Tag: Lin I-hsiung

The Dull-Ice Flower (魯冰花, Yang Li-kuo, 1989)

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A mischievous little boy’s daily life beings to change following the arrival of an inspirational teacher in Yang Li-kuo’s poignant drama, The Dull-Ice Flower (魯冰花, Lǔ bīnghuā). Adapted from the novel by Chung Chao-cheng and set in the 1960s, the film was released shortly after the lifting of martial law and examines the many ways in which A-Ming’s (Wong Kwan-Yuen) life was defined by forces outside his control from his family’s poverty and the feudalistic nature of local society to the rigidities of authoritarian rule.

Indeed, there is something quite sad in seeing the once bright and energetic boy at the film’s centre gradually lose his spark, become listless and dejected, and finally succumb to the same illness that took his mother’s life. A-ming and his sister Cha-mei (Lee Suk-Ching) live in a remote mountain village where their father Shi-sung (Lin I-hsiung) grows tea. Though A-ming loves drawing, his father is always chastising him for being lazy and not working hard enough on their farm. He is bottom of his class in terms of grades and has a reputation as a troublemaker among the teachers.

It’s only on the arrival of Mr. Kuo (Yu Han), and idealistic art teacher from Taipei, that A-ming gains the courage and confidence to embrace his talent, though not everyone is as convinced of it as Mr. Kuo. Many of the other teachers favour Chih-hung, the son of the local mayor (Chan Chung-Yung), who was previously selected to represent the school in an art competition but didn’t win anything. Chih-hung’s drawing style is technically proficient, but in Kuo’s view overly naturalistic and lacking in both feeling and imagination. After Kuo starts the art club, Chih-hung is unable to draw anything without being given a subject first and when told to draw the class immediately gets up and starts counting the number of people in the room. He measures everything out and aims for accuracy in depicting the world around him. As Kuo’s fond of pointing out, a camera could do that just as well, while A-ming’s drawings are full of abstract ideas and childish flights of fancy. While Kuo sees genius in the them, the teachers dismiss his work as incomprehensible because in their rigid, authoritarian way of thinking they prize only “realism”. Not only are they unable to understand A-ming’s paintings, they have no desire to.

At the same time, they are all obsessed with currying favour with the mayor, Mr Lin, and local politics dictate that no one challenges him or his family. When Kuo tells Chih-hung that his drawing doesn’t make sense and all he needs to do is colour the flag red, it causes the boy to burst into tears because no once has ever given him anything other than praise so he feels personally attacked. The incident provokes a minor crisis that sees the other teachers rally round Chih-hung while telling a baffled Kuo not to bring “politics” into his work. Seemingly left-leading, Kuo speaks his mind and represents a new kind of democratic spirit that sees him advocate for egalitarianism and freedom of thought.

Even so, A-ming continues to suffer because of his family’s poverty and the feudalistic ties between the villagers and the mayor. It’s the mayor who rents the land to A-ming’s father, while he also took out a sizeable loan with him during his wife’s illness. Shi-sung fears that a poor harvest could result in his inability to pay the rent to Lin, leaving them homeless. Consequently, he pulls the children out of school to help kill an infestation of tea bugs, disapproving of their involvement with the art club because it means they come home later and less have time to work. Though she is also talented and enjoys drawing, Chi-mei gives up the art club so that A-ming can continue going while she works in the fields. Kuo later brings the class to them to help kill the tea bugs so the Chi-mei and A-ming can go to school and be in the art club. Chih-hung is apparently taken with this brief foray into the mountains, while Kuo later takes up the family’s plight with Lin who has the field sprayed as a symbolic gesture but then later presses Shi-sung for the repayment of his loan when he fails to vote for him after taking A-ming to the hospital on election day.

Forced to sell his pigs early, Shi-sung is unable to pay for the medical treatment and takes A-ming out of hospital early, though he thinks he’s recovered and is excited about returning to school and participating in the art contest. “Rich kids have a better chance at everything,” he laments sadly on hearing that Kuo was overruled when he nominated him for the contest as the other teachers all insisted on Chih-hung. This final disappointment seems to put paid to all his dreams to the point that Ah-ming gives up painting entirely as his illness intensifies. His painting of the tea bugs expresses his fears that everything will be taken away from him from food to the opportunity to go to school and paint. Shi-sung laments that it was this poverty that led to his wife’s early death, while later exacerbating Ah-ming’s illness and preventing him from receiving medical treatment.

This sense of unfairness permeates the film, as does a wonder and respect for the natural world echoed in Ah-ming’s desire to paint something just as beautiful on a large canvas so that the world could see. The teachers come to regret the way that they treated Ah-ming along with their dismissal of his artwork, though the mayor is full of self-serving hypocrisy announcing that they will now be sure to focus on artistically talented children when his own son is an aspiring artist. Even so, like the lubin flowers of the title, A-ming’s presence does seem to have enriched the world around him, kicking back against the elitism of an authoritarian regime with raw talent and finding new ways to express himself in an otherwise conformist culture.

Moneyboys (金錢男孩, C.B. Yi, 2021)

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“Who doesn’t sell themselves to make money?” a young man asks in C.B. Yi’s melancholy mainland-set drama Moneyboys (金錢男孩, Jīnqián Nánhái) relating the story of a relative who worked as a tanner all his life, became ill from the effects of the chemicals, and died alone far from home. He may suggest that the exploitative nature of contemporary capitalism will eventually consume you, but it’s an older set of social codes that do for Fei (Kai Ko) who consumes himself in a pathological desire for self-sacrifice as if constantly trying to prove himself worthy of acceptance.

As we first meet Fei he introduces himself as “Jackson”, a naive country boy in the city seeking a means to support his struggling rural family which he finds in sex work. Through his job, he encounters the swaggering Xiaolai (JC Lin) who introduces himself as “Max” and takes him under his wing. Soon they fall head over heels in love, but Xiaolai fears Fei’s desperation and lack of judgment in his choice of client, an anxiety which is later borne out when Fei is badly beaten by a local gangster. Filled with rage, Xiaolai attacks him with a metal bar but ends up badly beaten himself and thereafter sought by the police. Not wanting any trouble, Fei skips town and five years later has started a new, apparently much more successful life, in another city. 

“You’re always living for others” he’s later told by a childhood friend, Long (Bai Yufan), whose long-term crush on him Fei seems to be wilfully ignoring, “the way you sacrifice yourself, you constantly hurt yourself and sometimes others too”. Fei’s self-sacrificing nature does indeed seem to have a masochist component as he wilfully puts himself in dangerous situations to get money to provide for his family. His family, however, reject him precisely because of the nature of the sacrifices he is making. Returning to his home town after being unjustly hassled by local police who attempt to entrap him by getting an undercover officer to pose as a client and searching his home for drugs, Fei is physically attacked by a belligerent uncle who can’t stop ranting about Fei’s marital status beginning by berating him that his family is embarrassed because he has no wife before revealing that they all know about “what you did in the city” and are shamed by it. His father barely looks at him, though his sister appears to know and encourages him to find the right person and hold on to them because life is long and she doesn’t want him to be lonely. 

Later, another woman reassures him that he is “someone who deserves love” though he struggles to accept it. He feels indebted to Xiaolai because he lost a leg for him, unable to move past the transactional nature of love to accept it from someone who wants only the same in return. Consumed by internalised shame he struggles to let go of outdated traditional social codes and unlike Long is unwilling to abandon them in order to live the life he wants. One of his sex worker friends in his new city eventually enters into a sham marriage with a woman who is fully aware of the realities and later pledges to move back to the country and raise a child as a conventional husband and father while tearfully explaining that six years with the gay community have been the best of his life. He too has made a sacrifice of himself for his family but is already torn apart with disappointment and resentment. 

Fei’s tragedy is that he tries to please everyone but himself, revelling in his self-sacrificing suffering and barely noticing when others are caught in the crossfire. Unable to let himself go, he is left only with the memory of the one time he was happy, which wasn’t the one he originally thought it was, and the simultaneous knowledge that he has lost It forever through his own thoughtlessness. Trapped in the past both by the traditional social codes and his thwarted romance with Xiaolai he envisions an ironically progressive compromise but is unable to see the selfishness in his desires perhaps for once putting himself first in failing to consider the feelings of those around him. A neon-lit vista of loneliness, C.B Yi’s melancholy tale of self-imprisonment and the commodification of love discovers only unhappiness in the midst of a repressive social culture defined by the twin poles of rampant consumerism and the filial imperative. 

Trailer (English subtitles)