I’m late to the game, but I finally watched Marry My Dead Body (《關於我和鬼變成家人的那件事》, literally “Concerning me becoming family with a ghost”) on Netflix over the weekend (available with English subs). The film did have its moments although not all of the jokes landed to me.
The name in Chinese follows a pattern of using overly wordy titles that started more or less with another film You are the Apple of my Eye (《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》, literally, “Those years, and those girls we chased together”). This formula is a little played out now in popular culture, however, and I think they could have gone with something a little snappier. There’s also a euphemistic tone to the Chinese title, as the marriage part is not stated overtly, referred to just as “becoming family.” The English title, although a little inaccurate in terms of spirit versus corpse, has a touch of humour to it in its echo of the phrase “over my dead body,” so I’d say the English title works quite well, as it reflects the enmity between the two main characters at the outset in typical rom-com fashion.
The film is largely well-meaning in its message: essentially that stereotypes and discrimination are a result of ignorance, and that, once homophobic people interact in a meaningful way with gay people, they begin to see them as human.
Mountains May Depart (《山河故人》 Jia Zhang-ke, 2015) depicts the breakdown of small town culture and a family unit in China, the price paid for the pursuit of the Chinese Dream and ‘going West’.
The film opens with a surreal scene of a group of people dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Although this appears jarring at first glance, the symbolism of the song when sung from a Chinese perspective, ties in with the stated ambition of one of the protagonists, Zhang Jinsheng, to bring the object of his affection, Shen Tao, to the US. In the small town of Fenyang in Shanxi Zhang has a violent falling out with his friend Liangzi over the pursuit of the female lead, Shen Tao. There are then successive jumps through time, from 1996 to 2014 and finally to 2025.
We follow Zhang Jinsheng as he wins Tao’s affections (attempting to bomb Liangzi in the process), they get married and have a baby together, while the spurned Liangzi travels to another province to work in mining. As we jump again, we learn that the marriage has failed and Zhang has taken their son to live in Shanghai, while Shen Tao remains in her hometown. She has limited contact with her son, Dollar, and they have several tense and awkward exchanges when he returns from Shanghai for her father’s funeral.
With the next jump in time, Liangzi returns home after being diagnosed with lung cancer and meets again with Tao in Fenyang where she offers to pay for his treatment. An increasingly unhinged Zhang Jinsheng has taken Dollar to live in Australia, where he has all but forgotten his mother. Zhang himself hangs around with other people from his province, unable to return due to ongoing corruption purges back home and largely unable to communicate with his son, having to resort to Google Translate to hold a conversation. Dollar subsequently develops a romantic attraction to his Chinese teacher, an older woman from Hong Kong (and mother substitute), and announces that he is leaving his father. The film ends with another rendition of ‘Go West’, this time with Tao dancing alone.
As Michelle Huang’s (黃宗儀) points out in her book ‘New Feelings Between China and Hong Kong: The Politics of Emotion in Dreams of Development’ (《中港新感覺：發展夢裡的情感政治》), the culprit in the eventual misery of each of the characters in the film seems to be globalism and new iterations of the “Chinese Dream” that spur people on towards an illusory upward mobility. Contrary to popular representations of the nouveau riche in China as an aspirational identity, Huang suggests the film’s subversion of the conventional perception of the nouveau riche (「新富」) stating:
In Mountains May Depart, the nouveau riche aren’t purely represented as smug members of the developed world, or as those who have forgotten their roots, on the contrary, impoverished people and the nouveau riche become the ‘kitchen waste of history’, with societal development they lose their desires and sense of orientation.
Zhang JinSheng ticks all the boxes of the Chinese success story on the surface, but in reality, he is unmoored in Australia (which although in the cultural west, is ironically east of China), hanging around with a group of fellow exiles from his home province and isolated from his son. Huang talks about how Zhang Jinsheng is never really able to make the conversion from small town mindset to global or international point of view and part of this is represented linguistically. Part of this small-town mentality, is Zhang’s (rather clumsy and over the top at times) hypermasculinity, whether it is his incel-like plot to blow up his friend and rival for the affections of Shen Tao, or the collection of guns he keeps in Australia. This association of small town mindset with traditional gender roles also applies to Dollar, who Shen Tao scolds for the effeminacy she perceives as Shanghai (metropolitan/cosmopolitan) affectations, which she contrasts with the 「爽快」 (lit. frank and straightforward; read masculinity) values of small towns. She angrily removes his cravat and tells him his use of the Chinese equivalent to “Mummy” (媽米) instead of “Ma/Mum” (媽) isn’t manly enough:
-Dollar, why aren’t you speaking to your mother? Call me ma! -Mummy -Mummy? Who taught you to say that? You should be more straightforward, and call me ma. -Ma -Are you a boy or a girl? Who put this thing on you?
