San Francisco International Film Festival 2008

[Chris Knipp]

GILLIES YA-CHE YANG: ORZ BOYZ! (2008)


LEE KUAN-YE ON THE SHOULDERS OF PANG CHIN-YU

Kids fleeing from reality in Taiwan

A lot of twee meanderings have to go by before some human emotional content enters this cute but disorganized story about two mischievous schoolboy pals whose gym teacher nicknames Liar No. 1 (Pang Chin-yu) and Liar No. 2 (Lee Kuan-yi). Yang lets every shot and every scene run too long; the nearly two-hour film could benefit from some radical cuts.

Nonetheless first-timer Yang, previously author of Blue Gate Crossing, a successful Taiwan youth novel about teenage girls that was made into a movie by Yee Chi-yen, does have a grasp of the boys' imagination and gets nice performances from his young stars. The film, which includes animated sequences by Wang Teng-yu involving the boys' fantasy escape, the Kingdom of Orz and "Qatar King," is technically accomplished and makes good use of local settings in its Taiwan coastal town of Danshui and dozens of cooperative extras.

Though many scenes take place at school, classroom activities and individual classmates aren't the focus because they aren't for the boys, who also rarely confront the adult world. For their constant pranks (a scam to grab classmates' money opens the film), No. 1 and No. 2 are forced to spend much of their summer repairing library books after school. But they use their time scheming to fly to Orz, imagining a bronze school statue coming to life, and on other boyhood follies.

Liar No. 1 is the bigger boy and takes the lead, and has a peculiar, deranged father. This father and son are vaguely reminiscent of Kurosawa's Do-des-ka-den, and there's material here for a heartbreaking study of deprivation and loneliness. The film winds up spending more time with the living situation of Liar No. 2, who's reluctantly cared for by his mildly abusive shopkeeper grandma (Mei Fang), who doesn't like her son's farming out his kids, and actually loses his baby daughter, Mei--who No. 1 steals as a joke, but then loses in a park.

Granny goes bonkers, but the sequence wanders off at the end, and what preoccupies the boys and the film much more is their project to save money so they can go to the Kingdom of Orz--and their desire to get hold of a winning coupon to get the special edition Qatar King from the local toy shop.

"Orz" also refers to an emoticon of Japanese origin depicting a figure bowing toward the left and denoting surrender, dejection, or deference. Perhaps it refers to the obedience to adults No. 1 and No. 2 don't want to grant. In that sense they're certainly not "Orz boyz," and adults don't come off as very supportive or helpful here.

The filmmaker in Chinese style is also known as Yang Ya-che. Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008.