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

[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

[Chris Knipp]

ZU FENG IN A LONG SHOT

GAO PENG: A LONG SHOT (2023)

Impressive debut about China in chaos on the brink

The early scenes of this film, which are dark, desperate, and violent, grabbed me immediately. However "grimy" or gritty, rain-drenched and in multiple shades of grey it is, Gao Peng's directorial debut is a wonderful film, transferring the searching moral intensity of Krzysztof Kieślowski with the action showdown of a great Western to a period Chinese setting and with an intense human drama at the center of it all. Based on a real event, A Long Shot focuses on northeastern China and the huge, festering Fenglin Ferroalloy Factory, an old iron and steel foundry which isn't functioning productively and hasn't paid its 8,000 employees for months. It's the winter of 1990, before the economic miracle, when the changeovers of the economy were struggling to happen. Violence and disorder prevail and there are frequent thefts, culminating in a shootout toward the film's end. Amid the schemes and robberies and violence what's happening is a human struggle to live one's life.

A Long Shot is brilliant enough to have gotten complimentary festival reviews in Hollywood Reporter (Jordan Mintzer) and Screen Daily (Wendy Ide). Mintzer is basically right in his concluding assessment that what's "ultimately most memorable" here isn't the finale "gunplay" but the film's overall "setting itself," which has the air of "a small city" that's become the victim of "a major dystopian catastrophe." The gunplay, the action, is good too, and so are the intense human bonding and coming of age stories and the portrait of a struggling society. There are a lot of characters, a lot going on, wrangled by the three writers plus the director who penned the screenplay. Apart from the workers, who figure, as well as their disaffected, aimless or delinquent young offspring, there are the managers, who tilt into criminality in the desperate situation too, and a rough gang of security guards who function as local police, when they're doing what they're supposed to, settling trouble often violently, often without turning it over to the police.

Though the opening depicts violence among youths and the security crew's aggressive handling of it, and these youths will flow in and out of the scene, riskily stealing parts and scrap from the factory's interior, playfully throwing firecrackers at each other and on the windshield of the factory manager's car, in the foreground of the film is its struggling moral center, the former champion sharpshooter Gu Xuebing (Zu Feng), who once was a local celebrity, but became deaf in one ear and had to quit. Now he is one of the security guards, but unlike the others, he refuses to take bribes from thieves. There is also his female friend Jin Yu Jia (Qin Hailu), whom Wendy Ide assumes is his former lover; she thinks her son Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie) is also his. Jin Yu Jia urges him to mentor the boy, who gets caught in a robbery of the factory in the opening sequence, though boy and man have a love-hate relationship. Zhou Zhengjie's intense expectant gaze and Zu Feng's world-weary gloom are the contrasting emotional and visual hearts of the film. When Zhou discovers the sleazy bar his mother has been forced to moonlight at, it's a classic scene of disillusionment. Everyone struggles with each other - and with the pushes and pulls of the environment, with its social volatility and economic stress.

The action thriller finale is as clear and compelling, transported to this chaotic setting, as a John Ford Western. It comes at a time of an ill-starred 40th factory anniversary celebration when the 8,000 employees are going to finally get some back salary payoffs. The sound of firecrackers mingles with machine gun fire. Gu Xuebing and Xiao Jun both put their hands on a certain illicit homemade weapon - changes in arms access regulations are another theme underlined in opening and closing onscreen texts. But when the smoke clears and the film's over one has lots more to ponder than that, guided by the youth Xiao Jun's intensity and moral confusion and Gu Xuebing's courage and sense of loss. This film is a thrilling picture of a country full of energy, a "smoldering crucible" just on the brink of betterment. It may also refer (as Mintzer notes) to the country's "current economic slump," or to all the twisting and breaking of law that's always gone on.

A Long Shot老枪 ("Old Gun," also "Old Timer"), 117 mins., debuted at Tokyo (Best Artistic Contribution winner: see coverage of the Tokyo Q&A); it was also presented at Mykolaichuk (Ukraine) Jun. 16, 2924. Screened for this review as part of the2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 9:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Gao Peng


TEEN REBELS INA LONG SHOT

[Chris Knipp]

CHAYANIT CHASANGAVEJ IN SUPPOSED

THANKORN PONIGSWAN: SUPPOSED (2023)

Wild for to hold

Supposed is a sort of dating app rom com involving a successful executive who meets a beautiful, younger woman via Tinder, is entranced, but can never hold her. This begins to be a telling, touching study of the attractions and dangers of such relationships. It seems to fade away a bit into little more than a music video at the end. But we must cut it some slack, since the director, Thankorn Ponigswan, died of lymphoma, at the age of 46, shortly after the film's completion and he may hot have been able to put the finishing touches on it.

The encounters of "Non" (Ananda Everingham), the Tinder-cruising businessman, and "Dear" (Chayanit Chansangavej) start via social media. She says she has been away for five months. He never gets a clear answer from her about what this means. But her teasing, wild, playful ways are entrancing. When the Korean restaurant where she wants to eat is closed, she breaks in and makes "Non" cook for her.

There is some of the life of Laotian-Australian actor Everingham in "Non," because the actor's father was an Australian photojournalist who scuba-dived to save his lover, and aa "Non" he is always taking pictures and wants to be a writer, and talks about scuba diving. "Dear" won't say what she does away from "Non." They have a sex life and things seem great except she is distant, keeps disappearing, and seems to have another involvement, while "Non" falls more and more in love with her.

"Dear" and "Non" made me think of the 16th-century English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt's famous poem "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind," which imagines his lady love as a wild deer that he chases in vain, and concludes she is "wild for to hold, though she seem tame." He imagines a necklace around her "fair neck," "graven with diamonds in letters plain" saying "noli mi tangere," touch me not. "Dear" escapes "Non." He cannot trap her. At the end he sorts through her cancelled web page's many images and pursues her at the places she has seen and photographed.

She has said revealingly that whenever she is involved with someone she enters his world and imitates him, but so she does not know who she really is herself. With "Non," she also has begun taking a lot of pictures, as he like to do. But early in the film, we see him posing, and describing that he wears blue because he's been told it's a friendly color, and he photographs himself. He's a narcissistic male and, like so many before him, pursues an image, "Dear" with her unspoiled young face, her tempting eyes, instead of being attracted by the other woman he sleeps with briefly, who is communicative, and available: not interesting, too easy, too practical.

Supposed is a study of modern dating app romance, but winds up being such a classic love story it can be epitimized in a 16th-century poem. Chayanit Chansangavej is certainly entrancing in the role of the elusive young woman, and Ananda Everingham is a suave, able dupe, the eternal male chasing a women who is too young and too mysterious to remain in his clutches for very long. Too bad the film does't find a less pretty, less ambiguous solution, but most of the way it depicts the eternal chase beautifully. The cinematography of Vardhana Wanchuplao has a dark, distinctive look; the score by Wittawin Amornrattanasak, however obtrusive, is essential to the online, pop-culture mood.

Supposed, 100 mins., opened in Thailand Dec. 5, 2023, debuting at the Osaka Asian Film Festival Mar. 4, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 3:30pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro with cast members Ananda Everingham & Chayanit Chansangavej

[Chris Knipp]

LIN JIANJIE: BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY (2023)

New York Premiere
Brief History of a Family
家庭简史
Lin Jianjie's gut-punch of a debut rips the Band-Aid off the wounds of post one-child policy China and exposes the scars and anxieties beneath. When Wei, an outgoing only son from a middle-class milieu, and Shuo, his taciturn but scarily sharp-eyed classmate, get tangled up in each other's lives after a mysterious incident at school, it sets off a chain reaction that turns Wei's picture-perfect existence inside out. As Shuo worms his way deeper into Wei's family and becomes the unofficial new member of the household, the cracks in the foundation start to show, and what was once a mutually beneficial friendship turns into a pressure cooker ready to blow. Lin's filmmaking style foregoes hand-holding in favor of pure, raw emotion, turning a simple family drama into a seductive, unsettling psycho-thriller that holds up a mirror to the absurdities and contradictions of modern life and makes you want to call the therapist.

Director: Lin Jianjie
Cast: Sun Xilun, Lin Muran, Zu Feng, Guo Keyu
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
2024; 99 min.

SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 20, 4:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center