Tag: Taiwan

Lost in Forest (山中森林, Johnny Chiang, 2022)

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History repeats itself for a former gangster recently released from prison in Johnny Chiang’s melancholy neo-noir, Lost in Forest (山中森林, Shān Zhōng Senlín). Set in a neon-lit Taipei, Chiang’s moody crime drama finds its hero displaced in the modern society unable to look either forward or back while meditating on all he’s lost and another less corrupt vision of his home city as symbolised by his late father’s missing sausage bike and the changing back streets where it was once parked.

This Taipei is however a less wholesome place as suggested by Chiang’s frequent cuts to Christian churches and the giant neon crosses that sit above them as if looming in judgement on the chaos below. 12 years previously, Sheng (Lee Kang-sheng) opened fire on rival gang members who’d kidnapped his best friend and comrade Seagull (Angus Hsieh) who has now taken over the outfit while he’s been inside. Customarily, Seagull should have had someone come to meet him on his release, but Sheng exits the prison alone and is given a lift back into the city by the entourage collecting his prison buddy Ji despite the fact they are headed to an entirely different part of the country. Without a phone and not knowing where the gang even is anymore, all Sheng can do is hole up in a hotel until he finds out what’s going on. All of which suggests that despite his sacrifice, Seagull may not be particularly glad to reunite with him.

The conflict exists on three levels. Sheng must necessarily doubt his old friend Seagull, especially on realising that his new business model involves exploiting vulnerable women by pressing them into debt via high interest loans and then forcing them into sex work, while simultaneously worried about his guys who claim they have not been well treated while Sheng was away. But then it also becomes clear that much like many contemporary Taiwanese crime dramas, the real villain is institutional corruption as Seagull’s alliances with corrupt politicians and shady businessmen continue to destabilise the underground society thanks to the machinations of anarchic street punk Monkey (Sean Huang) who engineers a gang war by giving the businessman’s son a kicking as leverage in a dodgy land deal. 

On the one hand, Sheng watches history repeat itself as a handsome foot soldier, Chenghao (Prince Chiu), vacillates over leaving the gang for his respectable girlfriend Alice (Puff Kuo), while on the other Sheng becomes attached to sex worker Jing (Lee Chien-na), one of Seagull’s exploited women working for him to pay for her father’s medical bills. Sheng’s former lover tells him that if he really cared about her, he shouldn’t have sacrificed himself for Seagull just as Chenghao shouldn’t put himself in harm’s way out of a pointless sense of loyalty for a gang that has no real loyalty to him. Before his release, the prison warden had advised Sheng not to let his sense of loyalty get the best of him, but as he says Sheng no longer has much of anything else. His parents died while he was inside, the woman he loved married someone else, and Seagull can’t even remember what he did with Sheng’s dad’s sausage bike which is his only path back to a more wholesome existence. 

In a certain sense he’s powerless, unable to escape the inexorable pull of gangland karma until finally forced to reckon with the destabilising force that is Monkey to restore some kind of order and undermine the system of corruption that has arisen between underworld thuggery, local politics, and big business. The warden had also pointed at the fish in his tank and asked Sheng if it was happier in there or back in the sea but Sheng had merely said that it’s up to the fish to decide, hinting that in a certain sense it’s all the same and it’s just that one prison is bigger than another. At least the fish gets fed and is kept safe from predators even in its lonely isolation, which might be more than can be said for Sheng who can never truly escape his past even as he tries to free Chenghao and Jing from a similar fate. A melancholy mood piece, Chiang shoots night-time Taipei as a land of neon emptiness set against a classic jazz score that echoes Sheng’s deadpan ennui in a modern world of electronic smoke and rueful nihilism in which there is no escape from karmic retribution. 

Lost in Forest screens in Chicago April 16 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Day Off (本日公休, Fu Tien-Yu, 2023)

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The wholesome small-town values of an ageing hairdresser place her increasingly at odds with her cynical consumerist kids in Fu Tien-Yu’s poignant tale of changing times, yet as she’s fond saying children have their own lives and all that really matters is that you’re satisfied with what you have. Day Off (本日公休, běnrì gōngxiū) is partly a lament for the things we’ve thrown away in the name of convenience but also a celebration of human connection brokered by something as simple and routine as a haircut.

A Rui (Lu Hsiao-fen) has toiled away in her family-run barbershop for most of her adult life and the business has changed little in the time she’s been running it. Old men and their sons have been coming to get a haircut and a shave for the last few decades because as someone else later puts it, men are largely creatures of habit and a hairdresser like a wife is hard to switch. A Rui’s daughter Ling is also a hairdresser but works in a much more modern salon and is planning to open a supercuts-style express service aiming to get people in and out in a short amount of time for a small amount of money. Ling’s philosophy is contrary to everything A Rui was taught, advised by her mentor to take her time and work with precision. He told her that if she provided a good service she’d always have custom and does that does seem to have been the case. 

