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

[Chris Knipp]

JUN SAITO, GO AYANO IN LET'S GO KARAOKE!

NOBUHIRO YAMASHITA: LET'S GO KARAOKE! (2023)

Choir kid mentors Yakuza mensch

This is a coming of age charmer matching unlikely types: a meek, bespectacled boy soprano from a choir and a Yakuza boss who comes to him for voice coaching. (It's complicated.) Sparks fly and then they bond. The kid, as the boss puts it, "goes ballistic" when he's angry. His speeches when aroused are illustrations of the fire that can hide behind a seemingly quiet Japanese exterior.

The boy is Satomi Oka (Jun Saito), and he's the star boy soprano of his mixed choir, but as the story begins he's worried about the final competition. The secret is that his voice is changing and he may not manage the solo any more. That is pushed aside when he is suddenly approached by a sleek, suited man, Kyoji Narita ("Crazy Kid," Go Ayano), who grabs him and says "Let's go Karaoke!" The leader stages Karaoke contests among the gang. Kyoji is afraid of losing, and the loser gets an ugly, mocking tattoo crudely and painfully etched on him by the boss himself. He knows of Satomi's musical accomplishment and wants help. For all Satomi's musical experience, this unexpected new job will take him far afield. He never expected to have one-on-one sessions with a gangster.

What follows is quite hilarious and unexpected, revealing the human and vulnerable side of Japan's most menacing gangsters and the courageous and macho side of apparently meek types like the boy soprano. At one point Satomi is called on to assess the singing abilities of each member of the whole gang, and with his brutal and specific comments, he astonishes. Frequenting Kyoji and oddly bonding with him leads Satomi to Tokyo's colorful Minami Ginza district. The boy and the gangster start exchanging text messages, and however often Satomi tells Kyoji to go away and stay away, the communication continues and the bond keeps growing.

Kyoji's hidden paternal instincts obviously are aroused and so is Satomi's need to expand his horizons, and show he can not only use that changing voice to sing sweetly, but to yell authoritatively. Our own desire to root for the underdog is aroused along with our need to see the good in bad guys. Perhaps director Yamashita wants to avoid the obvious, but I would have liked the Yakuza to be played by an actor a little more conventionally tough looking than Go Ayano. But in the heat of the moment that can be overlooked and the film, though slight, goes down easy.

Let's Go Karaoke!, 108 mins., debuted Taipei Nov. 2023; released Jan. and Feb. Japan and Taipei. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Wednesday July 24, 6:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Nobuhiro Yamashita

[Chris Knipp]

CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING

CARL JOSEPH E. PAPA: THE MISSING (2023)

Through delusion to healing

In this unusual animated film, which was the Philippines' Best International Feature Oscar entry for its year, an alien about to abduct a child speaks to him in Tagalog. Wny not? The influence of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin seems obvious here, though the abduction is the clearest part of it, and how the film feels about events is different.

Araki's film begins with a man's sexual abuse of two young boys, Brian and Neil. Fast forward to years later when they're young men who react dramatically differently to this traumatic event. Neil, now played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a gay hustler. Brian, played by Brady Corbet, blocks out the childhood abuse with the belief that he was abducted by aliens. So there is something of Brian in Eric (Carlo Aquino). Eric and the present-time part of the film is rotoscoped. In using this process Papa has said he was influenced by Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Eric is closely in touch with his mom but lives alone in an apartment and works as an animator, and his colleague, the one we see, is Carlo (Gio Gahol). They seem attracted but communication may be impeded by lots of things, first of all that Eric is mute. Not only that, he has no mouth. The animation omits it, and later he loses an eye, and other parts. Eric's traumas as a child are gradually indicated by flashbacks in a more childlike and naive kind of animation. These short, staccato, more stylized passages are rather opaque at first. When the chatty Tagalog-speaking alien comes for Eric it's clear enough. In these childlike animations we see Eric, aged nine, when he was still able to speak (voiced by Jeremy F. Mendoza. And eventually we'll find out the secret that has been imposed on him and we guess why.

It seemed a good choice on Araki's part not to show us Brian's fantasy memories of alien abduction. But Papa has a wholly different approach to childhood sexual trauma. While in Mysterious Skin Neil, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, gets most of the attention, this is as if from the point of view of Brian, who in Araki's film seems beyond help but here finds healing. Maybe Araki would have shown the aliens if he'd been making an animated film. The beauty of Mysterious Skin in how grounded it is in the real. The beauty of The Missing is that it takes us emotionally through its protagonist's trauma and out into healing.

A folksy Filipino flavor comes with Rosalinda, Eric's caring mom, who turns out to be open to Eric's gayness and his nascent "thing" with Carlo. Rosalinda is played, rotoscoped, by Dolly De Leon, the actress playing the shipboard cleaning lady who takes over the second half of Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness.

The action of The Missing is slow to get started at first. Eric is tormented and blocked. He has a lot to deal with and what really troubles him isn't made clear, through the primitive flashback animation, until an hour into this ninety-minute film. Earlier, Rosalinda sends Eric (he goes with Carlo) to look for his uncle Rogelio (voiced by Joshua Cabiladas, who also does the Blurry Man and the Alien), who's been unresponsive, and they have to break into his apartment, and find him dead in his bed - and not recently, which is scary and disturbing. Now Rogelio’s daughter Precy (Christela Marquez) appears, and she has become as mute and mouthless as Eric.

In a car trip Carlo sensitively plays along with Eric's irrational fears of aliens, which seem very real and emotionally disturbing, and by sharing helps him work through them. Eric's battle with the burden of trauma embedded in aliens, helped by Carlo and a little by his mother Rosalinda, leads him to a dramatic ritual of healing and he gets back all he has lost, his eye, his ear, his penis, his hand, and finally his mouth. He can throw away the whiteboard he has been wearing around his neck to communicate with. Sitting symbolically near Rogelio's grave, Eric speaks to Carlo and Rosalinda, and the first thing he says is that he has something to tell them.

The film is another example of how animation can be used to delve into imagination and find shorthands to complex emotional truth. It seems laborious at times, but that emotional message is powerful enough to explain the Oscar submission. Papa uses his sources in a new way. The Missing is a touching, heartfelt film.

The Missing/Iti Mapukpukaw, 90 mins., debuted the Philippines (Cinemalaya) Aug. 5, 2023; also shown at Rotterdam, Palm Springs, Jeonju, Netherlands. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 4:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center


GIO GANOL, CARLO AQUINO IN THE MISSING

[Chris Knipp]

JUAN KARLOS LABAJO IN WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER

KEVIN MAYUGA: WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER (2023)

Rampant covid self indulgence, self-questioning, and class disparities in a Manila condo highrise

Kevin Mayuga's playful examination of full-on covid self indulgence in a Manila condo high rise may owe something to the HBO anthology series "High Maintenance" of six years ago with its linking personality, a Brooklyn pot dealer known only as the Guy. That's what the protagonist (Juan Karlos Labajo) is called and does here, except he's more involved not only in drug purchases, which range freely over the psychedelic panorama, but in every scene, especially arranging a big rooftop party hosted by a quartet of privileged young misfits. But the working class maintenance staff are not much better, breaking the rules, getting high, giving a crowded little "surprise" birthday for one of their own, which they think is a necessity. Isn't he the senior member of the group?

Tanya (Nourijune Hooshmand) and Taylor (Chaye Mogg), originally call the Guy toget an order of weed edibles. But they keep talking.The rooftop party arrangement comes when he learns Taylor's father can arrange him to get the US visa he wants. When he geets it and he tells his mom in the US he plans on coming, things start to look different. The Guy keeps getting asked to take the drugs to prove they're legit, so the movie is full of trips. The biggest one is when Guy is being evicted from the condo and his mother's rejection causes him to question everything, and he takes a life-changing dose of psychedelics. It's a cinematic acid trip that compares with the best ones.

The Guy is a link, not really privileged or snooty like the party-givers, but white, and big, and not forced to work. This is unlike Rosemarie (Jorrybell Agoto), whom he connects with when she hounds him to get off the roof, and then bonds with by blackmailing her to get the upstairs keys for the party. She is little, harried, and works at three jobs. When the Guy says they'r alike, she can't accept it. "The thing you have that I don't," says Rosemarie, "is luck." And you just look at his big white face and his unruly curly hair and you see why she thinks this. This is a world of class, of snobbism, of obsequiousness. And i't a retro world, further frozen by the pandemic. The pandemic, however, is something everyone is working hard to ignore here. Meanwhile we know the Guy may be higher up on the social ladder than Rosemarie, for sure, but he's not anywhere. His main project is to get a visa and come to the US.

But this isn't unadulterated social commentary. It is primarily the Guy's journey toward self knowledge. It also comes generously packaged in a wild stoner comedy filled with both old fashioned and new getting high scenes and noisy psychedelic party sequences sleekly lensed by cinematographer Martika Ramirez Escobar. The opening titles already announce that, though this is familiar material, its approach is sleek and up to date. Partly exasperating and partly fun, When All This Is Over is a snapshot of Filipino urban society's concerns about class and need to escape from oppressive situtions.

When This Is All Over, 87 mins., debuted at Pasay, Philippines (Cinemalaya) Aug. 5, 2023, also showing at Udine May 1, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).

SCHEDULE:
Thursday July 18, 8:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Kevin Mayuga

[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

[Chris Knipp]

BAI RUN MIN, AKIO CHEN IN OLD FOX

HSIAO YA-CHUAN: OLD FOX (2023)

Boy learns about inequality from sly local boss in a Dickensian coming of age focused on real estate

With Old Fox director Hsiao Ya-Chuan has made an old-fashioned but highly accomplished and thought-provoking movie about the basic moral conflict between justice and power. The ruthless and cruel local factory and property owner Boss Xie (Akio Chen), who is like a well-dressed lizard tooling around in beautiful cars, befriends the 11-year-old Liao Jie (Bai Run-yin) because he feels the boy is a kindred spirit, the mirror image of himself at that age. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) ,Xie thinks, is like Xie's own late mother, a "loser," softhearted, not tough. "Inequality," Boss Xie repeats to the boy, "inequality." There is a power structure, he teaches the boy, and you must learn to be ruthless to get to the top of it. He remembers that he began himself very poor, his mother a street cleaner who died of blood poisoning

The boy is tempted by Boss Xie's lessons and some of his power wears off on him simply by visibility, by his riding back and forth in Xie's big black chauffeured Mercedes and expensive new red sports car, which intimidates bully boys who lingered around and menaced the boy earlier. He gets dirt against the bully boy's mother that he wields to threaten the boys and make them run away. Jie has been called a "snitch" and doesn't even know why. His new skill at menacing the bullies is as satisfying to him as it is infuriating to him when his father in a gesture of kindness gives up the possibility of a cheap store space he had gained from Boss Xie. Jie really has come to identify with Boss Xie. . . but then he begins to feel the man's cruelty and brutality and rejects him.

The movie is complicated, despite its schematic ideas, and I am not sure I follow it after one viewing. It also gives us glimpses of other possibilities. There is, for example, a brief stream of black and white images of penniless boys begging for help, like many generations of Liao Jie, shot like clips from Italian Neorealist films. There are several women who come and go, without explanation. And, at the end, there is a present-day scene of an adult Jie, now a sophisticated and accomplished architect. In his work and Zoom consultation on the design for a glamorous but understated house it doesn't seem the contrasts between justice and power really apply.

The time of the main action, 11-year-old Jie, is 1989, a moment of rapid economic growth and insecurity in Taiwan, when some made a killing and others lost everything. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai, is a waiter dreaming of owning a small space where he can open a beauty shop in memory of his late wife, the boy's mother. But his savings aren't enough when property prices suddenly double. The boy repeatedly tries to persuade Xie to sell his father a property at a price he can afford, but what Xie wants to do is teach the boy to be tough and self-interested, indifferent to morality and to human feelings, like him. Drink cold water, he says in a memorable moment, close your eyes, and say "None of my damn business!"

There are other characters, notably Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), the young woman people refer to as "Miss Pretty," who is Xie's rent-collector. (It's all collected in person in cash every month.) She is an agent of the cruel boss but herself a kindly person with the renters, and she knows Liao père, who serves lonely and sumptuous meals to her at the restaurant. She seems a somewhat mysterious character. In fact we don't go deep into any character. We often see Liao père and his son meeting at their little home and we see the boy in school uniform, but school we don't see. We see the father play the saxophone and take in tailoring, but this hardly makes us know him. We are instead restricted to a stylized world of power and weakness, haves and have-nots, the soft-hearted and the hard-hearted. We know the boy has talent because he solves a Rubik's cube. This is an old-fashioned world as well as an old-fashioned movie. The characters are conceived in rather Dickensian terms, but the stark contrasts still work. As the boy, Run-yin Bai is the best in the cast, his performance a marvel of restraint. He presents a whole panorama of stoney expressions. When he smiles, it's a breathtaking moment. Director Hsiao's suave control can be seen at work.

