Ximending's (西門町) colorful mixture of characters and cultures has served as an inspiration for up-and-coming filmmaker Lin Yu-hsien (林育賢), who rose to the forefront of Taiwan's cinema with his documentary Jump! Boys (翻滾吧！男孩). In his feature debut, Exit No. 6, the area is portrayed as a playground for a group of young adventurers and Ximending subculture is presented through a colorful fusion of martial arts, teenage romance, detective work and thriller movies.
The premise of the film: anything can happen around Exit 6 of the Ximen MRT station. The four buddies in the film: legendary stuntman Van Dine, skateboarder and hacker Vance, punk girl Vivian and good girl Fion. A rescue mission unfolds after Vivian goes missing and all evidence points to the so-called "binding demon," a BDSM practitioner who preys on teen prostitutes on the street of Ximending.
Drawing inspiration from his previous documentaries Pray for Graffiti (鴉之王道) and His-men Street (街頭風雲), both dealing with teenage subcultures in Xinmending, Lin blends extreme sport, graffiti, snapshot fever, electronica and rock 'n' roll.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF LONGHUBAO ENTERTAINMENT
The Japanese manga-type humor works well and one of the film's most ingenious comic sequences takes place when old veterans, who also populate the Ximen district, turn into a tech-savvy troop that uses 3G mobile phones to help the youths apprehend the suspect.
With an engaging storyline and pop-culture idols who are aptly cast, Exit No. 6 marks director Lin out as a promising star in Taiwan's commercial cinema.
Another local director, Pan Zhi-yuan (潘志遠), also looks at the teenage life in his second feature, A Touch of Fate (指間的重量), but has a somewhat different take. A human drama about a lost teenager and his estranged family, the film unfolds around a 15-year-old boy named Da Yu, a trouble maker at school who later makes friends with a light-fingered man named Lee.
Taken in by Lee to live with a family of pickpockets at a deserted mansion, Da Yu quickly picks up the art of stealing from his mentor Lao and learns to survive with his newly learned skills. Yet their dangerous trade gradually deteriorates into violence and finally death, making the lost youth realize that there is some things in life that are worth cherishing.
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