Why would a pigeon, or a child, return to you if you failed to make them a home? The enigmatic title of Chan Ching-lin’s gritty familial drama Coo-Coo 043 (一家子兒咕咕叫, yījiāzi ér gū jiào) refers to a homing pigeon that unexpectedly arrives seven years late but bringing with it less joy than an unwelcome confrontation with the unresolved past. A tale largely of male, patriarchal failure the film revolves around the taciturn figure of a middle-aged man obsessed with pigeon racing who attempts to build a coop an in abandoned field for the birds he no longer has means to care for even as his own home crumbles.
Old Ching (Yu An-shun) appears to be a broken man who’s never quite recovered from the massive success of having won a lot of money on a pigeon race several years previously though most of his birds since have never returned at all. Gambling is technically illegal in Taiwan, and the sport of pigeon racing is itself a little taboo though popular enough at least in the small town where Ching lives. It appears the family is mostly supported financially by his second wife Ming’s (Yang Li-yin) banana farm, while ironically enough his daughter Lulu (Rimong Ihwar) dreams only of flying the coop for a less depressing life somewhere else. Part of the reason for the difficult atmosphere in the family home is the sense of absence left by Shih, Ching’s son from his first marriage who disappeared on his way to school aged 12 more than a decade earlier.
Ching continually blames Ming for Shih’s disappearance because on that day she did not drive him to school as usual, ignoring the fact that she stayed to clean up the house after he trashed it in a violent fit after losing at gambling and told the boy to walk. Ching’s irony is that he is always waiting for something to come back to him, but never gives any reason why it should. Though he is often seen tenderly caring for his pigeons, he treats his family members with coldness and contempt and is on occasion violent towards Ming who has a sideline working as part of a troupe conducting death rituals and is considering leaving him. She takes pigeon 043’s miraculous return after seven years as a sign that they should look into having Shih declared legally dead to help them accept he won’t come back but Ching refuses to do so and continues to wallow in his own violent and angry grief unable to see that it may be him that drove his son, and later his daughter, away.
His limp also hints at a violent past as do his ties to a group of local gangsters who seem to be well into the pigeon racing scene, while gang young toughs make a living kidnapping birds and ransoming them back to their owners or else killing them for fun if they don’t pay. Ching finds a surrogate son in the orphaned Tig (Hu Jhih-ciang), Lulu’s sometime pigeon-catcher boyfriend, but fails to see him as such until it’s too late. Unlike Lulu, Tig is a man looking for a coop. He slides into the vacant space in the family longing to be accepted, but finds only coldness and abandonment left behind while everyone else flies away in search of a better life.
Often captured behind bars, the two men are just as caged as the pigeons though the kind that don’t fly away when the doors are opened. Some of those who leave do so for the after life, no longer seeing any point in continuing this miserable existence which shows no sign of improvement and unable to envisage any other kind of escape. Even Lulu’s flight to the city to become a nightclub dancer seems as if it may just be another kind of cage from which she cannot fly. Ching’s pigeon coop is eventually ruined by a more literal kind of storm, but mainly because he failed to protect it unable to look past his personal despair and indifferent to the vulnerabilities of his home. Bleak in the extreme, Chan paints a grim picture of life on the margins in rural Taiwan in which the wings of all have long been clipped and those who return do so only because they have nowhere else to go.
Coo-Coo 043 screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 