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.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not