by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: Film Poster
DESPITE ITS promising premise, in depicting various contemporary vignettes of Taipei, Tales of Taipei is a letdown. This is all the more of a shame, considering the significant star power that the anthology film marshals—featuring no less than 9m88, Wu Bai, and other iconic musical talents as actors.
What proves of interest is the recurring tropes that come up between. For example, the movie features an unusually large number of characters who are Hongkongers, attesting to how the emigration of Hongkongers to Taipei after 2019 has not gone unnoticed, and figures heavily in the imagination of immigration to Taipei.
Many of the tales are about separation, distance, and chance meeting. Among the standout segments is one featuring 9m88 as the anonymous girl that the protagonist meets at a nightclub and acts as if she knows him, but he does not remember. The premise of the interaction between the two provides for a great deal of humor. Likewise, the final segment, featuring Wu Bai as a newspaper deliveryman who encounters a supernaturally conscious building that is about to be torn down—representing Taipei itself—is another standout. This is mostly on the basis of the segment’s premise, thematically uniting the movie as a whole.
But, as is common with anthology films, the quality is uneven in Tales of Taipei. That is, some segments are less memorable. A segment about a couple having relationship issues—seemingly because the woman is a supernatural creature masquerading as a human, unknown to her husband—is tonally odd. Even if it is not the only segment featuring supernatural elements, it proves out of place.
One of the weaker segments features a deliveryman who strikes up a conversation with a betel nut girl. As it transpires, both are budding musicians working side gigs in order to make money. If anything, this segment does not work because of its transparently unrealistic depiction of the betel nut stand industry, or hip hop in Taiwan. While the segment probably aims to depict a meet-cute, the effect is tawdry and corny.
Indeed, the betel nut stand that features in this segment is Baby Betelnut, a real-world location, and among the actors are the actual staff of the business. The nightclub that appears in the segment with 9M88 is the nightclub FINAL. Yet despite that real-world locations appear in the movie, this generally detracts rather than adds depth to the movie—most likely because the movie has done so little research that it is self-apparent that the movie is an imagined fantasy of Taipei. This is a way that Tales of Taipei differs from the classic depictions of Taipei from the Taiwanese New Wave, which aimed at social realism.
Tales of Taipei is less than the sum of its parts, then. Neither memorable nor creative, the movie comes off as a series of disjointed, mostly undistinguished vignettes that fail to be interesting or revealing about Taipei. In this sense, there is much left wanting from the movie.
