Mirroring the lovely absurdity of Taipei

For director and writer Hung Hung (鴻鴻), many of his works are about recording the life and the scenery of Taipei City. "I am a typical urban adult. Taipei is my air, water and sun," said the 38-year-old, whose original name is Yen Hung-ya (閻鴻亞).

A playwright and director for 15 years, Hung has excelled at combining human emotion with his intellectual ideas, specifically in the lives of Taipei residents. So when shifting roles to film director, Hung brought his wit and sensitivity to his second and third works, Human Comedy (人間喜劇) and A Garden in the Sky (空中花園).

The audiences' non-stop laughter during Human Comedy's tour of European film festivals was proof of his special talent. He may not be Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), with his particular film language and intense look at a period of time. Nor is he similar to Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), who sharply and boldly looks at the loneliness and alienation of people living in Taipei. Hung is more like a poet with a warmer look at the city and its people.

The film's amiability earned it the Audience Prize at the 2001 Festival of the Three Continents, in Nantes, France. It won Best Film at this year's Muscat Film Festival, in Oman, and was also selected as the opening film at the Festival Cinemas d'Asie de Vesoul, in France, where the festival organizer described it as breaking the stereotype of Asian films, which are usually seen as "artistic" but slow.

"I was consciously trying to present the colorful side of Taipei ... with different layers and thicknesses. I intended to give [the film] a cordial feeling," Hung said.

But neither Human Comedy nor A Garden in the Sky are conventional comedies. Instead, they are more about tragedy and absurdity. Human Comedy weaves four loosely adapted, updated Confucian moral fables (The Book of 24 Filial Pieties, 二十四孝) into a sensitive, often comical portrait of contemporary Taipei. A shoe shop salesgirl dwells in her fantasy world, out of touch with the people around her. Her sole pleasure is her passion for Hong Kong film star and singer Tony Leung (梁朝偉).

One day, crushed by the news that he has cancelled his long-awaited Taipei concert, she becomes so distracted she doesn't even notice that one of her customers may have been Tony Leung himself.

A-Xing rehearses an avant-garde play for a director dying of AIDS. Asked to perform a nude scene, he must choose between satisfying his demanding director and facing his conservative mother, who will be in the audience.

Cramped space and cockroaches send one battling couple on a comical quest for a new flat and "the good life." Unable to find an affordable flat within Taipei, they look outside the city. A savvy real estate agent named Darren nearly gets them to sign for an apartment in a remote and expensive hi-rise project, but the stress of house hunting reveals striking differences in the couple's respective visions of "the good life" and they start to quarrel.

Meanwhile, Darren faces down a raging typhoon to rescue his ex-wife. Although recently divorced, he is finding it difficult to get away from his former wife, Caixia, who is suffering from a host of psychosomatic illnesses that appear to be caused by her desire to prolong her involvement with Darren.

"For many people, sacrifice is not tragic. They don't even deem [dying] as a form of sacrifice. Yet, such `ignorance' is what makes them seem noble and beautiful. This says to me that ancient Chinese fables and contemporary lives in fact share the same absurdities." Hung said.