Following the box-office success of Leste Chen's (陳正道) horror film Heirloom (宅變) last year, the local filmmaker has a new offering for local audiences: a coming-of-age movie about troubled youth and homosexual love titled Eternal Summer (盛夏光年).
The film opens at a seaside elementary school in the picturesque Hualien countryside when well-behaved student Cheng Hsing is tasked by a teacher to help bad boy Shou Heng adjust to school life, and the two become good friends.
Time passes and high-school life ticks along uneventfully until classmate Hui Chia comes between the two friends. The sensitive girl gradually realizes that she will never win the heart of Cheng Hsing, who has been harboring a secret love for his buddy.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FLASH FORWARD ENTERTAINMENT
Hui Chi and Shou Heng become a couple in college, but the Sept. 21, 1999, earthquake opens Heng's eyes to the true nature of Cheng Hsing's feelings.
Not knowing where the love triangle will lead, the trio takes a trip to the seaside. Secrets that have been hidden in their hearts for years are revealed and the revelations mark the end of naive youth.
The film's cinematography is simple and clean with blue tones accentuated, and the scenery includes clammy urban imagery that reflects the muffled restlessness among the three protagonists.
What is surprising about this movie is director Chen's fine portrait of homosexual love. The sex scene between Shou Heng and Cheng Hsing is treated with great care and instead of being arousing or erotic, it portrays the emotional difficulties the two characters feel and the pair's tenderness.
Eternal Summer benefits greatly from accomplished performances by the three main actors. Having starred in the TV series Crystal Boys (孽子) based on the gay novel by Taiwan's Kenneth Pai (白先勇), Chang Hsiao-chuan (張孝全) seems to handle his bisexual role with ease. TV soap-opera actor Chang Jui-chia (張睿家) gives an amazingly vivid portrait of the reticent young repressed gay man while Golden Horse nominee Yang Chi (楊淇) brings to life the straight girl torn between the two.
Whether it is the verdant fields and beaches of Hualien or the damp streets and packed cram school in Taipei, Chen has created a movie full of familiar imagery that local audiences can identify with.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby