With Beautiful Crazy (亂青春), director Lee Chi-yuan (李啟源) breaks from the conventional approach to storytelling in an attempt to capture the fluidity of time, love and memory. The result is a cinematic poem about three teenage girls and their friendship, desires and betrayals, in which the time in a linear sense collapses and non-chronological montages drive the story. Fragments of the characters’ lives from the past, present and future intertwine, and the past is juxtaposed with and thrust into the present in the same way that one’s memory is constantly filtered, transformed and re-interpreted.
Angel (Angel Yao, 姚安琪) and Xiao-Bu (Amiya Lee, 李律) are best friends. They like to ride on a swing and play together in their secret hideout. Like her alcoholic father, Angel doesn’t talk much, but she feels her heart pounding the day when Xiao-Bu makes her burn a love letter a boy had given her.
Years later, Xiao-Bu, her boyfriend, and Ah-mi (Liao Chien-hui, 廖千慧) enjoy a summer day at an amusement park. “We will always be like this. Always,” says Ah-mi.
The three hold hands as the sun sets, and, for a moment, Xiao-Bu remembers Angel, the field with sunflowers where they played, and how they once fought over a cigarette in the pouring rain.
As the film moves back and forth in time, audiences are able to piece together the girls’ stories and their relationships to each other, even though initial perceptions often change as new perspectives, anecdotes and scenes are brought into play.
Lee would not have been able to pull off this kind of lyrical cinema if not for the mesmerizing camerawork of Dutch/Indonesian documentary filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, whose 2004 Shape of the Moon won top prizes at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Sundance Film Festival. Helmrich, who makes his debut as a cinematographer for a fictional film with Beautiful Crazy, is known for his long takes which he produces using a mount that frees the camera from conventional movements for a method he calls “single shot cinema.”
Moving freely around the characters and spaces, Helmrich’s improvisational, handheld camera focuses on the intimate and immediate rather than the narrative, capturing shifts in mood and the fluidity of emotions.
The acting is also improvised. Rather than reciting lines from a script, the three leads appear to spontaneously react and interact with each other and to their surroundings.
More often than not, the film’s landscapes and settings assume a poetic significance. A scene where Xiao-Bu and Angel fight in a junkyard next to a lotus pond represents Lee’s idea of youth, which is simultaneously tender and rough, beautiful and ugly.
In Beautiful Crazy, Lee has created a unique cinematic vocabulary that invites us as the audience to actively experience rather than passively watch what the characters experience and feel, giving us a glimpse of old but familiar feelings and images that belonged to our own youth.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
Since its formation almost 15 years ago, Kaohsiung rock band Elephant Gym (大象體操) has shattered every assumption about contemporary popular music, and their story is now on screen in a documentary titled More Real Than Dreams. It’s an unlikely success story that says a lot about young people in Taiwan — and beyond. For a start, their sound is analog. In the film, guitarist Tell Chang (張凱翔) proudly says: “There is no AI in our sound.” His sister, bass player KT Chang (張凱婷) is the true frontwoman — less for her singing abilities than for her thunderous sound on the instrument. Fast like
RSS