Category: Taiwan

Salli (莎莉,  Lien Chien-Hung, 2023)

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Romance and tradition collide when a middle-aged chicken farmer is unwittingly duped by an online dating scam in Lien Chien-Hung’s gentle dramedy Salli (莎莉). Though everyone tells her the man she thinks she’s talking to on the internet probably isn’t real, Hui-jun (Esther Liu) continues to believe in the possibility of love and a more sophisticated world than that she knows from her rural small-town where everyone knows everyone’s business and she’s looked on as something of a pariah for being unmarried at 38.

Her busybody aunt (Yang Li-yin) in particular is keen that she get married as soon as possible and keeps bringing photos of eligible bachelors most of whom are more than 20 years older than her or just a bit strange. The aunt has also somewhat taken over in the upcoming wedding of Hui-jun’s younger brother Wei-hong (Austin Lin) to the daughter of a local pineapple farmer. She’s had a fengshui master come round and declare that Hui-jun’s bedroom is the best one for the new couple to sleep in so she’s been turfed out, while another fortune teller suggests that as she is unmarried herself Hui-jun shouldn’t even attend the ceremony otherwise the couple will end up arguing for the rest of their lives. Though Wei-hong tells her he doesn’t care about any of that and it’s important to him she attend his wedding, Hui-jun can’t help feeling a little guilty and in the way.

What the aunt doesn’t seem to consider is that after their parents died in an accident, Hui-jun in effect became everyone’s mother which made it impossible for her to have the kind of experiences one needs to get married. She even ended up caring for the daughter of her older brother who abandoned the family after the end of his marriage, though he later took her back to Shanghai where he lives with a much younger Mainland fiancée. Xin-ru has returned home in search of maternal comfort, but Hui-jun knows she will soon have to leave again and she’ll be on her own. It’s Xin-ru who sets her up on an internet dating app explaining that she uses them for “fun” though once Hui-jun starts chatting to “Martin”, a Parisian gallery owner, she can’t help but succumb to romantic fantasy. 

There are those who pity Hui-jin or mock her for being taken in by such an obvious scam, even considering giving Martin her life savings for the downpayment on a flat where they could live together in Paris when he proposes to her after a short period of text-based communication facilitated by AI translation. But Hui-jun is lonely and is just wants to feel loved and valued in a way she obviously doesn’t by her family members who are obsessed with her marital status. In any case, it’s through her imaginary romance with Martin that she begins to come into herself, to think about what it is she wants out of life including whether to not she actually wants to get married, and embrace a new sense of confidence as a person in her own right.

A disaster at home sends her to Paris, alone, hoping to clarify her situation which she eventually does though not in the way anyone might have expected. An elderly woman gives her a piece of life advice that after a divorce and several years of unsatisfying dating experiences, she realised that she just do things on her own and that was okay. What the opportunity affords her is the chance to rediscover herself as distinct from her roles as a sister, aunt, and surrogate mother and wonder if she might be happy enough with her chickens and the dog for company. Filled with a gentle humour and an affection for small-town, rural life in Taiwan if also a yearning for a little sophistication, the film has boundless sympathy for its put upon middle-aged heroine as trapped as some of the chickens in her coop by outdated patriarchal thinking and longing to strut free like the white cockerel she seems to treat almost as a friend. Taichung may not have the Eiffel Tower, but it has its charms and as Hui-jun is discovering the freedom to decide on her own future.

Salli screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

A Boy and a Girl (少男少女, Hsu Li-Da, 2023)

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A young man on the cusp of adolescence longs to escape his miserable circumstances but gradually finds himself succumbing to the corruption all around him in Hsu Li-Da’s bleak coming of age drama, A Boy and a Girl (少男少女, shàonánshàonǚ). Though the title may sound like a cheerful rom-com, Hsu’s film is closer to anti-romance as the ill-defined relationship between the two provokes unforeseen changes and eventually dangerous situations. 

In any case, all the Boy’s trouble’s start when his phone gets broken in the middle of a deal to sell in game points signalling an abrupt end to his escapist dreams. He’s desperate to get another one, but his mother can’t afford it and has problems of her own in that the hostess bar she runs is in financial trouble and she’s had to enter a sexual relationship with a local thug just to keep it running. The Boy catches them at it, and looks on voyeuristically laying bare his oedipal desires coupled with a moralistic objection to the act and resentment towards the gangster.

For these reasons he becomes determined to escape his moribund small town along with the hostess bar where his mother works by fighting back against adult duplicity. After meeting the Girl and gaining access to her phone, he discovers that she had been involved in a sexual relationship with their PE teacher which had resulted in a pregnancy. The pair of them attempt to blackmail the teacher with screen caps of his incriminating messages to her, but the plan backfires. The teacher doesn’t feel under threat and gets two of his underlings to beat the Boy up rather than pay. The Boy is morally outraged by the teacher’s behaviour and thinks someone ought to do something, but doesn’t know what to do so lands on blackmail as a form of punishment though as it turns out the Girl was less interested in vengeance or money than whether the teacher really loved her. Like the Boy, the Girl is mostly alone. She claims not to know who her mother is, while her father is suffering with an illness.

As expected they plot their escape together, but events soon overtake them. With the blackmail scheme ruined, the girl settles on sex work and the Boy becomes a kind of pimp if a conflicted one frustrated by the Girl’s whimsical businesses sense which sees her tell a potential client to forget about the money because he’s not quite as hideous as all the others. Meanwhile, she starts giving the boy a drug called Little Devil which causes those who take it to laugh manically and commit acts of extreme violence. Left without a moral arbiter the boy has nowhere to turn. Not only can he not talk to his mother’s boyfriend, but eventually encounters a corrupt cop whose immediate reaction is to tout for a bribe or, as he would have it, protection money. 

In this very messed up environment, all relationships have become transactional. Gradually the Boy begins to behave like those around him and takes on the codes of the masculinity with which he is presented, posturing and squaring up to his mother’s boyfriend in contest over ownership of her. His mother wants escape too, but is afraid and constrained by the persistent misogyny of the present society even if, ironically, her work her also leans into it in running a karaoke bar where the some of the hostesses are encouraged to undress. The more they try to escape, the tighter the noose seems to grow refusing to let any of them leave and denying them even the hope of better life.

Already cynical, the Girl is resigned to her fate and in fact no longer really resisting it save for interactions with the Boy. Told that her father is much sicker than they thought and needs an expensive operation, the Girl suggests that she doesn’t intend to pay while the Boy tries his best to get cash to pay off the ganger, free his mother, and keep the bar only to be confronted with his naivety. The picture Hsu paints of contemporary Taiwan is bleak and unforgiving, refusing either of the pair the prospect of a happier future and guaranteeing only misery for all in a land of cheats and gangsters in which a good heart is weakness few can afford.

A Boy and a Girl screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

After School (成功補習班, Lan Cheng-lung, 2023)

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In an odd kind of way, Lan Cheng-lung’s autobiographically inspired coming-age drama After School (成功補習班) charts how far Taiwan has come since the mid-90s while pivoting around the figure of Mickey Chen, a hugely influential LGBTQ+ filmmaker who passed away 2018. Chen was in fact Lan’s own cram school teacher and in terms of the film a voice for the future giving the children the permission to be themselves in the post-martial law society even as they struggle to break free of the authoritarian and fiercely patriarchal past. 

In a sense, cram school itself is the manifestation of that culture in that most of the kids have been forced to go there by their parents to pursue futures not of their choosing. The hero Cheng Heng (Zhan Huai-Yun), Lan’s stand in, wants to be a filmmaker but his dad wants him to be a maths teacher. That might be one reason he and his friend Cheng Hsiang (Chui Yi-tai), who lives with his family because problems with his own, spend most of their time messing around and playing childish pranks on the teachers and admin staff. Meanwhile, they’re far mare interested in potential romance than studying with Cheng Hsiang a bit of a ladies man and Cheng Heng nursing a crush on the school’s most popular girl Chen Si (Charlize Lamb). 

Nevertheless, the closeness between the boys gives rise to a few rumours that they may be gay. The idea is only further cemented by an ironic incident in which Cheng Heng sustains an embarrassing injury to his groin while watching a pornographic video he swiped from a cousin little realising that it was actually gay porn. His parents, or really more his father, do not take well to this and see it perhaps as just more evidence of his rebelliousness and lack of respect for his family in his desire to follow his own path rather than the one they’ve set down for him of getting a steady, respectable job as a teacher. 

