Swedish bureaucracy and middle-class hypocrisy come in for some gentle ribbing in Patriik 1.5, in which gay couple Goran and Sven apply to adopt a child and settle into a picture-perfect middle-class neighborhood. They don’t have an easy time of it, but surprisingly, director Ella Lemhagen has not had to resort to the considerable armory of hackneyed gay jokes to get laughs, nor does she find it necessary to get mired in the hot, sweaty passions which dominate the “gay interest” films that have such a large presence at alternative film festivals.
Goran and Sven are trying to establish themselves as a couple; properly married with kids, a garden, and maybe even a dog. They want to be open, even if this gives their straight neighbors something of a shock. Goran, a doctor, who refers to Sven as his “husband,” is a gentle soul who we gradually discover is the stronger of the two, even though he lacks Sven’s aggressive masculinity.
Lemhagen deals with the relationship between Goran and Sven with great sympathy, showing them first as a perfect couple in the face of uncertainty, gaucheness and sometimes outright hostility from those around them. Sven wants to share Goran’s dream, but as a former party animal with a barely suppressed addiction to cigarettes and whiskey, and a resentful ex-wife and angry teenage daughter, he finds the difficulties of the adoption process overwhelming, pushing him back towards his old habits.
The film flirts with social realism, but this is a bit of a tease, and Patrik 1.5 is essentially a feel-good movie in which all the characters, with only one exception, both gay and straight, are treated with sympathy. After a remarkably deft introduction to the gay couple and their new neighbors, Patrik 1.5 moves into more conventional comedy territory when the couple discovers that because of a typographical error, the child they are to adopt is not a cute one-and-a-half year old, but a 15-year-old social misfit who tells Sven proudly that he once kicked a gay man in the face.
But this homophobic sociopath is shown to be more fearful than frightening, even as he accuses Goran of being a pedophile and tells the social welfare services he worries he will be raped. It helps that Thomas Ljungman, who plays Patrik, is a dead ringer for an adolescent Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and his sullenness is able to morph into a wary smile of great charm. One of the straight neighbors, in a misguided attempt to make nice with Goran, talks about how he managed to leverage hiring a Polish maid into a summer of cheap sex, suggesting that his neighbors have hit on a pretty good deal themselves.
The script manages the tensions between Patrik and his foster parents well, as Goran and Sven feud over having Patrik in the house. Gustaf Skarsgard plays Goran with great feeling, capturing his vulnerability in the face of verbal barbs and emotional turmoil while still making him convincing as the stronger and more mature member of the relationship. The quality of the acting helps to move the story along at a good pace, providing plenty of emotional depth and making the film seem more substantial than it actually is.
That all will end happily is never really in doubt, for Lemhagen’s treatment is far too good natured to allow for a sudden turn into tragedy. Nevertheless, the emotional payoff at the end does not come too easily, and there is a sense of satisfaction when all works out in the end, even though we knew it always would.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and