Parking (停車) (2008, Taiwan)
I vaguely remember having heard buzz about this film when it came out last year, and that it was chosen for Cannes. Really good film, I was very impressed by it. It's a bit like the old Scorsese cult classic After Hours, where the most routine task is rendered impossible by a series of farcical, improbable, unforeseeable and frustrating circumstances.
In this case, all the main character wanted to do was buy a cake to help mend over a row he had earlier with his better half. Finding no parking near the cake shop, he does what any Taiwanese person would do – he parks illegally to run a simple errand. Just as he leaves his car, a parking space comes available, and he does what any Taiwanese person wouldn't do – he moves his car into the legal parking space. Hilarity ensues. Or not.
Actually, that he moves his car into the legal space isn't implausible. People who are socially responsible like that are very rare here, but they are here. So that move says something specific about him in the film – he's basically good people. And we all know what happens to good people.
I might classify this film as an ironic suspense comedy of errors. There's a suspense element in that you're always wondering what's going to happen next, but it's not a suspense film. It's not a comedy, you never bust out laughing, but there are amusing, laughable moments. There's irony involved, but it's not a cheeky film. The irony is measured, as is the pace of the movie, which is neither fast nor slow.
The film displays good emotional depth and character empathy, and the director has a masterful way of doling information out to build up a situation or reference back to a character's motivation or will have further consequences, where one decision will have one immediate repercussion but then come back later with a different result.
There is a definite point to this film about consequences and situations as the director adds bits showing how other people's situations can be worse or how bad things can really get. The unusual catharsis of the ending wouldn't have happened if he didn't make the decisions he made, and gone through all the crap he went through. It all fits together nicely with the information the director doled out through the film. And it's important to note that the main character's attitude through the whole thing is key. He's basically good people, but he reacts, he gets pushed, he gets pushed too far, he responds reasonably realistically.
It's not perfect. Some exposition scenes run a little long, and maybe some scenes were unnecessary and not all of the pieces fit, but that's easy for an audience member to nit-pick at, but much harder for a director to assess while editing reels and reels of film. Forgivable. Not all the why questions are answered, there are some inconsistencies. The female lead was probably miscast (she's a current "it" girl in Taiwan), and it was probably a mistake to make her occupation a model. That didn't really fit. Still forgivable.
Highly recommended for fans of indie film and irony. 8 out 10 tomatoes.
Su mi ma sen, love (對不起, 我愛你) (2009, Taiwan)
After panning so many romances recently, what could have possessed me to rent yet another romance? Well, from the picture on the back of the DVD case and the little bit of Chinese I have the patience to read in a video store, I was guessing it was set in Kaohsiung, where my family is from. Just that, I knew, was going to make me rent/endure it sooner or later.
Also, the hint of Japanese influence in the English title and that the Japanese actress who appeared in last year's local smash hit "Cape No. 7" is in it (that's even printed on the cover) made me think, for some unknown reason, that this might not be just another dumb romance.
But all this panning of romances, which clearly is not a film genre I appreciate, gets boring. So let's see if I can't say something good about this direct-to-DVD rental.
It's about a Japanese woman who works as a model/actress in Taipei. After ruining a photo shoot, she assumes she has the next day off and goes to the southern city of Kaohsiung. She loses her wallet and runs into a local guy who helps her out and quickly pronounces their meeting is fate. Hilarity ensues. Or not.
They end up spending the day together, sharing anecdotes about love and their lives and backgrounds; he always having it in his mind that he wants to
OK, that was boring, too. Now for the panning.
The director opens the movie with a shot – the same shot – cut about 8 different times in quick MTV-like succession in brazen announcement that he prefers style over substance.
Steadicam? We don't need no steenking steadicam. Bungie cord! Shaky camera (I was getting a little nauseous during some scenes – and this is on a 19" tv screen), subjects moving all around the screen and cheap camera tricks are apparently artistic. I missed the memo. You have to be a master like Wang Kar-wai to pull it off.
The narrative is immediately bungled as the above-mentioned scene actually comes later in the movie. After the opening credits, the movie jumps back one day earlier, but having been exposed to that opening tidbit and not being told it's one day earlier, the information given is totally misleading, and this isn't a spoiler, it's doing the film a favor – his opening narration isn't about her, despite the misleading visuals.
What's to like about these two annoying, self-absorbed characters who we're supposedly hoping will come together in some realization of or about love? In the first scenes developing their characters, we find that they're both incompetent and irresponsible at work and are rude and flippant to their employers. We're supposed to sympathize or feel bad for them? We're supposed to wish for something better for them because of their bad situations? I thought they should have been fired. I would have fired them. Even if I weren't their boss.
The dialogue made me wretch several times. There were some Kaohsiung geographical problems that only a local would know, like that she didn't need to take a taxi to go from a cafe on the Love River to that Catholic church – they're about 200 meters away from each other. But, of course, any film has these problems. Off the top of my head "When Harry Met Sally" (Chicago, at the beginning) and at least one Dirty Harry film (San Francisco) had geographical problems.
On the plus side, the filmmaker did do a good job creating a feel of loneliness and isolation, I'll give him that even though it's not the most challenging thing to do in a film. I'm not sure that was the motivation to shoot in Kaohsiung, which although is Taiwan's second largest city, is still a boondock compared to urban and modernized Taipei.
And he does catch a few bits of local history in the unfolding. At the beginning, the guy rides away from his house along what I recognized as Park Road – before a bunch of blocks got torn down to make way for a park – and the character later mentions that his home is going to be torn down to make way for a "lawn", and so he's afraid if his father ever does return from running away, he won't be able to find him.
The film, ostensibly set on specifically May 18-19, 2008, also had scenes in the freshly opened KMRT subway system, whose red line went into operation early last year, and the people taking photos in the station was a common sight.
I give this film a rotten 4 out 10 tomatoes, recommended for anyone interested in seeing Kaohsiung on film, Taiwanese indie film, and for total, hopeless, sappy romantics.
