An unemployed young man named Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) passes idle time at a local Taipei mall when he encounters an old friend (Chen Shiang-chyi) on the opposite escalator. With time on his hands, he agrees to accompany her back to the location shoot where she is working as a production assistant for a film. At […]
In the crowded metropolitan city of Taipei, the empty lives of three strangers cross paths in a vacant apartment. The film opens to a shot of a key accidentally left on the front door. Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a fragile, young salesman, seizes the key, inspects the apartment, and decides to move in, proceeding to bathe, […]
On a raining evening at a nondescript telephone booth in Taipei, two petty criminals, Ah-tze (Chen Chao-jung) and his friend Ah-ping (Jen Chang-bin) drill through the lock of the public telephone and steal the contents of the collection box. In another part of the city, an unmotivated and distracted student named Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) encounters […]
In a pivotal encounter in Teuvo Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a lovesick Olavi seeks solace in a brothel and instead finds himself confronting past transgressions when his abandoned lover Elli, now working as a prostitute, challenges him to follow through on his empty promises of marriage by arguing that, in her provocative dress […]
The recurring imagery of turbulent waters in Teuvo Tulio’s films reflect a kinship with early Norwegian (and more broadly, Scandinavian) cinema in the use of rugged landscape as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of the human condition. In Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a daredevil log ride through the swift currents of a […]
A clear highlight in an already strong French cinema program this year is Agnès Varda’s playful and understated, yet endlessly inventive The Beaches of Agnès. Part autobiographical survey from her childhood in wartime Europe to her lifelong activism (she self-effacingly admits that she missed the events of May 68 because she was living in California […]