Tag: Leste Chen

Delicious Romance (爱很美味, Leste Chen & Hsu Chao-Jen, 2023)

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Three “best friends forever” find themselves struggling with happy ever after in the big screen sequel to the hit TV show Delicious Romance (爱很美味, ài hěn měiwèi). Exploring the lives of contemporary women, the often hilarious and infinitely relatable film is both a female friendship drama and a quiet advocation for the right to find one’s own balance in life even amid the series of social expectations each of the women quietly contends with that eventually threaten their friendship.

Meng (Wang Ju), Xin (Baby Zhang Hanyun), and Jing (Li Chun) have been friends since school where they vowed to always remain so. 20 years later, they have each attained a kind of success in both career and romance but are now beginning to flounder as the warm glow of temporary fulfilment starts to wear off. TV producer Meng is happily living with fitness enthusiast Lu Bin (Zhang Fan) but the difference in their social status continues to disrupt the relationship while she encounters workplace strife. Xin works in PR for a wedding company and is expecting a baby with boyfriend Zhang Ting (Ren Bin) but is having second thoughts about marrying him in part because of the failure of her first marriage but also because he’s become worryingly overprotective. Jing, meanwhile, quit her job in IT to open a restaurant but is experiencing difficulty keeping it afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic while she abruptly breaks up with her film exec boyfriend Shanmu (Zhao Chengao) after discovering that he still hasn’t deleted the dating apps on his phone. 

Many of the problems they face are the same given that they all live in a patriarchal society, but each of them faces them slightly differently. Xin, for example, explains that he’s joined a company which has a majority female staff and is run by a progressive female boss who assures her her pregnancy won’t be a problem as they run a flexible workplace geared towards supporting women in society. Yet she soon realises that her boss is run ragged and her image of “having it all” is largely a PR front as Xin discovers when she’s pulled off a campaign to do her boss’ son’s art homework. Feeling professionally sidelined especially as the controlling Ting doesn’t let her attend after work events, Xin starts to wonder if she’s made the right decision doubting that it’s really possible to have fully balanced and fulfilling personal and professional lives. 

Meng finds something similar when her boss gives her a warning and insists she land the TV rights for a popular sci-fi novel by a good-looking author or fire one of her team. Working for a station that specialises in TV drama aimed at a stereotypical female audience, she too looks down on her work but immediately faces sexism from author LuoKK (Patrick Nattawat Finkler) who dismisses her suggesting that a woman won’t be able to do his sci-fi novel justice. In a minor gag, neither he nor any of his obnoxious buddies understand the concept of entropy which is central to the novel though both Meng and LuoKK’s  female agent easily explain it. Having spent a long time abroad, LuoKK appears prefer speaking English and originally claims not to have a WeChat which would make his life near impossible in contemporary China. To land the contract, Meng has to pretend to be into mobile gaming getting her boyfriend Lu Bin to play on her behalf while squaring off against an unpleasant ex who has also befriended LuoKK. 

Jing also takes on alternate personalities while trying to trap Shanmu into exposing himself as a cheat. With her restaurant shut down for a fire system repair, she’s offered the opportunity to become an influencer trashing highly rated restaurants for clicks but is quickly disillusioned with the duplicity of online video culture. Like Xin she struggles with her decision to follow her dreams as she faces both personal loss and professional setbacks while battling parental expectation in her family’s continued disapproval of her desire for independence. 

The women are brought together by Meng’s quest to triumph at the office party with a dance routine just like they did at school, only instead of an inappropriate song about “meeting people for drinks and gossip”, she plans to Fosse it up with All That Jazz. When their respective troubles put their relationship under strain, the trio reevaluate their friendship and realise its greatest quality is the unconditional support they give each other as each of them comes to an accommodation with their various difficulties through coming to understand themselves better. Authenticity really is the key as rammed home both by the skewering of the gimmicky restaurant the girls visit in the opening scene and Meng’s realisation that they should perform their high school dance after all rather than making a bid for an affected sophistication. Charmingly heartfelt and amusingly quirky, Chen and Hsu’s zeitgeisty comedy captures the absurdity of life as a woman in the contemporary society while allowing each of the women to take charge of their own lives and destinies through the power of self-knowledge and female solidarity.

