Departing from a narrative about the city’s misfits and the displaced in A Place of One’s Own (一席之地, 2009), writer-director Lou Yi-an (樓一安) turns to rural underdogs for his second feature film The Losers (廢物), a socially-conscious drama that tackles some of the difficult issues facing Taiwan’s farming villages as told through the stories of those deemed “losers.”
Articulately written and finely executed, the film is a brave probe into the dark sides of rural life that finds little, if any, treatment in the current genre-inclined Taiwanese cinema.
Among Lou’s losers, Shiou, played by theater veteran Hsu Hua-chien (徐華謙), is a struggling stage actor in Taipei who works odd jobs to make ends meet. Frustrated, he returns to his Greater Kaohsiung suburb hometown, Meinong (美濃), only to be greeted with a disapproving look from his aging father, who claims that those who stay in town are either drug addicts or jobless.
Photo Courtesy of Good Days Film
While trying to learn about his farmer father’s trade and grow tomatoes on the family farm, Shiou meets an old girlfriend, Mei-shia, played by Tsou singer and actress Paicx Yatauyungana, better known by her Chinese name, Kao Hui-chun (高慧君). Now married, Mei-shia lives an affluent but spiritless life in a mansion along with her teenage son Ah-pan (Pan Chin-yu, 潘親御), as the husband and father, Tian-jin (Lin Chih-ju, 林志儒), spends most of the time away in China, accumulating wealth.
Soon, the flame is rekindled between the failed actor and the bored wife.
Ah-pan, a typically troubled teen, befriends classmate Yu-mei (Chiu Su-chin), a girl from a poor household barely sustained by her Vietnamese mother. Unable to find work after a serious workplace injury, Yu-mei’s father has been in and out of jail for stealing to support his drug habit.
The newly found friendship between the two turns into a romance, then a romance in jeopardy when Yu-mei finds out about Ah-pan’s ketamine abuse, which offers a quick escape from the dead-end mentality of small town life.
Meanwhile, real-estate speculators have been systematically buying the fertile land of Meinong, aiming at property development. Shiou’s family farm is no exception from the development craze, and industrialist Tian-jin is eager to get his hands on it.
Compared to the director’s loud, uneven debut feature, The Losers suggests a more assured direction that lays out the multitude of issues Lou wishes to examine at a thoughtful pace. Drug abuse, rural poverty and land exploitation are among the most obvious. Looming in the background is the omnipotent force of capitalist globalization, colluding with misguided agricultural policies.
And it is the underprivileged who are hit the hardest. A sense of defeat pervades the film, whether an aging farmer, Southeast Asian immigrant, disillusioned youth or an Aboriginal resident, unnamed and unrecognizable on her own land. At one point, the simmering discontent and frustration boil over, somewhat feebly, through the character of Ah-pan, who, high on ketamine, sinks back into oblivion while listening to the sound of Kou Chou Ching’s (拷秋勤) Civil Revolt (官逼民反), a song that has often been played over the past few months at protests on Ketagalan Boulevard.
But Lou deals with this raw anger intelligently. As in his previous work, he uses dark humor to examine injustice and oppression. It mocks and makes the unbearable absurd and comic, while adorning his characters and their struggles with a new sense of warmth.
Along with Cho Li’s (卓立) less successful The Rice Bomber (白米炸彈客), which opened in local theaters last month, The Losers brings a largely absent and thus much-needed focus on Taiwan’s rural life, raise important, difficult questions in a manner accessible to anyone who is concerned.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
As I finally slid into the warm embrace of the hot, clifftop pool, it was a serene moment of reflection. The sound of the river reflected off the cave walls, the white of our camping lights reflected off the dark, shimmering surface of the water, and I reflected on how fortunate I was to be here. After all, the beautiful walk through narrow canyons that had brought us here had been inaccessible for five years — and will be again soon. The day had started at the Huisun Forest Area (惠蓀林場), at the end of Nantou County Route 80, north and east
Specialty sandwiches loaded with the contents of an entire charcuterie board, overflowing with sauces, creams and all manner of creative add-ons, is perhaps one of the biggest global food trends of this year. From London to New York, lines form down the block for mortadella, burrata, pistachio and more stuffed between slices of fresh sourdough, rye or focaccia. To try the trend in Taipei, Munchies Mafia is for sure the spot — could this be the best sandwich in town? Carlos from Spain and Sergio from Mexico opened this spot just seven months ago. The two met working in the
RSS