Treated with violence and relentless mockery, and shunned to the point that even her grown children don’t want anything to do with her, 55-year-old transgender woman Evon (Lee Lee-zen, 李李仁) has paid a huge price just to be her self. As if things couldn’t get any worse, she loses her job and her only friend is murdered when walking the streets. And that’s just the beginning.
The events that happen to Evon may seem a bit too exaggerated to create despair and emotion, but it also starkly highlights the challenges transgender people face in Malaysia, where the film is set. There, they long suffer from widespread brutality, injustice and discrimination, while religious authorities continue to arrest and punish people just for their sexuality.
While not nearly as bad, don’t think that there isn’t a problem in Taiwan. It isn’t exactly rosy for the transgender community here either despite the nation’s advancement in LGBTQ rights.
Photo courtesy of MM2 Entertainment
Lee, who lost 13kg for the role, portrays Evon with finesse and subdued emotion — she rarely reacts even in the most heartbreaking and humiliating situations (including her daughter screaming at her in public for daring to attend her wedding), but Lee is able to exude the sheer disappointment and sorrow through the cracks of Evon’s stoic exterior. And when Evon does break down, all that’s repressed gushes out in a lifetime of pain.
Lee invokes just the right amount of femininity for this setting and does a convincing job, while the over-the-top diva role is claimed by her roommate and friend, Lucy. The dynamic between the two is fun but brief.
An extremely gentle and sentimental soul, Evon desires intimacy and family. She was a caring family man who waited for her wife to die before transitioning and for the previous 10 years has used her wife, son and daughter’s birth dates to buy lottery tickets. She eventually finds a semblance of what she desires when she takes in illegal Vietnamese migrant Sophia (Ruby Lin, 林心如) and her young son, and befriends Teck (Jack Tan, 陳澤耀), his hearing impaired coworker-slash-love interest who dreams of becoming rich.
This rag-tag group, each with their troubles, do enjoy some tender, tear-jerking moments. In any event, we become so emotionally invested in Evon’s character that we genuinely hope that everything turns out for her.
Lin, who makes her producing debut, does an adequate job portraying the quiet, reserved mother who will do anything to survive and protect her child, but her barely passable Vietnamese accent makes the dialogue rather unnatural. Teck’s cheerful but desperate character is also complex, and the cinematography helps with capturing the expressions and emotions that belie their outward behavior.
There are some overly melodramatic and sappy moments and a few questionable plot devices, but overall the film allows Malaysian director Teddy Chin (陳立謙) to tackle a number of important topics through Taiwan’s liberal cinema scene. But ultimately it is Lee’s sublime performance that makes Miss Andy truly worth watching.
Miss Andy 迷失安迪
DIRECTED BY:Teddy Chin (陳立謙)
STARRING: ee Lee-zen (李李仁) as Andy, Ruby Lin (林心如) as Sophia, Jack Tan (陳澤耀) as Teck
LANGUAGE: Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay and English with Chinese and English subtitles
RUNNING TIME:108 Minutes
TAIWAN RELEASE:In theaters
The town of Baolai (寶來) is located along the Southern Cross-Island Highway in the upper reaches of Kaohsiung City. After suffering a devastating setback at the hands of Typhoon Morakot, the town’s tourism industry is finally showing signs of recovery. While the town itself has many commercial hot spring offerings for tourists, the adjacent Baolai River also has at least five different wild hot springs available to those with a more adventurous spirit. SHIDONG AND WUKENG Just before entering the town of Baolai, make two right turns to reach the bridge across the Baolai River. Immediately after crossing this bridge, there is
Jan. 25 to Jan. 30 It was the beginning of the end when Dutch sergeant Hans Jurgen Radis walked out of Fort Zeelandia and surrendered to the besieging army of Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga). The Dutch had already been trapped in the fort for nine months, and they were sick, hungry and in despair. After one defection during the early days of the siege, Dutch commander Frederick Coyett set up checkpoints around the fort’s perimeter, in what is today’s Tainan. Radis told his bunkmate he was going hunting, but by the time they realized where
In October of 2002 the James Ossuary exploded into the public consciousness. The artifact, a burial box in which bones were interred, was announced at a press conference in Washington prior to undergoing any form of scholarly authentication. It had an inscription that read in Aramaic: Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua (“James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”). Its promoters presented the thing as the first real concrete link to the historical Jesus. It was an obvious fake, and at that time I was administrating two enormous discussion groups devoted to early Christian history, which hosted numerous scholars in
“Well, if it cannot happen this year because of the pandemic,” Tourism Bureau Director General Chang Shi-chung (張錫聰) says at the end of his interview with Cycling Shorts last week, “at least we’ll be ready to promote it next year.” Chang is discussing the Year of Cycling Tourism (自行車旅遊年) that has long been planned for this year. He has spent the previous 30 minutes introducing the various infrastructure projects undertaken over recent years and those proposed for the next few. Essentially, the Bureau, under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), has been pulling together resources from a wide range of
RSS