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Is it a splendid float? You decide. Courtesy of www.taipeitimes.com
Filtering Asian Cinema
Festivals are popping up everywhere but not all films are treated equal. APA looks at some of the Taiwanese films shown at the Newport Beach and VC Film Festivals.
Los Angeles severely lacks a true international film festival on the level of Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, or Chicago. The annual AFI festival, while admirable, is still too industry-centered and thus a significant notch below those which pick from the high-profile premieres at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Pusan, collect the best new local talent, and make a few international discoveries of their own. This makes such events as the Iranian, Chinese, and Taiwanese film series at the UCLA Film and Television Archive ever more valuable, and it also puts greater pressure on smaller festivals like the VC Film Fest and the Newport Beach International Film Festival to pick up the many treasures AFI neglected or was unable to bring to the Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
In terms of delivering foreign cinema to the area, the Newport Beach fest is not quite as international as its name claims. Perhaps it doesn’t have the reputation to attract the finest in world cinema, or perhaps that isn’t the niche it truly wants to carve out, so its African, South American, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and Asian selections really suffer as a result. Asia gets a measly two representatives, hardly reflecting the Asian waves that are transforming all the major festivals outside of places like Orange County. One is Kenneth Bi’s Hong Kong/Singapore co-production Rice Rhapsody. An immediately likeable film, Rice Rhapsody is the sort of crowd-pleaser that whets the palate for Asian cooking mixed with family melodrama. If Eat Drink Man Woman comes to mind, it should. Not only do both films star Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang, but both are about a traditional-leaning parent who is a cook whose glory days are fading, and is conflicted by the modernizations of his or her three children. The Ang Lee connections continue: In Rice Rhapsody, Sylvia Chang’s two oldest sons are gay, and she makes it her mission to make sure her youngest son doesn’t go that route. Scoping out the neighborhood for female hotties to sway him straight, she settles on a French exchange student, after a failed attempt to hook him up with a beautiful Cantonese actress played by beautiful Cantonese actress Maggie Q. But these connections with Eat Drink Man Women and The Wedding Banquet aren’t simply signs of derivative filmmaking, but points of departure for Bi, who proves to be surprisingly open-minded in terms of ethnicity and sexuality. For one, he replaces Ang Lee’s grand patriarch with a woman, immediately shifting the dynamic from Chinese nationalism to a mother’s sense of domestic and emotional stability. Chang’s character also pleads for her son to become involved with a French woman, so while the film stays grounded in a certain logic of homophobia, the stigma of dating a white person is gone.
This openness toward Asian/white miscegenation but restraint toward homosexuality could explain the film’s attraction for moderately conservative American filmgoers. The film takes few steps away from the American status quo, which makes it typical flavor-of-the-week viewing on this side of the Pacific, whereas in Singapore it constituted truly radical mainstream filmmaking -- it pushed the boundaries of censorship regarding homosexuality, which the government insists doesn’t exist. And as the filmmaker and festival presenter noted after the screening of the film in Newport Beach, the American audience may have been so attuned to the film because it is predominantly in English, which is what people actually speak in Singapore. But Americans, who wouldn’t know better, just see it as those silly Asians mixing Chinese with America’s “universal” language. In other words, the film is very easy for the everyday American to get into, and very easy to get through, making it about as safe an Asian selection a festival could choose.
Newport Beach’s other Asian film, The Music and Dance of Taiwan’s Aborigines: My Home My Song, is a surprising choice given that the documentary seems to cover an impenetrably local topic, and also because it’s quite a bad film by any standard. For a Taiwanese film, it is an embarrassment. Seemingly liberal in its fascination with aboriginal customs, it is in actuality a model Orientalist buffet of tribes and cultures, put on display for Han Chinese to consume, probably on National Geographic-type public television programs. What are constantly shoved into the background (sometimes quite literally) are all signs of modernity -- for example cars -- in order to create the illusion that the film is preserving some purity of pre-Han contact. Any suggestion that the aboriginals today have problems regarding racism, unemployment, underrepresentation, or homelessness is completely elided in favor of a purity which simply does not exist anymore, if ever. The film focuses on local music and dance, which isn’t problematic in and of itself (see my comments on Viva Tonal) as long as the nostalgia for such arts is placed in its proper historical context and depicted critically and intelligently. So perhaps it’s not that surprising a choice for the Newport festival. While the screening itself was far from well attended, the film could easily be consumed by Discovery Channel aficionados and local supporters of Taiwanese independence who seek depictions of a Taiwanese “essence” separate from contact with the mainland, Japan, or the United States.
