Tag: Zero Chou

Splendid Float (豔光四射歌舞團, Zero Chou, 2004)

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A lonely taoist priest with a sideline as a drag artist falls for the siren song of a drifting fisherman in Zero Chou’s mystical vision of love and loss, Splendid Float (豔光四射歌舞團, Yàn Guāng Sìshè Gēwǔtuán). One of very few out lesbian filmmakers currently working in East Asia, Chou’s films more often deal with love between women but her second narrative feature is a melancholy meditation on grief and impossibility revolving around a performer with an itinerant drag act as she struggles to understand why the man she loved couldn’t stay with her forever. 

A taoist priest performing death rituals by day, by night Roy (James Chen Yu-Ming) becomes Rose a drag performer singing sad songs of lost love from the makeshift stage of converted pickup truck with a rainbow roof. It’s one evening when the van breaks down that she first meets Sunny (Chung Yi-Ching), a handsome swimmer who soon becomes her lover only to disappear the next morning leaving behind only a note saying goodbye and a yellow flower. Heartbroken, Rose tries to find him and begins to suspect the worst later discovering that Sunny has apparently drowned at sea. 

The minor irony is that Rose’s day job is as a taoist priest which to say bound up with the rituals of death and grieving yet she struggles to come to terms with Sunny’s absence and is unable to let go of a tragic, fleeting love. Following the rather lengthy opening sex scene, Rose asks Sunny to stay with her longing for a place to settle down together looking for conventional domesticity as a couple, something about which Sunny appears unsure not it seems because of societal pressure but because he is not made for a settled life. Often seen swimming, Sunny is a kind of mermaid happiest in the water which lends his death by drowning an additionally poetic quality but also perhaps aligns his sexuality with a sense of impossibility suggesting Rose will never be able to achieve the fulfilling romance of which she dreams. 

This is further brought home in her frustrated attempts to make contact with Sunny’s spirit, often seeing his ghost but refusing to let him go. Ironically brought in to conduct a death ritual on behalf of Sunny’s mother and sister, she unwittingly hints at their relationship by using the t-shirt he left behind to summon him and thereafter determines to split his soul taking a funeral tablet with her after tossing coins to try and gain his consent only to ignore the result when it implies Sunny chose to leave her and does not want to be possessed by her in death. “We live amongst tradition but still there’s no place for people like us” one of Rose’s fellow performers laments, “look at you and Sunny, together for so long but what are you, just ordinary friends? It’s not like you can just go and tell everyone you’re his widow and take his icon with you.”

Even Roy’s family members are apparently ambivalent, suspecting he might be gay but unsure how to respond to it. They avoid sending him to funerals because he has a reputation for being overly emotional earning the nickname of “the wailing girl “and feel bad about him being teased while also confused that seems so “effeminate”, “not like a man at all”. His aunt, however, a fairly butch older woman asks if she doesn’t look “like a man” while in her full taoist priest outfit, suggesting perhaps that gender is an irrelevance at least in the course of their work. 

Rose, meanwhile, struggles to come to terms with loss while unable to voice her grief. In this quasi-musical, Rose’s songs are the only way she can express her suffering. “No one knows the pain I must face” she sings in a repeated refrain, “smiling and swallowing my tears secretly casting my sorrows to the sea.” Exploring both the vibrancy of traditional taoist practice, the soul guiding ritual described as the last dance of life, along with the precarious existence of the itinerant drag queens, Chou crafts an etherial fairytale of love and loss in which Rose herself becomes a kind of wandering ghost trapped in a rootless existence while yearning to settle down in perpetual search for safe harbour amid stormy seas. 

Splendid Float streams in the UK until 31st October as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Secrets of 1979 (弓蕉園的秘密, Zero Chou, 2021)

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Love is a political act in the latest film from Zero Chou, Secrets of 1979 (弓蕉園的秘密, Gōng Jiāo Yuán de Mìmì). As history repeats itself, a now ageing woman is called back to the past on witnessing the Hong Kong democracy protests triggering memories of the Kaohsiung Incident and her youth fighting for political freedom in martial law Taiwan. Chou’s betrayed heroine dreams of a future in which all voices can be heard and all loves embraced, a future that in some senses may have come to pass, yet tragically too late for some forced to believe that their love must forever remain a secret. 

Malaysian student Shu-lan (Daphne Low) falls for Kuan (Chen Yu), the daughter of a banana plantation owner majoring in art as part of a teacher training programme. The pair draw closer while sharing a room, and a bed though partly because those two things are mainly the same, over the summer while Shu-lan takes a job at the farm but their innocent romance is soon overshadowed by the revelation that Kuan’s brother Siu (Hsu Yu-ting) has become involved with the movement against martial law producing a magazine critical of the government. Though they could never know it, their love will lie at the centre of a political divide, cruelly used against them even while they commit themselves to the battle for freedom and human rights. 

Soon after the film opens, a young man walks into Shu-lan’s classroom with application forms to join the nationalist governing party of the martial law one party state, the KMT. The idea does not seem popular among the students, but some are interested if treating it with a degree of irony explaining that they’d only be joining to take advantage of the generous perks which include free travel back to your hometown to vote and access to scholarships, or else because it may be advantageous in their future careers. Shu-lan is fiercely disinterested and attempts to politely decline, but the recruiter, Chih-hsiang (Sean Sun), has an obvious crush on her and won’t take no for an answer thrusting a form into her hand to think about later while lowkey resentful as she distances herself from him to leave with Kuan. 

Kuan, meanwhile, has just been subjected to an unpleasant grilling in her art class when she tried to stand up for a painter rumoured to be gay provoking a homophobic rant from several of her classmates who then openly mock her for being a lesbian. Perhaps surprisingly the rumour of homosexuality does not cause either of the girls particular problems with the authorities or their fellow students save for further irritating the extremely creepy, generally evil, and cruelly manipulative fascist Chih-hsiang who views it as merely another bargaining chip in his pointless quest to convince Shu-lan who has no interest in men (or members of the KMT) to go out with him. The problems that Shu-lan faces which are partly set up by Chih-hsiang so he can save her from them, are largely to do with her status as a foreign national and involvement with politics accused of collaborating with communists for listening to Chinese folk songs sent by her teacher in Malaysia. 

These are all reasons, along with her treatment at the hands of the authorities, that eventually convince her she must renounce her love for Kuan in order to keep her safe in fear that she too will be implicated as a politically suspicious person. Prior to that, she’d been learning Taiwanese and hoped to stay living on the banana farm with Kuan whose family seem relatively relaxed about the relationship, only for their love to be stamped out by oppressive authoritarianism and the machinations of a petty and jealous man. The bookending sequences set in the present day and featuring a Kuan who seems much older than a woman who’d only be in her mid-60s remind us that though Taiwan may have become a relatively progressive place in which same-sex marriage has been legalised, the battle is never really won as the young people of Hong Kong too campaign for freedom and democracy. But Kuan is left only with her secrets and her sadness stuck in the summer of 1979 and a love never to be told. 

Secrets of 1979 screens at Lexi Cinema on 21st September as part of this year’s Queer East. It is also available to stream in many territories via GagaOOLala.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Spider Lilies (刺青, Zero Chou, 2007)

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“I have no choice but to live in a virtual world” according to the lovelorn heroine of Zero Chou’s ethereal reflection on love and the legacy of trauma, Spider Lilies (刺青, Cìqīng). Two women connected by childhood tragedy struggle to overcome their respective anxieties in order to progress towards romantic fulfilment, eventually freeing themselves only by destroying the image of that which traps them. 

In the present day, Jade (Rainie Yang) is an unsuccessful camgirl with a habit of shutting down her clients on a whim which doesn’t play well with her boss. In an effort to spice up her live show, she decides to get a raunchy tattoo only to realise that the tattooist, Takeko (Isabella Leong), is in fact her long lost first love, a neighbour she took a fancy to at the tender age of nine. For her part, Takeko appears not to remember Jade but cannot deny the presence of her unusual spider lily tattoo, a version of which hangs prominently on her wall. Hoping to maintain contact, Jade decides to get the spider lily tattoo herself but Takeko is reluctant, explaining that the spider lily is a flower that leads only to hell. 

According to Takeko’s master, there is a secret behind every tattoo and the responsibility of the tattooist is to figure out what it is but never reveal it. Thus Takeko crafts bespoke tattoo designs for each of her clients designed to heal whatever wound the tattoo is intended to cover up, such as the ghost head and flaming blades she tattoos on a would-be gangster who secretly desires them in order to feel a strength he does not really have. Her tattoo, however, is intended as a bridge to the past, a literal way of assuming her late father’s legacy in order to maintain connection with her younger brother (Kris Shen) who has learning difficulties and memory loss unable to remember anything past the traumatic death of their father in an earthquake which occurred while she was busy with her own first love, a girl from school. Feeding into her internalised shame, the tattoo is also is a means of masking the guilt that has seen her forswear romance in a mistaken sense of atonement as if her sole transgression really did cause the earth to shake and destroy the foundations of her home. 

Then again, every time Takeko seems to get close to another woman something awful seems to happen. Jade, meanwhile, affected and not by the same earthquake is burdened by the legacy of abandonment and the fear of being forgotten. Living with her grandmother who now has dementia the anxiety of being unremembered has become acute even aside from the absence of the mother who left her behind and the father last seen in jail. “Childhood memories are unreliable” she’s repeatedly told, firstly by Takeko trying to refuse their connection, and secondly by a mysterious online presence she misidentifies as her lost love but is actually a melancholy policeman with a stammer charged with bringing down her illicit camgirl ring. The policeman judgementally instructs her to stop degrading herself, having taken a liking to her because he says he can tell that she seems lonely. 

A kind of illusionary world of its own, Jade’s camgirl existence is an attempt at frustrated connection, necessarily one sided given that her fans are not visible to her and communicate mainly in text. It’s easy for her to project the image of Takeko onto the figure of the mystery messenger because they are both in a sense illusionary, figments of her own creation arising from her “unreliable” memories. Jade wants the tattoo to preserve the memory of love as a bulwark against its corruption, at once a connection to Takeko and a link to the past, but the tattoo she eventually gets is of another flower echoing the melancholy folksong she is often heard singing in which the lovelorn protagonist begs not to be forgotten. 

“I am a phantom in your dream and you too live in mine” Jade’s mystery messenger types, hinting at the ethereality of romance and fantasy of love. Caught somewhere between dream and memory the women struggle to free themselves from the legacy of past trauma and internalised shame, but eventually begin to find their way towards the centre in making peace with the past in a sprit of self-acceptance and mutual forward motion.

Spider Lilies streams in the UK 26th April to 2nd May courtesy of Queer East

Original trailer (English subtitles)