Judging from the trailer, Stand By Me appears to be another over-the-top and sappy Taiwanese schoolyard rom-com with extremely unhealthy and unrealistic views about love, romance and relationships.
Jiubing (Mason Lee, 李淳), has been in love with Bohe (Ivy Shao, 邵雨薇) since childhood, and even though he seems to be the screw-up who needs taking care of, he has made it his life’s mission to protect her and make her happy. However, he never tells her his true feelings while she dates other men. Very typical formula indeed.
More often than not, these types of tales promote the “nice guy” or hero syndrome where the knight in shining armor “gets the girl” by protecting her and basically doing everything for her. An egregious example is the 2017 disaster Please Love Her (請愛我的女朋友), where a man is tasked with taking care of his dead cousin’s girlfriend — even financing her business and butting in to fix her mistakes. There was nothing romantic about his sense of obsessive entitlement without even considering how the woman feels, and the notion that the woman is incompetent without the man helping her is horribly outdated and, frankly, downright misogynistic.
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In real life, that does not usually work out, giving rise to popular terms such as “tool person” (工具人) who is willingly used in hopes of having a shot with their object of affection. They often make the tabloids as comical incidents, but their misguided mindset really isn’t something to laugh at as it can lead to violent crime when the man lashes out after pouring in heaps of money and effort and not getting what he wants.
There’s no point in purposely seeing a bad movie and then trashing it. But what piqued this reviewer’s curiosity was the fact that Stand By Me is billed as “a breath of fresh air that subverts tradition.” Bohe is the stronger one who ends up taking care of Jiubing, who gets tangled up in various ridiculous situations, but that’s not anything new in Asian cinema. A love triangle forms when Jiubing’s quirky female roommate (Tsai Jui-hsueh, 蔡瑞雪) falls in love with him after trying to help him win Bohe’s heart — that’s also a rather cliched device.
Format wise, it follows the typical Taiwanese rom-com style with quirky settings and plenty of absurdist humor (including a requisite gangster scene) and the plot is quite sappy and unrealistic. But somehow it’s not cringeworthy; the dialogue is believable to some degree.
What’s clear, however, is that this movie, although featuring teenaged characters and the kind of grandiose undying feelings of love that cynical grown-ups will sneer at, isn’t just targeting teenyboppers. It focuses on themes, especially dealing with relationships and emotions, that adults still grapple with; instead of making them scoff at the foolishness of being young, it reminds them that they’re still deep down that same teenager despite the battle scars.
Even though the movie is not meant to be taken realistically, it still bothers to fill in the plot holes such as explaining Lee’s odd Mandarin accent (he is Taiwanese-American) by showing that he had trouble speaking as a child and learned how to talk through watching American movies. This is a problem in many films where some actors inexplicably speak in Western, Chinese or Cantonese accents while their characters were born and raised in Taiwan. It is extremely annoying.
The absurd scenes definitely add to the film’s entertainment value and remind the viewer not to take the events seriously — but it just doesn’t need to be 107 minutes long. More importantly, however, the message is a healthier-than-usual take on unrequited love. There’s a difference between a “nice guy” who is driven by ulterior motives such as approval and affection (and sex), and a genuinely kind person who does good deeds simply out of basic human decency. It doesn’t seem like this line is drawn clearly enough in the media — but this film explicitly emphasizes this point and even pokes fun at it.
In one scene where Jiubing leads a pack of naked men with “I am proud of being a tool person” taped behind their backs, he yells at a playboy who has hurt Bohe, “I’m not a rebound guy, I’m a pacer!”
Jiubing has been a professional pacer — someone who gets paid to run alongside joggers to help them maintain their pace or to motivate them — since his college days . But it seems that his clients, more than anything else, enjoy his company, not having to run alone. That is a metaphor for the entire film, as he helps his clients reach their goals by running with them. It’s not his job to reach the finish line himself, and the film is about him, as well as other characters, learning how to come to terms with that.
It’s not exactly a groundbreaking idea, and saying that Stand By Me “subverts tradition” is going too far. But it does separate it from movies of its ilk. Life isn’t about happy endings or tragic outcomes, you just grow from each experience and keep trudging forward.
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