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

[Chris Knipp]

JUSTIN LIN, YANG LI-YIN, ESTHER LIU, A SETTER, AND A WHITE COCKREL IN SALLI

LIEN CHIEN-HUNG: SALLI (2023)

Chicken farmer in rural Taiwan is lured to Paris by a dating app, learns independence

In this unusual and various movie from Taiwan, Hui-chun (Esther Liu), a vibrant, relaxed country chicken farmer in her late thirties, goes onto a dating app using the name Salli looking for onscreen romance. Everyone around warns her she's just going to get scammed but she persists. She has been joined on the farm from Shanghai by Lin Xin-Ru, her niece, who is a little like her daughter. Her busybody aunt (Yang Li-yin) is also urging Hui-chun to find a mate. The wedding of Hui-Chun's younger brother Wei-hong (Justin Lin) is coming. Fortune tellers and feng-shi experts have declared Hui-Chun's bedroom the best one for the newlyweds, and also declared it would be bad luck for her to attend the wedding. Via the app Xin-Ru sets up for her, Hui-chun seeks to remedy her single status, and she finds, or thinks she does, a French man called Martin, supposedly a gallerist in Paris, who's instantly interested in her and starts wooing her and calling her "mon poussin" (my chick, my sweetheart). The secret is (spoiler alert!) that there really is a French guy the other end of the line.

This plotline recalls, but winds up quite different from, the similarly dating app-focused NYAFF feature from Hong Kong, Love Lies, where an accomplished, but single, middle-aged Chinese lady obstetrician falls for a dating app Frenchman who isn't. The first section of Salli is marked by its loose, romanticized depiction of farm life, with people running around grabbing chickens for soup, occasionally throwing them some feed, and chased by their friendly dog. One would not want to stay on a farm where the farmers walk around the barnyard in flip-flops, but it looks like great fun, and the acting of Liu, Lin, and the others (including the dog and a handsome white rooster, which Hui-Chun treats like a pet) is relaxed and charming in this setting and the farmhouse life freshly and amusingly used. I rather wish the film had stayed here. But the filmmakers have other things in mind.

We may be wondering how this rural chicken farm is going to be the setting for a rom-com, however. Well, it's not, because, propelled by a somewhat gratuitous disaster on the chicken farm, Hui-Chun is going to spend her savings not on the app "boyfriend's" scam but to take a tour to France ostensibly, to meet "Martin," and prove to her family that he's real.

Bear in mind that this film is a Taiwanese-French co-production. So once Salli abandons her quick Taiwanese tour of Paris, what happens is, well, French, filtered through the rose-colored glasses of a Taiwanese picture of French life.It's an adventure that entertains Hui-Chun, but she's content to walk away from it. In this new Paris section of the film she undergoes a transformation into someone more sophisticated and polished but also content to be who she always was. She is less naive than she was when the film began, and from an older female member of the tour with much experience of men she has received a message: it's okay for a woman to be single. Really good, in fact.

Then comes the third section of the film, Hui-Chun back in Taiwan, where her life is again transformed through brother Wei-hong's wedding, which after all she is invited to and becomes a big part of. Afterwards, he has decided to open a chicken restaurant in Taipei. Hui-Chun will continue to be herself, but in a new framework, raising chickens on the farm for the restaurant.

The critique of dating app scams again, as in Love Lies, has obviously been abandoned in favor of something else, this time the idea that it's okay for a woman of a certain age to choose to live independently. This film doesn't altogether make sense, but its combination of rural Taiwan segments and Parisian ones is unusual and interesitng. More importantly, it's an original character study, for which Esther Liu makes an excellent tabula rasa, a blank slate in whom we can read all sorts of new possibilities. She goes from naivete to a kind ofd worldly wisdom. She embodies not only beauty and glamor but also plainness; a woman just being real, being herself. Salli, her app persona, turns out to be someone fabulous and cool.

Salli 莎莉, 106 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 5, 2023., and was also featured at Taipei Golden Horse, Göteborg, Osaka, Singapore, LA (Asian Pacific) and Taipei. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 28, 4:30pm
SVA Theatre
Intro with actor Austin Lin