Then again perhaps times aren’t so different as they seem. Ling is unpopular at her salon because she has poor customer service skills and doesn’t seem to be particularly well suited to the social nature of the job. Her boss always gets all the best clients and that’s largely because he treats them just like A Rui treats hers even if his care and attention is a little more cynical than heartfelt. Ling has also divorced her husband, Chuan, essentially for being too nice after he lent money they were saving for a new flat to a friend in need. A Rui can’t understand why she’d split up with a perfectly good man when they have a small child together, but Ling is an ambitious ultramodernist who values change above all else and looks down on small-town values of community and reciprocity seeing her former husband and mother as merely foolish and living in the past. She can’t understand why her mother bothers to ring up her elderly regulars to remind them they’re due a haircut when she could just set up an automated system to take care of it for her, nor can she get her head round it when A Rui says she’s going to travel to a faraway town to cut the hair of an elderly gentlemen who can’t make it to the shop without even asking for expenses. 

But to A Rui it’s just the right thing to do and an appropriate act of reciprocity for decades of custom. Chuan feels much the same, always willing to put his life on hold to offer roadside assistance and understanding if a client can’t pay him right away knowing that they can’t get the money if they can’t work so it’s better to just fix the car. A Rui worries about her other daughter living with a boyfriend and a dog in a rented flat in Taipei, and about her son who seems to have several failed entrepreneurial projects behind him, but encounters on the road another man who gave up a job as a scientist to become a farmer and seems to be happy with his choice. In the end it might not be that one is better than the other, the only thing that matters being whether or not you’re satisfied with what you have.

There’s a certain poignancy in the disappearing quality of A Rui’s way of life, the hair on one of her customer’s heads slowly turning from black to grey as if she were literally shaving the years off him. “Time flies” she often remarks, realising that she’s known some of her customers all their lives and has become a kind of community hub that they can always return to even if they move away. The knees she once practiced her shaving on are now old and worn from years of standing, but as her customers remind her she can’t retire because no one knows their heads like she does and then where will they get their hair cut? Bittersweet and elegiac, Day Off ends on a note of moving on as A Rui gives the baby of a second generation client their first haircut and prepares to say goodbye to a much a loved friend seeking a more satisfying future while resolving to carry on doing what she does best in providing the best possible service to her regulars and to the world around her.

Day Off screens in Chicago April 15 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Taste of Wild Tomato (野番茄, Lau Kek Huat, 2021)

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Towards the conclusion of Lau Kek Huat’s documentary Taste of Wild Tomatoes (野番茄, yě fānqié), a man whose father was murdered during the White Terror gets into a heated debate with a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek who asks him if he thinks things would have been better if the Japanese had stayed. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that Taiwan might have been just fine on its own, a free and independent nation no longer subject to any particular coloniser. Her attitude reflects the contradictions of the contemporary society still trying to understand and make peace with its past. The now middle-aged man thinks that Chiang Kai-shek’s presence in “Liberty Square” is inappropriate, “worshipped by tourists who do not know our history”, and that the lingering national trauma of the 228 Incident, in which a popular uprising against the rule of the KMT government in 1947 was brutally put down, has never fully been addressed. 

Another of Lau’s protagonists also lost her father to the White Terror and her mother to suicide shortly after. It’s her recollections that give the film its bittersweet title as she remembers being taken to her father’s grave as a small child but not knowing what was going on. She didn’t understand why her mother was crying and simply carried on eating some wild tomatoes that were growing near the grave. Their taste has stayed with her all these years as an ironic reminder of the fruits of oppression and the frustrated vitality of the Taiwanese society enduring even during its hardship. 

The film opens with a sequence featuring animation and stock footage from the colonial era over which a man gives a speech likening himself to the Japanese folk hero Momotaro and Taiwan to the island of barbarians to which he traveled. Kaohsiung had been an important military base under Japanese colonial rule, integral to imperial expansion to the South. The voice over describes it as an uncivilised land where they do not speak his language, but then emphasises that Taiwan has been transformed by Japanese intervention and is now the pearl of the empire. “As long as you work hard, you can be the true subjects of the Empire of Japan’” he ominously adds. 

Under the Japanese, the Taiwanese people were asked to give up their names and language, but they were also asked to do so under the KMT under whose rule Taiwanese Hokkien was actively suppressed in favour of Mainland Mandarin. A folk singer explains that traditional folk singing is tailored to the rhythms of the local language, Mandarin simply does not scan and if she cannot sing in Taiwanese then she cannot sing at all. She offers a caustic retelling of history in her songs reflecting on the 228 incident and the “unreasonable and cruel” rule of the KMT governor Chen Yi. Another man who took part in the uprising explains that the widow and son of a man who died next to him only came to ask how he died decades later because it was not only taboo but dangerous to make any mention of what happened on that day. 

Lau’s camera makes an eerie journey into a tunnel built by the Japanese military that was used as an interrogation room during the White Terror. A guide explains that the soundproofing wasn’t present in the colonial era but was added by the KMT so that people couldn’t hear what was going on inside. The woman who had tried to defend Chiang Kai-shek, irritated by the man continuing to speak in Taiwanese and answering him in Mandarin, had not tried to deny that such things had happened only that sometimes it is necessary to do “bad things” to survive much as an elderly conscript had recounted murdering an abusive Japanese officer and eating his flesh while hiding in the Philippine jungle during the war. “Justice always defeats authoritarian regimes” Chiang is heard to say in an incredibly ironic speech in which he also talks of the importance of rehabilitating “those who learned the wrong ideas in the fascist regimes” and making them accept Sun Yat-Sen’s Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, and the peoples’s welfare). 

The woman who lost her parents now cares for her older sister who suffers with dementia, she thinks brought on by the hardship she endured because of her orphanhood. Closing with scenes of an air raid shelter repurposed as a children’s park, the film presents an ambivalent message as to how the past has been incorporated into contemporary life. Something good has been made of these relics of the traumatic memories, but in doing so it might also seem that the past itself has been forgotten or overwritten. The man who lost his father and himself went into exile defiantly holds up banners stating that Taiwan is not “Chinese Taipei” while insisting that the statue of Chiang Kai-shek must be removed from Liberty Square if it is to have any meaning, all while the folk singer continues to sing her song in her own language refusing to be silenced even if society does not always want to hear about its painful past.

Taste of Wild Tomato screened as part of this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival UK.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

A Holy Family (神人之家, Elvis Lu, 2022)

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“Do you think the gods ever helped our family? Or, should I say, do the gods exist?” asks documentary filmmaker Elvis Lu of his brother, a spiritual medium who stayed behind with their devoutly Taoist parents while Lu left for the city 20 years previously and never returned. Lu admits that he likely never would have come back had his mother not contacted him with an ominous message about sorting out her funeral plans, but while filming seems to come to a new accommodation with his familial relationships guilty that he stayed away so long no longer a resentful young man but one beginning to consider the encroachment of mortality.

Lu’s mother confesses that she had pretended to herself that he didn’t exist, hurt that he rarely answered her calls and never visited home even as he points out that she never came to visit him him Taipei either. She feels she “achieved nothing as a parent” and is most regretful that she could not nurture Lu’s talent because she was forced to work long hours to support the family while also taking care of the household. In the opening conversation Lu had coldly answered the phone assuming his mother had called to ask for money, and the hollowness at the centre of the family is largely caused by Lu’s father’s longterm gambling problem which saw him fritter away most of the family’s property and savings leaving the couple financially dependent on their sons for support. Lu’s brother also feels a degree of resentment towards their near silent father, revealing that he does not want to do to his son what his father’s done to them in leaving them nothing but debt and disappointment. That’s one reason he’s always looking for new ways to support the family and has recently begun farming.

The obvious question when his tomato crop is destroyed by floods is why didn’t he ask the gods for guidance first, only it turns out that he did. As Lu points out, the family has endured long years of suffering despite their piety, if his brother is really so close to them why didn’t they help? It’s a question he obviously doesn’t have an answer for, nor does he have one when his son pleads with him to ask the gods for advice as to what to next with the ruined tomato field. His brother’s pained expression hints that he might have doubts despite being able to talk to the gods in his job as a spirit medium handing out advice on investments and other more Earthly worries for a small donation. The family’s upper floor is home to a large altar with several statues of the gods his mother describes as her only friends during the time that both her sons and husband were absent from the family home. Lu’s mother is tiny and now somewhat advanced in age. The stairs appear difficult for her, yet she climbs them every day to pay obsevance to the gods. 

After 20 years in the city all of this religiosity seems even more bizarre to the now adult Lu, but he also also captures ceremonies in the community in which people pray to the gods for health and prosperity suggesting that it’s not so odd after all and that the sense of community may be more important that the rituals themselves. Even so, it’s also true that this almost transactional view of spirituality feeds directly back in to his father’s gambling addiction in which he constantly looks for signs of lucky numbers to place bets or buy lottery tickets. After being diagnosed with glandular cancer and too ill to do much else, Lu’s father still picks up the phone to lay a sizeable bet even while his exasperated wife tries to control her resentment that if only he hadn’t lost his job he’d have had a pension, they’d have kept more of their property, and would all have happier, more comfortable lives. 

In any case, through adopting a more neutral position as a filmmaker Lu is able to better interrogate the realities of his family and his own relationship with it. As the documentary progresses, he sometimes appears on screen holding a large camera on a tripod while someone else films him from another angle. What began with frosty resentment slowly gives way to warmth and reconciliation even while underpinned by a melancholy practicality as Lu helps his parents choose pictures to use at their funeral underlining a sense of oncoming loss as Lu finally takes his mother to see the sea and gently tracks her as she walks along the shore, slowly moving away from him.

A Holy Family screens in London 24th March and in Edinburgh 25th March as part of this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival UK.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波, Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)

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In the iconic opening sequence of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波, Qiānxī Mànbō), a young woman bounces enigmatically along a walkway, filled with joy and abandon and seemingly exultant in her freedom. Occasionally she glances back as if someone were actually filming her but then we start to wonder if this isn’t just her looking back at herself as she narrates her story in the third person, as if it happened to someone else because in a sense it did. “This happened 10 years ago,” she explains from the vantage point of 2011 looking back on the coming millennium and her own slow dance towards a new world. 

Then again, as she admits Vicky (Shu Qi) always seems to be drawn back into the orbit of Hao (Tuan Chun-hao), her no good, abusive boyfriend who is so controlling that he deliberately prevented her from taking her high school exams out of fear that she’d “move on”. Circling around Vicky’s memories, Hou often cuts to Hao in exactly the same position as he was before while Vicky has indeed moved on if not always in the direction she might have chosen such as the abrupt transition to her naked behind as a dancer at a nightclub where she is forced to work because Hao refuses to earn a living. When we first see her arrive at their apartment, Hao is sitting in the dark and we don’t even notice him until he gets up after Vicky enters the bathroom. Where her bedroom is colourful and cosy, bathed in soft light and demonstrating her ability to find small comforts in an otherwise harsh existence, Hao’s space is gloomy and ominous in its austerity. 

While Vicky tries to move into a more responsible adulthood, Hao extends Taipei clubland into their home frequently hanging out with friends while djing on the rig in his room. He takes drugs to keep his weight down to evade military service and gets into trouble with the law after pinching and pawning an expensive watch from his dad rather than trying to get job. He is the force which seems to keep Vicky trapped in a disappointing existence. By her own admission she finds herself returning to him as if she were in a kind a kind of trance, unable to escape though at times clearly despising him and perhaps herself too. Even Hao is fond of saying that they’re from different worlds, stuck on parallel orbits and otherwise incompatible. Even their apartment seems to be divided into night and day. 

Yet it’s also Taipei clubland that offers Vicky an escape route through the community she finds surrounding her amid the pulsing beats of millennial techno. A kindhearted gangster, Jack (Jack Kao), comes to her aid though he is later brought low by the recklessness of youth as his naive underlings bring their world crashing down around them. Jack takes her in and protects her with paternal affection, eventually inviting her to go on the run with him in Japan but immediately disappearing, just like the snowman she later describes Hao to have been in a moment imprinted on her memory. She carries Jack’s phone around with her unable to let go of him while recalling the scent of his abandoned jacket as she tries to make a decision in a snowy Tokyo just as she’d sworn to herself she’d leave Hao when she ran through her savings. 

Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing shoot all of this through the breeziness memory, following emotional logic rather than the literal as Vicki narrates to us events which are at odds with those occurring on screen and zig zags through the story of her youth before arriving at what seems to be a genuine moment of warmth amid heavy snow, perhaps finally “moving on” from the dissatisfying past to a future of her own choosing. Then again, her fleeting recollections amount to a constructed narrative, the story of the girl on the walkway who finally reaches the other side and disappears into the night either progressing into the new millennium or remaining trapped in a thousand year mambo of memory reliving the key moments of her life in a gentle oscillation, “as if under a spell or hypnotised” , unable to escape from the dangerous allure of nostalgia. 

Millennium Mambo is screening now at New York’s Metrograph and available to stream in the US via Metrograph at Home courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Terrorizers (青春弒戀, Ho Wi Ding, 2021)

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A collection of youngsters is drawn into a dangerous web of simmering violence in Ho Wi Ding’s Taipei-set drama, Terrorizers (青春弒戀, qīngchūn shì liàn). The film may share its name with an Edward Yang classic, but it is very clearly society that is the terroriser in this instance from toxic masculinity and social conservatism to youthful isolation, video games, and pornography. The film seems to ask if it’s ever really possible to move on from the past and discovers that it may not be though some may be prepared to help carry your baggage as they travel towards the future so long as they know what’s in it. 

The youngsters are brought together by the ominous presence of Ming Liang (Austin Lin Bo-Hong), an isolated young man who barely speaks and spends all his time playing video games. It’s him we see dressed in full ninja garb attacking a young woman, Yu Fang (Moon Lee), with a katana at the train station only for her boyfriend Xiao Zhang (J.C. Lin Cheng-Hsi) to heroically throw himself in front of her to fight Ming Liang off. 

Later a dejected middle-aged woman Ming Liang befriends ironically tells him that guy who protects his girlfriend is a real man, working the wound of Ming Liang’s bruised masculinity and causing him to double down on his frequent insistence that he can protect women, though later he indeed does on separating precocious teen Kiki (Yao Ai-Ning) from the previously diffident best friend who tried to assault her. Having given up on Yu Fang he begins stalking a woman from her acting class, Monica (Annie Chen Ting-Ni), whose admittedly no good ex boyfriend he later beats up assuming it will buy him white knight credits as a protector in the shadows when in reality he’s a total creep who cloned the key to her apartment and has been hiding in her wardrobe later driven into a frenzy by the irony of watching Yu Fang and Monica, the two women he wanted, deciding they’d rather be with each other. 

Part of Ming Liang’s problem is a sense of parental abandonment, something he shares with Yu Fang whose mother abandoned her when young while her relationship with her father, who has recently remarried, has always been strained. After his parents’ divorce, Ming Liang moved in with Yu Fang’s politician father after being palmed off off by his own, the implication being that he has never really been shown parental love or given any guidance about how to live in the world save that he gleaned from the violent video games he constantly plays along with voyeuristic pornography. 

Yu Fang and Ming Liang are attempting to escape the legacy of parental failure, but Monica is left with a much more recent dilemma in her history as an early cam girl named Missy, a character created by her ex, David, who has since moved on. The more Monica tries to chase her dreams, the more her past comes out to haunt her with creepy men for some reason making a point of telling her they saw her sex tape while on some occasions actually playing it for her on their phone. Hoping to crush her spirit, David tells her that she’ll always be Missy, unable to escape the social stigma of having participated in a pornographic video, while she and Yu Fang are subject to a public shaming when a tape of them goes viral allowing the authorities to all but justify Ming Liang’s attack on Yu Fang on the grounds that she stole his girlfriend and therefore was in the wrong as if such feudalistic behaviour could ever be permissible. 

Yu Fang finds herself terrorised by the media storm of the 24hr news cycle, her new life with Xiao Zhang in jeopardy while she feels ever more isolated realising that her father cares less for her wellbeing than the optics in the light of his ongoing political campaign. Ming Liang meanwhile is forever reminding people that his father is rich and influential as if his misuse of his status is a direct rebellion against it and the parents he feels abandoned him. The fact that the news essentially reframes the slashing incident as a defence of heterosexual love, demonising same sex relationships, only emphasises the tyranny of outdated social prejudice and misogyny as Yu Fang becomes the villain and Ming Liang the victim entirely ignoring his predatory stalking of Monica and otherwise disturbing behaviour. It may not be possible to effectively move on from the past, overcome the legacy of parental abandonment and develop the ability to trust in others, but there may be less destructive ways to take the past with you if only in finding someone willing to share your burden. 

Terrorizers screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © changheFilms 2021

Remember Me (金門留念, Hung Chun-hsiu, 2022)

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Some way into Hung Chun-hsiu’s documentary Remember Me (金門留念) a woman takes part in a military reenactment firing large scale artillery from a now disused military base. What’s ironic is both that what was once a frightening reality of ongoing warfare has now been commercialised as an attraction for tourists, and the fact that the woman firing the gun pointed at China on this technically Taiwanese island is herself Chinese. As the opening graphics point out, the island of Quemoy (also known as Kinmen) is geographically closer to Mainland China though governed by Taiwan and for much of its mid-20th century history at the front line of an ongoing ideological battle between communists and nationalists. 

In the stock footage often employed by Hung, newsreaders can be heard uttering phrases about “vile communists” and eliminating communist “scum” along with impassioned sloganeering about taking back the “motherland” and freeing its people from the yoke of communism. The island was under near constant shelling until as recently as 1979 and consequently largely populated by the military many of whom were ordinary young men conscripted for national service. The island has obviously changed a great deal since then, though one unexpected casualty has been the gradual decline of the island’s photo studios. Less due to technological than demographic change, the first of Huang’s subjects explains that given the precarity of life in Quemoy soldiers would have their pictures taken as often as once a week, often full body portraits they would send home to their families as evidence that they had not been severely injured. Kuo-ming has been operating his photo studio for 46 years now one of only two still operating on the island. Like the gun show, the military portraits have also become a kind of costume play, Kuo-ming handing out army uniforms and prop weapons for people to pose with often against a painted matte backdrop of a local lake or else Japan’s Mount Fuji. 

Meanwhile, the photographs taken at the time hint at the loneliness felt by the men who were dispatched to the island, many of them opting to have pictures of their wives or girlfriends inset alongside them. Those who had no girlfriends sometimes used a picture of a famous model or actress as a personal keepsake though one photo which goes unexplained is inset with the photo of another man in uniform. It has to be said that many of these photos have a homoerotic quality, especially the ones featuring shirtless well-built men striking muscle poses, while others are unexpectedly feminine in nature featuring the soldier in soft focus and surrounded by flowers. The ones from later years are also sometimes playful, featuring soldiers sitting in a model speedboat in or in more relaxed, artistic poses. A man who had his photos taken there while on his military service reads a letter he wrote to a woman he loved promising a photo, one in which he later inset her portrait, little knowing that she did not return his feelings and only kept the correspondence up in fear he might harm himself if she turned him down. Though he discovered on his return she had married someone else, the couple found each other decades later and decided to have a “real” photo taken together at Kuo-ming’s shop dressed in faux army uniforms. 

Having married a local woman and decided to stay on Quemoy, former solder Shan-yung also used to have his picture taken at Kuo-ming’s to send back to his mother. He joined the army voluntarily as his family was poor and was shocked to be sent effectively to the front line. After leaving the service, he and his wife opened a karaoke bar largely catering to military personnel and though his business still seems to be doing well, bears out Kuo-ming’s description of the economic changes brought about by decreasing militarisation. Even so he feels a sense of guilt that his life has taken him so far away from his family that he is no longer able to care for his parents in their old age while taking care of his in-laws on Quemoy.

Chen-mei, the woman staging the live reenactment of firing the artillery gun, expresses something similar while explaining that she came to the island from the Mainland for an arranged marriage and now works as a civil servant. She concedes that it’s a little awkward for some of the Chinese visitors realising that their nation had been firing shells at the island for three decades, but suggests that it’s all in the past while espousing a well-meaning but possibility reductive One China philosophy that they are all one Chinese family who no longer need to care about labels like “communist” or “nationalist” because they live in an era of peace. The gun, and the remaining military garrison, may be a reminder it might be dangerous to take that for granted given the rising rhetoric on the Mainland in response to the desire for a recognition of Taiwanese independence. A father explains to his son that the artillery gun was a loan from the Americans to help resist communism, but when the boy asks him how long is left on the lease the man can only look confused and reply that he doesn’t really know. In any case, Remember Me seems to be keener on remembering the rosier side of life on Quemoy under fire as old soldiers look back on their youth if grateful that goats now roam their barracks and the only shells to be found are the ones commemorating a war that for now at least has ended. 

Remember Me screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Confucian Confusion (獨立時代, Edward Yang, 1994)

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A collection of conflicted urbanites find themselves lost in a rapidly changing society in Edward Yang’s bitterly ironic social drama, A Confucian Confusion (獨立時代, dúlì shídài). Floundering in the post-martial law society, they struggle with the new freedoms of the democratic future torn between the blind obedience of the authoritarian past and the risky business of having to figure out who they are and what they want in a Taipei that seems to have its lost soul to rapidly advancing consumerism. 

Much of the confusion is centred on Chi-chi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a demure young woman admired by all for her radiant quality yet herself under-confident and worried that on some level others might resent her assuming that her genial persona is in someway an affectation. Chi-chi’s tragedy is that she is genuinely nice and relatively authentic in comparison to those around her only she’s beginning to realise that she doesn’t really know herself and has no idea what it is she really wants. “I didn’t have views of my own, it doesn’t mean I agreed with you” she eventually fires back at her ultra-conformist boyfriend Ming (Wang Wei-ming) after he takes the step of resigning for her when she expresses reluctance to accept a job offer set up by his father’s girlfriend.

“You weren’t like this before” Ming continues to berate her, telling another woman, Feng (Richie Li), that feels he no longer understands the changes in Chi-chi’s mind. A symbol of old school patriarchal thinking, he attempts to overrule all her decisions while frustrated that she can’t see he’s only acting in the best interests of her future. Ming thinks that everyone being the same is a good thing, determined to follow the conventional path for a “stable” life as a civil servant but carrying a degree of personal baggage that his politician father was once sent to prison for corruption. He tells Feng, the one person most at home with the duplicities of the modern society, that he chased Chi-chi because she most conformed to the image of his ideal woman which does rather imply that he preferred her to appear as an extension of himself not having any particular thoughts or opinions of her own. The realisation that she does indeed have individual agency seems to destabilise him even as his allegiance to the social conformity of the authoritarian era is shaken on witnessing the hypocrisy of contemporary corporate culture in which his straight-talking friend (Chen Yi-wen) is forced to pay for Ming’s own mistake. 

It’s the hypocrisy which seems to weigh heaviest on the mind of a struggling writer (Hung Hung) who finds it impossible to accept the democratic revolution and has given up the cheerful romance novels which made his name to write “serious” books. Now living in a tiny apartment without electricity, he has become estranged from the wealthy woman he married as a student (Chen Li-mei) who defied her family to turn down an arranged marriage just to be with him. She now hosts a fairly conservative TV programme aimed at housewives pushing family values which is one reason it would be a problem if their separation became public knowledge. The man she was supposed to marry, Chin (Wang Bosen) the foppish son of a business associate of her father’s, is now engaged to her sister, Molly (Ni Shu-Chun), and mainly conducts his business in Mainland China looking ahead to a kind of “One Country, Two Systems” future which may in a sense be a return to a more authoritarian society albeit one fuelled by corporatism. 

In any case, more than anyone Chin is caught between old and new desperately trying to make his engagement to Molly work by hoping they will eventually fall in love while she is more or less just going along with it while convincing him to continue investing in her failing business. In this very confusing environment, communication is never direct. Molly, who is also a childhood friend of Chi-chi and Ming, never really discloses her feelings but according to Chin’s sleazy business manager Larry (Danny Deng) is too “unique” for the times in failing to appreciate the necessity of emotion as a corporate tool. Yet she goes along with the arranged marriage unable to fully break with feudal norms as her much more conservative sister had ironically done even if she is no longer happy with her choice. As is so often pointed out, anything can happen anytime. Sudden reversals and accidental revolutions are just a part of life. 

Conformity had perhaps been a way of coping with life’s uncertainty, but in its way only created more misery and resentment. Ironically the radiant smile Larry so admires in Chi-chi is also the symbol of a societal defence mechanism. The angrier you get, the wider your smile, Larry had tried to teach Chin who nevertheless remains the most “emotional” of all the protagonists, eventually breaking with feudal past in ending his engagement to Molly after randomly falling in love with a voice on a telephone. “We’re all so lonely” Ming admits, disillusioned with his life of dull conformity and edging towards seizing the new freedoms open to him to finally be “independent” no longer bound either by lingering Confucianism or the authoritarian past. The writer’s last book had followed Confucius as he found himself in the modern society but discovered that the people no longer believed in his sincerity, seeing him as a kind of motivational speaker and wanting to learn the quick fixes of his philosophy. Yet in meeting his own destiny, the writer hits on an epiphany that the best weapon against hypocrisy is to live honestly and authentically. Finally integrating into the democratic future, each is finally becoming accustomed to making their own decisions but informed by a kind of mutual solidarity in navigating the still confusing landscape of a changing Taipei.

A Confucian Confusion screens at the Museum of Photographic Arts on Nov. 11 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Restoration trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzczMy23bj4

Gaga (哈勇家, Laha Mebow, 2022)

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“Children will find their own way” a grandmother reassures while her community fractures all around her in Laha Mebow’s lighthearted drama, Gaga (哈勇家). “Gaga” refers to the traditional rules of the Atayal people which find themselves under increasing pressure from the wider society. While one granddaughter returns after living abroad in New Zealand and is caught between her affection for her family and her desires for her future, her cousin is devotes himself to his culture but may end up marooned amid encroaching modernity. 

As the film opens, Enoch is hiking with his grandfather Hayung on the mountain where he tells him that he used to come to catch fish in his youth but not anymore. Back then, he explains, it was considered important not to transgress on another’s turf. If someone had set fish traps already, you’d be expected to move yours somewhere else. But it doesn’t work that way anymore, as the family discover on entering a dispute with a neighbour who’s engaged a surveyor to essentially annex a third of their land. Father Pasang appeals to the mayor, but is given short shrift and reminded that making an offering is no longer sufficient to mark a boundary. This crisis informs Pasang’s fateful decision to stand for mayor himself which places increasing strain on family relations especially in the wake of Hayung’s death. 

With Hayung gone, there is a sense that the traditional practices of the Atayal people are being lost. His grandson, Enoch, has a Christian name but is close to his grandfather and seems to be devoted to preserving their culture, often seen playing his mouth harp, singing traditional songs and dancing. His cousin Ali, meanwhile, has been studying abroad in New Zealand and seems increasingly at odds with the traditional ways of the village not least when it is discovered that she’s become pregnant out of wedlock with her overseas boyfriend who is also of an Asian background but is unable to speak Mandarin let alone the Atayal language. Ali isn’t sure she wants to keep the baby, but abortion is against Gaga while her father is chiefly worried about his electoral prospects amid a scandal concerning his only daughter. 

Pasang’s response hints at the inherent corruption in the electoral system. Resolving to neutralise a scandal before it takes hold, he decides to slaughter 10 pigs as a sacrifice and give the meat to other villagers, holding what is staged as a wedding reception for Ali and her oblivious boyfriend Andy who suddenly arrives for a surprise visit. Local politics is essentially transactional, villagers are accustomed to voting for whoever gives them the most stuff rather than whoever offers them the best prospects for their future perhaps cynically deciding to take what they can get having little faith that those in power are really going to have their best interests at heart. Pasang plays the game, but the game costs money endangering not only his own financial security but that of his family and most particularly his younger brother Silan whose land was at issue in the first place. Pressured by his mother, Silan is emotionally blackmailed into “helping” his brother with the promise that he will pay him back when he wins which he must do or else they are all ruined. But Pasang soon discovers that taking power over one’s life is not so easy, because those who already have power will be forgiven for breaking the rules while those who do not will not. 

On some level, Pasang is still expecting Ali to stay in the village and Andy to move there to be with her, while Andy, a little older than Ali, is seemingly unfazed by the prospect of youthful fatherhood but wants to take his family home to New Zealand. Communication issues are only part of the problem, the indigenous community switching between their own language, Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien while adding English into the mix but eventually discovering that in the end they don’t need really words to communicate with Andy but are satisfied that he loves their daughter while the choice should be hers alone. Ali meanwhile is beginning to feel railroaded, as if everyone is trying to make her choices for her. Grandma has already named the baby after Hayung seemingly assuming that she will raise it to be an Atayal adult in the village. 

