Shu-shen Hsiao

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

The film consists of three stories: One about a 5-year-old girl, one about a teenager, and still another about a 30 something woman involved in an affair with a married man. Without providing a definite answer whether the three leading actresses are playing the same person in different stages of life, the movie instead hovers on several consistent themes that keep on emerging in all the stories. For example, the image of drops of blood on the clothes, in the shape of maroon flowers.

1945-1947, Taiwan. A teenage couple were deeply in love despite objections from the girl’s family. Their tragic story is played out in travelling troupes, tea-houses and western-style cafes, with the backdrop of Japanese occupation and the 28 February Incident.

A woman falls in love with two different girls, both singers - one in Shanghai during the late 1940s, the other in Taiwan during the late 1950s.

Da Yu, a 15-year-old boy, wanders aimlessly in the lonely city.

Burned by the desire to avenge her dead boyfriend, a Japanese woman learns to shoot a gun, and goes after the local Mafia in Taiwan. Mizuno Miki excels in her role as the grieving and estranged, then vengeful and cold-blooded foreigner.

Due to a combination of bad writing, unnecessary and distracting directorial gimmicks (split screens, black & white, slow motion, etc.) and very inept subtitling, "West Down Girls" is almost completely impossible to follow, but I think it has something to do with the rivalry between two girls who are members of opposing street gangs, and the arrival on the scene of a third girl who is the childhood friend of one of them and the sister of the other. The (very few) action scenes are a complete mess. The film is basically an over-the-top melodrama and makes very little sense. I was too frustrated to even enjoy the beauty of Cheryl Yang and Annie Wu.

'Such a Life' is quite a sad film. It is set in the sixties, in a village on the west coast of Taiwan, where many are succumbing to 'black foot', a disease caused by drinking contaminated well water. The only 'cure' is to amputate the afflicted limb, and to avoid drinking the contaminated water. Many in the village were already sick, and few could afford to have tap-water installed. At the center of the story is Ah Chung, who lives with his grandfather, who has already lost one leg to 'black foot'. In the same village also live an opera family, who are finding things increasingly difficult there, an oyster farmer, who complains that his oysters are being poisoned by a nearby pharmaceutical plant, and an assortment of children who enjoy swimming in the sea, and who bully Ah Chung. A significant portion of the action also takes place in the village school, where Ah Chung is having trouble keeping up with the fees.

To achieve his dream of being a trumpet player, a man leaves his hometown and works in a touring operetta troupe. He falls in love with a girl but then contracts tuberculosis, forcing him to give up the trumpet.

Hsin-He, a high school sophomore who can get along just fine on her own, lives with her father. At school, the days pass slowly by, until one day, she is assigned to be the student teacher. Since she loaths math, her teacher orders Ke-Lei, student teacher from another class, to tutor her.

Never Compromise