Taipei, the present day. Born blind, to parents with a flower-growing business in rural Taiwan, Huang Yu-hsiang is a talented pianist who faces his first time away from home when he goes to attend university in the capital. He’s the first blind student in the college’s musical faculty. His mother helps him during the first few days and he has a friendly roommate in Chu Tzu-ching, who wants to start a band of his own. Near the college, Chieh works in a small fruit-juice shop, despite the naggings of her spendthrift mother to get a better job. Stuck in an unsatisfying relationship with a rap dancer, she dreams of taking up modern ballet seriously, and finally enrols in some free classes. Yu-hsiang and Chieh meet in the street one day, when she helps him find his way to an elementary school where he’s giving music lessons, and they inspire each other to fulfil their dreams.
With its two lead characters remaining platonic friends throughout, Touch of the Light is more a mate movie than a date movie, an offbeat heart-warmer – or what the Chinese call an “inspirational movie” – that’s paper-thin on a plot level but manages to maintain interest over almost two hours on its performances and direction alone. This first feature by early 30s film-maker Chang Jung-chi is a development of his 37-minute short The End of the Tunnel, which featured the same two leads, real-life blind pianist Huang Yu-hsiang and 25-year-old Taiwanese-French actress Sandrine Pinna (Candy Rain, Yang Yang). A follow-your-dream movie, in which the pianist leaves his rural home to attend college in Taipei and encourages a fruit-juice girl to pursue a career as a dancer, it mostly manages to stay the right side of soppy melodrama while sketching a spiritual attraction between the two very different leads.
The script doesn’t even bring the pair together until halfway through the film, which until then cross-cuts between Huang (playing a version of himself) settling into college with the help of his mother (nicely played, with supportive optimism, by Lee Lieh, producer of Monga and Jump Ashin!) and Pinna’s Chieh, who has a two-timing boyfriend and a mother who squanders money on special-offer beauty products. When the two bump into each other on the street, it’s a meeting of minds: she releases him from his prison of blindness and he releases her from her prison of everyday life.
It’s a fanciful, rather thinly-scripted idea that pretty much works on its own level, thanks to Spanish-born French d.p. Dylan Doyle’s mobile camerawork, which gives the movie a realist edge instead of a saccharine feel. Doyle’s experience on commercials and music videos clicks in whenever the film develops its boldest riff – visually portraying the link between Huang’s world of sound and touch with Chieh’s aspirational world of pure feeling, of flying free, in dance. (The Chinese title means Backlit Flight.) When the movie cross-cuts between Huang and his band performing at a competition in Taipei and Chieh doing her solo dance routine at an audition in Hong Kong, it is, indeed, an inspiring moment, as music and visuals combine to link the characters.
Not yet an accomplished actress, Pinna is fine here in a role that’s made for her indie-ish screen persona. However, all the clever camerawork, which stays away from full body shots, can’t disguise the fact she’s no dancer – unlike Huang, who’s a real pianist and proves it. This imbalance weakens the realist side of the film, though Pinna’s Eurasian looks nicely underscore the fact, without ever being stated explicitly, that she’s also, like Huang, a kind of outsider. Supporting performances are warm and marbled with comedy, in a Taiwan-slacker way, and editing by scriptwriter Nyssa Li is smooth.
Derek Elley