Grief and healing take central stage in Kuo Chen-ti’s (郭珍弟) new film, The Boar King (山豬溫泉), which tells a deceptively quiet story of loss and rebirth inspired by the traumatic events when Typhoon Morakot devastated southern Taiwan in 2009. While it could have easily been made into a work of lachrymose sentimentality, the film thankfully doesn’t go in that direction. Instead, it looks at human suffering and pain with considerable restraint, buttressed by solid performances of Lu Yi-ching (陸弈靜) and Tsai Chen-nan (蔡振南).
Set in Baolai (寶來) in Greater Kaohsiung’s Liouguei Township (六龜), the film opens with home video footage of torrential flooding caused by Typhoon Morakot, as the off-screen cameraman witnesses the catastrophe in awe. The man’s name is Ying — played by Chen Mu-i (陳慕義) — who later disappears.
The widowed wife, Cho (Lu Yi-ching, 陸弈靜), is left with a hot spring lodge that barely survives the disaster. Seized by despair, Cho attempts and fails to commit suicide, having thought of her responsibility for Ying’s senile father, who lives with her. One day, Ying’s close friend Nan (Tsai Chen-nan, 蔡振南), a hunter, shows up at Cho’s door, offering to help rebuild the mountain inn. A reticent man, Nan has kept his tender feeling toward Cho for years.
Photo courtesy of Good Day Films
Ying’s death also brings back Cho’s step-daughter Fen (Wu I-ting, 吳伊婷), who works mundane jobs in the city. Amid grief, she meets land surveyor Garmin, played by Soda Voyu from Seediq Bale (賽德克巴萊), and love starts to bud between the two.
Meanwhile, the villagers are forced to leave the devastated area, selling their homes to a resort development company. But one by one, they receive invitations sent by Ying before he died to a banquet set to be held at the inn. Perplexed, Cho looks to the home videos shot by her late husband, hoping to unravel the secret of his death.
Five years after her less than satisfactory debut feature Step by Step (練戀舞), Kuo has returned here with a finely executed and honest work filled with lyrical moments. The polished cinematography by Paotao (寶島) allows for the full expression of nature, whether a collapsed mountain slope, a riverbed studded with massive rocks, lush woods and hidden trails.
At times, sequences from the home videos shot by Chen’s character are inserted in and fused with the present narration, not only providing clues to the man’s thinking and his mysterious disappearance, but serving a link that enables the living to search for and reconnect with the dead and to come to terms with their grief.
The daughter’s reconnection with her father also raises the issue of land and homecoming. “The mountain road to home is no longer obstructed, don’t you think?” she says to her lover. However, much of the film’s failing lies in its rather flaccid effort to explore the young woman’s transformation. Her off-screen narration appears superfluous, adding nothing significant to the story, and theater actress Wu delivers the role with punctuated intensity that sometimes belongs to the stage rather than in front of the camera.
The crowning moments in The Boar King ultimately belong to veteran thespians Lu and Tsai. In a scene toward the end, Nan recounts an unforgettable encounter with a wild boar to Cho. We follow Nan’s resonant voice into the woods, where hot spring water flows, lives are intertwined and life quietly goes on.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS