By Brian Hu
2008 was the year Taiwanese audiences started caring about the domestic film industry again. But there are plenty of other reasons to celebrate.
At a co-production seminar attached to the Golden Horse Film Festival, director Kevin Chu Yen-ping noted that in previous years, it would have been embarrassing for Taiwanese audiences to admit they wanted to see a local film; however, the unprecedented success of Wei Te-sheng's Cape No. 7 made spurning local films the true embarrassment in 2008. Chu is right. Years ago, "support local films" was a flimsy government slogan akin to propaganda. Now, "support local films" is something movie fans tell each other, pumping ticket sales and curbing piracy. As a result, Cape No. 7 pulled in over US$7 million in Taipei alone, while other films like Orz Boys and The Legend of Formosa in 1895 rode Cape No. 7's momentum to impressive box office.
But Taiwan's Cape fever monopolized the discourse on Taiwanese cinema, making it seem that Taiwanese cinema should be split into pre-Cape and post-Cape eras. The film was heralded as such a revolution that most forgot that Taiwanese cinema in 2008 was not just a sudden shock to the system, but that it followed 2007, 2006, 2005, etc, emerging out of past aesthetic and thematic trends, and a result of various government policies, financing patterns, and phenomena of transnational distribution. Cape No. 7 caught the most tailwind and rocketed into uncharted territory. But it was not alone. In 2008, many commentators rushed to proclaim a "new new wave." Perhaps there is indeed something brewing, but this insistence on newness, with Cape No. 7 as the center of the revolution, unjustly makes Wei Te-sheng's film the standard by which all future Taiwanese films are to be compared.
In December, Cape No. 7 lost the top prizes at the Golden Horse Awards, to the astonishment of everyone in the audience, especially because the entire ceremony up to that point had been a four-hour tribute to the film, with musical numbers, short films, and speeches presented to celebrate the significance of Cape No. 7 within the history of Taiwanese cinema. Cape No. 7's ultimate loss (to Peter Chan's Warlords) was an awkward reminder that Cape No. 7 is not sacred -- it was a phenomenal success yes, even a terrific film, but there are better films and different styles and traditions, pointing to alternative paths Taiwanese cinema have and can still take.
Indeed, despite the way the press homogenized the industry, Taiwanese cinema in 2008 boldly pointed in multiple directions, often quite successfully. Most years, I'd have to strain to list ten solid Taiwanese narrative feature films, and even if I did, most of them would look very similar (teen romances, obscure art films). The following are what I found to be the year's best narrative feature films. I didn't include documentaries (which for a while surpassed fiction films in quality and box office) partly because they play by different criteria, but mostly because I didn't see enough to adequately represent them. I also limited myself to films that got local theatrical distribution.
Of my ten, three are about lesbian relationships, three involve Taiwan-Japan relations, and two are directed by women. None are directed by the usual suspects Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, both of whom have been absent from local productions since 2005. Lastly, I suspect my first two choices will be controversial because they were far from the most acclaimed Taiwanese films of the year. Yet they've been stuck in my head since I saw them, so I'm sticking to them now.
1. Drifting Flowers 漂浪青春
dir: Zero Chou 周美玲
Though the pangs of lesbian identity play a tad too aggressively here, Drifting Flowers is Zero Chou's best feature to date because its narrative structure is slyly innovative, because the music is fantastic, but above all, because the film is just so damn romantic: young lovers discover their sexual identities, and an old couple discovers new reasons why they're in love. From the hypnotic opening shot of a blind singer against blood red wallpaper, I knew Drifting Flowers was going to be a transcendent experience and I was right. As in Splendid Float, Drifting Flowers sweeps our emotions with old-school music and time-honored romantic sensibilities, but gives them a queer twist that challenges our notions of traditional values and modern sexualities. Moments in Drifting Flowers reminded me less of Taiwan than of alternate worlds lined with beaded curtains, where women drift to each other to the lonely chords of a bar accordion.
