starring one of Hong Kong’s most iconic stars. Check them out, and in case you missed them, you can find my other recommendations here.

The Con-Heartist

An extremely high-energy romantic comedy from director Mez Tharatorn, who essentially specializes in this genre, The Con-Heartist teams a young woman and wannabe YouTuber who works at a repossession office with a con man she catches in the act. Ina (played with screwball charm by Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul) records Tower (Nadech Kugimiya) attempting to con her and offers to delete the recording instead of reporting him to the police under one condition: that he help her get revenge on her ex-boyfriend, Petch (Thiti Mahayotaruk), who conned her out of 500 thousand baht and then took off.

Tower reluctantly agrees to help Ina and comes up with a convoluted scheme that involves sending the sales manager at a posh hotel on a vacation to Russia and then taking advantage of his absence to impersonate hotel staff. Petch currently works at a travel agency; the idea is to convince him to pay out a large sum of cash on behalf of a client who wants to book a block of luxury hotel rooms, then to abscond with the cash. Ina enlists her old teacher, Ms. Nonguch (Kathaleeya McIntosh), who has debts of her own, to masquerade as the rich client, while Tower gets his older brother, a goofy-seeming but actually even more ruthless con named Jone (Pongsatorn Jongwilak) to pretend to be a hotel salesperson.

It is all very complicated and confusing, and needless to say, there are a lot of hiccups along the way. But there are also many, many laughs—which is good because, at a little over two hours, The Con-Heartist is a little too long for a film of this genre, with a few too many twists by the time it reaches the end. Fortunately, Tharatorn’s direction keeps things moving along at high speed, and the film’s hyper-stylized vibe, from the exaggerated sound effects to quirky animation and other visual cues, is both attention-grabbing and fitting for a film centered on a woman who records goofy “review” videos of anything and everything for YouTube. Keeping up with the madcap plot is guaranteed to keep you engaged even as the film starts to overstay its welcome.

Some of the humor in The Con-Heartist may be too broad for audience members unused to, say, the zany style of the Lucky Stars movies starring Sammo Hung; the hotel sales manager’s tendency to spit all over everyone and everything courtesy of the cartoonish gap in his teeth is probably the prime example of this, especially since they return to this joke a few too many times throughout the film. But the charm of the main cast members, especially Luevisadpaibul and Kugimiya as the mismatched partners in crime who gradually grow to care for each other, is too much to resist, while the perpetually smiling Petch, as played by Mahayotaruk, is the perfect villain to root against. Needless to say, it’s very easy to fall for The Con-Heartist.

A Leg

The feature directorial debut of Chang Yao-sheng, who previously co-wrote the scripts for The Village of No Return and acclaimed drama A Sun, A Leg is extremely dark and strange but still somehow elicits a healthy amount of laughs. With a script co-written by Chang and his A Sun collaborator Chung Mong-hong (who also produced and shot the film), it follows a desperate young widow as she seeks to reunite her husband’s amputated leg with the rest of his corpse prior to laying him to rest. As A Leg progresses, flashbacks show us that while her relationship with her husband was fraught to the point of being essentially over, even lost love deserves a proper farewell.

Qian Yu-ying (the marvelous Gwei Lun-mei) is a dancer in a club when she is spotted by Zheng Zi-han (Tony Yang, very handsome but also very punchable here). Zi-han approaches her with his dream of becoming an international ballroom dancing champion, and together they make a charming couple both on and off the dance floor. However, Zi-han isn’t exactly the most reliable of men. In an attempt to escape from gangsters trying to collect a gambling debt, he falls and hurts his foot, ending his dancing career. He and Yu-ying marry and open a dancing studio, but he lets her down yet again when she walks in on him with another woman.

Soon, that old foot injury comes back to haunt him, and Zi-han finds himself in the hospital, accompanied by his now-estranged wife. Amputation was supposed to save him, but complications from the surgery ended up killing him. Despite having already signed a waiver that permitted the hospital to take and dispose of the leg (really, it’s mostly just his foot), Yi-ying refuses to allow him to be put to rest without it and goes on a tireless quest through hospital bureaucracy and medical waste disposal, much to the chagrin of everyone around here who would prefer she let amputated limbs lie. This tireless quest is where the film’s pitch-black comedy comes into play, highlighting the absurdity of Yi-ying’s situation and her growing obsession with achieving this final goal for the man she once loved.

The film begins with Zi-han’s amputation; the story of their marriage and its eventual dissolution is told through flashbacks narrated by Zi-han from beyond the grave, seemingly not yet at rest due to his corpse being incomplete. Reuniting his leg with his body will provide closure for both Zi-han and Yi-ying, allowing him to pass on and her to bid farewell to him and begin living a new life, without the baggage he saddled her with during his. It all culminates in an ending that is oddly moving, a fitting tribute to the importance of letting go. And while it’s hard to sympathize with Zi-han throughout the film considering that all he does is let down poor Yi-ying, watching Yi-ying grow as a person after his death is one of the stranger and yet more beautiful character arcs I’ve seen. It helps that Gwei is a delight, walking A Leg’s tonal tightrope with ease and ensuring that no matter how fruitless her quest may seem, you still want her to get there in the end.

Raging Fire

The final film from celebrated Hong Kong director Benny Chan, who was diagnosed with cancer during the production and sadly passed away last summer, Raging Fire is an action-packed cop drama starring one of the best to ever kick ass and take names on screen, Donnie Yen. Yen might be pushing 60 with a recurring shoulder injury, but you’d never know it from his performance here; he meets the much-younger but also incredibly badass Nicholas Tse blow for blow in this tale of rage and revenge that was selected as the Centerpiece film of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Yen stars as Bong, a highly respected cop with a righteous character that infuriates his more easily corrupted bosses and prevents him from getting the promotions he deserves. In one early scene, Bong is invited to a very fashionable tea house where a powerful businessman, aided by Bong’s bootlicking superiors, attempts to convince Bong to drop a case in which he is involved. Bong not only refuses, he also asks how much the exorbitantly expensive tea they offered him costs and throws down a few bills to cover his few sips.

After a complex operation designed to catch an infamous drug lord goes awry—resulting in the deaths of many cops, including Bong’s mentor and friend—Bong devotes all of his considerable skill to tracking down the culprits. Soon, it becomes clear that a group of criminals led by Ngo (Tse), a former cop who was recently released from prison, is at the heart of the case. Bong used to mentor Ngo on the force; however, when Ngo and others beat a suspect to death in the process of tracking down a high-powered businessman who was being held hostage, Bong’s sense of honor prevented him from lying under oath about what he had seen. Now, Ngo is filled with little else but the fiery desire for revenge on everyone who abandoned him to a sentence behind bars, including Bong. Even Bong’s pregnant wife (Qin Lan) isn’t off-limits.

The script, written by Chan with Ryan Ling and Tong Yiu-ling, is a bit convoluted, frequently relying on lengthy flashbacks that break up the propulsive momentum of the more action-fueled portions of the story. The film is populated with a countless sea of characters both criminal and cop that are often hard to keep track of, not least because they are not very deeply fleshed out. (How could they be, there are so many of them!) Yen and Tse both do as much with their relatively cliched characters as they can—indeed, Tse makes someone guilty of police brutality far more charismatic than he should be—but let’s be real, you’re not watching a movie that stars two of Hong Kong’s finest martial artists-slash-actors for the plot. You’re watching it for the fight sequences, and on that count, Raging Fire delivers enough explosive action to live up to its title with gusto.

Chan directs the action sequences in Raging Fire with a marvelous sense of inventiveness, ensuring that you’re always entertained even as some sequences stretch on and spill over to multiple locations. While the final showdown between Yen and Tse is of course a major highlight of the film—not to mention the fiery car chase leading up to it—I found the scene in which Yen waged war while trapped in a broken-down house with criminals spilling in through the door to be some of the most exciting action in the film. Yen removes his bulletproof vest, wraps it around his arm, and uses this armor to expertly batter the oncoming assailants. In the small space, he’s less reliant on his gun and more reliant on hand-to-hand combat, and the result is a reminder that even an older and more injury-prone Donnie Yen is still capable of kicking nearly anyone’s ass.

There’s just something about the resigned “here we go again” expression Yen gets on his face every time he realizes he needs to fight another bad guy that is just a joy to watch in any film. He’s next set to face off with Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter Four and needless to say, the prospects of seeing them fight should be mouth-watering for any action fan. But Raging Fire is a solid bit of entertainment to tide you over until that moment comes, not to mention a fitting tribute to the talents of Benny Chan, gone far too soon.

Conclusion

I hope you were able to catch some, if not all, of the great films from across the continent screening both virtually and in-person at the 2021 New York Asian Film Festival. Personally, there are so many others I wish I could have found time to squeeze in, including the latest from Fruit Chan (Coffin Homes) and a satire of indie filmmaking from Myanmar (Money Has Four Legs).

What do you think? Have you caught any of the movies screening at the New York Asian Film Festival? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The 2021 New York Asian Film Festival runs from August 6-22, 2021. You can find a complete list of virtual and in-person screenings here.

Raging Fire opened in theaters in the U.S. on August 13, 2021. You can find more international release dates here.