New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

HWARNG WERN-YING: BE WITH ME (2023)

Who are we being with?

This film which is indebted to the filmmaker's mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien depicts a woman, working in the movies as a production designer, who returns to her hometown of Chiaiyi to see to her ailing father and in doing so awakens memories of family and grandfather and Taiwan's troubled history and a desire to return. In unfolding her tale the director Hwarng Wern-ying (also known as Huang Wen-Ying) melds flashbacks with scenes from a film-within-the-film, juxtaposing black-and-white footage of Taiwan's long period of Japanese domination.

The father of Faye ("Ma-ya" in the film, Ariel Lin) is stubborn, announcing he won't go back to the hospital for further treatment and insisting on being released home earlier than the doctor wants. Ma-ya is too. She is boarded here by a man, a Mr. Yu (Ethan Juan), who's apparently big in real estate; he drives a spectacular car, a McLaren with flying doors. Flashbacks to 2015 when they first met in Shanghai, apparently, when she spars with him and subtly mocks his pretension to being a man of great taste with a big collection of antiques. Black and white flashbacks to granddad's childhood when the Japanese are taking over Taiwan in 1941, forcing replacement of local gods by Japanese ones. (All this in the first twenty minutes.) Taoism is important in the film, seen as part of the protagonist's search for meaning in life in this grand, if somewhat artificial and predetermined film that tries a little harder than it needs to to impress.

Also in 2015 Faye/Maya meets another man, a Mr. Fu Chunshan (Vic Chou). She wants to hire him as an architect for a film, though he's said to be expensive. She likes him much more than Mr. Yu, he seems to be much more sympathetic, more of the place, into raising and roasting tea. The black and white flashbacks show granddad's house and the inn he runs destroyed in an earthquake, which was rebuilt and then bombed by the Americans, a similar theme to the film Ma-ya is working on now, it turns out. Supervising the production of her current film allows her, in a way, to revisit and reconstruct her family's past. There are also flashbacks, in somewhat heightened color, to Taiwan in the 1980's when men partied in supper clubs with children, including young Maya, but not their wives.

In an article about this film, Charlie Smith on Pancouver (Feb. 2024 ) points out the Taiwanese history presented here is "selective": no mention of the martial law declared by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, which was to last for nearly forty years, and an implication that when the New Taiwan Dollar was introduced that year everything was "hunky-dory," but it was not. Smith feels this can be forgiven because of the interesting structure of the film and performance of the lead. But it's not so easy to overlook big oversights about the history of Taiwan in a film that takes such a grand overview.

The historical parts of the film start to feel a bit like window dressing. A simpler structure might have been a better way to get at the nature of the protagonist who is, already, carefully considered. But in that alternate film the flashbacks and history would have to go, and the concern with Taoism postponed to another movie. However, this is, after all, an autobiographical film about being true to your origins that's also about filmmaking and about debating how a film should be.

Be With Me 車頂上的玄天上帝 ("The God of Heaven on the Roof"), 130 mins., premiered Oct. 20, 2023 at Hawai'i International Film Festival, and was also shown at Taipei Golden Horse Nov. 9 and Taipei Film Festival Jun. 25, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (July 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 1:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57


ARIEL LIN, ETHAN JUAN IN BE WITH ME