NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

DAN-GUEI SHEN: THE FUNERAL 頭七 (TAIWAN, 2022)


WU YIHAN IN THE FUNERAL

Bad reception

The visuals are generally elegant in this slow-burner horror film from Taiwan, which blends family conflict with folk evil spirits and explodes into traditional intensified scares and excitement in the last twenty minutes of its 103-minute run-time. An uncomfortable mood is definitely created, though some moments are just too conventional and a perceivable disconnect between the opening and later sections reveals a certain weakness in a screenplay that has some inconsistencies.

The family conflict, and the elaborate focus on funerary ritual, makes one wonder if this couldn't just have been a straight socio-psychological drama. On the other hand, for horror genre fans, all the delving into personal issues may seem to get in the way. Central is a mother, Chun-hua (Selina Jen Chia-Hsuan) and her teenage daughter Qin Xuan (Wu Yihan), who live in Taipei. The daughter suffers from kidney disease and is delicate, needing a transplant. The pic opens with a long sequence where mom, working in a large convenience store at night, walks around continually spooked by odd noises, then a power outage. Later, she and her daughter go out to the family seat in the country - a Chinese language site, Movies and Culture calls it "a dimly lit old mansion" - for the funeral and seven-day wake of mom's grandfather where they are met first by an unfriendly reception from relatives, then by the hostile pursuit of unfriendly spirits. The daughter meets family members she's never known. They are just as unfriendly as the spirits. This world is both familiar and unfamiliar for the mother now.

It turns out Chun-hua hasn't been back in a decade because there was a falling out when she became pregnant out of wedlock refusing to reveal the father's identity or to end the pregnancy as her parents, especially her father (Chen Yi-Wen) wanted, and went to Taipei to raise the child on her own. Her parents have not forgiven her for this. Her father, the most convincingly disagreeable, walks up and simply says, "You are not welcome here." That's about as malevolent as family relations can get, and no folk evil spirits are needed to reinforce it. Mom is nearly as unpleasant. More comes to show Chun-hua's mistreatment in early life, but this is never resolved or explained.

A "large mourning hall built in the countryside" (the Chinese site again) is an impressive reference point of the film that is both grand and scary, a place where "The hanging couplets and yellow curtains make people feel chills down their spines." The daughter is afraid to go to the funeral, so mom goes alone, and while separated from the girl is attacked by a peripheral family member (Na-Do) who, lacking legitimacy, has been excluded from the will and is enraged by this.

While her parents have told her to leave, Chun-hua is determined to remain for the traditional seven days of ritual surrounding a funeral, with the soul wandering on preceding days and set free on the seventh (and sometimes multiple seven-day rituals thereafter). There is a Taoist priest on hand played by Chen Jiakui. We don't quite get to the full ritual, because in the last quarter hour of the film all hell breaks loose, with some possessed by malevolent spirits and violence entering the mourning hall for a dramatic and surprising finale. The site I've cited says this is the best horror movie ever made in Taiwan. Maybe, maybe not; horror fans may like only the last part, but tech features are good throughout and the late scenes have good visuals.

(For more about the plot complications I defer to Don Aneli on Letterboxd who has the only lengthy discussion at present, in English at least.)

The Funeral 頭七 ("The First Seven"), 103 mins. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival, the film's international premiere. It debuted in Apr.1, 2022 at the Quingming Festival in Taiwan.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Wednesday Jul 20, 9:00pm (Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center)


THE "LARGE MOURNING HALL BULIT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE"

[Chris Knipp]

TOM TENG: LIFE FOR SALE 售命 (TAIWAN 2021)


FU MENG-PO, JOANNE TENG IN LIFE FOR SALE

No time to die

This movie from Taiwan about a failed young insurance salesman Liang (Fu Meng-po) makes desperation fun. There's a daft, ironic nihilism about it that recalls early writings of William Burroughs and might have been directed by the Cronenberg of Naked Lunch.We're in a kooky urban purely cinematic world. With its candy-colored noir style, its desperados in the subway, it's elaborate failed suicide attempts (by attempting to consume fatal amounts of cinnamon, chewing gum and carrots), its cockroaches and the loosely-slung young female neighbor Yu-jen (Joanne Tseng) with a teenage son needing a heart transplant who comes over to drink, this is a sprightly and fast-moving tragicomedy full of youthful bravado. As time goes on the movie drifts into genre violence which is over-the-top fun but drifts from earlier promise.

After he gets fired from the insurance job for socking a high-earning stiff - since the income hs's bringing in, a bespectacled female accountant totes up, is less than they are paying him, Liang sets out to follow the theme of the eponymous Yishima novel he picked up on the subway, Life for Sale. (A nice detail is the lingering smell of vomit on the book cover from Yu-jen throwing up on it one night.) He decides to sell his life for real, on the internet. But once he makes known how little he values it, the more others seem to value his existence: e.g., a mysterious woman (Janel Tsa) who urgently seeks a test subject for a high-stakes experiment. Interesting and well costumed characters turn up: a medical experiment, and shady old Mr. Wang (Tsai Ming-shiou), who wants someone to perform dangerous tasks, including getting back a stolen dog from a vicious rival crime boss. Liang spends the rest of the film fighting off unsavory characters out to get him.

Things may begin to seem a little random by halfway into the 105-minute runtime. While the outcome is uncertain, the irony of the situation is clear, how Liang's death instinct has made him desirable material for various oddballs with missions. We could have used a pause for breath or a change of tone: this is a film where a completely new chapter, like in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, would have been welcome. But producer now first feature director Tom Teng in his enthusiasm misses, as feature debut helmers often do, the need to pause for air. The temptation of stylish pop genre violence has been too great. It's fun, but it swallows up the film's earlier promise.

However the first twenty-five minutes of so are among the freshest and most stylish footage the NYAFF has to offer this year, and we must be grateful for that. Better luck next time, Mr. Teng.

Life for Sale 售命, 106 mins., Mandarin and Taiwanese, English subtitles, debuted in Taipei in early May 2022. Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival. International Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES: Showtimes
July 24
9:30 PM
Q&A with Tom Teng
Walter Reade Theater LincolnCenter

[Chris Knipp]

GENG JUN: MANCHURIAN TIGER 东北虎 (2021)


ZHANG YU AND XU GANG IN MANCHURIAN TIGER

Cold laughter in China's far north

A review in Sino-Cinema by veteran Asian film specialist Derek Elley says of this extremely dry, off beat comedy that it "overstays its initial welcome." He describes in detail how the director shows off an indie style of longueurs and eccentric provocations. Though this effort is more commercial than previous ones, it did not do well at the box office.

A coal-mining city in set in Heilongjiang province, located in China’s northeastern corner, closer to Russia than to Beijing, the present day, winter. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu of An Elephant Sitting Still) operates his own bulldozer loading coal at a mine. He’s broke, is married to the heavily pregnant Meiling (Ma Li), and has a young mistress, Xiaowei (Guo Yue).

Before this "deadpan dramedy" takes shape, we see a few sketches introducing the characters. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu) is an excavator machine operator in a mine of this constantly cold Chinese Northeast, and between a cigarette and an excavation, he enjoys the regular visits of his mistress Xiaowei (Guo Yue), not the first, we learn. Despite her insistence, he is firmly and melancholically convinced that his marriage is the only thing he has left in his life. On the other hand, it's his wife who keeps the marriage together. With the same determination she instructs Xu Dong to get rid of their handsome German Shepherd, Ruyi, to prepare for the baby. He struggles to find someone who will buy the animal as a pet and not for the meat. As a last resort, he leaves it to builder Ma Qianli (Zhang Zhiyong), who has a spacious courtyard and a reputation as a successful businessman. Xu Dong also tries to help Luo (Xu Gang), a friend who has mental illness and considers himself a poet, by getting him a job as a schoolteacher, but this is not successful. And Ruyi winds up eaten.

The themes of Geng Jun's film are various: family and the attachment to money; desolation and the lack of a social structure of assistance for the disabled; betrayal, viewed fatalistically, at the expense of respect for women. The protagonist never really pays the price, except through awkward and clumsy triangular situations, which are as worthy of our scorn as of our forgiveness.

The film won the top prize, the Golden Goblet, at the 24th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival, June 2021, Variety reports. Geng’s previous film, Free + Easy, won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Manchurian Tiger is his fourth feature.

Screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Sunday, July 17 at 1pm, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

WEI SHUJUN: RIPPLES OF LIFE 永安镇故事集 (CHINA 2021)



TRAILER

Tumultuous three chapter filmmaking sort-of documentary evokes Jia Zhang-ke and other role models

Wei Shujun, the young director of the semi-autobiographical (and wholly indulgent) Striding into the Wind shown in Competition at the abortive 2020 Cannes Festival, depicted himself as a dissolute, slightly jokey sound man driving a beat-up jeep Cherokee. But he has been a Cannes protégé since his short film On the Border 延边少年, was awarded Special Jury Distinction in 2018. This time he reveals the extent of his ambition (and his enthusiasm for cinema) in this ironic, but rich and beautiful mocumentary about the cast and crew of a pretentious indie film about to be made in rural China about "authentic" people.

The film is divided into three interlocking chapters. The first one, entitled Waiting Alone, in particular is gorgeous (thanks a lot to dp Wang Jiehong), and at points evokes Jia Zhang-ke's exciting early work. Every shot is complicated and fascinating and fun, full of people and junk. The color is like you've never quite seen before and a delight to the eye. The plot again is very meandering but focuses on certain crew members and on a squabbling local couple, the vibrant, pretty young wife, Xiao Gu (Huang Miyi), with a year-old baby, also running her in-law's little restaurant which now finds itself catering for the film crew. She and her husband argue about whether she should breast feed; the husband quotes edicts from his mother to countermand his wife's wishes. Meanwhile the crew members turn their cameras on her and like what they find.

Wei Shujun's previous feature seemed so meandering, disorganized and indulgent I didn't review it. Derek Elley's description of it in his Sino Cinema review (after one of his typically meticulous summaries) was "a pointless two hours spent in the company of uninteresting people," and that did not seem too wide of the mark. But something about the detail of scenes, and the lack of self-centeredness about this, second feature by most counts, fourth by Elley's more inclusive reckoning, makes one feel forced to take notice. But it's still not easy to describe or to do justice to all the often chaotic details.

The film overall concerns a big female star who after 20 years away brings a film crew to her remote hometown for a shoot. The Chinese title means "Yong'an Town Story Collection" and the film was shot at Zixing City, Hunan Province. The production is afflicted by disagreements among crew members while as mentioned, Xiao Gu, the bored local restaurant operator, is excited at the prospect of becoming a stand-in for the star and the star suffers from being too famous.

The first chapter belongs to Gu; the second one, called It Looks Beautiful, begins with the arrival of the film’s leading lady Chen Chen (Yang Zishan). Chen Chen's desire to return to the simpler life of her youth is deceived by her realization that now that she's a star, of course nobody treats her as a normal person in Yong'an Town any more and they celebrate her in endless cumbrous ways she must smile and endure while old friends and acquaintances turn away from her, try to gain favors from her, or are sadly changed. This is a combined study of the disenchantments of "success" and the disillusionment of a simpler past that's forever lost. It's a chapter rich in colorful celebratory scenes, fireworks and costumed dragons and crowded reception parties, chaotic material still sometimes suggestive of Jia Zhang-ke.

The third chapter, perhaps more in a Hong Sang-soo mode, focuses on the director (Liu Yang) and the screenwriter (actual film screenwriter Kang Chunlei), who argue over the philosophy behind the film and what it should feel like. This chapter is entitled Pluto Moment, referring (I gather) to the 2018 Zhang Ming film about a film crew who get lost in the mountains and never complete their film. This title signifies a creative impasse experienced by the script writer and the artistic differences between him and the film director. The scriptwriter is a melancholic romantic and a fan of classic rock; the director is a sanguine pragmatic ex rapper (a Wei standin?). They appear incompatible and it doesn't look like the script is going to be completed. And it will never be authentic even if it is, because the crew realize it ought to be made in Hunan dialect, which they can't do.

Screen Daily compliments Wei for "Swiftly delivering on the promise of his freewheeling, semi-autobiographical debut feature" and calls the film " a dexterous rumination on the pursuit of authenticity" The reviewer, John Berra, suggests Wei this time "courts comparison with the meta-comedies of Hong Sang-soo" because the film's local ingenue is complimented for resembling Hong's muse Kim Min-hee - whom she has never heard of, of course. Hong may come to mind in the third chapter, while obviously the first evokes Jia, and the second could bring to mind The busy, crammed early segment is nothing like Hong's minimalist dramas, but early Jia Zhang-ke can't help but seem real influence and not an unsuccessful one.

Ripples of Life is inconclusive, by intent, but begins to live up to Wei's extravagance and promise. This is one to savor and rewatch.

Ripples of Life 永安镇故事集 ("A collection of stories from Yongan Town"), 123 mins., in Mandarin and Hunan dialect with English subtitles, premiered at Pingyao in Oct. 2021, and also debuted at Cannes 2022 in Directors' Fortnight, showing later at London, Busan, and Brussels and other international festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the July 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Monday, July 18
6:00 PM AT THE Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

ARVIN CHEN: MAMA BOY 初戀慢半拍 (TAIWAN 2022) |


VIVIAN HSU, KAO KO IN MAMA BOY

TRAILER

A sheltered son breaks away

The situation of Mama Boy brought back memories of the classic 2001 French comedy by Étienne Chatiliez, Tanguy. Xiao-hong (Kao Ko) is a sheltered young man, nearly thirty, who lives at home - but only with his mother, who is very bossy. And this is not like the posh bourgeois Parisian world of Tanguy. Meiling (Yu Ziyu), Xiao-hong's mother, works in retail. And rather than perpetually at university, Xiao-hong works in his uncle's tropical fish store. Xiao-hong is a strange, touching character who finds a unique way out. Director Arvin Chen has a fresh approach, but it is the performance, and the presence, of heartthrob Kao Ko that makes this film especially memorable.

Xiao-hong is a peculiar young man. He is tall and almost silent, and appears glum. In the trajectory of the film he will gradually open up and start to smile. He has been completely under Meiling's thumb. She is trying to find him a girlfriend, but when she sets him up on a dinner date, mom intrudes via smartphone and becomes an obtrusive third party present at the table and the girl flees from the restaurant with dinner untouched. As Meiling, Yu Ziyu risks being shrill and sometimes is, but the secret of Chen's comedy is that it stays human.

In Kao Ko's wonderfully restrained and surprising performance Xiao-hong is strange, mysterious, sad, but also very sweet. In his quiet containment there is a world of potential waiting to be let out. Yes, he's an odd creature, but he's presentable too, tall, poised, on the edge of "handsome guy."

It's Xiao-hong's cousin at the fish store who drives a wedge into the young man's isolation by dragging him to a "love hotel" to lose his virginity. Against his will he's pushed into a room with one of the girls, known as Apple, a specialist in virgins. When she starts to service him he immediately flees. But it's at once clear that he has liked the madam, Sister Lele (actor and pop star Vivian Hsu). And for obvious reasons. He's not awkward with her as he is with the restaurant date or the cute young woman who comes to buy fish because she's been told it will cure her insomnia. Sister Lele is a mature woman and also beautiful. In Vivian Hsu's excellent performance the audience finds Sister Lele attractive too, at ease and casually elegant.

And sad and problematic. But that comes later. Xiao-hong starts coming to the brothel all the time. He just sits in the room with Apple and then leaves on his motorcycle. Sister Lele of course hears what's going on, but she tolerates it, and Apple likes having such an easy customer. We know that he is living for the glimpses of Sister Lele.

As the world of Sister Lele's problematic son Weijie (Fan Shaoxun) comes into play it's jarring, a break in the gentle social comedy and a hint of danger and violence. Weijie is slick, handsome, confident, a con man whose unwise scheme selling knockoff wine is going to get him into serious trouble with dangerous loan sharks and with the law. He only sees his mother when he desperately needs to borrow money from her. The film seems to slip into a different, gangster genre. Weijie is a liar, a trickster, an angry man. Weijie and his mother make the relationship of Xiao-hong and his mother seem not so bad after all. When Weijie glimpses Xiao-hong's relationship with his mother he is angry and there is going to be trouble.

Chen avoids sentimentality in the relationship that develops between Xiao-hong and Sister Lele when he starts accompanying her to a dance bar, an old hangout of hers and learns a little about her past. But when he starts dancing around in the fish store - a memorable image of the tall young man and the sweeping, graceful movements - it tells us he's in love, a little delirious, transformed. She's a lonely woman and divorced her husband immediately after Weilie was born. Her trials with him make her time with Xiao-hong a comfort.

Xiao-hong starts haltingly dancing with Lele, staying out at night. His mother is not happy. He won't tell her what he's doing or introduce her to his new "friend." By now he is all focused on Sister Lele - he still calls her that, treating her with great respect and almost awe, which she cannot help to especially like. The movement of the film is that as Xiao-hong grows more confident and happy, but always restrained, with Lele and they have a great time dancing and he takes her home on his motorcycle, the trouble Weilie is in is correspondingly getting worse while Meiling is getting more angry at Xiao-hong's suspicious new independence. There is a subplot of Meiling's chorus and a male singer of the group who's interested in her, a retired police academy professor. This connection will lead to big trouble for Sister Lele when Meiling finds out who her son has been seeing all this time.

It is inevitable that this sweet comedy will move into disaster and some violence and end with disenchantment. It will end with Meiling's statement that she and her son have both learned important lessons. It would seem that Arvin Chen hasn't a mean bone in his body. the lack of irony of Mama Boy is essential to the unique quality that Kao Ko's subtly nuanced performance embodies as the lead.

This is the his third feature set in Taiwan and in mandarin for forty-four-year-old writer-director of Mama Boy Arvin Chen, who was born in Boston of Taiwanese immigrant parents and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from UC Berkeley and USC School of Cinematic Arts. After college in 2001 he moved to Taiwan and worked for Edward Yang, an interlude that had a decisive effect. He returned for film school at USC. His short made there, "Mei," won a Silver Bear at Berlin 2007, and his debut film Au Revoir Taipei won awards at Berlin, Deauville, and San Francisco. It will be interesting to see if in future he incorporates his American background into his films. A story in Taiwan News[/i] about Mama Boyreports that he has lived in Taiwan for the past decade. He is completing two other films and says that he plans "to focus on international co-productions."

Mama Boy, 94 mins., debuted at the Udine Far East Film Festival, and it opened in Taipei. It was screened for this review as part of the July. 15-30, 2022 New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center. North American Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Showtimes
Saturday, July 16
3:15 PM
Walter Reade Theater

[Chris Knipp]

TOM HUANG: DEALING WITH DAD (2022)


PETER S. KIM, ALLY MAKI, HAYDEN SZETO IN DEALING WITH DAD

A Chinese American family faces a depressed dad

With an uneven start, and some glitches along the way - Tom Huang brings in too much and leaves some threads dangling including several unnecessary relatives and a young Taiwanese immigrant (Anthony Ma) - Dealing with Dad winds up being a touching and astonishingly bold portrait of the problems, hopes, dreams, and ordinary satisfactions of a first-generation Chinese American family living in California. It's also a very welcome addition to the New York Asian Film Festival. New York is, after all, in America, but Asian Americans are woefully underrepresented in mainstream American movies and in this festival.

As the title implies, there is humor in Dealing with Dad, in which director Huang has a strong background, but it's built around very real issues, particularly one Huang dealt with in his own family and one that's shirked by many, particularly in the Asian-American community: depression. The Taiwan-born father (Dana Lee) who is not young, has lost his job and that has triggered a bad one: he spends all day in bed lifeless, debilitated, staring at the television in a daughter's cluttered former bedroom, having already turned his own into a dump. He won't acknowledge anything is wrong, nor will his wife.

The comedy - maybe not so much - is that in this very reduced state Dad is not a little, but much nicer, too weakened to be the loud, violent, overcritical, overbearing asshole brute he normally is. Do the adult children really want him back like that, the way he was abusing them as kids and adults?

The action begins with the parents' most accomplished of their American-born offspring. Their daughter, Margaret (Ally Maki), is a hotshot, with a job on a startup, taking charge of her kid Nikky's school bake sale, and married to a nice African American husband, Jeff Atlas (Echo Kellum). But she has stress dreams, something like the trailer of The Shining. She keeps working a Rubik Cube and reciting a mantra, "I can choose how I feel, and I feel peace," to calm down.

Jeff tells Margaret she has to go to deal with the Dad problem. Against her will she goes and against his will she gathers her banker older brother Roy (Peter S. Kim), who's overweight from stress eating due to his broken marriage, and they hop a plane and go north to Milpitas, where their old rooms await them, except Margaret's is occupied by Dad. Their mother (Page Leong), with her blunt, comical English, is kooky, racist, and dramatically stingy, and forever misunderstanding and pushing to get the kids married. She loves Nikky but forgets and calls him a mongrel. She's not much help here. Roy's a bit of a mess: he's having to face being served with divorce papers - another thing that's funny, but not exactly.

Younger brother Larry (Hayden Szeto), who's 33, is already there. He's a case of arrested development, still living at with Mom and Dad and seeming more a boyish hobbyist than an adult. There are some good scenes of him and Aaron (Ari Stidham), the large, bulbous, bearded manager of a hobby store, bargaining for the sale of some of his choice action figures. His character is very specific. Cash poor, he likes that Dad gives him money unquestioningly now, and, living at home, he likes having Dad be quiet and out of their hair.

On the way to the house in the rental car Roy and Margaret talk and we see several flashback glimpses of Dad's truly horrific meanness and sometimes violence.

A lot of interesting stuff happens that show off the family's interactions, which can be hot tempered, but have an underlying love behind them. After a visit from a nice young Indian psychiatrist they know (Karan Soni) who confirms the depression diagnosis and prescribes Zoloft, Margaret eventually persuades Dad to take the pills and start seeing a therapist who (improbably?) makes house calls.

And then, Dad is an asshole again, as bad as ever. But that has taken quite a while, and by that time Roy's and Larry's fortunes have improved immeasurably, Larry has a place of his own with Sarah (Megan Gailey) and a job at Aaron's store, and Margaret is doing as well as ever. They have learned things about Dad's life in Taiwan and things given up in America that make them understand his sacrifices for him.

The point has been made: Asian immigrant parents can be clueless and cruel, but they care, and the families are tight, for life. Depression is a disease people have trouble dealing with, but it can be cured. And director Tom Huang has done a remarkable job of talking about his own experience in a way that's humorous, but also truthful (including references to the pandemic, by the way). Audiences like that. It's what blurbs call a "bittersweet comedy," but it feels more unique than that label. This reviewer didn't want it to end.

The multi-ethnic cast members aren't exactly mated with each of the characters they play but are all the more fascinating as a picture of the complexity of Asian American life - maybe, except that only English is poken here other than a few words between mom and Shiao Li.

Dealing with Dad, 106 mins., debuted at Cleveland Apr. 3, 2022, showing at other festivals including Alabama, Oxford MI, Phoenix, Tucson, San Francisco's CAAMfest and LA Asian Pacific. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, July 15-31m 2022, It showed July 15.

[Chris Knipp]

C.J. WANG: RECLAIM 一家之主 (TAIWAN, 2022)


BAO QIJING AND YU JIAAN IN RECLAIM

Portrait of a retiring woman lacks shape

CJ Wang's feature debut revolves around a woman who's life revolves around others. She is Mrs. Yeh or Ye Lanxin (Bao Qijing), who once wanted to see the world and be an artist, and now is a soon-to-retire children's art teacher whose husband (Kou Shixung) and children order her around like a servant and she humbly obeys. Her placid nature keeps this situation from feeling as ugly as it is. Much of the film gets lost in financial speculations whose outcome isn't altogether clear, and so the film doesn't quite go anywhere. It has made its point, which is to show a glimpse of the complicated life of a middle class Taiwanese woman, but the result is not an altogether successful film, at least for non-Taiwanese viewers.

This is a film rich in details but also lost in them. It seems to want to be a gentle chronicle of domestic life à la Ozu (but with an ironic twist?) but that doesn't come off, and there are dangling threads, in particular one about a young man who shows Mrs Yeh properties for sale and offers her off-the-cuff investment opportunities who may or may not have swindled her. The property-viewing scenes are repetitious.

There are interesting scenes with Mrs. Yeh's elderly mother (Yu Jiaan) who is elegant but has Alzheimer's. (Isn't she a bit too well turned out for one so out of control mentally?) She gets into trouble at the nursing home and so Mrs. Yeh wants to bring her home. To this end and also because of the value Taiwanese attach to property investment, she starts searching for a larger house to buy. (Her husband takes little interest in this. Isn't that odd??) Her relations with her mother lead up to a dream sequence which is supposed to lead to a sense of fulfillment and understanding, but this passage is overlong and doesn't come off. And all the property-viewing scenes: where are they going, exactly?

It feels, from a western point of view at least, as though Wang is a bit, sometimes a lot, too forgiving, or at best just ambivalent. The husband whom a festival blurb calls "mansplaining" is worse than that. He's really just an a-hole, inexcusably exploitative and condescending. He is a blunt illustration of Taiwanese society's lingering, deeply inbred misogyny, which allows women still today to be assumed to be responsible for all the trivial duties around the house, and as mothers likewise obliged even toward adult children. Mrs. Yeh makes a few gestures of independence, equivalent to saying "Do it yourself," but the screenplay doesn't make clear if these are changes or anomalies. One mild gesture of change comes when Mrs. Yeh doesn't answer a phone call from their son, who, after they have spent so much on his education for so many years, now suddenly tells them that instead of taking a local teaching job, he is going to go to the country with his wife and take up farming. This is news so devastating that she doesn't dare tell her husband.

The key element is the relationship with the mother, because the point is that Mrs. Yeh used to be a daughter herself, who had hopes and dreams long now lost in duty; the mother now is set free in her meandering world of dementia. And what will become of Mrs Yeh? But it's difficult to deal with a character with dementia because she is cut off and opaque.

Reclaim provides a great deal of detail of everyday life from the point of view of a sixty-something woman, including those all-important scenes in Chinese films of food preparation and eating. But the detail pours out unheeded; the screenplay needed refinement. The film and especially the latter part with its confused dream sequence need paring down and reshaping, with tweaks in the house-hunting segments as well. CJ Wang is nonetheless a promising young director with a gift for the mundane who may provide more shapely depictions of domestic life in future.

Reclaim 家之主 ("Lord of the House") , 123 mins., debuted in Taiwan June 11, 2021. A review by Daniel Ku in Vogue(which can be viewed in English translation) can be found here reveals that Bao Qijing won numerous acting awards. International Premiere.

NYAFF SHOWTIMES:
Friday Jul 29, 6:00pm
Asia Society