The distance between mother and son is also emphasized through the latter’s use of Shanghainese on the phone to the woman we suppose is his step-mother and his inability to speak the local dialect. Huang states that Dollar’s ultimate unhappiness also subverts the conventional portrayals of the 「富二代」 (second-generation wealthy) in China:
Conventionally portrayed as the final victors in the social transition spurred by China’s rise and globalization, the second-generation of wealth in the film is portrayed as rootless. Dollar feels constricted and exasperated by post-socialist development.
Huang points to Tao as the embodiment of the small town culture that we see eroded throughout the course of the film, represented in the decline of Chinese New Year traditions (and Tao’s role in them at the start vs. when Liangzi returns from the other province):
In Mountains May Depart, Jia Zhang-ke uses the character of Shen Tao to embody nativist affection and values, to reflect the small hometown of his memory (or more accurately his imagination).
This evoked for me Shen Cong-wen’s portrayal of the border regions of China, chronicling an era on the brink of its own demise.
Some parts later in the film, particularly those parts filmed in Australia felt a little more melodramatic and corny compared to the rest of the film, but overall the film was well-paced and moving.
The message this film seemed to want to convey was of a tragic unrealized potential of love between two high school guys because the time (1988, just after the end of Martial Law in Taiwan) was not yet right for their love to flourish. The narrative that it seems like we’re supposed to read into the film is that, out of his love for Jia-Han, Birdy pretends not to love Jia-Han back and pursues a female classmate called Banban in order to try and give Jia-Han the opportunity to live a “normal life”.
If we examine the events that actually take place in the film, however, it’s clear Jia-Han crosses boundaries on several occasions, kissing Birdy when he’s asleep. Birdy, in appearance at least, is in love with a female classmate called Banban and is increasingly uncomfortable with Jia-Han’s jealousy and attempts to intervene in his love life.
This culminates in a scene in which, under the pretext of helping Birdy shower, Jia-Han forcibly masturbates him when he’s unable to defend himself due to his injury. The narrative it seems we’re supposed to read into this is that Birdy’s erection is a manifestation of the love he has for Jia-Han that he’s sacrificing for Jia-Han’s own good. This is not a reasonable deduction to make, although it may be a major theme of Japanese porn. Birdy did not consent and repeatedly tries to fend off Jia-Han’s advances. Even if this is some (rather convoluted) act of gallantry by which Birdy sacrifices his own feelings for Jia-Han so that Jia-Han can live as a model straight citizen in society (this is a major break in character for him given his constant impulses throughout the film to defend gay people, including a younger Chi Chia-wei), no means no. From Jia-Han’s perspective at this point in the movie, Birdy could very well be a straight man who is sympathetic to the disgusting way gay characters in the movie are being treated.
The film romanticizes an obsessive jealous idea of what love is, although to some extent the Canadian priest tries to deter Jia-Han from the pursuit of this unrequited love.
The ending of the film echoes this dynamic of teasing and violation of consent, with a middle-aged Jia-Han asking Birdy to come up to his hotel room, only to be refused, but then insisting on walking to Birdy’s hotel room instead, despite the rejection being quite clear.
In my imagination of the end of the film, Jia-Han walks with Birdy to his hotel, asks to come up and is politely rejected again, roll credits. This film left me uncomfortable and to some extent I think if Jia-Han had been cast as a less jaw-droppingly handsome actor, the creepiness would have been more noticeable.
It’s definitely worth a watch, but perhaps we can read it as the unreliable narration of a stalker, rather than a romantic film.
OK, so I couldn’t let a film go by without spotting an interesting bit of Taiwanese. One phrase which stuck with me was 「坩仔」 khaⁿ-á (lit. crucible) which is a contraction of 「坩仔仙」 khaⁿ-á-sian (fairy of the crucible) which is a derogatory term for a male homosexual. You can read a debate about what the term used actually is on ptt here.
“A Sun” is a 2019 film from director Chung Mong-Hong (鍾孟宏), dealing with family relationships, crime and redemption.
