Pretty-faced stars and idols-in-waiting, catchy tunes by indie musicians and bands plus slick MTV imagery. Theses are the elements you can expect in Candy Rain (花吃了那女孩), the feature debut by Taiwan’s prolific commercial and music-video director Chen Hung-i (陳宏一). Constructed from four vignettes, the film is a breezy and lightweight lesbian flick that explores the relationship among eight young women in Taipei.
Based on the experiences of some of director Chen’s lesbian friends, the film starts off with the burgeoning romance between Jessie (Belle Hsin), a small-town girl moving to Taipei, and Pon (Grace Chen), who had a secret crush on Jessie in high school. The puppy-love tale is sweetened with a clean, innocent look, though the helter-skelter sequences of everyday trifles may test audiences’ patience.
The visual tone shifts to a more voguish, MTV-aesthetic as story two introduces the 25-year-old U (Sandrine Pinna), an OCD-suffering chef seeking possible partners online in a room painted in black and white and decked out with a snowy-white bed that turns fluorescent at night. She meets a glamorous and assertive magazine editor named Lin (Waa Wei), but the two soon realize they would be better off apart.
The third and strongest segment of the quartet portraits lovers Spancer (Niki Wu) and Summer (Kao Yi-ling), who agree to separate for 10 years while the latter fulfills her societal responsibility: namely to get married and have babies. The intimate camera closely follows the couple and eloquently captures their doomed love.
Rounding out the lesbian love ballad is Ricky (Hong Kong’s Karena Lam). The butch lesbian and her seemingly endless succession of abusive relationships are tackled in an anime-informed manner, overdone in a way that is more irritating than witty.
Director Chen calls on a multitude of storytelling styles to put together a well-executed ballad on love accompanied by the music of indie luminaries such as Sandy Chen (陳珊妮), Deserts Chang (張懸) and Ciacia (何欣穗), as well as off-screen narrator Cheer Chen (陳綺貞). With its hip MTV sensibilities and faux Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) look, the film, however, has all the faults one can detect in works of a commercial director building up his artistic career in an ivory-towered entertainment industry. The film is pretty and enjoyable to look at, but after a while, it gets tiring with erratic and strained scenes that are easily excisable and its too obvious metaphors: most notably the box of candy for delivery to a person named Candy Rain that loosely connects the segments.
Chen’s ambitious exploration of the relationship between China and Taiwan, which he works into the story of these four lesbian couples, is little more than a hollow pitch line.
While the performances range between passable and engaging, Kao Yi-ling and Niki Wu grab most of the attention as a couple torn between love and society’s demands and expectations. Despite a few strained moments, this segment has the melodramatic heft that allows it to be moving and amusing at the same time.
Hong Kong sweetheart Karena Lam’s butch lesbian character may seem grotesquely miscast to some, but the actress does comes off as a comical tomboy whose over-the-top antics, annoying at times, are of a piece with the overly elaborate finale.
True to its name, Candy Rain is a pop-art confection that melts on the tongue and is immediately forgotten.
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