Parking

Chung Mong-hong's Parking contains a remarkable trio of debut performances, as writer, director and cinematographer, by the young Taiwanese movie-maker. The 2008 showcase for his talents was screened at many film festivals, collecting awards in Taipei (Golden Horse for Best Art Direction, and Critics award) and Hong Kong (Best New Talent, and Audience Favourite).

At first sighting, many audiences may have dismissed it as an overly eager tribute to Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai and his key art director/editor (William Cheung) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle). Wong usually wowed critics with scrappy scenarios soaked in artful lighting and colour effects. For Parking, Chung inter-wove five plots in the tale of an unhappily-married young man, whose car is trapped overnight in a Taipei street by double-parkers. Chung's art director adorned the sets with Doyle-style dabs and swathes of colour or moody shadows.

The man is on his way to his estranged wife for dinner and stops to buy cakes. Blocked from driving away from the run-down street, he seeks the double-parked car's owner and encounters a one-handed barber making fish-head soup, an old couple and their grand-daughter who think he's their executed son and father, a mainland Chinese prostitute and her vicious pimp, and a bankrupt Hong Kong tailor pursued by a gang of loan sharks.

It's just about feasible that such a motley and melodramatic crew of characters might all inhabit the few occupied units in neighbouring buildings. Some of the deliberately stagy conversations are not so easily acceptable; neither is the man's willingness to enter these strangers' lives and risk his life for them. Yet the allegorical ambitions (if not the meanings) of the movie are clear, prompting an audience to forgo reality judgments. The fine cast of actors dispel any lingering doubts: they present credibly interesting people living on knives' edges. If there's a link between the sub-plots, other than danger and death, it's motherhood; the characters provide enough oddball interest.

The pimp is played by Leon Dai, who gained the screenplay and directing Golden Horses the next year for his own creative debut, No Puedo Vivir ...; the tailor is a rich cameo role for Hong Kong's Chapman To; lead actor Chen Chang is a much-nominated actor who's worked in various Wong films.

Several loose ends are tied up in the finale, with a recited moral conclusion, that may have upset movie critics. Hong Kong audiences loved it, though, and Chung's second film (2010), Fourth Portrait, will be watched with high hopes.