The English title, I think is a play on the sounds Sun/Son, as the father in the film, a driving instructor, always says he has only one (a) son when asked by nosy older female students about his family, although the referent changes from one son to the other as the film progresses, first due to his disappointment at his younger son’s failure in school and criminal acts, then due to his elder son’s suicide. The Chinese title 「陽光普照」 (the sun shines over all things) is more a reflection on both sons growing up in the same environment, but having drastically different personal outcomes. The story has echoes of the parable of the two sons in the Bible, in terms of traditional filial expectations:
“But what think ye? A certain man had two sons. He came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’ He answered and said, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he repented, and went. He came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, ‘I go, sir!’ but went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father?”
“The first.”
Jesus said to them, “Verily I say unto you that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering into the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. When you saw it, you didn’t even repent afterward, that you might believe him.”
At first, it appears that A-he is the son who has turned from the path his father wants for him. He gets involved with a dodgy friend, Cai-tou, who goes too far in trying to intimidate someone and lands them both in prison by cutting off the guy’s hand. The family also find out that A-he impregnated his girlfriend not long before going into prison. His brother, on the other hand, has perfect grades and is the apple of his father’s eye. In the end, however, it is A-he who ends up working hard at two jobs, marrying and having a son, while the elder son takes his own life, seemingly due to a combination of being bad at talking to girls, rejection from his brother and the pressure his dad puts on him. Both sons are led to completely different outcomes by the same circumstances, and neither is happy.
Although the film has been described to me as highlighting the value of perseverance, this interpretation is thrown into question by the final twist. The only reason Caitou doesn’t succeed in destroying A-he’s attempt to rebuild his life and drawing him back into the criminal underworld, is that A-he’s father murders him. This seems an unlikely outcome in reality, and one might imagine many young offenders like A-he just getting pulled back into crime. The difficulty in finding redemption for people just released from jail is showcased by the series of interviews A-he goes to, just to be rejected when he tells them where he’s been for the last year and a half. Even A-he’s dad’s job is put into jeopardy by the appearance of Caitou’s dad at his workplace, desperate to find money to pay compensation to the victims. This was another interesting aspect of the film, in that the financial repercussions of criminal acts in Taiwan often fall on the families of the perpetrator.
Overall it is a very compelling film and well-shot. I think there could have been more resolution over the brother’s storyline, as I think the suicide was a little too easy and cliché in terms of Taiwanese drama. The appearance of the ghost of the brother bringing father and son together was also my least favourite part of the film, but led to one of my favourite scenes, when the son served the father in the Family Mart.
For me this film doesn’t work for completely the opposite reason that another film by this director, Ice Poison, didn’t work. Whereas Ice Poison is centred around the rather hackneyed trope of “young man led astray by damaged young girl”, this film is rather unclear in its voice and direction.
The film is underlaid with a pseudo-neo-colonial gaze, as much of it is pure exposition aimed at a Taiwanese audience, what people earn in relation to wages in Taiwan, what the different smuggled Chinese imports cost etc. This is not an unworthy goal, given that South East Asian workers are reported to have faced substantial discrimination and exploitation when employed in Taiwan and China, but I’m not sure if this makes the film interesting beyond its Taiwanese context. Otherwise the kind of poverty that they suffer, although awful, is rather unexceptional: the struggle to find work and support oneself and one’s family.
Temple; Source: Return to Burma
Not much happens in the film and I felt that, although the director might be aspiring to capture the fatalistic outlook of the characters in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films in the face of tragedy, the tragedies seemed too distant from the core of the film to give the impassivity of the protagonist any gravity in contrast. We hear his sister was kidnapped and forced to marry an older Chinese man, but she’s resigned herself to her circumstances and is wealthier than the rest of her family now, with two kids that she loves (interestingly Ice Poison shows us a woman who makes a different choice, in that she runs away from her husband in China and, long story short, she ends up in jail for drug-dealing (moral lesson: stay with your kidnapper?)). While I might criticize that sentiment, it underlines the desperate poverty of many of the people featured in his films. It’s also a common trope in the Chinese anti-modernist tradition, in which writers like Shen Cong-wen suggested that though tradition might seem overly exploitative or repressive of a certain group or class (i.e. women), the discretionary power inherent in traditional social relations tended to mitigate this harshness in everyday practice and that “modernity” could actually be more repressive in its lack of this discretionary power (see his short story 〈蕭蕭〉).
