Tag: Wang Ming-Tai

After School (成功補習班, Lan Cheng-lung, 2023)

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In an odd kind of way, Lan Cheng-lung’s autobiographically inspired coming-age drama After School (成功補習班) charts how far Taiwan has come since the mid-90s while pivoting around the figure of Mickey Chen, a hugely influential LGBTQ+ filmmaker who passed away 2018. Chen was in fact Lan’s own cram school teacher and in terms of the film a voice for the future giving the children the permission to be themselves in the post-martial law society even as they struggle to break free of the authoritarian and fiercely patriarchal past. 

In a sense, cram school itself is the manifestation of that culture in that most of the kids have been forced to go there by their parents to pursue futures not of their choosing. The hero Cheng Heng (Zhan Huai-Yun), Lan’s stand in, wants to be a filmmaker but his dad wants him to be a maths teacher. That might be one reason he and his friend Cheng Hsiang (Chui Yi-tai), who lives with his family because problems with his own, spend most of their time messing around and playing childish pranks on the teachers and admin staff. Meanwhile, they’re far mare interested in potential romance than studying with Cheng Hsiang a bit of a ladies man and Cheng Heng nursing a crush on the school’s most popular girl Chen Si (Charlize Lamb). 

Nevertheless, the closeness between the boys gives rise to a few rumours that they may be gay. The idea is only further cemented by an ironic incident in which Cheng Heng sustains an embarrassing injury to his groin while watching a pornographic video he swiped from a cousin little realising that it was actually gay porn. His parents, or really more his father, do not take well to this and see it perhaps as just more evidence of his rebelliousness and lack of respect for his family in his desire to follow his own path rather than the one they’ve set down for him of getting a steady, respectable job as a teacher. 

That’s one reason that the arrival of Mickey (Hou Yan-xi), a recent graduate taking a temporary teaching job to save for studying abroad, is thought so disruptive because he encourages the kids to be who they are not who they’re taught to be. Mickey holds progressive sessions on sex and sexual identity, explaining concepts such sexual orientation and safe sex which is surprising not least because this is a cram school which exists solely to help kids do well on standardised tests rather than give them any broader kind of education. The headmaster, who is also the father of the boys’ friend Ho Shang (Wu Chien-Ho), is by contrast an authoritarian remnant of the martial law era who can’t permit any kind of liberalisation or individualisation and often inflicts corporate punishment on pupils deemed to have transgressed the rules of a polite society. 

But it’s Mickey who tries to help the boys accept and become comfortable with their sexuality and that of others, taking them to a gay bar where he interviews several of the regulars for his documentary. The barman once entered a marriage of convenience and had a child to please his parents but feels deep guilt and regret for the way he treated his wife and his since been disowned by his family. Now he hosts a New Year dinner for others like him who have nowhere else to go because their families have rejected them. The boys too are rejected by their fathers solely on the suspicion of homosexuality while the mothers remain broadly supportive of their children but trapped by those same patriarchal social codes caught between their authoritarian husbands and love for their sons.

Yet even with these more distressing themes, Lan’s film is at times a little too rosy, sticking to its lighthearted tone rather than fully address the implications of society’s attitude to the LGBTQ+ community in the mid-1990s as opposed to that of today in which Taiwan became the first Asian nation to legalise same sex marriage. Nevertheless, it presents a warm-hearted firsthand account of the effect Mickey had on those around him as the teens rebel against the authoritarian past to embrace their freedom and identities, no longer afraid to speak their feelings but determined to be themselves and accept the selves of others rather than live under the constraints of oppressive patriarchy and traditions.

After School screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Eye of the Storm (疫起, Lin Chun-Yang, 2023)

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In the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan was thought of as kind of safe haven which had largely managed to keep the disease a bay allowing many to live their lives more or less normally while much of the rest of the world contended with intermittent lockdowns of varying severity. The reasons for their success are said to lie in their experience during the SARS crisis of 2003. 

To that extent, there’s a kind of eeriness in Lin Chung-Yang’s poignant drama Eye of the Storm (疫起, yì qǐ) in watching the early days of this present pandemic play out 20 years earlier as medical personnel attempt to deal with a new illness about which they know almost nothing save that it appears to have a frighteningly high mortality rate. As the film opens, self-involved surgeon Xia (Wang Po-chieh) is clocking off a few minutes early in an attempt to make it to his daughter’s birthday party, rudely brushing off the complaints of warmhearted male nurse Tai-he (Tseng Ching-hua) and dismissing requests from his colleagues. Leaving in a taxi, however, he’s soon called back to deal with an emergency operation and becomes trapped when the hospital is placed into lockdown after the report of a possible SARS case. 

Unlike so many dramas centring on frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, :Lin does not necessarily portray the medical staff in the best light. As the suspected case was being treated in B Wing it is the first to be shut down and some of the doctors and nurses start a protest refusing to treat patients with SARS resentful that they’ve been locked up with the disease. Meanwhile, in A Wing some of the nurses also go on strike holing themselves up in the rec room and refusing to come out. As Tai-he had been helping out in B-Wing, he is quickly rejected by his peers and exiled there despite having no symptoms while the nursing staff otherwise know that they maybe condemning him to death in sending him to the frontline battle against the disease.

Also on the frontline is journalist Yu-zhong (Hsueh Shih-ling) who snuck into the hospital after a tip off and is determined to let the people know by capturing the chaotic scenes at the hospital first hand. He and Xia eventually end up going through old records to figure out how the virus took hold while Xia mainly spends his time hiding in a storage cupboard and trying not to come into contact with anyone who might have SARS which is not very doctorly. Though originally desperate to get out of the hospital, Xia’s mindset begins to change when he sees how bad things are in B Wing after being charged with transporting food supplies while he later comes to realise that he may bear some responsibility in the rather cavalier treatment of a patient he recently operated on.

Then again, perhaps there is something also a little on the nose in the constant references to the disease’s origins in China while it’s the hospitals choice to use a Mainland construction firm that directly leads to the infection. In any case, Xia eventually beggins to come around realising that it’s selfish of him to refuse to help when the hospital is already so short staffed with some medical personnel on strike and others already falling ill and even dying. Lin lends the tunnel connecting the two wings an eerie quality in the ominous opening and closing of its oversize doors, as if Xia were really descending into hell dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit of yellow overalls. 

Xia had appeared to be a narcissistic surgeon with little interest in his patients. Criticised by Tai-he he clapped back that it’s the nurse’s job to care for them, not his, while continuing to keep his distance and fixating on being allowed to leave the hospital before beginning to empathise with the sick. Yet many other medical staff react in a similar way, overwhelmed by the fear and chaos of the situation while resentful in feeling that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned only later coming to accept the situation and returning to caring for the patients as best they can. Eerily echoing our present times, Lin’s poignant drama eventually finds a kind of serenity even among so much panic in quiet moments of small victories and human solidarity.

Eye of the Storm screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)