With Beautiful Crazy (亂青春), director Lee Chi-yuan (李啟源) breaks from the conventional approach to storytelling in an attempt to capture the fluidity of time, love and memory. The result is a cinematic poem about three teenage girls and their friendship, desires and betrayals, in which the time in a linear sense collapses and non-chronological montages drive the story. Fragments of the characters’ lives from the past, present and future intertwine, and the past is juxtaposed with and thrust into the present in the same way that one’s memory is constantly filtered, transformed and re-interpreted.
Angel (Angel Yao, 姚安琪) and Xiao-Bu (Amiya Lee, 李律) are best friends. They like to ride on a swing and play together in their secret hideout. Like her alcoholic father, Angel doesn’t talk much, but she feels her heart pounding the day when Xiao-Bu makes her burn a love letter a boy had given her.
Years later, Xiao-Bu, her boyfriend, and Ah-mi (Liao Chien-hui, 廖千慧) enjoy a summer day at an amusement park. “We will always be like this. Always,” says Ah-mi.
The three hold hands as the sun sets, and, for a moment, Xiao-Bu remembers Angel, the field with sunflowers where they played, and how they once fought over a cigarette in the pouring rain.
As the film moves back and forth in time, audiences are able to piece together the girls’ stories and their relationships to each other, even though initial perceptions often change as new perspectives, anecdotes and scenes are brought into play.
Lee would not have been able to pull off this kind of lyrical cinema if not for the mesmerizing camerawork of Dutch/Indonesian documentary filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, whose 2004 Shape of the Moon won top prizes at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Sundance Film Festival. Helmrich, who makes his debut as a cinematographer for a fictional film with Beautiful Crazy, is known for his long takes which he produces using a mount that frees the camera from conventional movements for a method he calls “single shot cinema.”
Moving freely around the characters and spaces, Helmrich’s improvisational, handheld camera focuses on the intimate and immediate rather than the narrative, capturing shifts in mood and the fluidity of emotions.
The acting is also improvised. Rather than reciting lines from a script, the three leads appear to spontaneously react and interact with each other and to their surroundings.
More often than not, the film’s landscapes and settings assume a poetic significance. A scene where Xiao-Bu and Angel fight in a junkyard next to a lotus pond represents Lee’s idea of youth, which is simultaneously tender and rough, beautiful and ugly.
In Beautiful Crazy, Lee has created a unique cinematic vocabulary that invites us as the audience to actively experience rather than passively watch what the characters experience and feel, giving us a glimpse of old but familiar feelings and images that belonged to our own youth.
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
On Jan. 17, Beijing announced that it would allow residents of Shanghai and Fujian Province to visit Taiwan. The two sides are still working out the details. President William Lai (賴清德) has been promoting cross-strait tourism, perhaps to soften the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) attitudes, perhaps as a sop to international and local opinion leaders. Likely the latter, since many observers understand that the twin drivers of cross-strait tourism — the belief that Chinese tourists will bring money into Taiwan, and the belief that tourism will create better relations — are both false. CHINESE TOURISM PIPE DREAM Back in July