There is no real exploration of the political state of Myanmar (Burma) in the film (it occurs in the run-up to substantial political change) and the regime is largely invisible, other than the rather amusing pro-government songs that play, praising the new congress and a vague reference to strict anti-smuggling measures. This in a way reinforces the neo-colonial idea that the film is aimed solely at creating “Taiwanese guilt” for the way they take advantage of this poverty, which, although it may have some merit, doesn’t do anything to address any of the domestic causes of this poverty. Nor is there any exploration of the ethnic conflicts that have surfaced in the country over the last decades. This means that the telling of this story of poverty is so universal, that it would have had to take a more interesting narrative line or adopted a more interesting technique to keep it from being a rather monotonous retelling of what we’ve all heard before. I almost feel that Ice Poison was an attempt at breaking from this monotony by staging a romance, it’s just a pity that it felt so… staged.
This film is set in and around Lashio in Northern Shan State in Myanmar, a region populated by many ethnic Chinese. Some are later immigrants, while others are remnants of the retreating Nationalist Army – posted there as guerrilla forces after the main force retreated to Taiwan. Conflict between rebels here and the Myanmar central government spilled over into Yunnan province recently when a bomb dropped by a Myanmar Air Force plane killed some villagers there.
The film deals with a very current issue as the civil war in Myanmar between government forces and northern ethnic rebel groups continue. China has been struggling to outdo the US in wooing the government and the main opposition ahead of general elections there next year, although illegal border trade with China is believed to be the main supply line for rebels in the north. Chinese business people are also responsible for a lot of the illegal logging and mining taking place in the region (despite getting permits from northern rebels, many of them are aware that logging is illegal in Myanmar).
This had the unfortunate effect of raising my expectations for the film, as despite being located in a fascinating part of the world, I felt that the “love story” wasn’t done in a convincing way. The female protagonist returns from China where she has married a substantially older man, from whom she seemingly wants to escape. She travels home for the death of her grandfather, taking him funeral clothes from his hometown in Yunnan. She is driven home by a farmer-turned motorcycle driver, who is not very successful at his new job. She meets him again when he takes a message to her from the town, and eventually she proposes that they go into the meth business together, as her cousin is in the business and can set up deliveries for her. They fall in love while working together and both start using from their own supply. Eventually they get caught on a delivery and the male lead flees the scene, leaving her with all the blame. He then flees back to his rural village and appears to be in great mental trauma. The process of the female lead stripping the male lead of his innocence was portrayed in montage style, so we end up feeling distanced from the process which would have drawn us in and made us identify with the two of them. The girl’s life in China is never really presented in a way that allows us to understand in a visual sense why she comes back and what motivates her to get involved in the drug trade, as we just learn about her treatment in China through phone calls with her mother in law.
The film is beautifully shot and the issues it deals with, the rise of amphetamine in Myanmar and Southeast Asia and the poverty of Chinese ethnic groups in Myanmar, are interesting, although they get a more interesting examination elsewhere. Check out the references below for a more interesting analysis on how the meth trade is affecting China and for more news on Myanmar and South East Asia from a news site run by exiles from Myanmar.
That said, I thought that certain scenes were moving, like the death scene of the grandfather at the start of the movie and the bookend-style scenes on the male lead’s family plot at the start and end of the movie. The film does achieve its end in the sense that I was convinced of the frustration felt by these people and that there is no way out for them other than death from starvation or criminal behavior and prison, however, I felt this could have been achieved with a lot more pathos if the characters and the love between them had been more three dimensional than the “romantic montage” allowed for.
This is a slow-brewing documentary and Taiwanese director, Yao Hung-yi (姚宏易) clearly shares a love of long but poignant camera shots with executive director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢). The documentary is about Chinese artist and actor Liu Xiaodong (劉小東) going back to his hometown of Jincheng in China’s north-western Liaoning province to paint his childhood friends. Liu was a producer on Devils On the Doorstep, which I reviewed here, and starred in the film The Days (《冬春的日子》), which I haven’t yet seen.
The Chinese title of this documentary translates literally to “A home without a spouse, the city of the past.” It is directed by Mickey Chen (陳俊志), who wrote quite a biographical book Taipei Dad, New York Mom (《台北爸爸紐約媽媽》) a few years ago. I’m halfway through it, but I would recommend what I’ve read so far – as it is a touching account of a gay man’s life without being trite or shmaltzy. Continue reading →
This is a guest post from blogger Garrett Dee which offers a different perspective on a film I reviewed a little while ago, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin. Check out Garrett’s blog here.