Delicious Romance screened in UK cinemas courtesy of CMC

International trailer (English subtitles)

Eternal Summer (盛夏光年, Leste Chen, 2006)

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A trio of emotionally displaced teens find themselves swept into an awkward love triangle while longing to escape their loneliness in Leste Chen’s melancholy youth drama Eternal Summer (盛夏光年, Shèngxià Guāngnián). Each in someway marginalised and searching for acceptance, the teens struggle to define themselves as the world changes itself around them while bound by the paradoxical qualities of their circular relationships, their unspoken secrets continually driving them apart even as they continue to long for the intimacy born only of sharing their authentic selves. 

A quiet, studious boy, Joseph Kang (Ray Chang) is asked to befriend his deskmate Shane (Jopseph Hsiao-chuan) who has ADHD and has been labeled disruptive in the hope that creating social relationships with other children will help calm him down. The arrangement in a sense backfires, Joseph’s academic achievement falling while his friendship with Shane only grows in strength and intensity. By the time they are teenagers, the pair are inseparable but Joseph has also fallen in deep, unrequited love with his best friend, a secret he is afraid to share with anyone and ironically cannot share with the one person to whom he is supposed to be able to tell anything. The friendship is further disrupted by the sudden introduction of transfer student Carrie (Kate Yeung Mei-ling) who has returned to Taipei to live with her mother after years of living with her father in Hong Kong. Carrie first develops a fondness for Joseph while working with him on the school paper, but later figures out that he’s secretly in love with Shane and decides to support him as a friend while in another irony Joseph’s ongoing internal crisis eventually forces his friends together, Carrie secretly dating Shane while each of them knows on differing levels how their relationship may hurt Joseph when he eventually finds out. 

In 2006 Taiwanese society was perhaps not quite as accepting as it would become, yet Joseph’s anxiety in his sexuality in compounded by the desire not to lose his friendship with Shane fearing not just that his feelings are not returned but that he may reject him altogether just for being gay. While Shane, a high school sports star with terrible grades, eventually blossoms academically after Carrie makes the ironic promise to go out with him in the unlikely event he gets into uni, it’s heavily implied that Joseph’s previously high level of achievement is damaged because of his preoccupation with his sexuality shockingly failing his uni entrance exams and thereafter further separated from his friends as they move on and he remains in cram school limbo hoping for better luck next year. Meanwhile he finds himself in potentially dangerous situations cruising in parks trying to verify his homosexuality while privately consumed by shame. 

For Shane, meanwhile, his problem is that he feels rejected by the world around him because of the way his ADHD was treated as a child. Regarded as a disruptive troublemaker none of the other kids would play with him save Joseph, meaning that he too is desperate to maintain the friendship in fear of his inescapable loneliness even while finding a similar connection with Carrie who is herself longing for love seemingly having strained relationships with each of her divorced parents while geographically and culturally displaced in having spent much of her life in Hong Kong. Carrie is, however, the only one to know the whole truth frustrated with the two men in her life that they can’t simply clear the air by voicing the secrets that continue to erode their relationship. 

Then again perhaps what they really fear is “change”, afraid of an uncertain adulthood in which their childhood connection will necessarily weaken. “We will lose each other in the future?” a conflicted Shane wonders, uncertain if his co-dependency is entirely healthy or fair on his friends but fearing becoming alone or having to make a choice unable to lose one or both of his essential connections. At heart a mood piece, Chen’s melancholy drama is filled with the strange canted angles of a world out of kilter and poignant reflections of the past in the midst of present torment, both elegiac and nostalgic for a particular moment in time which must in some way pass even if his parting words are painfully ironic in their cutting intensity.

Eternal Summer streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

4K restoration trailer (Traditional Chinese subtitles only)