Rene Liu Ruo-ying – Windows on Worlds

Looking for love in all the wrong places, a Taipei career woman suddenly decides to give up her life and place a personal ad stating that she’s looking for a husband, “Who knows, maybe I’ll find happiness” she unconvincingly explains. Chen Kuo-fu’s sophisticated dramedy The Personals (徵婚啓事, Zhēnghūn Qǐ Shì) sends its heroine on a dating odyssey through the contemporary capital but is at heart the story of a woman learning to see herself while grieving a failed relationship and the married ex who won’t return her calls.

Tu Chia-wen (Rene Liu Ruo-ying) was a successful eye doctor at a Taipei hospital, explaining to a patient that some people lose the ability to produce enough tears after the age of 30, but abruptly quits her job later claiming that she wanted sever connections with her past which is another reason why she’s decided to place an ad rather than asking friends to set her up with eligible bachelors. Implicitly, it also seems that Chia-wen feels her status as a doctor may be intimidating to some men in the still patriarchal society, if also a clue to her true identity which she has otherwise chosen to keep hidden going instead by the name of Miss “Wu” which just happens to be the name of her lover’s wife.

Of course, it’s illogical to use a false identity if your end goal is finding a life partner, a factor which later feeds in to Chia-wen’s half-hearted conclusion that it isn’t the fault of the men she’s been meeting that they didn’t hit it off but her own in that she’s so far failed to fully “open up” to any of them. Despite newspaper personal ads not featuring photos, Chia-wen receives 100 messages in the three days after her details are posted from a varied cross section of applicants some more suitable than others. One gentleman who unconvincingly claims to be in his 30s reels off his CV as if he were introducing himself at a job interview while wearing a cheerful farmer-style straw hat. A factory worker chews betel nut and smokes tobacco at the same time while exposing an insecurity over his financial situation in complaining that modern women are too materialistic. One suitor is a woman who struggles to explain her gender and sexual identity with the terminology of the time causing Chia-Wen a degree of consternation. Another potential date is a shoe fetishist with a large suitcase intent on some kind of cinderella role-play closely followed by an executive who enthusiastically explains his only hobby outside of drinking is an encyclopaedic knowledge of S&M porn, while a son brings his father as a potential match because his mum’s “gone abroad” and in a heartbreaking moment a worried mother tries to negotiate on behalf of her son who appears to have learning difficulties and might not be sure what’s going on, hoping to find someone to look after him when she’s gone.

It may be a biased sample, but it doesn’t speak well for the men of Taipei and that’s without even getting into the guy trying to recruit Chia-wen as a high class call girl, the obvious married man after no strings sex, or the salesman trying to peddle women’s self defence equipment with a case full of tasers and pepper spray. Chia-wen pours out her frustrations in daily calls to her ex’s answering machine, leaving long messages she knows he won’t reply to but somehow it makes her feel close to him. Gradually through her monologues we begin to piece together the trauma that she’s struggling to accommodate while a late and unexpected twist keys us in to the cosmic tragedy of her frustrated romance. “Choose what you can endure” she’s advised by a professor friend who confesses to her that he’s chosen to suppress his homosexuality out of a desire for a “normal” life as a husband and father hinting at the still conservative nature of the contemporary society.

It’s not until she’s caught off guard by a potential match seeing through her ruse that Chia-wen begins to reconsider her experiment, eventually captivated by a sensitive young man who’s not long come out of prison but has an endearingly awkward smile that reminds her of her own. She meets each of the men in the same cafe where she had her first date with her former lover, taking on a slightly different character as she attempts to interview them about their lives, getting to know their hopes and desires often tinged with a note of loneliness or despair. They seldom seem very interested in her, but instantly propose marriage or at least some sort of serious courtship without even finding out about her hopes and aspirations in life. Chia-wen’s often comical encounters from the teenage boys trying their luck to the old men taking their last chance each expose something of contemporary gender dynamics as well as hinting at increasing urban loneliness and romantic desperation but in the end it’s herself Chia-wen must face in learning to let go of past trauma in order to give herself permission to move on in her ever evolving quest for love.

The Personals streams in the UK 25th to 31st October as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

What is love? Who gets to define it, and should it be a force of liberation or constraint? Sylvia Chang attempts to find out in looking at the complicated, unexpectedly interconnected romantic lives of three generations of women who discover that nothing and everything has changed in the decades that divide them. While a bereaved daughter channels her own anxieties of impending mortality into a petty and hopeless quest to validate the true love history of her parents, a daughter battles an oddly familiar problem with her musician boyfriend, and an elderly village woman is forced to realise she wasted her life waiting for the return of a man who had so carelessly abandoned her. Mediated by a culturally specific argument over burial rites, Love Education (相愛相親, Xiāng ài xiāng qīn) is a meditation on the demands and obligations of love, both familial and romantic, as they inevitably change and mature across the arc of lifetimes.

