From The Pain of Others (海巡尖兵, 2005) to Winds Of September (九降風, 2008), Tom Lin Shu-yu (林書宇) excels at drawing inspiration from personal experiences. With Zinnia Flower (百日告別), the director gets especially personal by using his latest film to deal with his grief over the 2012 death of his wife.
The film eschews elegiac cliches, but doesn’t evade pain and heartache. It tugs at the heartstrings with honesty, tenderness and intimacy. Karena Lam (林嘉欣) and Shih Chin-hang (石錦航), the film’s two leads, deliver heartfelt performances.
The film opens with a devastating car crash. Wei, played by Shih, loses his pregnant wife (Alice Ko, 柯佳嬿). Ming, played by Lam, loses her fiance (Umin Boya, 馬志翔).
Photo courtesy of Atom Cinema
Overwhelmed by grief, Wei drinks heavily and takes his anger out on everyone around him. The quiet and introverted Ming embarks on a trip to Okinawa that she had planned to take with her fiance, but it does nothing to alleviate her pain and emptiness.
Ming and Wei meet each other at a Buddhist ritual where the bereaved mourn the dead for 100 days. The film ends on the 100th day after the last ceremony is completed.
Zinnia Flower adresses themes oft-ignored by Taiwanese movies, which mostly stay on the light, fun and emotionally frivolous side. Yet, the story is not all tears, as the characters come to realize that they are not alone in their suffering. Lam and Shih give nuanced performances, while Shih in particular shows that he is more than the talented lead guitarist Stone (石頭) from pop-rock band Mayday (五月天).
One disappointing thing about Zinnia Flower, though, is that it is missing the sex scene between Ming’s character and her fiance’s younger brother, played by Chang Shu-hao (張書豪). The 20-second long sequence elicited much controversy when the film premiered at the Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節) in July, and was consequently cut by Lin.
Lin reportedly says the removal of the scene doesn’t affect the story, but to this reviewer, who saw the version screened at the festival, those moments of intimacy offer a deeply moving moment of despair and a desperate longing to connect.
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