‘Black Ox’ Review: Tsai Ming-liang Collaborator Lee Kang-sheng Leads a Cryptic Tale of Westernization

The last film by writer, director, and editor Tetsuichirô Tsuta, 2013’s “The Tale of Iya” didn’t get to make a big splash in the UK or US. But perhaps the association with names such as Lee Kang-sheng and Ryuichi Sakamoto will help move things along for “Black Ox,” a standout from the Tokyo International Film Festival’s fascinating and varied “Asian Futures” program, which showcases a variety of critical perspectives from across the continent. 

“A certain island country is on the path to civilization.” That wry prelude is all the introduction we get before Tsuta plunges us into the story of a mountain man (Lee) whose life is framed by the assimilation of all peoples under one unified umbrella of “Japanese” identity during the latter half of the 19th century (starting around the time of the Meiji Restoration). If the festival’s opening film, the samurai epic “11 Rebels,” is about the overt violence of the Boshin War that established this new regime, “Black Ox” hones in on the quieter violence that comes through the annihilation of cultural identity, such as through the targeted bans of practices associated with indigenous cultures. 

A brutal cacophony of severed limbs and exploding bodies used to underline the oppressiveness of the regime, “11 Rebels” is a much less subtle affair than Tsuta’s film. “Black Ox” prefers to leave more up to the viewer, favoring a opaque and poetic approach over a few bonks to the head. Lee’s appearance, as well as his calligraphy in the film’s title treatment, will inspire comparison to his many films with Tsai Ming-liang, and “Black Ox”s’ meditative pace and dreamlike atmosphere certainly keeps Tsai in mind. When characters actually do speak — which isn’t often — there’s never a sense of instructiveness towards the bigger picture of the film. But at the same time, Tsuta doesn’t always have them speak in cryptic riddles; these are people focused on their immediate needs, and they have to be, as they’re quickly forced into changing their way of life. 

The film is inspired by the “Ten Oxherding Pictures,” a series of Zen Buddhist paintings of cows and accompanying poems depicting the path to enlightenment; the film adds the realization of the True Self as an addendum. These paintings are paid homage homage in the pictures — named things like “Finding the Ox,” “Searching for Footprints,” “Taming the Ox” and so on — that effectively appear as chapter headings, breaking each strange segment of the film into distinct parts. 

“Villagers who opposed the nationalization of the mountains set fire to trees and turned them into ash,” continues the one bit of real context that the film provides, and perhaps that ash is reflected in Yutaka Aoki’s stark, grainy black and white film photography, which switches to a 65mm format after an opening shot in color of a faraway mountain burning, a moment that robs the film of its color while an ambient piece from the late, great Sakamoto hangs over it like a fog (it’s one of only two music cues in the film).

As Lee’s character comes down from the mountains, he’s quickly assimilated into working for an old crank on a farm. After some humiliating busywork, his patron dies and he’s left to fend for himself, acquiring his own land for farming and attempting to make a citizen of himself. The actual black ox comes in at this point, the unnamed man leaning on it as livelihood as the Tsuta watches him through menial tasks, often in thundering rain. 

The director illustrates much of this through long, patient takes, often keeping distance with interjections of a slow push in towards Lee’s face, studying him in meditation as the the sounds of the natural world quietly score the scene, as though the two are in communion. One of the film’s most captivating moments is a continual zoom which dissolves into a close-up of Lee’s face as he simply breathes in high-contrast black-and-white, the sound from his lungs carrying over the hills.

The film isn’t always so quiet, however. As if on a whim (maybe to jostle sleepy viewers out of such gentle rhythms), Tsuta sometimes cranks up the mix to thunderously loud volumes. The elemental force of those spikes, in concert with the physical distance which Tsuta maintains from his subjects while filming them, palpably conveys the insignificance of our species on this Earth, with the move towards “civilization” being a rather arbitrary construction. “Nature has no label,” one man says, “humans like to label everything but they don’t know about that.” But Tsuta’s camera belies that sentiment with a probing curiosity; whenever his camera isn’t focusing on the man and his ox, its eye is cast towards the very cultural practices which the government of the time was attempting to flatten out. That aggressive pursuit seems especially pointless in the (still very cryptic) big picture scope that Tsuta displays — the film transporting into 35mm color film, widescreen landscape shots showing dilapidated buildings and other dead things while the rest of nature carries on. 

Despite the austerity of its reflections on this period of westernization, Tsuta’s winking sense of humor manages to shine through. Case in point: one of Tsuta’s aforementioned long takes simply watches from a distance as the mountain man chases the film’s eponymous ox for several minutes straight. Another memorable sequence finds a westerner visiting the mountain man’s village, where he asks the locals to hold their breath while he takes a photo on a large format camera – the camera holding at a distance in observation of those agonizing moments before they all let out a gasp for air. 

Anyone impatient enough to leave during the film’s credits will have missed the film’s rather tongue-in-cheek but still affirming coda, questioning its own right to be a depiction of the path to enlightenment, positing that as Lee’s character was stifled by doctrine and lost his sense of self, perhaps you shouldn’t look at art and media as doctrine either. Instead – in a message that can’t help but feel like a well-deserved rib at the audience — it reimagines the message of the tenth painting: “Leave the theater and live in the world.” Message received. 

Grade: B

“Black Ox” premiered at the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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