Devoid of musical background and utilizing the now smog-covered skies over much of China as its primary color scheme, Jia Zhangke’s most recent film A Touch of Sin presents to the viewer an aggressive portrayal of modern China in which the average citizen fights a sometimes life-or-death struggle for their societal niche. Spanning a series of four short vignettes, each focusing on a single character and based (partially) on real-life events, Jia’s engaging film seems meant to be viewed as a loosely-fantastical interpretation of a Middle Kingdom in which what has been thought of as a traditionally communal society has become atomized by wealth, power, and frustration.
It is the casual method with which Jia peppers the plot with violence, which is neither discussed or lingered upon for too long a frame, that appears more crucial than the violence itself. I am reminded in a way of the titular character of the novel American Psycho, who intersperses his daily routine with random acts of murder in such a nonchalant way: a killing of a homeless man during a coffee break here, murdering a prostitute before going to a nightclub there, and so on.
Jia’s film’s violence, however, seems to want so say something about his homeland in that very circumspect way that many Chinese artists (see, Mo Yan and company) seem to have perfected given the limitations under which they labor. In most of the vignettes, the characters are only driven to violence after suffering some sort of injustice. This seems in part, though, due to the ubiquity with which violence is dealt out in Jia’s China, the young woman in particular suffering through several bouts of violence with no visible reaction from onlookers, who have no apparent qualms about a woman being forcefully thrown against a car and wandering into an inexplicably unattended snake pit.
The exception to this theme of flight from some kind of persecution seems to be the second vignette, the story of the young man returning to his family village to celebrate his mother’s birthday before murdering a woman and bystander in order to steal the woman’s purse. Based on the factual incident of Zhou Kehua, a gunman suspected of murdering nine people before he was finally gunned down by Chinese police in 2012, his acts of brutality appear to be somewhat cathartic, a symptom of the same restlessness that has driven him from city to city in such a driftless manner.
Indeed, this listless mobility weaves into the narrative throughout the final three vignettes and seemed to be one of the strongest unifying themes of the film as a whole. The characters seem to have little compunction against abandoning their place of abode for somewhere new, whether out of necessity or, in the case of the Zhou character, for the sheer desire to be an abandoner of past and family in favor of something new. China is indeed undergoing the largest mass migration in human history, and the way in which these characters constantly reshuffle their lives around jobs and lovers, alighting at their family homes before departing for parts unknown, seems realistic when set in this context.
The order in which Jia chose to place each of these vignettes appears to form a kind of meta-narrative, descending from the high vantage point of characters who proactively seek redress and agency towards a state of utter hopelessness in the face of a bleak future, driving them towards either death or a profound detachment. The final scene, in which the young woman, who we last see as having cut her hair short and fabricated a new identity, stumbling aimlessly through the barren landscape before joining a crowd of blank faces gazing at a puppet show ends the film on a hollow, bitter note.
This is, after all, Jia’s puppet show, one in which he cruelly dangles his marionettes in agony before cutting their strings and smashing them on the ground. In Jia’s version of China, though, the real puppeteers seem to be the most wealthy and powerful, whose fortunes and statuses allow them to not only afford lavish lifestyles in significant disparity from the meager existence of the various protagonists, but also permit them to do as they please with impunity. However, the initial vignette, is an answer to this problem, a fantasy in the style of the 2011 film God Bless America in which Jia gets to have some darkly humorous fun of his own as his protagonist sets about literally blowing the heads off of those who have wronged him.
Jia’s fascinating film serves his homeland up to audiences as a cynical, lawless society in which violence permeates daily life and wealth is the only respected authority until it annulled at the barrel of a gun or the edge of a knife. Jia stays away from explicit criticism of the policies that have led to this sort of situation, but the implications of the desperation and restlessness with which he portrays the lives of his main characters suggest these are but a microcosm of problems on a macro scale.
The nicest thing one can say about this film is that it gives an idea of what it was like growing up as a straight boy in Taiwan for the generation born in the 1980s, or at least an idealized “idol drama” version of it – but I think that this is done in a more interesting way in Eternal Summer (《盛夏光年》), which incorporates a gay story line and has more complex character development beyond the Taiwanese “everyman” represented in this film and even Winds of September (《九降風》). Based on a short story by Giddens Ko, a Taiwanese blogger-cum-novelist, You Are the Apple of My Eye is an extended idol drama, a dreary recounting of the author’s high school and university years. The humor in the film incorporates several wank jokes reminiscent of American Pie, but in this film these just came off as weird as the film tries to be an idol drama and The Inbetweeners at the same time, so the protagonist is a compromise between the typical Taiwanese drama male lead and an inbetweeners-style comically unself-aware weirdo and the balance didn’t quite work here, as he just came off as cocky. Continue reading →