Old Fox 老狐狸, 111 min., debuted Oct. 27, 2023 at Tokyo and Nov. 11 at Taipei (best feature, best director), Golden Horse (best director award, other awards), and this year (Apr.-May 2024 at Udine Far East Film Festival. It was screened for the present review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 6:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

[Chris Knipp]

FANDY FAN (AS A-XIANG), TOP, AND TERRANCE (CHUN-HIM) LAU (TIAN-LU), BOTTOM, IN A BALLOON'S LANDING

ANGEL TENG: A BALLOON'S LANDING (2024)

TRAILER

In search of Jin Run-Fa

What this movie from Taiwan about the unrequited attraction of two young men may lack in verisimilitude or logic or sexual oomph in its screenplay it compensates for, if you view it sympathetically, via the charm and good looks of its twin protagonists, the complex romantic wistfulness of the action, and the beautiful scenic locations.

In the main action a frustrated Hong Kong writer, Tian Yu, meets a Taipei street gangster, Xiang, and the two of them embark on a journey to find the Bay of Vanishing Whales, a place that leads to paradise. But a Letterboxd comment (in Chinese) is "The Taiwan travel promo has no plot at all, and the parallel time is very fragmented." Some have commented it's not really gay but just a movie packaged as "queerbait." This indeed is a long tease of a gay romance, with no punch line, just the wistfulness.

At the outset, the poetic voiceover mentions the death of legendary actor/singer-songwriter Leslie Cheung along with the passing of the speaker's parents. One of Cheung's songs will be referenced later. The voiceover is spoken by Tian Yu (Terrance Chun Him Lau), a young writer in Hong Kong who, though he has admirers, is adrift. He winds up going to Taiwan, which he used to visit on summer trips with his parents as a child, where he wakes up in a room in Taipei with a male hustler, A-Xiang (Fandy Fan), whom he owes money. He tries to escape, and keeps being pursued by the increasingly enthusiastic and clingy A-Xiang, who wants his money, and seeing he's loaded, sticks around for more. There's probably also an initial attraction, but that is only hinted at with a look or two, and scuffles that are an opportunity to get physical. They have a good time, including attending a summer fireworks festival, but nothing happens, that we see, other than closeness, and the longing that follows, years after.

Flashbacks and voiceovers recount how Tian Yu as a student found a letter from an orphanage from a boy of eight called Jin Run-Fa. They begin a correspondence. It is Jin Run-Fa who tells Tian Yu about the Bay of Vanishing Whales. Tian Yu in turn tells the boy about how years ago he fantasized writing the story of a boy alone on a remote desert island who finds a bottle washed up on the sand containing a message from ten years in the future. As I've written previously, even Wong Kar-wai indulged in romantic hooey like this, borrowed from Chinese pulp novels. It weaves in and out to add a dreamy, poetic aura to the foreground narrative and to intermix fantasy with unrequited experience.

Of course it would turn out - it seems obvious when it's sprung on us - that Jin Run-Fa later changed his name to A-Xiang, so Tian Yu has, without their knowing it, met the boy he corresponded with when he was a student. And this gives him an excuse to go back to Taipei and seek out the young man who, anyway, he was wanting to see again, after he has snuck back to his, after all, successful life as a writer there - his novel is going to be made into a TV series - a dry, bureaucratic interlude that makes the viewer long for the Taiwan seashore and the energetic, good looking young hustler. (A-Xiang is supposed to be considerably younger than Tian Yu, though the age difference of the two actors, 30 vs. 35, doesn't show much.)

For the Chinese audience much of the fun may be in contrasting the lonely, jaded Hong Kong writer guy with the vibrant young Taiwanese hustler. Different cultures and dialects linked by, perhaps, a common need. And for all of us, the charm is in the actors. On the road trip A-Xiang, with the Taiwan heartthrob Fandy Fan turning on the charm and energy in the role, dances around the glum, reserved Tian Yu, the latter in approach-avoidance mode, pretending to reject A-Xiang while following him in a trip to the coast through various changes of venue and means of conveyance, on the pretext that A-Xiang can take him to the Bay of Vanishing Whales, almost a mythical, dreamlike place Tian Yu knows or dreams of only from the lost boy's letters. But after a while the motor bike rides and dips in the water and tastes of new dishes Tian Yu starts to smile and feel attracted, hinted at when he grabs A-Xiang around the waist on the motorbike. He enjoys being with A-Xiang very much. But not that way.

Director Angel I-Han Teng is already known for a successful LGBTQ+ drama series, "Fragrance of the First Flower." But she doesn't have the kind of remarkable grasp of male homosexual desire, and sex, for a woman, that was displayed so notably by Patricia Nell Warren in her unforgettable mid-Seventies gay page-turner, The Front Runner. In fact this movie seems to dance around rather than plunge into male-to-male desire. If this is a homosexual awakening for Tian Yu as some presume, it remains on a very platonic level. A Balloon's Landing seems to want to linger forever at the first glimmerings of experience.