As Huiying’s (Sylvia Chang) elderly mother lies dying, she sinks into a vision of a bright summer’s day spent with her one true love who is already waiting for her in a better place. Huiying, a middle-aged school teacher facing semi-enforced retirement, is thrown into a tail spin of grief and anxiety in losing her mother, realising that it won’t belong before her daughter will in turn lose her. Weiwei (Lang Yueting), an aspiring TV journalist, remains unmarried and still lives at home though, unbeknownst to Huiying, is planning to move out and live with her aspiring rockstar boyfriend, Da (Song Ning). The plan is, however, thrown into confusion by the resurfacing of his ex, in the city with her son to compete in a cheesy TV singing contest. Meanwhile, Huiying has become obsessed with the idea of burying her mother alongside her father, only his body was sent back to his rural hometown, as is the custom, and so will need to exhumed and brought to the city. Unfortunately, Huiying’s father was technically a bigamist – he left an arranged marriage in the country to look for work in the city, “married” Huiying’s mother and never looked back. Huiying, determined to prove the “legitimacy” of her parents’ love seeks to reunite them in death, but Nana (Wu Yanshu) – the abandoned country wife, is hellbent on retaining the body, at least, of the man she married and thereby legitimising herself as a “true” wife.

Huiying’s grief-stricken descent into desperate obsession is a thinly veiled attempt to work through her own feelings of middle-aged dissatisfaction and anxiety on being violently confronted by her transition from a position of authority into a potentially powerless old-age. Her decades long marriage to Xiaoping (Tian Zhuangzhuang), a mild-mannered former teacher turned driving instructor, is comfortable enough but perhaps floundering as the couple contemplate their retirement and impending dotage. Huiying, mildly jealous of a elegant pupil who seems to have taken a liking to her husband, is also entertaining a mild crush on the father of one her own pupils while quietly feeling the distance that has inevitably grown between herself and her husband throughout the years. And so, she sets about “proving” that her parents’ romance was good and true, not only morally recognised but blessed by the state and legally approved.

This, however, proves more difficult than expected due to China’s rapid modernisation, series of political changes, high levels of bureaucracy and idiosyncratic way of issuing documentation. As her parents were “married” in the ‘50s, their union was approved by the local Communist authorities whose approach to record keeping was not perhaps as serious as might be assumed. The receipt for their license should be at the local block office, but they knocked that down. The papers were supposed to be moved to the town hall, but lacking resources they simply threw away all the documents from 1978 and before. Huiying’s parents belong to a past which has literally been thrown away, erased from history and regarded as an irrelevance by the current generation who think only of the future.

Meanwhile, Nana has been patiently waiting in her home town – a “good wife” by the standards of her rural society. Marrying Huiying’s father in an arranged marriage she has done all expected of her – looked after his family and then lovingly tended his grave despite the fact that he abandoned her after only a few months of marriage, not even bothering to tell her that he met someone else and wasn’t coming back. Nana, like Huiying, is desperate to legitimise her position to avoid the inevitable realisation that she has sacrificed her life for a set of outdated ideals.

Weiwei feels this most of all. Unlike her mother, she can’t forgive her grandfather’s moral cowardice in treating his first wife so cruelly. Building up an unexpected bond with the ironically named “Nana”, Weiwei is also forced to think about her own stalling relationship with Da who put his rockstar dreams on hold to stay with her rather than proceeding on to Beijing to try his luck there. Da, like her grandfather, has a past – in this case a childhood sweetheart with a young son and possibly territorial ambitions over a kind young man she has wounded through abandoning. Should Weiwei wait for Da, and risk ending up all alone like Nana, or should she end things now and give up on youthful romanticism for grown up practicality?

So bound up with the “legitimisation” of love, there’s an inevitable degree of possessiveness which creeps into each of the relationships – even that of Huiying and her daughter as she attempts to clip her wings to keep her close, but there’s also a kind of generosity in Chang’s direction which eventually allows them all to break away (to an extent) from an insecure need for validation to something bigger, warmer, and with more capacity for empathy and understanding. Quite literally a Love Education, Chang’s exploration of the romantic lives of three generations of women finds that though the times may have become more permissive nothing has become any easier. Nevertheless, there is comfort to be found in learning to appreciate the feelings of others, offering support where needed, and making the most of what you have while you have it in the acceptance that nothing is forever.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Rene Liu Ruo-ying

The Personals (徵婚啓事, Chen Kuo-fu, 1998)

Love Education (相愛相親, Sylvia Chang, 2017)