Genre: Drama, Romance
Starring: Pernilla August, Ludwig Palmell, Huang Ho
Release year: 2009
Language: Mandarin/Swedish
Subtitle: English
SYNOPSIS:
Kicki has after several years abroad returned to Sweden. Her 16-year old son has been brought up by his grandmother and has a very distant relationship to his mother. In an effort to get reacquainted Kicki invites her son to join her on vacation in Taiwan. But her hidden agenda is that Taipei is also the home of the Taiwanese businessman with whom she has been conducting an internet romance
RATING: 8/10
WARNING: THIS MOVIE CONTAINS GAY LOVE STORY. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!
REVIEW:
" This is the twenty-third film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.
When the film began, the biggest surprise, the thing that made my eyes pop out, is the sight of Eric Tsang playing a Taiwanese businessman speaking unbroken English (though with a moderately strong Chinese accent), and completely without the usual flamboyance he portrays in character in the movies and TV shows he's in. His character is at first seen through the Internet flirting with our eponymous main character, Kicki, who lives in Sweden and is lonely in her solitary apartment. We get it, and thankfully young Scandinavian-Chinese director Håkon Liu (劉漢威) doesn't linger on these scenes for too long. In 15 minutes, we understood (or at least, have an idea, but do not have the facts confirmed until later in the film) that Kicki lives alone after being away from Sweden for a long time, and is thus estranged from her fatherless son Viktor who lives with Kicki's mother.
Out of nowhere, she decides to go to Taiwan for a holiday, and invites Viktor to come along with her. (We know of course, that it's not really "out of nowhere".) Viktor, shy as he is, is of course happy to come along to get to know better the mother who normally seems so distant. And thus begins two sets of misadventures which eventually converge (rather unwillingly): one is Kicki who, now having found herself halfway round the world, finds it difficult to summon the courage to actually see the Taiwanese businessman; the other is Viktor, who is sort of stalked by an odd Taiwanese boy his age with dubious connections but who seems really in need of a friend and somehow finds it in Viktor, and who goes by the name of Didi. Didi keeps taking Viktor around Taipei, despite Viktor never asking and always politely declining.
When Kicki finally meets the Taiwanese businessman, the meeting is awkward and has a huge number of unwanted witnesses. How Liu handles that scene is accomplished, in that he doesn't do any flashy stuff and just shoots it simply, allowing the actors to emote at two different levels – the surface and the underlying, with the underlying layer being what the scene is actually about. At the end of that, you find that you're only an hour into the film – what happens next? I thought it might falter and get boring, but the film sustains audience interest by ...
... I just halted my stream of thoughts right there because I got stuck wondering which phrase to use: "by having the characters go through such and such scenes" or "by having the plot twist this way or that", and I realised that I can't really use just one or the other. It's both, a very properly welded combination of character and plot.
This is possible because the script did a good job with its setups that leads to natural (or at least plausible) pay-offs later on. I say this because a dilemma involving gangsters appears late in the story, but we buy it, and somehow it is the perfect set-up that forces Kicki to go into action and get her close to Viktor again after screwing up before. Gangsters, in what is essentially a fairly quiet relationship drama.
There is a moment between Viktor and Didi which will surprise audiences, probably make some of them uncomfortable. I thought it was quite tender.
I am generally quite impressed with the writing and direction – and this being Liu's first feature film. There is a lot of playing with the audience, in the form of withholding of information; but unlike true arthouse films the film does finally reveal those pieces of information. It's sort of fun like that, keeps you guessing. Plotwise, it is ultimately quite predictable, but really, the actors are mostly quite compelling to watch, and you become almost as self-conscious as the characters are about the scenes they find themselves in, that it is still an engrossing film – but a quietly engrossing one; I suspect if one is in a distracted or unfocussed mood it would be easy to lose interest in the film.
Acting-wise, obviously Eric Tsang stands out by being so different from what we have seen him before; Pernilla August as Miss Kicki is just wonderful, her character could easily alienate audiences if not played properly but she didn't, in fact we like her and she feels like a real person, and any idiosyncracies or stuff she does which we don't understand, well, we attribute it to the fact that we don't know her well enough, rather than poor characterisation. (I also stumbled upon the rather surprising fact that Pernilla August played Shmi Skywalker in the Star War prequels.)
I also observed that people when they are travelling, the travelling tends to bring out something different in them, and this makes for good movies because of the emotions that surface ... but only if done well.
I actually would like to watch this again.
Did I Like It? Very much yes.
Did I Fall Asleep? Thankfully no."
Source: filmgarmott.blogspot.com
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