L.A.’s VC Film Festival -- a celebration of Asian American talent -- is by its nature more interested in Asian cinema than the Newport Beach festival, bringing to L.A. films like the much-awaited pan-Asian omnibus horror Three…Extremes (directed by Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, and Fruit Chan) as well as Bi’s Rice Rhapsody. The two Asian films I caught belonged to a night of Taiwanese cinema, playing at the Arclight in Hollywood. The first was the terrific Bear Hug by Wang Shau-di, whose last film Grandma and Her Ghosts received a belated L.A. premiere earlier this month as part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s New Taiwanese Cinema series.
Like that film, Bear Hug describes the inner workings of children, as they grapple with growing up in a world of modernity. Wang’s new film is truly incredible in the way it is not for kids as much as it is about kids, as if letting parents understand the everyday mysteries of growing up in Taiwan were his primary mission, especially in a society that puts getting into college well before all other priorities. Immediately after the cuddly animated intro, we’re immersed in a world where parents ship their kids from piano lessons to karate like luggage, but never sense the anxieties about loneliness and abandonment their children may have to endure as a result. The film is crowd-pleasing and humorous at times, and always engrossing, culminating in a touching, but not overwhelming climax.
There are also moments of reflection. Late in the film, a father approaches his son (who is last place in class standings) about sending him to a boarding school in the United States, and we suddenly feel the weight of education and parental expectations come crashing down on the poor boy. We also feel the imminent connection between Taiwan’s well-being and the rest of the world (as in Edward Yang’s recent films), something that Taiwan’s current overly insular cultural stance tends to neglect. It’s not surprising then that this Taiwanese film is playing at an Asian American film festival; as a Taiwanese American, I somehow felt my own identity being spoken through a film made half-way across the globe. For me, Bear Hug is a precious encounter.
The VC Fest’s other Taiwanese films included 62 Years and 6,500 Miles Between (which I didn’t catch), 20:30:40, which I’ve written about before and Splendid Float, by Zero Chou. Billed everywhere as a story of a Taoist priest by day and a drag queen by night, Splendid Float turns out to be something else entirely: an atmospheric musical about lost love.In many ways, Splendid Float is the anti-Rice Rhapsody, and it really exemplifies the difference between the VC and Newport Film Festivals. Had Splendid Float been simply a gimmick of a man’s double life, it may have attracted audiences curious about flamboyance, sexual awakening, and personal secrets. Instead, the film presents a Taiwan that is surprisingly open to homosexuality. The priest’s co-workers all seem to know about his night life, and while they tease him for it, they don’t necessarily discriminate. When his song-and-dance troupe’s van breaks down, locals help them and never bring up their sexual orientation. This of course could be read as the film’s attempt to write out conflict (as with Formula 17, which also played as part of the UCLA Film Archive’s Taiwanese film series), but I’d prefer to see the film as one seriously thinking about gay love rather than gay identity -- the opposite of Rice Rhapsody, which derives its pleasures from the mother’s preemptive strikes against her son.
Splendid Float is one of the emerging films shot on DV to really take advantage of the new medium’s specificities, as when it exploits DV’s blurriness (once considered a disadvantage compared to the clarity of celluloid) to create a world of loneliness where objects, spaces, and people escape one’s vision. DV also tends to desaturate vibrant colors; while it’s easy to see this as a weakness of the medium, I’d argue that in Splendid Float, the muted colors make gay culture seem less exotic and commodifiable. The film’s strongest characteristic (aside from how elegant the priest looks onstage in a black slip) is the use of Taiwanese love ballads. The conservative tear-jerkers usually sung by older, traditional Taiwanese men and women at karaoke bars throughout the island are co-opted by the performers in the film for their own expression; in essence, drag queens are performing songs in drag, performing their subjectivity by turning tradition on its head. That kind of campy play on form and genre is a strategy that takes some work by American festival audiences to comprehend, but as more and more festivals spring up in the area, let’s hope interesting and idiosyncratic films like this don’t get overlooked in the competition.
Date Posted: 5/12/2005