That’s one reason that the arrival of Mickey (Hou Yan-xi), a recent graduate taking a temporary teaching job to save for studying abroad, is thought so disruptive because he encourages the kids to be who they are not who they’re taught to be. Mickey holds progressive sessions on sex and sexual identity, explaining concepts such sexual orientation and safe sex which is surprising not least because this is a cram school which exists solely to help kids do well on standardised tests rather than give them any broader kind of education. The headmaster, who is also the father of the boys’ friend Ho Shang (Wu Chien-Ho), is by contrast an authoritarian remnant of the martial law era who can’t permit any kind of liberalisation or individualisation and often inflicts corporate punishment on pupils deemed to have transgressed the rules of a polite society. 

But it’s Mickey who tries to help the boys accept and become comfortable with their sexuality and that of others, taking them to a gay bar where he interviews several of the regulars for his documentary. The barman once entered a marriage of convenience and had a child to please his parents but feels deep guilt and regret for the way he treated his wife and his since been disowned by his family. Now he hosts a New Year dinner for others like him who have nowhere else to go because their families have rejected them. The boys too are rejected by their fathers solely on the suspicion of homosexuality while the mothers remain broadly supportive of their children but trapped by those same patriarchal social codes caught between their authoritarian husbands and love for their sons.

Yet even with these more distressing themes, Lan’s film is at times a little too rosy, sticking to its lighthearted tone rather than fully address the implications of society’s attitude to the LGBTQ+ community in the mid-1990s as opposed to that of today in which Taiwan became the first Asian nation to legalise same sex marriage. Nevertheless, it presents a warm-hearted firsthand account of the effect Mickey had on those around him as the teens rebel against the authoritarian past to embrace their freedom and identities, no longer afraid to speak their feelings but determined to be themselves and accept the selves of others rather than live under the constraints of oppressive patriarchy and traditions.

After School screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Who’ll Stop the Rain (青春並不溫柔, Su I-Hsuan, 2023)

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What does “freedom” actually mean? Su I-Hsuan’s post-martial law drama Who’ll Stop the Rain? (青春並不溫柔) sees a younger generation struggle to shake off the authoritarian yoke meanwhile it seems clear that freedom has its limits and has not been granted equally to or by all. Set in 1994 it takes place against the longest student strike in the nation’s history and ultimately pits the forces of protest and complicity against each other in the constant struggle for individual freedom. 

Free-spirited Chi-wei (Lily Lee) might be something of an outlier in this age, later expressing confusion to the comparatively repressed Ching that she doesn’t understand why they’re fighting for freedom when freedom was something they had always possessed. Yet at the university she finds herself constrained in what is supposed to be an artist’s school, denied creative freedom by stuffy professors who mark their students not by the quality of their work but their obedience and willingness to accept the lessons the professors see fit to give them. Chi-wei’s professor gives her telling off because he says her hair’s too messy, then humiliates her in front of the class by throwing her work on the floor and telling her to start again. Chi-wei, however, remains defiant and continues to work her own way regardless of what the teachers may say. 

It’s after a chance encounter with Ching (Yeh Hsiao-Fei) that she’s drawn into the student movement which opposes the authoritarian rule of the professors and demands greater creative freedoms for the students and society at large as this generation who came of age after martial law considers the kind of future they envision for themselves. But like any student movement, there are innate tensions within the group with some suggesting that its leader, Kuang (Roy Chang), is merely trying to relive the White Lily movement and is in fact less committed to the cause than he seems as evidenced by his willingness to enter dialogue with the staff against the wishes of his girlfriend, Ching. 

Unlike the others, Ching is a law student and not and artist. She’s also the daughter of a prominent, conservative and patriarchal politician and the group is somewhat ironically often dependent on her familial wealth. Her background perhaps makes it harder for her to emerge into a new, ostensibly freer age as bound by a set of ideas otherwise alien to Chi-wei who is at any rate absolutely herself and unafraid to be so. Ching tells her that she longs to be part of a group, which is presumably why she’s joined the artists in their protest even if others accuse her of simply rebelling against her privilege, which is something Chi-wei has little need for as she has already discovered the power of freeing her mind. 

It’s these forces that generate the push and pull between the two women as Chi-wei is eventually awakened to her sexuality by Ching only to experience her pulling away in her deeply internalised shame. Even so, she takes an approach that largely avoids direct confrontation but allows her to stay by Ching’s side, patient yet confused in attempting to create a safe space that Ching can accept as her own. Both women are also constrained by forces of traditional patriarchy with even Kuang stating that perhaps women shouldn’t be too independent after all or else they wouldn’t need him in an ironic moment foreshadowing his total redundancy. Meanwhile, Chi-wei is aggressively pursued by a fellow student who won’t be deterred by her frequent rejections and general lack of interest in men while ironically trying to convince her she’s been “brainwashed” by the strikers and is really a good girl, like him willing to bend to the authoritarian yoke. 

Perhaps it’s telling that it’s only once the strike is over and following a confrontation with her authoritarian father that Ching is able to overcome the barriers that prevent her from embracing her true desires and authentic self. In her opening voiceover, Chi-wei reflects that back then they still believed a tiny flame could burn down the forest implying at least that she was mistaken but even if a wider revolution ends if not exactly in failure than in compromise, disappointment, and rancour, it is true enough that the spark between these women was enough to burn through the forces that kept them apart to find a more individual kind of freedom that exists outside of oppressive superstructures even if as Ching says protest never ends.

Who’ll Stop the Rain screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Young Hoodlum (壞男孩, Yu Jhi-Han, 2023)

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Seemingly abandoned by their society, the four young men at the centre of Yu Jhi-han’s The Young Hoodlum (壞男孩, huài nánhái) survive on petty crime and brotherhood yet their bond is soon disrupted by the presence of a privileged young woman. Contrasting the circumstances of these boys who find themselves without parental support and the girl who resents her parents for micromanaging her life the film makes a point of criticising the inequalities of the contemporary society if succumbing to a potentially unintended misogyny.

With no family to rely on, the boys are largely dependent on a local gangster, Xiao-hei, for whom they’ve become runners withdrawing cash with stolen cards then putting it in a locker for another of his men to pick up. Having left home after his father, who has issues with alcohol, almost set the house on fire, Cheng-han is also caring for his younger sister who comes to view each of the other boys as additional brothers with the five of them forming a close, quasi-familial unit. 

But that unit is disrupted by the arrival of Pin-Ran, an aspiring influencer from a background of extreme wealth who appears to be living in a luxury hotel while hiding out from her parents who, she says, arranged everything in her life so far including a place at a foreign college. Cheng-han is captivated by her and struck the kindness she showed his sister but also uncomfortable in her upperclass world while she, by contrast, is just really a tourist in his having fun experiencing poverty and the transgressive acts the boys must perform just to survive. She gets a thrill out of conning a young woman out a small amount of money at a bus station and convinces the guys to help her exploit one of her fans in a badger scam but she could of course walk away at any point and return to her privileged life which is not an option open to any of the boys. 

Even so, when her parents finally cut her off she decides on drastic action to get back at them and help the boys out of a jam after a questionable decision that puts them on Xiao-hei’s hit list. From the first, she creates discord within the group with it’s old leader, Shi, resentful both of the way she seems to have taken charge and of the way Pin-ran chose to distribute the loot taking the bulk herself and then splitting their cut between the four of them. Shi feels he’s not getting his proper due either from Xiao-hei or Pin-ran and is quickly getting fed up with the futility of his situation. He feels he needs the money to support the other guys and Cheng-han’s sister, while another of the boys has an additional motive in needing to pay for medical treatment for his grandmother all of which makes them desperate and reckless. 

The opening voiceover reveals that one of Cheng-han’s friends was killed in the summer with Yu drip feeding information trying to explain how the brotherhood of the boys imploded to the extent that one of them died, but ultimately returns to the themes of rich and poor as we can see Pin-ran getting advice from a fancy lawyer while each of the boys some of whom are still below the age of majority are questioned alone with no legal representative present. Shi had asked Cheng-han if he was more afraid of being dead or being poor, explaining his desperation in his intense fear of poverty insisting that he would rather not live at all than continue to suffer. The irony is that the boys find themselves in this position because of parental neglect or abandonment while Pin-ran has rejected her parents for being overly attentive and railroading her into a life she may not want. Her position within the gang necessarily disrupts its dynamic with Cheng-han trying to keep the peace while Shi in particular is pushed to extremes by increasing desperation. Yu’s bleak friendship drama in the end suggests that the innocent will end up paying for the poor decisions of those around them and that ultimately the borders of class and gender cannot be overcome for rich girls like Pin-ran can always count on parental support while boys like Cheng-han will have to fend for themselves.

 The Young Hoodlum screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Old Fox (老狐狸 , Hsiao Ya-chuan, 2023)

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It’s all about “inequality”, according to the titular Old Fox (老狐狸, lǎohúli). Or at least knowing how to leverage it. Inequality is something that’s coming to bother the young hero of Hsiao Ya-chuan’s coming-of-age drama in which a small boy finds himself torn between two father figures, one a wily old slumlandlord with a heart of stone and the other his melancholy and disappointed but kindhearted father who simply endures the many blows that life has dealt him. 

