During the height of Taiwanese new wave cinema, directors portrayed Taipei as a city of bleakness and anomie. Now younger generations
of filmmakers have injected color and zest into their depictions of
the capital.
In his feature debut Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北), Taiwanese American director Arvin Chen (陳駿霖) evokes a city that is lively, splashy and heavenly matched for his fun-filled romantic comedy mostly set during the young protagonist’s final night in the city.
Writer-director Chen paints nocturnal Taipei as romantically as cinematic depictions of Paris. The boisterous Shida night market, winding downtown alleys and narrow neighborhoods evoke a sense of magic as Taipei 101 flickers in the distance. The vivacious cinematography basks the city in opulent colors, while briskly moving scenes accelerate the plot at an energetic pace. The sound track by Chinese American composer Hsu Wen is an absolute delight, lending the story an irresistibly jazzy tone.
Kai (Jack Yao, 姚淳耀) bids farewell to his girlfriend before she heads off to Paris at the beginning of the film. Obsessed with joining her in Europe, Kai reads up on French in a bookstore when he is not waiting tables at his parents’ noodle stall. His absent lover hardly calls, but bookstore assistant Susie (Amber Kuo, 郭采潔) shows interest.
When Kai’s girlfriend dumps him over the phone, he seeks help from gangster boss and real estate shark Bao (Frankie Gao, 高凌風), who offers the heartbroken lad a ticket to Paris in exchange for carrying out a courier delivery.
Believing the package Kai couriers contains something extremely valuable, Bao’s nephew Hong (Lawrence Ko, 柯宇綸) and three bumbling sidekicks embark on a scheme that sees Kai, Susie, Kai’s goofy friend Gao (Paul Chiang, 姜康哲) and the two cops who are staking out Bao’s operation all enmeshed in a night of high jinks that involves kidnapping, dancing in a park, and a love motel.
Kai and Susie traipse across the city and meet a number of likable oddballs, most of whom have their own problems involving love: Bao is an old gangster boss who wishes to retire with his much younger sweetheart, while cop Ji-yong, played by an amusingly gawky Joseph Chang (張孝全), is ditched by his girlfriend for being an indifferent lover. Ko is a likeable character, a slightly neurotic small-timer who dreams of making something big out of his dull life as a real-estate salesman. The brightest new find is Chiang, who possesses an instantly lovable goofiness that is well expressed in his character Gao, a tall, fumbling convenience-store worker.
The boy-meets-girl romance can be a tiresome genre, but Chen has enough in his scriptwriting bag of tricks to keep the audience engaged pretty much to the end. Sugar-coated with warm humor and kooky charm, the film is sweet and lighthearted, and audiences should not expect anything that even slightly resembles the oeuvre of Wim Wenders, one of the film’s executive producers.
Au Revoir Taipei, with a few character modifications, could be an expanded sequel to Mei (美), Chen’s graduation film at the University of Southern California that won the Silver Bear in Berlin’s International Short Film Competition in 2007. The 12-minute short tells the love story between a young man (also played by Yao) and a girl who plans to go to New York City, compacting emotions that linger much longer than its glossier follow-up does.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS