Monga

A-

Good-looking tapestry of gang motifs.

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Every country with a film industry makes movies about gangs of youths, to satisfy ready-made audiences eager to buy tickets for big-screen battles starring their proxy selves. Taiwan's 2010 successful version of the genre, set in the mid-1980s, was Monga.

Named for an old rough and raunchy Taipei district, the movie shows locale-specific scenes of young male bonding, homoerotic friendship, street battles and adult gang reality. Five stereotypical young men have fun and games and fights, following character outlines that highlight comic cuteness or simple-mindedness, dramatic leadership qualities and perfectly-posed outsider stares.

Director Doze Taipei 24H Niu (who also plays a mainland gangster) and the excellent cinematographer (Taiwan-resident Jake Pollock, Yang Yang and Pinoy Sunday) wove a good-looking tapestry of gang motifs. The lead actors preen, puff their cigarettes, sport their pecs and make gangsterdom look an adorable lifestyle, until it turns, as film industry morality demands, nasty.

Taipei exchanges

The Mandarin title for Taipei Exchanges (Di 36 Ge Gu Shi) provides a better clue to the quilted nature of the 82-minute Taiwanese indie. In a chic but cluttered coffee bar, 35 bars of soap from cities around the world have tales to be told or exchanged; the final tale has not yet happened. The soaps are just some of the pretty props set in an artfully crafted little movie about young women's dreams and realities. Their "Daughter's Cafe" belongs to Doris (played by very busy and successful Lun-Mai Ocean Heaven/Parking/Stool Pigeon Kwai), her equally-angular sister is Josie (newcomer Zai-Zai Lin); both are charming, perky company, just like good coffees should be.

The offbeat, almost flaky, 2010 feature is writer-director Ya-chuan Hsiao's second; the first was Mirror Image (Ming Dai Zhui Zhu), a decade before, which collected several awards. It spun a similarly light (and even shorter) scenario about bizarre retail experiences, focused on a pawnshop where a young man and his girlfriend collect palm prints and vend unwanted pawned items. In the latest variation, one of the sisters is a business graduate who develops the attention-grabbing idea of getting customers to exchange unwanted collectibles or provide services (from singing to unclogging drains). The girls squabble, dream, get nagged by their divorced mother (in cute but repetitively themed settings), are attracted by the man and his soap bars, attract tourist groups, and prepare the daily cake specials.

It's no surprise to learn see that the real Taipei Tourism Board helped sponsor the movie, which shows the city in well-lit enticing light moods. The movie presumably gained much from its lead executive producer, multi-award-winner (including Cannes, Golden Horses and Venice top prizes) veteran director Hsiao-hsien (Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, Three Times) Hou. The movie's slow-paced, but his usual tedious stylishness isn't overbearingly present.

Although it's a cinematographic delight, and is blessed with some delightful light jazz soundtrack music, and has been edited with panache (and cute mocumentary street interviews with Taipei residents), and is borne airily along by the actors, Taipei Exchanges is just a cute and pretty bauble, as substantial as a perfectly-cooked souffle.

Prince of tears

Hunan-born Yonfan (aka Yeung Fan) holds a special place in Hong Kong's film industry. Best known as a photographer (first; cinematographer second) enchanted by natural and human beauty, colourful settings and romantic messages, he's been a highly distinctive director, an auteur sans equal since 1970 (when he was 23).

His latest (2009) melodrama, Prince of Tears, tells tearful tales of Republican Taiwan during its early years of anti-Communist paranoia and injustices. Somehow, it was nominated as the official Hong Kong entry for that year's Oscar for best foreign-language movie, despite being a Taiwan production and story with much post-production work done in Bangkok. The movie also competed (and also unsuccessfully) at the 2009 Venice film festival.

Yonfan once won a Best Film award, at the 1998 Milan International Lesbian and Gay festival, for Bishonen, his melodramatic overview of gigolos in Hong Kong. I recall going to watch it at the Central's original, large Queen's cinema, and being the only audience member. Yonfan had hired the place for a week (presumably to qualify for competitions requiring public exhibition), hung velvet drapes in the lobby, and produced a lavish souvenir booklet. He clearly had access to large funds.

Presumably, he still does: the executive producer for his latest movie is indie auteur and multi-award-winning writer-director Fruit Chan. Yonfan, as usual, wrote his own screenplay and created his own art designs. He also uttered the narrative notes that ensure the audience knows about plot points and ironies in the moodily mournful story about two young girls whose parents are arrested and imprisoned as suspected spies for the PRC. Their handsome father (Joseph Chang) is an airforce pilot who plays the accordion and loves Slavic music; their beautiful mother (mainland newcomer Zhu Xuan) cooks lovely meals.

Together with them in the charming rustic accommodation and leafy lanes of a Taiwan air base in 1954 are a moody limping military friend with a scarred face (Fan Chih-wei) and an even more beautiful mystery woman (Terry Kwan), the wife of a KMT general (veteran Kenneth Die Another Day Tsang). Their young daughter is a schoolmate of one of the pilot's girls. All will not end prettily, we soon realise in the movie, when a girl's favourite teacher is arrested for espionage, unwisely painting glorious coastal scenery amid exquisitely-hued wind-rustled vegetation in a military zone, and is thrown off the cliff in a bag.