Set in Taipei in 1989 shortly before an apocalyptic stock market crash in the post-martial law economy crushes the hopes of millions of ordinary people convinced to invest their savings, the film wastes no time in showing us the various inequalities in play in small alleyway of traditional stores all owned by Boss Xie (Akio Chen) whom many seem to regard as a kind of saviour even if he cares not at all about them. Jie’s (Bai Run-yin) father Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) works in a local restaurant and rents a room above a beef noodle cafe for which he pays in cash every week to Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), a pretty young woman working for Boss Xie and enjoying an unusual amount of power for someone of her age and gender for a society still somewhat conservative. 

Tai-lai has been patiently saving money so that he can afford to buy a house and open a hair salon which was the dream of his late wife, but obvlious to the world around him he hasn’t noticed that prices are continuing to rise placing his dream of homeownership further out of his reach. Meanwhile, Jie is bullied at school and called a “snitch” without understanding why or even what the word means. This sense powerlessness and inferiority maybe be why he’s drawn to Boss Xie, a man who does after all exude power if also a sense of menace and melancholy. Xie in turn sees in Jie a potential protégé, both a mirror of his younger self and an echo of the son he lost who rebelled against everything he represents.

Nicknamed Old Fox, Xie stands for everything that’s wrong with the contemporary society which is about to implode in the financial crash. Wounded by his childhood poverty in which he, like Jie, also pleaded with a local landlord to sell his mother a property, Xie has adopted a ruthlessly selfish disregard for the lives of others teaching Jie his mantra of “none of my damn business” while the boy develops a worrying admiration for the aura a man like Xie projects and actively enjoys the sensation that others fear him. While hanging out with Xie he comes to look down on men like his father whom Xie calls “losers” who care only for others and disregard themselves. Xie teaches him to leverage the inequalities of power and turn his enemies’ weakness back against them to increase his own strength placing him further at odds with Tai-lai’s innate goodness and down-to-earth humanity. 

Yet we can also see that Tai-lai has had a life of disappointment. A woman who comes into the restaurant (Mugi Kadowaki) now married to a thuggish local big wig is a former childhood sweetheart from whom he was separated by time and circumstance while it also seems that Miss Lin has taken a liking to him though he appears not to have noticed. At home he plays the saxophone and takes in tailoring while resigned to saving a little longer before he’ll finally be able to buy a house and achieve his dreams. Tai-lai is one of the few who does not play the stock market and is therefore free of the danger it represents while Jie soon becomes sick of his his father’s frugality in their regular practice of turning the boiler off after having a bath and keeping their taps on a slow drip so they don’t trip the water metre and longs to become a man like Boss Xie unafraid to exploit any advantage in complete disregard for the lives of others. 

A brief coda set in the present in the day suggests that the older Jie may have found a happy medium, at least disguising a genuine concern for the safety and happiness of others as being solely about profit, while Xie’s sadness and doubts about the path his life has taken are never far from the surface as the society teeters on the brink of financial disaster. Capturing a palpable sense of late ’80s Taipei the film has a nostalgic atmosphere but also an equally prescient quality in the things that are only half-visible to the younger Jie in the melancholy disappointments of the adults who surround him still struggling to reroot themselves in a new society while overburdened by the failures of the old.

Old Fox screens April 22nd as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Soul (緝魂, Cheng Wei-Hao, 2021)

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“Affection is the greatest obstacle on the path to success” according to the villain at the centre of Cheng Wei-Hao’s philosophical mystery, The Soul (緝魂, Jī Hún). Adapted from a science-fiction novel by Jiang Bo, Cheng’s near future tale has a series of questions to ask about legacy, family, love, and repression as its earnest investigator tries to come to terms with his oncoming end while living with treatment resistant cancer and trying to decide what is the best way to support his wife and unborn child in his impending absence. 

In 2032, police are called to the palatial estate of a local tycoon only to find him brutally murdered. Perhaps there’s nothing so shocking about that, powerful men have enemies, yet the strange thing is that Wang (Samuel Ku) was already dying of brain cancer and had a very short time left to live so there would seem to be little advantage in bumping him off early. The prime suspect is his disgruntled son Tien-yu (Erek Lin) who was seen leaving the mansion in a hurry and is known to bear a grudge against his father over his mother’s death while Wang’s much younger second wife Li Yen (Sun Anke) also identifies him as the killer. But there are definitely a few things which don’t add up here. Why is Wang’s business partner Wan named as his second choice as heir after Li Yen despite the rumours he had been having an affair with first wife Su-chen (Baijia Zhang), why are there security cameras in Li Yen’s bedroom, and why would a man with so little time left to live opt for an arranged marriage to an orphaned 20-year-old woman from one of the orphanages his philanthropic organisation supports?

Those are all questions which immediately present themselves to veteran investigator Liang (Chang Chen) whose own wife Pau (Janine Chang Chun-ning), also a policewoman, is pregnant with their child while he has just learnt that his cancer has resisted all treatment and may in fact be incurable. Deciding his remaining time may be best spent providing what he can for his family he asks his boss for his job back and specifically to be put on the Wang case, immediately homing in on the company’s radical new treatment for cancer through transplanting rejuvenated neurons directly into the brain. He begins to wonder what comes with it if you begin implanting neurons that belong to someone else but gets no reply from Wan in the middle of his sales pitch. 

Hinted at in the Chinese title the question that arises is that of the connection between soul and flesh and whether it becomes possible to achieve a kind of immortality through colonising brains in healthy bodies, an idea which might of course prove appealing to Liang if he were not so innately incorruptible. Then again as his wife says, perhaps it’s easier to die. It’s the ones left behind who have it hardest, suddenly left to deal with everything on their own. That might be why she finds herself tempted by their rather obvious conflict of interest in compromising her integrity to buy her husband a few more days while he wonders what the point of such a sacrifice might be.

Yet what we discover in the unhappy saga of the Wangs is both a megalomaniacal obsession with control that extends beyond one’s own lifetime and a tragic love story born of internalised shame that led to a lifetime of repression and unhappiness in the inability to be one’s authentic self. Liang describes the RNA treatment as an expression of the living’s obsession with the dead, while others describe it as “modern necromancy” oddly echoing the black magic which Su-chen, herself a neuroscientist, and her son had apparently been practicing in their intense resentment of Wang. Pau insists she’d rather believe a soul exists no matter in what form, but if you make division of yourself you may also face an unexpected existential threat born of your own internal conflicts and mutual desire for survival. A slow burn mystery, Cheng’s eerie drama has its share of hokum but nevertheless asks some pertinent questions about the nature of humanity in an increasingly technological age, what it is we leave behind and how it is we move forward (or not) with the process of letting go even as its ironic final moments provide a kind of justice emotional and literal in restoration of a family. 

Trouble Girl (小曉, Chin Chia-hua, 2023)

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The sad thing about Xiaoxiao’s life is that everyone is so intent on making her just like everyone else rather than trying to find ways to allow her to be more of herself. The film’s English title, Trouble Girl (the Chinese being simply her name, 小曉, xiǎo xiǎo), might hint at the external attitudes towards her in which she is seen only as a disruptive troublemaker while largely friendless and bullied by the other kids in her class.

The irony is that it’s only her teacher, Mr Chen (Terrance Lau Chun-him), who is actively trying to help her but he does so from a place of corrupted paternity in that he’s been having an affair with her mother, Wei-fang (Ivy Chen Yi-han), which began as a consequence of their meetings to discuss Xiaoxiao’s ADHD diagnosis and how to manage it at school. Seemingly under stimulated, Xiaoxiao ignores her classes and plays video games instead while Mr Chen doesn’t really say anything before gently taking her aside to suggest it’s not a good idea. He’s a proponent of positive reinforcement but is also a regarded as a soft touch by some of the other parents who increasingly turn against Xiaoxiao, regarding her as a disruptive presence damaging their kids’ education. 

Then again, it’s mostly these kids who are bullying Xiaoxiao for being not quite like them. Mr Chen has started some kind of secret program in which kids can get stickers for being nice to her, but it’s largely backfired as they alternately provoke Xiaoxaio because they think it’s funny when she loses her temper and act friendly when the teachers are around. Rather than attempting to make some accommodations for her, the school is only capable of trying to force her to behave in exactly the same way as everyone else. On an awkward camping trip with her mother and Mr Chen, he suggests capturing a frog but despite her fascination with them Xiaoxiao rejects the idea. She wouldn’t want the frog to be trapped in a bottle, and later attempts to free an owl from a cage symbolising her own desire to be free to be herself. After being suspended from school, she heartbreakingly tells her mother that she just wants to stay home and learn not to take pills anymore.