In parallel, Enoch’s sister Agnes is forced to enlist in the military in order to support the family following their financial ruin each of them accepting that Enoch is not suited to life outside the village and can do nothing other than continue their traditional way of life. But then again, it’s also clear that as an alternative revenue stream the villagers are forced to parade their culture as entertainment for tourists. Pasang even strikes a funding deal agreeing to host a temple on his land where tourists can stay, while attempts to construct a “traditional” Atayal house in the central square to provide cultural education are co-opted by builders from the city who ignore all of Hayung’s advice about how to build. Part of the roof collapses during the opening ceremony. Enoch asks why some of the children are excited about the “real” New Year which they think of as the Spring Festival pointing out that the Atayal celebration takes place after the harvest, Christmas is for Westerners and Dec. 31 the Japanese. In the end it’s up to him alone to stoke the fires of his culture amid an uncertain modernity. 

Gaga screens at USCD Price Center Theater Nov. 6 and Ultrastar Mission Valley on Nov. 7 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Shiro – Hero of Heroes (諸葛四郎 – 英雄的英雄, Lin Yu-chun & Chuang Yung-hsin & Liu Yu-shu, 2022)

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An earnest young man, grieving son, and feisty princess team up to stop the evil Demon Society from becoming all-powerful rulers of their land in an adaptation of classic Taiwanese comic book Shiro – Hero of Heroes (諸葛四郎 – 英雄的英雄, Zhūgě Sìláng – yīngxióng de yīngxióng). Created by Yeh Hong-Chia in the late 1950s, the series has become a nostalgic touchstone for generations of children and is about to reach new ones with a feature-length 3D CGI animation following Zhuge Shiro (Wang Chen-hua) on another exciting adventure to reunite the magical Dragon and Phoenix swords and stop their awesome power from falling into the wrong hands. 

Unfortunately the Dragon Sword has already been lost, much to the king’s regret. When Demon Society raid the palace during a festival and place a mask over the princess’ face, the king puts the land on lockdown and summons the nation’s locksmiths to try and free her only to realise there’s no way to unpick Demon Society’s diabolical locks without giving in to their demands to surrender the Phoenix Sword. Luckily hero of heroes Zhuge Shiro just happens to be in town on the invitation of his locksmith uncle and pledges to help the king salvage his fracturing relationship with his daughter who resents his hesitation to exchange the sword for her wellbeing and make sure Demon Society doesn’t get its hands on the swords’ unleashed power. 

Though this is in many ways a tale aimed at younger audiences, the incredibly witty script moving to the rhythms of traditional opera includes a series of meta jokes for grownups from a silly reference to a limited edition dart and workplace exploitation to subtle digs at societal authoritarianism along with a small cameo from a wandering cartoonist whose work is censored by the powers that be. Having faced Demon Society several times before, Zhuge Shiro is a pure hearted young man wise beyond his years with a strong sense of justice. His first act of goodness is standing up to an officious guard, General Shan, who won’t let a worried father with a sick child enter the town to find a doctor, while he soon earns the respect of the king through his compassion and emotional intelligence in trying to explain the king’s dilemma to the princess. He does however engage in a little sexism which the princess herself is quick to push back against, pointng out that she’s a skilled fighter herself and does not need protecting but will be joining him on this mission whether he likes it or not. 

Similarly, Zhuge Shiro gains another comrade in Zhen Ping (Chiang Tieh-Cheng) who is originally under the misapprehension that Zhuge Shiro is responsible for his father’s death only to later realise it was all the fault of Demon Society. To reunite the swords and save the kingdom, the trio find themselves battling through the villain’s booby trapped lair and discovering that the swords’ power lies in a different place than they first might have assumed, one Demon Society is largely unable to appreciate and therefore to benefit from even if they had managed to hold both swords in tandem. In other words, it’s brotherhood and justice which eventually enable the trio to prosper while the bumbling masked demons only make fools of themselves in their intense greed and villainy. 

Staying close to the aesthetic of the comic book, the film’s highly stylised designs closely match those of the original characters from back in the late 1950s if perhaps a little cuter and rounder in keeping with contemporary CGI animation while it moves to a comic beat inspired by traditional opera interspersed with a few song and dance numbers and exciting martial arts fight scenes as the trio face off against the minions of Demon Society while standing up for justice. Just as the king learns the real meaning of treasure, the trio discover a brotherly bond and a new mission to rid the land of the evils of Demon Society while accepting that even villains can change their ways and should be allowed a chance to redeem themselves, and those who may seem obviously villainous might be alright on the inside. In any case, Zhuge Shiro embarks on what could be the first of many adventures in charming style taking down the bad guys with good humour and righteousness fuelled by the power of friendship.

Shiro – Hero of Heroes screens in Chicago on Oct. 23 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)