The movie shows the father being executed too, although he reappears at the end of the film. By then we've learned that the oldest child had a different father, her mother had some sort of eye-flashing love affair with the general's wife, who was some sort of agent for something. Yonfan's dreamy (and beautifully dreary) script floats very prettily, but illogically. His end credits state that it was based on a real Taiwan family which experienced similar melodramatics and produced one of the island's better-known (and unidentified) actresses.

Sadly, another Yonfan creation wastes lots of good actors, technical talent and money, albeit prettily.

Au revoir Taipei

Audiences at a handful of international film fests in 2010 (from Berlin to SFO) gave it their top awards, with good reason: Au Revoir Taipei is a charming adolescent rom-com. It's a happy little lightweight cinematic souffle, a tasty entertainment from Arvin Chen, a first-time writer-director whom Wim Wenders co-executive-produced (perhaps explaining why experienced Caucasians are credited with the cinematography and editing).

As so often with Chinese debut features, there's an over-reliance on the Wong Kar-wai "look" - doorways painted red, green lighting and purple lips, rain-soaked back lanes and sloppy cafes, neon lights and strange angles. Pretty to look at and far from menacing in Chen's quirky tale of oddball, goofy Taipei kids during one night of slapsticky gangland antics.

At times, the cuteness and the characters' comic non-viciousness are cloying, especially when the French motif is overstated in the soundtrack of pretend-Parisienne cafe violin music and jazz. The movie's starting point is the dream of slim young graduate Kai (Jack Yao) to follow his girlfriend to Paris. He doesn't act or look old enough to have graduated, he works in his parents' noodle cafe, and he sits on a bookstore's floor teaching himself French. He's mildly cute, while the bookshelf stockist Susie (Amber Kuo) is really cute and a delight to watch.

The supporting cast do wonders with characters who are simple-minded or foolish oddities: shy convenience store clerks, an orange-uniformed gang of ugly young real-estate touts, plain-clothes policemen with girlfriend and obesity hassles, bumbling middle-aged gangsters and a fey and lanky gangster wannabee whose hair-style and moues suggest a Taiwan Peewee Herman.

The moral of the crime caper is predictable: who needs to go to Paris when Taipei's own nightlife, street markets, gourmet snacks and transportation systems are so convenient and friendly? Naturally, Taipei's tourism authorities helped to fund the movie. They got good value if they were intending to appeal to unsophisticated Asian teenagers. Candy is cute, even if it's not very nourishing.

This Taipei is a far cry from stilted old black-and-white Chinese melodramas and crime flicks, clips from which are viewed critically and scornfully, yet lovingly, on late-night TV by various characters throughout the movie. Another cuteness possibly added primarily for its own sake, for the writer-director's amusement. Luckily, many audiences will share the joke.

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.

No puedo vivir sin ti

Taiwanese director Leon Dai gave his 2009 movie a Spanish title for overseas markets, maybe on the assumption that international audiences would be attracted better by the romantic No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti than the prosaic Cannot Live Without You.

That year's Golden Horse Film Festival jurors weren't bothered either way, choosing the movie for Best Film, Best Director and Outstanding Taiwanese Film of the Year awards. It also won the Best Screenplay accolade for Dai and co-writer (and lead actor) Chen Wen-pin.

A deliberately simple, under-stated and stark B&W tale of a simple, poor and uneducated single father and his 7-year-old daughter, the docudrama was based on a real-life incident. The desperate man perched on a high bridge in Taipei, threatening to throw himself and the child off in protest at society's unfairness.

An underwater mechanic and day labourer in the Kaohsiung docks, fell between the cracks in a well-meaning bureaucratic society. In order to register his daughter for school, he needed to be her registered father. He wasn't, and a succession of gently Kafkaesque encounters in various government offices in Kaohsiung and Taipei led to increasing despair. Only one friend, a fellow Hakka schoolmate, could try to help, before the failed suicide and after the man's return from prison to Kaohsiung's docks. The daughter had been taken into state care and placed with unknown foster families.

The credibility of the ending can be disputed, but everything before it is a cinematic delight, beautifully photographed in B&W, shadow and light, showcasing Kaohsiung's harbour with a clarity that evokes the best of Italian neo-realism. Lead actor Chen is totally convincing as a loving father without guile, and Dai's direction and editing meticulously present bureaucrats not as villains but understanding guardians (and prisoners) of legal processes.

Every now and then, details (such as a sidewalk beggar and protest banners) seem designed to arouse, almost subliminally, an audience's consciousness of actual unfairness and hypocrisy in Taiwanese society. Dai, a movie actor since 1997, achieves much within his short (85-minute) second feature (after the very different, very sexy Twenty Something Taipei in 2002). Chen, the co-creator, is a total newcomer. Both are worth watching in the future.