2. Candy Rain 花吃了那女孩
dir: Chen Hung-I 陳宏一
Like watching Chungking Express for the first time, sitting through Candy Rain is a revelation. As with Wong Kar-wai's classic, Candy Rain is composed of several bite-size episodes -- mostly cute fun, even superficial. On their own, these are fluffy treats with little nutritional value. Together, they are quadruply saccharine but make for an unforgettable sugar high that takes us through lesbian passion, solitude, nostalgia, and innocence, before arriving at sheer madness in a final episode that explodes into near abstraction: repetitions, movements, colors, music, and noises send us off through baptism by candy. The film uses music video aesthetics without denigrating them and without pandering to its young audience. It knows what makes music videos move us emotionally and does so efficiently and without ever losing sights on its purpose: to capture the sweeping fervor of young love, however naïve it may be.
3. Orz Boyz 冏男孩
dir: Yang Ya-che 楊雅喆
Weirdly enough, the top three films on this list are structured into short segments. In Orz Boys, those segments are episodes from a childhood friendship between two young boys. Much of it is familiar coming-of-age fare: their relationship is complicated by money, girls, responsibility. But Orz Boys rises above the rest because it's too much a kid's comedy to be weighed down by adult clichés. Except for the inspiringly ambiguous ending, the film is primarily a series of wonderful gags, misunderstandings, and quick thrills, topped off with my favorite Taiwanese scene of the year: a boy says goodbye to his childhood crush by playing one last game, rendered in sublime slow motion.
4. Winds of September 九降風
dir: Tom Lin Shu-yu 林書宇
Winds of September is A Brighter Summer Day for the strawberry generation. In many ways, it's like Edward Yang's classic in its folding together of the national, the social, and the personal. The fall of a gang of small-time high school hoods echoes the fall of a nation's baseball heroes. But unlike its New Cinema predecessors, Lin's film is hip and sexy; you're as enticed by the hot boys and girls as you are by the national allegory. The bold scene of the young men skinny-dipping at night captures perfectly that baffling junction between innocence and impropriety, at a moment in which their collective motivations -- masculine, fraternal, antisocial -- splash together in a pool ridden with confused sexual energy.
5. Cape No. 7 海角七號
dir: Wei Te-sheng 魏德聖
Enough has been said of Cape No. 7, by others as well as myself. All I'll add here is that Cape No. 7 is the most entertaining Taiwanese film of the year -- a perfect blend of melodrama, music, and romance with never a dull moment, put together with the mind to keep audiences laughing throughout. Not since Formula 17 has Taiwan had a film that demonstrates mastery of Hollywood structure, while incorporating distinctively home-grown sensibilities. Audiences felt happy after watching Cape No. 7: happy to sing along, happy to be Taiwanese, and above all, happy to be entertained.
6. Parking 停車
dir: Chung Mong-hong 鍾孟宏
Parking is the most radical re-envisioning of Taipei's look since Tsai Ming-liang scraped up his version of it 15 years ago. But Chung Mong-hong doesn't jazz up the city to bring out the dystopia. The Taipei of Parking isn't that of the transnational metropolis or the new Asian global city -- it's that of a Lexus commercial. The colors are vivid, the compositions flamboyant. Everything shimmers, even the cracks on the walls. Which makes the misadventures of Chang Chen and friends that much more sexily calamitous. Everything that can go wrong does, but the world is so slick and glossy that it plays as pure farce. Jack Kao, Leon Dai, and Chapman To keep things surreal with their quirks, and Chang Chen's nervously inexpressive response to it all makes Parking the funniest Taiwanese film of the year.
7. God Man Dog 流浪神狗人
dir: Singing Chen 陳芯宜
The most ambitious Taiwanese film of the year is God Man Dog, a Crash-like collision of ethnicities and religions. But if Paul Haggis's film is self-important and serious-minded, God Man Dog is curiously bonkers, as off-balance as Jack Kao's limp and as off-key as Hiromichi Sakamoto's odd score. Scanning the cast of characters -- there's a championship eater, a pair of scam artists, a driver of a giant Buddha, two sets of depressive married couples -- you find little reason for their comparison. In fact, director Singing Chen keeps the thematic relationships between stories painfully obtuse, but alas, there they are, she seems to say, take it or leave it. For those who stay, the effect is weirdly spiritual -- the narrative strands mapping an absurdist world of surprising order.
8. Soul of a Demon 蝴蝶
dir: Chang Tso-chi 張作驥
2008 finally saw the release of Chang Tso-chi's follow-up to his acclaimed Best of Times. Soul of a Demon isn't as powerful -- aesthetically or thematically -- as that 2001 feature, but it is no less uncompromising a vision of Taiwan's criminal underbelly. But Soul of a Demon, like Chang's previous films, is no gangster pic; rather it's a portrait of regular people caught up in shady dealings etched deeply in a community's history. Here, it is the underworld connections between Taiwan and Japan, and at the center is a family destined to crumble. Chang's achievement isn't the magical realism he's become associated with (though there are some flights of fantasy throughout). Instead, it's the sense of gloom that permeates everything from the color scheme to the camera movements to the characters' faces, which collectively portray Taiwan's historical roots as volatile instead of inspirational. Call Soul of a Demon the anti-Cape No. 7.
9. What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?! 情非得已之生存之道
dir: Doze Niu 鈕承澤
If it weren't for the obnoxious second half, Doze Niu's irreverent What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?! would easily have found itself near the top of the list. That's because the first half -- a mockumentary about the making of the film we're watching -- sets up a potentially scathing exposé of Taiwanese media and politics, all while keeping us laughing and on the edge of our seats. Doze Niu plays himself: a soap-opera director looking to do something truly different with a government film grant, so he decides to take to the streets with a Punk'd-type romp through anybody in his way. Unfortunately, the second half confirms our fears that Niu's character is more asshole than ass-beater, which would be okay except for the fact that the film drifts from a deconstruction of the media to a deconstruction of Doze Niu, who turns out to be not very interesting. Though the final scene redeems things, by then it's too late. Yet it's impossible for me not to recommend the film, for it showcases Doze Niu's undeniable ambition and gift for comedic self-deprecation. Doze: if you can stomach more, please keep it coming.
10. Miao Miao 渺渺
dir: Cheng Hsiao-tse 程孝澤
The end of 2007 saw Cheng Wen-tang's Summer's Tail, one of the best entries in that most popular of Taiwanese genres: the high school romance. Miao Miao follows up nicely. There's nothing here you haven't seen before, but never has the genre felt so clean and professional. Perhaps it's the Hong Kong money (the film has Stanley Kwan's name attached and is made by Jet Tone Productions), or perhaps it's a sign of the genre's maturity, but Miao Miao is a perfection of all the generic elements: students' coming-of-age, queer themes, pop songs, soft focus photography, whimsical characters. The latter is taken to the limit (and perhaps beyond) by Chang Yung-yung (aka Sandrine Pinna), the Taiwan film industry's favorite new starlet. 2008 was a breakthrough year for Chang, who also starred in Chang Rong-ji's terrific short film The End of the Tunnel, in which she impressively held her own when the film's success hung in her ability to balance sentimentality and believability.
Biggest disappointment: Kung Fu Dunk 功夫灌籃
dir: Kevin Chu Yen-ping 朱延平
It may be odd that the Jay Chou blockbuster Kung Fu Dunk could be called "disappointing," as if anybody thought it'd actually be good. The "disappointment" isn't that it failed expectations, but rather that, once again, Kevin Chu Yen-ping demonstrates why he's one of the most capable directors in Taiwan when it comes to storytelling, directing actors, and putting together set-pieces, only to succumb to disorganization, chaos, laziness, and disinterest about 1/3 of the way through the film. As a result, the special effects look pasted on, the talented actors come off as clowns, and the story degenerates into pure tedium. All of Wei Te-sheng's skills as a commercial filmmaker Chu Yen-ping has as well -- the difference being that Chu hasn't shown any passion for his films in over a decade. Kung Fu Dunk isn't the worst Taiwanese film of 2008 (that lofty distinction goes to Button Man, about as broke a thriller as you can imagine), but it's a good example of why for years, even the best of Taiwanese cinema could never succeed.
Back to APA's Best of 2008 issue
Published: Friday, January 2, 2009
