Tag: Taiwan

Mo sheng (Forgetting to Know you, ??)
China 2013, Quan Ling, 89′

TL;DR not really good people doing not really intelligent things. However loli.

The film shows, through our usual low-budget independent festival movie from Asia style, a slow spiral of a couple from an unknown small city (give or take a million people) somewhere near Chongqing from regular life with their incredibly cute little daughter who is the hidden star of the film, to distrust, lies and fundamental estrangement. Both of them have their flaws. They do not respect each other, they search through each other’s phones, the man visits cabaret clubs, the woman provokes his jealousy all the time with a young cab driver and of course there is his mother whose birthday is forgotten by the wife, which is the trigger to most of the following dissolution of their marriage. While it does not obviously employ the techniques of a soap opera it pulls you in like one and you start to wonder how low will they fall and if there is any solution for them to stay together and be happy.

Will you still love me tomorrow?
Taiwan 2013, Arvin Chen, 104′

The quiet glasses salesman Weichung has been married for nine years to Feng, his plain childhood friend. They have a son and life rolls along smoothly until Feng decides together with her parents that she wants another child. While at the engagement party of his younger sister Mandy and San-san he meets through a chance encounter with gay wedding planner and old friend Stephen who encourages him to take up “being gay” again so he slowly starts considering it until he actually falls in love with a flight attendant who visits his shop.

TL;DR embrace the gay

While I did not watch his first movie “Au revoir Taipeh” which was shown in 2010, I have seen the very cute “Lane 256” (the one about the couple with the incompetent moving crew), which was a part of 10+10. I seem to have a new tradition: romantic comedies from Taiwan at the Kino International. A very nice tradition because both films have turned out very good so far. While the main characters occasionally are quite cliché gay it does not really hurt because as someone who has grown up in the Bay Area Chen knows the diversity of the community and most of his gay characters are “regular” people. Most importantly no one in this movie takes themselves too seriously and the dialogues are full of witty one-liners and most of the main characters get lost in wonderfully shrewd short delusional segments. There is also a hilarious subplot about Mandy not wanting to marry the timid but loyal San-san and Weichung’s gay friends trying all kinds of stuff to get them together again. Besides being a warm portrait of Weichung and his friends it also shows the painful way of life for many gay Taiwanese: While in the quite progressive Taipeh you can be openly gay in your 20s it is expected that you wind down, get settled and start a family for your parents when you reach thirty. In this case, with the now platonic love and understanding between Feng and Weichung after tensions they manage to find an agreement to both live comfortably while being parents to their son.
On a side note the movie is also hilariously current with Mandy watching Korean dramas and imagining the flower boy giving her life advice in Korean while she talks back to him in Mandarin or the gay bar playing Korean idol pop.

10+10 (???)
Taiwan 2011, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and 19 others, 114′

Initiated by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and 19 other Taiwanese film makers made 5-minute shorts free from limitations regarding content or form.

Like any omnibus film, this one spans a wide range of style, genres and quality. Comedies about offering a movie screening (what lovely meta) at an extremely remote miniature shrine, about the problems that arise when you need to shoot a film for the Mainland and your location has a ROC flag plastered over it, about a young couple and their incompetent moving crew. Short vignettes about a cute rural bus driver, about a 100-year-old man, about the importance of family, about old pop songs, about a girl with stage-fright who ruins her rehearsal but then accidentally becomes a great star, etc. Some are just outright strange, like the tourist ad, turning silent film, turning pointless rape attempt.
Unfortunately not everyone was able to produce interesting or high quality material. There are other, better films of this kind but if you are at least slightly interested in Taiwan you should have a look, there’s always the fast-forward button.

Love (?)
Taiwan, PRC 2011, Doze Niu, 127′

Yijia is pregnant with Kai’s child, who is her best friend Ni’s boyfriend. She contemplates abortion, as Kai is not interested in her at all. Ni shoots down Kai’s desperate advances to win her back. Meanwhile Kuan, Yijia’s brother who works at a hotel and a car wash meets the flirty but unapproachable Zoe Fang, who first wants to become the trophy wife of Ni’s father, because she thinks it is her only outlook in life. Mark, a successful business man wants to buy a courtyard house in Beijing where he meets a quirky single-mom real estate agent who, together with her little son and a little help from local police, quickly turns his whole life upside down.

This one is kind of strange: On one side it is the epitome of over-produced with beautiful people who are either rich or at least middle-class, aesthetically perfect surroundings, obstinate mood music and sickly sweet Mandarin-pop. On the other side it is a genuinely funny script with good actors and just plain enjoyable, with the honest-if-not-kind-of-naive message that everything will work out with love. It also deserves merit for promoting modern family arrangements over traditional values which is definitely not a given if you want to make a commercially successful film for a still rather conservative audience.

The Q&A with the director who also played Ni’s father and Mark Chao who played the businessman was surprisingly funny. Mark joked about being an innocent, cute character, totally unlike his film persona. Doze later referred to this as the reason why he cast him: He needed someone to portray how important smell is for attraction to develop but feared that if he gave himself those lines it would come out as perverted, so he needed a cute, innocent flower boy to utter them. Doze then went on to prove this by trying to smell the male Q&A-host and successfully demonstrating a lot of playful creepiness.
Mark who spoke Chinese even though he was perfectly fine with English also produced a wonderful moment with the translator: Asked about Vicki Zhao, his partner in the film he gave a rather tame answer which the translator apparently exaggerated a little, so Mark cut in in the middle of the translation asking if the translator is a fan of Vicki as Mark was not that explicit in his answer. To everyone’s delight, the translator enthusiastically admitted that yes, he is a big fan!