Taiwanese cinema experienced a period of rebirth after the release of Cape No. 7 in 2008. More films were made, the box-office takings increased, and homegrown comedy established itself as the market leader. 2014 was a crucial year for the film industry. While numbers and earnings confirmed the positive “post-Cape” trend, a slight downturn, and the constant difficulties of sticking to budgets, mean that the market may be stalling. The most popular genres are indie pop films, as well as the comedies, although inroads are being made into other categories. One common factor is the growing attention being paid to the quality of productions, and the quality of the marketing.
Kano, Café. Waiting. Love, and Twa-Tiu-Tiann were the three highest earners of 2014, and were produced respectively by the makers of Seediq Bale, You Are the Apple of My Eye, and Night Market Hero. They all use the same basic elements that made their predecessors so popular.
Kano, directed by Umin Boya and produced by the director of Seediq Bale, Wei Te-Sheng, is once again set in 1930’s Taiwan, back when it was a Japanese colony. Like You Are the Apple of My Eye, Café. Waiting. Love is based on a romantic bestseller by Giddens, who directed the first film and wrote and produced the second. Lastly, Twa-Tiu-Tiann, which like Night Market Hero was produced by director Yeh Tien-Lun and actor Chu Ko-Liang, explodes with typically Taiwanese comic verve.
Although it stars two relatively unknown faces, Sung Yun-Hua and Bruce, Café. Waiting. Love managed to earn almost 7.5 million euros at the box office, and became the summer’s number one blockbuster. Director Chiang Jin-Lin, after having closely flanked Giddens on the production of You Are the Apple of My Eye, managed to faithfully recapture the spontaneous exuberance of his previous works. Thanks to some wide-ranging experience in short films, documentaries, music videos and adverts, he showed the influence of comic books, and this had younger audiences flocking to see his film, which became a big commercial success.
There are plenty of nods to Stephen Chow in Café. Waiting. Love, as well as cameos by Benjamin Lam (Love on Delivery) as a karate coach, and Wong Yat-Fei (Shaolin Soccer) as a hard-headed maestro. Giddens’ stories are also home to those characters who are head over heels in love in an exaggerated way, which is typical of Chow’s style. But Café offers us a romanticism adapted to local tastes, with a pinch of the 1970s and 1980s, and a helping of Taiwanese street food to add flavour. The other rom-com, Twa-Tiu -Tiann, which earned over 5.5 million euros at the box office, was set between the 1930s and the modern age, something which probably alienated the younger audience.
Two of the most representative films in Taiwan in 2014 were Kano and Paradise in Service, directed by Doze Niu. They were period feature films that were meticulously produced with an eye on commercial success, but they still did not make a profit.
Kano was overshadowed by the student protests of the period of March 2014. It was re-released in September, but never attained the anticipated heights. Its total takings of almost 10 million euros did make it Taiwan’s biggest ever box-office earner, but it didn’t break even.
Paradise in Service, another mega-production costing over 7 million euros, is set on the island of Kinmen in a military brothel in the 1960s. It’s a tale of heartache and families broken by the war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Despite expectations, the efforts of the producers were never repaid, and it only took two million at the box office.
Besides the dominant trend of local comedies and indie pop films, there were a few notable attempts to break the mould. Sweet Alibis by Lien Yi-Chi, and Partners in Crime by Chang Jung-Chi, tried to be different, while independent productions like Meeting Dr. Sun by Yee Chih-Yen, Rice Bomber by Cho Li, Ice Poison by Midi Z, and The Exit by Chienn Hsiang all centred on social issues. In Partners in Crime and Meeting Dr. Sun the central theme is student life. The former uses thriller techniques and addresses the issue of bullying and the solitude of youth, while the latter is an absurdist Story of two high school students vying over a statue.
After Touch of the Light, Chang Jung-Chi seems to have done an about-turn, style-wise: while his first effort was a moving, positive film, the second is racked with negativity and melancholy. In his new capacity as a director of thrillers, thanks to the knowing use of chiaroscuro photography and cold tones, he creates a growing pathos that slowly draws us into the depths of the human soul. It takes place in a local setting where bad intentions, social media posts instigating violence, peer pressure, and the cold indifference of adults prevail.
Meeting Dr Sun was directed by Yee Chih-Yen, 12 years after his Blue Gate Crossing. While sticking to the same youth issues as his previous outing, the new film widens its scope to take in the subject of economic disparity; it describes in a humorous way the tribulations of a new generation freed from political taboos and ideological binds. The two teenage protagonists of the film – the poorest student in their school – decide to sell their school’s bust of Sun Yat-sen, and hatch two different plans to steal it from their school’s storeroom.
During Chiang Kai-shek’s rule of martial law, statues of Chiang and of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the homeland, were omnipresent as a symbol of the political domination that covered every corner of the country. But with the democratisation of Taiwan, these figures, which had been eulogised by the ruling Kuomintang, lost their importance. The young protagonists of Meeting Dr. Sun, born in the post-martial law era, never experienced political repression, and instead reflect on their low social standing due to their limited wealth.
The schoolboys’ “interest” in the dusty bust of Sun Yat-sen is symbolic of them re-evaluating his revolutionary ideals about the redistribution of wealth. But the film, does not seriously criticise the system; on the contrary, it makes us reflect on the cycle of poverty, thanks to a comic treasure hunt carried out by the youngsters who, forced to write an essay of self-criticism by their teacher, end up vying for the title of the most penniless in the school.
In the past, the only film contenders during the Lunar New Year were Hollywood films. But after the release of Night Market Hero in 2011, a slew of local productions have opened in New Year: Lion Dancing 2, The Arti: The Adventure Begins and The Wonderful Wedding, partly helped by the stars trying to make it in continental China. But of these contenders, only the latter was a box-office smash.
Lion Dancing 2, starring two huge names in local comedy, Peng Chia-Chia and Hsu Hsiao-Shun, plays on the notoriety of the TV programme of the same name, in which the presenters entertain the public in a Taiwan-style cabaret show. The film version is one of their shows held in the continent, with the aim of promoting the minnan culture of southern China.
The Arti: The Adventure Begins is a 3-D puppet animated film produced by Pili International, a company from Formosa, which over the years has won over an increasing slice of the market, thanks to TV and DVD distribution, recently attempting its first foray onto the big screen.
Lastly, The Wonderful Wedding was the biggest box-office smash in spring, taking over 3 million euros in five days. The heart and soul of the film is Chu Ko-Liang, another king of comedy and cabaret on the island; he has starred in four different films in the past five years released during the Lunar New Year. In terms of the gross of these movies, he could now be considered to be the biggest box-office draw in Taiwan. The film revolves around the wedding of a girl from southern Taiwan, and a boy from China. It won over audiences, young and old, thanks to its bubbly dialogue and wit.
Film production obviously reflects the continuous development of the relationship between Taiwan and China, and The Wonderful Wedding’s central theme is the ideological, with the cultural differences between the two places being transmitted in a humorous caricature. The choice of the main stars, Chu Ko-Liang, Ruby Lin and Li Dong-Xue, was a smart one to satisfy the public from both markets.
We see them splitting up and getting back together, the meeting of the families and how they try to satisfy the others’ needs, the relationship between parents and their offspring, as well as factors that faithfully reproduce what really does happen in Chinese society before a wedding. There’s the calculation of the dowry, taboos to be avoided, the organisation of the banquet, and some other events that provide a comic outlook on the cultural conflicts. It’s made even more side-splitting by the hilarious Chu Ko-Liang, who infects the entire film with his riotous antics.
Hsiang Yifei