A Balloon's Landing 我在這裡等你 ("I'll Be Here Waiting for You"), 100 min. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 4:15pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

[Chris Knipp]

LEADING LEE: THE TIME OF HUAN NAN (2023)

TRAILER

This is a woozy, beautiful Taiwan film full of "BL" content, meaning soft core gayness, and focusing on three homoerotically filmed handsome young men and a vibrant young woman who bond as eternal "brothers" (even though one is a sister) in the vicinity of the eponymous Huan Nan Taipei food market, a traditional landmark whose rooftops, some in the film say, provide the best panoramic nighttime views of the whole of Taipei. The film is both epic, and intimate. And intensely colored, perhaps a little too much so. Above all it is replete with young male eye candy.

There isn't really that much about the market. There are a lot of swoony closeups of smooth male faces, torsos and butts, and intimate sexy closeups of a rugby game and more than one sequence of nude male bathing in all of which the homoerotic aspect is more than hinted at, though there is no male kissing - not any kissing, in fact - or sex. The emphasis is on longing and sadness. There is a heartbreaking, as well as slightly confusing, sequence of the three young men plunging riskily into a dangerous surf, with a teasing suggestion that a tragedy might be averted, though it's only a tease. The young woman stands by.

Did I say this is a time travel movie? It is, and reminded me of the equally woozy and soft-core erotic 2022 French Netflix time-travel series "Les 7 Vies de Léa," "The 7 Lives of Lea," which involves teenagers and also goes back 30 years to 1991. Something like that, only not as complicated, happens here. One of the young men, Chen Yao-hua (Hsia Teng Hung), the protagonist, if you like, is Back from the Future, visiting for a lengthy stay from 2022, a time of masks and Covid. At the present time, as the film begins, he works in the butcher stall of his father Chen Bao Ding (Edison Song) in the market. When he's up on the roof trying to persuade his father to stop dancing up there with a sword, he's suddenly transported to 1991 when his father was young, 30 years earlier.

In most of the film we see Chen Yao-hua, who becomes known as Liu Hung-hui, being taken for a highschooler who had gone missing, at a time when his father is young and handsome. And he's also in love with another man, something that wasn't at all okay - as it is, relatively, in Yao-hua's time, since in 2019 same sex marriage was legalized in Taiwan. Gay desire existed back then too, of course, but met with serious obstacles. Yao-hua encounters his young father and there are intimate, homoerotic moments even, perhaps oddly, between them. Yao-hua also sees his older father when he gets back back to 2022 and gives him a bath, also intimate.

Yu Kang Min (Wang Yu Ping), the young woman, plays an important role in the bonding of the Four Brothers of Yuan Nan. Yao-hua falls for her, while realizing that his younger father-to-be is gay and in love with another of what becomes the foursome, Chang An-jian (Chu Meng-hsuan).

Yao-hua becomes concerned with a developing tragedy, the disappearance of Chang An-jian. But this is not a world in which the visitor from today is able to alter events. Things get tricky for Yao-hua (and for us) when he returns to the present. It turns out he is now seen to have been gone for thirty years. It's complicated, and unclear. The film doesn't wind itself up well.

A review of the film by Brian Hioe in The Cinema Escapist confirms this about the weakness of the ending. Hioe is more knowledgeable about gay-themed Taiwanese films and lists and compares them. Though he finds faults in this one, notably a too didactic and explanatory section toward the end, a too obvious effort to highlight the famous market, and the failure to "stick the ending," yet he believes The Time of Huan Nan to be one of the best recent wave of Taiwanese LGBT-themed films. He feels that it is "well shot and excels at pacing"; that the acting "carries the movie," with all the principals "having excellent chemistry" and "oozing charisma." Some would argue that there are a tad too many intimate closeups, but we are invited to admire the handsome young men, and we do. Much though this may, by US or Western standards, seem somewhat timid about the sexual side of homosexuality - the step back to a more restricted time may be meant to justify that - still the film is full of warmth, sensuality, and one might almost say love. It may be considered audacious in combining gay themes with a traditional food market.

The Time of Huan Nan 環南時候,139 min., debuted in the Kaohsiung Film Festival Oct. 8, 2023, and opened in Taiwan May 31, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 13, 6:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57