Talk: New Auteurs in Taiwan Post-New Wave Cinema: Hou Chi-Jan, Lin Shu-Yu, and Cheng Yu-Chieh
Examining those under-examined ‘new auteurs’ in the post-New Wave Taiwan Cinema
5 November, 2020 2:00 pm
Wei and his wife, a piano teacher, are expecting a baby in three months. In three months, Ming will be married to You, a cook and the love of her life. Yet all this ended in a horrible car crash leaving Wei and Ming alone to face the world in emptiness.
Everything that was left behind seems unchanged, but is forever different. They choose different paths, different ways of mourning. Like two mice lost in a labyrinth, Wei runs around in circles, hitting walls, and still ends up where he began. Ming calmly and slowly creeps down a determined path, seemingly moving forward, but towards a fatal dead end. Days go on not feeling like days and the only thing that lets them know that time is still moving forward is the weekly seven-seventh ritual that they both go to up in a mountain temple. It is only there that their paths cross. In a crowd of hundreds of mourners, Wei and Ming notice each other and recognize the pain within the other.
Embarking on separate journeys, Wei decides to visit the homes of all this wife’s piano students, returning their tuition fees for the lessons that will never be taught. Ming decides to go to Okinawa, the honeymoon she and her fiancée will never go to together. In the end, they discover that the only end to their journey is the end of the journey itself, nothing more.
On the 100th day, they travel up to the mountains again for the final ritual. After the last prayer, they meet again, finding both pain and comfort in the other person, a total stranger, but the only stranger who knows what the other has been through. Sunset, on the bus down the mountain, sitting side by side, they weep in silence.