But then Wei-fang has problems of her own. She’s trapped too. Her husband has been living abroad for some time and it’s clear the marriage is all but over while she struggles to bond with Xiaoxiao and is ill-equipped to deal with her needs, perhaps on some level ashamed that she isn’t living up to the middle class ideals professed by the other mothers. She even may even resent her for trapping her in a dissatisfying domestic arrangement but is alternately frustrated that Xiaoxiao does not really want to play with her and prefers her father or Mr Chen. We see her struggle with her emotions too, sometimes slapping Xiaoxiao and shouting at her for doing something wrong or getting into trouble. 

Her affair with Chen may be a kind of escapist fantasy, but he seems to take it seriously and provides a positive, paternal presence in the absence of Xiaoxiao’s father who though he seemed caring later offers quite a harsh critique of his daughter that suggests he regards her as a disappointment. Nevertheless, it’s quite troubling that her sort of friend Xiaoshan calls Mr Chen “Paul” and is friendlier with him than seems appropriate but then her parents are involved with running the school so perhaps she simply knows him on a more personal level. Even so, the connection seems to arouse an odd kind of jealously that interacts with her disapproval of her mother’s betrayal of her father in having the affair. 

When Xiaoxiao tries to free the owl, she is surprised to discover that it simply flies back to its porch as trapped as both she and her mother though no longer with any desire for escape. Sympathetic towards the film’s twin heroines, Chin shoots with a down to earth naturalism though through the eyes of Xiaoxiao who is really just looking to be accepted for who she is while observing that her mother is much the same but even approaching middle-age seems no closer to finding accommodation or fulfilment.

Trouble Girl screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Eye of the Storm (疫起, Lin Chun-Yang, 2023)

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In the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan was thought of as kind of safe haven which had largely managed to keep the disease a bay allowing many to live their lives more or less normally while much of the rest of the world contended with intermittent lockdowns of varying severity. The reasons for their success are said to lie in their experience during the SARS crisis of 2003. 

To that extent, there’s a kind of eeriness in Lin Chung-Yang’s poignant drama Eye of the Storm (疫起, yì qǐ) in watching the early days of this present pandemic play out 20 years earlier as medical personnel attempt to deal with a new illness about which they know almost nothing save that it appears to have a frighteningly high mortality rate. As the film opens, self-involved surgeon Xia (Wang Po-chieh) is clocking off a few minutes early in an attempt to make it to his daughter’s birthday party, rudely brushing off the complaints of warmhearted male nurse Tai-he (Tseng Ching-hua) and dismissing requests from his colleagues. Leaving in a taxi, however, he’s soon called back to deal with an emergency operation and becomes trapped when the hospital is placed into lockdown after the report of a possible SARS case. 

Unlike so many dramas centring on frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, :Lin does not necessarily portray the medical staff in the best light. As the suspected case was being treated in B Wing it is the first to be shut down and some of the doctors and nurses start a protest refusing to treat patients with SARS resentful that they’ve been locked up with the disease. Meanwhile, in A Wing some of the nurses also go on strike holing themselves up in the rec room and refusing to come out. As Tai-he had been helping out in B-Wing, he is quickly rejected by his peers and exiled there despite having no symptoms while the nursing staff otherwise know that they maybe condemning him to death in sending him to the frontline battle against the disease.

Also on the frontline is journalist Yu-zhong (Hsueh Shih-ling) who snuck into the hospital after a tip off and is determined to let the people know by capturing the chaotic scenes at the hospital first hand. He and Xia eventually end up going through old records to figure out how the virus took hold while Xia mainly spends his time hiding in a storage cupboard and trying not to come into contact with anyone who might have SARS which is not very doctorly. Though originally desperate to get out of the hospital, Xia’s mindset begins to change when he sees how bad things are in B Wing after being charged with transporting food supplies while he later comes to realise that he may bear some responsibility in the rather cavalier treatment of a patient he recently operated on.

Then again, perhaps there is something also a little on the nose in the constant references to the disease’s origins in China while it’s the hospitals choice to use a Mainland construction firm that directly leads to the infection. In any case, Xia eventually beggins to come around realising that it’s selfish of him to refuse to help when the hospital is already so short staffed with some medical personnel on strike and others already falling ill and even dying. Lin lends the tunnel connecting the two wings an eerie quality in the ominous opening and closing of its oversize doors, as if Xia were really descending into hell dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit of yellow overalls. 

Xia had appeared to be a narcissistic surgeon with little interest in his patients. Criticised by Tai-he he clapped back that it’s the nurse’s job to care for them, not his, while continuing to keep his distance and fixating on being allowed to leave the hospital before beginning to empathise with the sick. Yet many other medical staff react in a similar way, overwhelmed by the fear and chaos of the situation while resentful in feeling that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned only later coming to accept the situation and returning to caring for the patients as best they can. Eerily echoing our present times, Lin’s poignant drama eventually finds a kind of serenity even among so much panic in quiet moments of small victories and human solidarity.

Eye of the Storm screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

My Heavenly City (我的天堂城市, Yu Sen-I, 2023)

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After taking a job as an interpreter working with the social and courts systems, overseas student Mavis (Vivian Sung) sits under a sign at centre for teens reading “you are not alone.” As she reveals to her client, alone is something she’s often felt while living in New York where everyone has “people to see, things to do, and homes to go to” while she feels herself in limbo with nothing and no one to turn to for support. Inspired by her own experiences, director Yu Sen-i’s My Heavenly City (我的天堂城市, wǒ de tiāntáng chéngshì) explores both the freedom and loneliness that can come with living abroad through the stories of three Taiwanese migrants who share unknown connections. 

Mavis is nursing heartbreak and finding it difficult to concentrate on her studies while her money runs out and she feels as if she isn’t getting anywhere. When an opportunity teaching Mandarin to the son of a Taiwanese-American couple falls through, she applies for a job as an interpreter but soon discovers that it requires more than language skills not least because many of the cases she’s called in on are emotionally difficult. Though reminded that an interpreter should maintain a professional distance and avoid becoming friends with a client, she can’t help bonding with 16-year-old Xiao Jian. Suspected of having come to the US undocumented, Xiao Jian was found wandering around alone in Bryant Park and is refusing to speak. 

What Mavis discovers is that she can’t really help him and no one wants to hear what he’s got to say anyway but in any case she comes to see him as a mirror for herself, another lost soul struggling to find a footing in the city. The same is true of street dancer Jack (Keung To) who is conned out of money by duplicitous locals but bonds with a young woman from Singapore, Lulu (Jessica Lee), who hoped that she’d find herself in New York but discovers only more lonely rootlessness and uncertainty. Even her connection with Jack is threatened by looming visa issues. Even so, in New York, Jack discovers greater freedom to be himself in embracing his love of dance if fulfilling parental expectation by continuing to study computer science.

Jack describes his mother’s micromanaging as oppressive, and is relieved to be if not freed from it that at least at a greater distance. These differing ideas of parenthood are also beginning to erode the relationship between successful architect Jason (Jack Yao), who came to the US 20 years previously, and his Taiwanese-American wife Clare (Mandy Wei) who struggles to deal with her own fiercely authoritarian father. The couple have a son, Jasper, who is autistic and also has emotional problems that have resulted in problematic violence that echoes a case that Mavis was brought in on of domestic abuse. Only nine years old, Jasper explains that he gets “very, very angry” when frustrated and it seems that he may not be well suited to busy city life. Clare’s father doesn’t believe in mental illness and assumes it’s discipline issue, believing that Clare and Jason are at fault for spoiling him rather than correcting his behaviour.

The conflict may echo a cultural divide between the authoritarian patriarchy of traditional culture and the aspirations of Clare who says she wants to try a new parenting style founded on love, but the fundamental problem for the family is in effect and absence of the father. The economic demands of living in an expensive city have forced Jason to abandon his family while he also seems unprepared to deal with Jasper’s complex needs and leaves everything to Clare who is then overburdened on the brink of burn out. Jasper’s increasing volatility and its effects on his mother finally convince Jason that he must find a way to rebalance his commitments and be emotionally, rather than just financially, present in the family and in his relationship with Clare.

A final visit to a lost and found office echoes the sense of displacement each of them feel but also what they discover in the city and the connections they make there whether they plan to stay or not. Though it may sound bleak in its exploration of the difficulties of living in an unfamiliar culture, the film discovers a sense of serenity in the improbably sunny city that cuts through its shadows and offers an unexpected of connection between its melancholy exiles. 

My Heavenly City opens in UK cinemas on 10th November courtesy of CineAsia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)