Highly acclaimed, controversial and openly gay, German director Monika Treut has spent the length of her career exploring hot-button issues such as homosexuality, feminism and marginalized identity.
Her first narrative feature film, Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), is a subculture milestone that tackles the subject of sadomasochistic sexual practices. The 1988 classic Virgin Machine explores the issue of homosexual identity through a girl’s coming-of-age story.
In the 1990s, Treut turned her attention to documentary filmmaking. The 1992 work Female Behavior chronicles the lives of four “bad” girls, including American feminist writer Camille Paglia. With 1999’s Gendernauts, Treut examines the lives of a group of San Francisco transsexuals relegated to the margins of society.
Her documentary Tigerwomen Grow Wings (母老虎飛飛飛), shot in 2004 during the presidential election in Taiwan, traces the lives of Taiwanese women from three generations — Taiwanese opera actress Hsieh Yue-hsia (謝月霞), famed novelist Li Ang (李昂) and director D.J. Chen (陳映蓉).
This week, Treut’s Taiwanese connections deepen with the release of Ghosted (曖昧), a supernatural mystery that also functions as a love story. Shot in Germany and Taiwan, the movie tells the tale of the relationship between a Taiwanese reporter, Wang Mei-li (Hu Ting-ting, 胡婷婷) and a German artist, Sophie (Inga Busch), whose former lover Chen Ai-ling died mysteriously.
Director Treut spoke with the Taipei Times via e-mail about Ghosted, her ties to Taiwan and who she thinks is the hottest screen actress.
Taipei Times: What was your inspiration for making the movie Ghosted?
Monika Treut: Before starting to work on Ghosted I had a personal loss: a close friend of mine died. I dedicated the film to her memory, and I was thinking that the Taiwanese way of dealing with loss is more human than our Western way. This influenced the writing of the script. We have a “ghost-like character” in the film. This character is kind of open to different readings. Taiwanese see it differently than people from Western cultures. In Germany we have the motif of the doppelganger: when somebody dies, Westerners might have guilty feelings for not having cared enough for the person so we might feel haunted and see the person incorporated everywhere — a very popular element of Romantic literature in Germany and England in the 18th century, which is still alive in popular mythology. In Taiwan, during the Ghost Month of the lunar calendar, the gates between life and death open and the living give offerings to the dead, which gives us the sense that the two worlds are not so far apart and we can communicate with our deceased loved ones.
TT: After a decade doing documentary work, what prompted you to come back to narrative film?
MT: To me, documentaries and narrative features are not very far apart. I like combining the elements of both. I try to give documentaries a narrative structure and in fiction I’m open and flexible for the unforeseen, the surprises.
TT: You are known for films that explore risque themes such as sexuality, gender identity and subculture sexual practices. Why did you decide to go for a conventional love story this time?
MT: Times are changing. I’d say in Western cultures exploring sexual practices like S&M in film or dealing with the concept of a variety of genders beyond just female and male like in Gendernauts has become more accepted and is almost mainstream by now. So the artist’s fun of attacking taboos is gone. With Ghosted I was interested in exploring the clashing of cultures via a love story between a German and a Taiwanese person.
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