A year of fruitful diversity

This past year, the local film industry has produced a welcome surge of genre-oriented commercial flicks and the vigorous return of art-house movies and non-fictional works. Aiming to make mainstream movies that appeal to a broad scope of audiences, new local production companies have mushroomed over the past couple of years while native-born masters have returned to the scene with their latest works. So here are the five local productions made by veteran film-makers and young talents selected as the most representative works of Taiwanese cinema this year.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's (侯孝賢) Three Times (最好的時光) is rightfully credited as the director's most enjoyable film to date. Though set against a social and political backdrop spanning some 100 years, the movie is oriented more as a romantic vignette than a politically conscious epic such as City of Sadness (悲情城市, 1989). The triptych film was born of both Hou's personal past and his life-long evolution as an artist.

However, Hou's masterpiece is not without its flaws. In the third segment that deals with the anomic life of contemporary youths lost in the urban jungle, the juxtaposition of the stereo-typical, fast-paced imagery of metropolitan life somehow fails to strike a chord with the contemporary soul.

Hou's interest in the so-called lost generation was made apparent in his 2001 Millennium Manbo (千禧曼波).

This year's Berlin Film festival winner The Wayward Cloud (天邊一朵雲) is said to be director Tsai Ming-liang's (蔡明亮) first attempt to cross over to the mainstream by using song and dance. But Tsai's signature slow, long takes, minimal dialogue and the explicit sexual content in the erotic musical have once again bolstered his fame as Taiwan's foremost art-house filmmaker.

The visual style of the film success-fully delivers the emotional power of the narrative, forming an elegant contrast between a stark cinematic reality and the colorful, vintage-looking musical numbers. The metaphorical use of watermelons and water poignantly manifest the controversial motif of Tsai's work: a human body that never ceases wandering in the landscape of desire.

In this film, the human body is treated as a machine of desire that eats, drinks, vomits and exchanges bodily fluids but is neither fulfilled nor content. The Wayward Cloud masterfully tells a contemporary story about sex and desire in all their splendor, banality, vulgarity and mystery.

Riding the ongoing horror-movie fever in the local movie scene, Heirloom (宅變) proves that local talent and production teams can make high quality commercial flicks that draw audiences back to theaters with solid storylines and casts of popular teen-idols. The young, innovative production company, Three Dot Entertainment (三和娛樂), made a daring move working with the 24-year-old director Leste Chen (陳正道) for its second ambitious project after box office hit Formula 17 (十七歲的天空). The collaboration demonstrates that young, creative and energetic minds are more than capable of making successful movies. The film's stylish art design and cinematography contribute greatly to the well-narrated horror flick for which audience members can find enjoyment with 90-minutes of suspense and beloved idols.

The unexpected box office successes of two documentary productions Let It Be (無米樂) and Jump! Boys (翻滾吧！男孩) in the first half of the year marked a "new documentary phenomenon," which has been enthusiastically greeted as the new savior of Taiwan's film industry.