Soul of a Demon (蝴蝶), celebrated director Chang Tso-chi's (張作驥) first film in five years, almost didn't make it to the big screen. Originally envisioned as a work of magic realism aided by CGI effects, the production came to a halt when the animation production company backed out of the project. After scraping together a new budget, Chang and his team re-shot the movie one year later. The result is a sober human drama about a tormented gangster who is unable to disengage from the cycle of violence and his troubled relationship with his father.
Set in Nanfangao (南方澳), a fishing port built by the Japanese, the film begins when Che (Tseng Yi-che) returns home from jail. Che took the rap for his younger brother, Ren (Cheng Yu-ren), who had stabbed to death the son of a local mob boss.
To reconnect with his semi-Aboriginal roots, Che visits his mother’s grave in Orchid Island (蘭嶼) with his ex-girlfriend Pei (Chen Pei-chun), who is mute from past emotional trauma.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHANG TSO CHI FILM STUDIO
Meanwhile, Ren returns from hiding in Japan with the brothers’ father, Chang (Michio Hayashida), whose departure from the family home led to his wife’s suicide. Old hatreds erupt, and violence rears its ugly head.
The title of the film comes from the Tao (達悟) word for butterfly. Tao tribal tradition holds that at the moment of death, a person’s soul leaves their body much in the same way as butterflies flutter towards the sky.
From images of butterfly wings shimmering on bamboo trees and the deserted amusement park where Che is abandoned by his father, to a glove puppet performance on the seashore, the film creates an atmospheric world in which the troubled protagonist is eventually consumed by his past and memories.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHANG TSO CHI FILM STUDIO
Though death, wickedness and human tragedy are motives in Chang’s work, the director’s sense of fatalism is taken to new heights in Soul of a Demon: men find no way to escape the vicious cycle of und erworld vendetta and women are either crippled, mute or dead. Chang’s Nanfangao is dismal and bleak, and suffocates the characters.
The fishing port is an ideal vehicle for Chang’s contemplative reflection on Taiwan’s history and the country’s hybrid cultural and political identities. By adding the role of Che’s grandfather, a photographer who came to Nanfangao with a Japanese construction team, to the story, Chang reveals the history of Nanfangao as one of the places where the first wave of Japanese soldiers and civil servants arrived in Taiwan. Che’s conflicts with his family, therefore, can be read as a metaphorical reference to Taiwan’s historical relationships with Japan and the nation’s Aborigines.
With the divine dancing Eight Generals (八家將) practitioners in Ah Chung (忠仔, 1996), the blind and gangsters in Darkness and Light (黑暗之光, 1999) and the deprived youth in The Best of Times (美麗時光, 2002), Chang excels in revealing the beauty and ugliness of life through the stories of social underdogs. In Soul of a Demon, the motifs are all there: gangsters, people with disabilities and a dysfunctional family. Yet the film is likely to be seen as one of Chang’s less successful pieces, since the story is oftentimes strays and becomes lost in the director’s auteurist exercise.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHANG TSO CHI FILM STUDIO
The film is, perhaps, like the director himself readily admits, a faithful reflection on the chaos of his life, frustrations and the passing of his father five years ago.
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
Oct 20 to Oct 26 After a day of fighting, the Japanese Army’s Second Division was resting when a curious delegation of two Scotsmen and 19 Taiwanese approached their camp. It was Oct. 20, 1895, and the troops had reached Taiye Village (太爺庄) in today’s Hunei District (湖內), Kaohsiung, just 10km away from their final target of Tainan. Led by Presbyterian missionaries Thomas Barclay and Duncan Ferguson, the group informed the Japanese that resistance leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) had fled to China the previous night, leaving his Black Flag Army fighters behind and the city in chaos. On behalf of the
I was 10 when I read an article in the local paper about the Air Guitar World Championships, which take place every year in my home town of Oulu, Finland. My parents had helped out at the very first contest back in 1996 — my mum gave out fliers, my dad sorted the music. Since then, national championships have been held all across the world, with the winners assembling in Oulu every summer. At the time, I asked my parents if I could compete. At first they were hesitant; the event was in a bar, and there would be a lot
The election of Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as chair of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) marked a triumphant return of pride in the “Chinese” in the party name. Cheng wants Taiwanese to be proud to call themselves Chinese again. The unambiguous winner was a return to the KMT ideology that formed in the early 2000s under then chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) put into practice as far as he could, until ultimately thwarted by hundreds of thousands of protestors thronging the streets in what became known as the Sunflower movement in 2014. Cheng is an unambiguous Chinese ethnonationalist,
RSS