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 […]
On an unassuming summer afternoon in 1959, the imploring voice of a principled, concerned father (Guozhu Zhang) is heard through the near empty halls of a junior high school as he attempts to persuade the school administrator into reviewing the grading of his son’s examination paper for Chinese literature (a subject that he claims his […]