Nai Nai And Wai Po (PG)
16 minutes, now streaming on Disney+
4 stars
Sean Wang’s grandmothers are going to the Oscars. The Taiwanese-American film-maker’s project, shot in his San Francisco home during the pandemic, is a Best Documentary Short Film nominee at 2024’s Academy Awards.
Recently added to Disney+, the film is a look at Chang Li Hua, who was 83 at the time of filming and is now 86. She is known in her family as Wai Po (maternal grandmother in Chinese). Her constant companion is Yi Yan Fuei, 94 at the time of filming, now 97. She goes by Nai Nai, which means paternal grandmother.
Wang’s camera records the grandmothers in their daily routine – waking up in their shared bed, doing stretches, gardening and cleaning. He has them talking about each other and their lives, some of it spent during the war, with the hardships that followed. Their affection for each other stands out, along with their unshakeable good humour.
The two women speak with almost no filter about the things that keep them going (“I feel 100 years old. As long as I have the newspaper, I can live,” says Nai Nai) and the biological insults of old age (“We sleep together, so we can take care of one another. But Nai Nai farts in her sleep a lot,” says Wai Po).
May December (R21)
118 minutes, now showing
4 stars
The alternative title for May December might be The Mind Of A Predator. Gracie (Julianne Moore) is the person first in focus and, in the opening scenes, she is shown to have a will so powerful, she can distort reality for not just herself, but also those around her.
Over 20 years ago, Gracie, then 36 and with children of her own, met and had sexual relations with 13-year-old Joe (Charles Melton). After igniting a scandal and following a stay in prison, Gracie returns to Joe. They marry and start a family.
In the present day, a biopic is being made of the relationship. Actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is playing Gracie in the movie, visits the couple, resulting in an encounter that unearths long-buried secrets.
The screenplay, written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, was inspired by the real-life case of American sex offender and teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and is nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the upcoming Oscars.
Director Todd Haynes, who made his name with women-centred stories that involve complicated power dynamics (Carol, 2015; Far From Heaven, 2002), frames the Gracie-Elizabeth conversations as interrogations, disguised as polite banter.
Without didacticism and enlivened by occasional flashes of humour, May December takes a moral stand on the question of whether sex crimes involving minors can be redeemed by reframing it as a love story, but with the added spice of the forbidden. It is a story, but love has nothing to do with it.
The Forbidden Play (NC16)
111 minutes, now showing
3 stars
A boy (Minato Shogaki), after losing his mother Miyuki (First Summer Uika) in a car accident, buries her finger in the backyard and chants over it every day for her return. Woe betide to the living when she is reincarnated.
J-horror pioneer Hideo Nakata can never create another Ringu (1998) – that genre-defining smash was a singular phenomenon. The Forbidden Play is nonetheless the director’s most meaningful work since Dark Water (2002).
This adaptation of a 2019 novel of the same title by Karuma Shimizu is American writer Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) – if the dead pet cat were mummy.
Bit by bit, body part by body part, Miyuki pushes through the earth to crawl fully back to life. It is a chilling sight.
The mysterious otherworldly phone calls and demonic possessions offer generic scares, but this supernatural yarn – which also stars Daiki Shigeoka and Kanna Hashimoto – is disturbing in the way it examines the undying power of grief and hate.
