Tag: Hu Jhih-ciang

Little Blue (小藍, Lee Yi Fang, 2022)

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Mother and daughter find themselves in eerily similar situations when dealing with a social double standard in Lee Yi Fang’s pointed drama, Little Blue (小藍). At heart refreshingly sex positive, the film nevertheless asks why some people seem to be hung up on what is a perfectly normal part of life while simultaneously exploring how sexuality can be misused or exploited and mostly particularly that of the young and naive. “I sometimes feel like my body’s not mine,” the titular Xiaolan (Wang Yu-xuan) confesses to a befuddled teacher who explains to her that she’s gone “astray”, while she might as it happens have a point. 

The opening sequence is witness to the transformation Xiaolan subsequently undergoes. Describing herself as incredibly confused, unable to understand what the teacher is getting at when he asks her why she didn’t come to him when it started, this Xiaolan is wearing makeup and has a fashionable hairstyle. But flashing back a few weeks, the Xiaolan we then encounter is shy and mousy. She has long, lank hair and glasses in contrast to her more glamorous friend Kyueiyu who needles her about hair removal techniques and the realities of contemporary dating. 

This Xiaolan is mildly resentful of her mother whom the other kids brand as “hot” when she turns up with a lunch box Xiaolan had forgotten. Vivi (Helena Hsu) is an estate agent who works late and leaves Xiaolan to get her own dinner but also has a very active sex life and an annoying boyfriend who keeps sexting her and sending videos of questionable taste at inappropriate moments. There’s probably something in the fact that aside from Xiaolan’s high school boyfriend Wu Miao (Ye Ting-qi), the otherwise unavailable men all have Western names. Vivi’s sleazy boyfriend goes by Matt, while she later starts an affair with a married client, Kris, and Xiaolan finds herself drawn to a slightly older guy she hooks up with on a dating app who tells her that he has a girlfriend and his name is “Tim” (Roy Chang). 

Just as Wu Miao had after seducing her on a beach, Tim soon starts ignoring Xiaolan’s messages. After all, he has a girlfriend and probably doesn’t want to be bothered by a genuine connection with a dating app hook up. Xiaolan experiences a kind of breakdown after handsome footballer Wu Miao shares an explicit photo of her with a friend who then “accidentally” posts it on the class chat if only to delete it seconds later. Wu Miao isn’t visible in the photo even if everyone knows he’s on the other side of it, but in any case it’s only Xiaolan who suffers a repetitional loss and is shamed by her classmates. It’s in the wake of his shunning that Xiaolan turns to dating apps, hoping to satiate her curiosity and desire but in the end discovering only more loneliness. Taking her to task, Vivi claps back that at least she gets a “thrill” from her otherwise painful love affairs whereas Xiaolan doesn’t seem very happy at all and gives the impression that her dating app odyssey is at least in part an act of self harm. 

Nevertheless, mother and daughter eventually begin to bond over the irony of their parallel crircumstances if only in the knowledge that it doesn’t really get any better and in the end female solidarity may be all there really is. Lee shoots the changing Xiaolan in melancholy shades of blue that of course eco her name but also lend her world an isolating quality that traps her within her own shame and uncertainty. Even the teacher who attempts to talk to her about her waywardness ends up becoming inappropriately aroused. Xiaolan tells him that he’s “very normal” and hasn’t done anything wrong in a moment that seems both a mic drop and somehow transgressive, allowing Xiaolan to offer the sex positive message she should have received while ironically highlighting that the teacher’s response, as unconscious as it may have been, is necessarily problematic. 

In any case, Xiaolan is finally able to reclaim herself and sexuality as perhaps is Vivi as something that belongs to her alone rather than for others. She’d begun to change herself to be accepted, getting contacts, stealing her mum’s makeup and following her friend’s beauty techniques but still found herself rejected and reduced to a mere body much as Vivi is described as a spare time girl realising that Kris only sees her as a temporary escape from his familial responsibilities. Maybe Vivi saw it the same way, too wrapped up in her own problems to deal with her daughter’s, but what emerges between them seems to be healthier kind of emotional honesty that, ironically, neither found in the arms of their duplicitous men. 

Little Blue screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Coo-Coo 043 (一家子兒咕咕叫, Chan Ching-lin, 2022)

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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)