Review - The Falls

February 12, 2024
 
The Falls – Taiwan, 2021
 

While watching Chung Mong-hung’s 2021 film, The Falls, I was reminded of something one of my child development teachers remarked, that tears and anger are often the result of an accumulation of frustrating experiences – tough mornings, disagreements with friends, difficulty at work or school – not just the result of what has recently happened. However, there are times in history when the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back is so powerful and unexpected that it has the potential to send people spiraling into the abyss. For some people, Covid-19 was such an event, and The Falls is the first film I’ve seen that attempts to show the impact of the pandemic on both people’s personal and psychological states.
 
The Falls begins with a scene of dysfunction, one that I’m sure many people are unfortunately familiar with. It is a school day, and for Lo Pin Wen (Alyssa Chia), just getting her daughter up and out the door is a momentous task. It should be easier, of course. Her daughter, Xiao-Jing (Gingle Wang), is 18 and a senior in high school, yet their morning is filled with a string of unfeeling inquiries and caustic backtalk. And it only gets worse as the day goes on.
 
At work, Pin Wen receives a double whammy. First, there’s a rather heartless email requesting that all staff members decide how much of a “voluntary” pay cut they receive. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she is informed that one of her daughter’s classmates has tested positive for Covid, automatically triggering home quarantine for the entire class. Pin Wen offers to keep working, but her boss tells her to take some time off. It’s an understandable decision, but it deprives Pin Wen of the one thing that she needs to feel in control of the chaos surrounding her, and without it, her descent is rapid and severe.
 
The Falls could easily have focused solely on the ensuing two weeks, detailing what quarantine is like and how these characters deal with their unwanted joint confinement. Instead, it elects to pivot in a way that allows for Pin Wen and Xiao-Jing to switch roles. Covid gives way to mental illness, and Xiao-Jing must now effectively become the head of the household. Unfortunately, the change is too abrupt, and Xiao-Jing’s sudden maturity seems unexplained. This is a character who, while possibly infected, was so spiteful as to take off her mask while standing close to her mother and tell her to keep away, a move that can only be seen as an aggressive attempt to create both emotional and physical distance. To see her acting kind and responsible so quickly was more than a bit jarring.
 
Hurting the film more is its apparent desire for its characters to resolve problems with very little effort. Need your mother’s financial information? Just make an emotional plea to a bank employee. Have money problems? Just sell your house. Never mind that by your own admission the market is bad. Have low savings? Perhaps you too can live off of NT $40,000 (about US $1,300) a month. Writers Chung and Chang Yao-sheng seem to think that there are easy solutions to everything, and that they can be discovered and dealt with in less than ten minutes of screen time. The result is less a journey of discovery than a series of simple steps.
 
Perhaps the most egregious of these “simple steps” is the notion that people with mental illness can, with enough introspection and awareness, eventually diagnose the source of their problems themselves. Twice in the film characters detail sudden flashes of awareness when developments like those are much more likely to be the result of therapy and strenuous reflection. It is as if the spectre of A Beautiful Mind had somehow taken possession of the writers as they looked for another rapid resolution and made them make the following erroneous calculation, Well, if worked in A Beautiful Mind, it will work here. Fortunately, the scenes in which these revelations are divulged are quite moving, and like Nash, one of the characters has developed a somewhat realistic method of coping with something that she knows is not really there.
 
Other aspects of the film also ring true. Many of the companies most directly affected by the pandemic did in fact either reduce their staff or ask them to take pay cuts, despite already having what can only be considered extremely low salaries, and yes, many workers were indeed asked to choose how much of their salaries they would lose. Given that they were told that the alternative was job loss, was it really a choice, though? More importantly, periods of quarantine were not always times when families came together. Those that were already dysfunctional did not magically come together – For many people, there were more arguments, more drinking, more friction, and even suicidal thoughts. Thus, it is not surprising that Pin Wen and her daughter do not come together during their quarantine. Realistically, their journey takes much longer. Also, I admired the way the film slowly puts the pieces of the mother’s condition together. As a result, we get a remarkable understanding of what leads to Pin Wen’s decline.
 
Still, I can’t help thinking of The Falls as a compromised film. The idea behind it is a promising one, and the two lead characters are fascinating to watch. However, the film’s frequent shortcuts undercut the drama, robbing it of much needed momentum. A better film would have left difficulties unresolved for a time, adding them to other conflicts and raising the stakes for its characters. This one does not. A better film would also not have to rely on a shock ending to make its point, for in a family drama, what resonates is the final state of the family, and that point had already been made. In the end, The Falls is a good film, one about sympathetic characters coping with tragic circumstances. It had the potential to be great, though; it just lacked to attention span to pull it off. (on DVD in Region 3; on Netflix)
 
3 stars
 
*The Falls is in Taiwanese and Chinese with English subtitles.
*The Falls won Best Narrative Film at the 58^th Golden Horse Awards in 2021.

Review - The Fourth Portrait

May 24, 2012

The Fourth Portrait – Taiwan, 2010

Mong–Hong Chung’s heartbreaking film The Fourth Portrait begins with the first of many unintended acts of cruelty. I say unintended because many of the people seem to have long ago given up any notion that they could change their own fate let alone alter someone else’s for the better. The film takes place in an area of Taiwan that its much touted economic miracle looks to have passed by. What we see is occasionally reminiscent of both a war zone and a ghost town, one whose inhabitants fled as quickly as they could and never looked back. In one scene, a young boy and the school janitor he refers to as “grandpa” rummage through abandoned buildings looking for something of value that they can sell so that one of them can get out of this place that time has forgotten. One of the eeriest sights is a child’s doll that lies in the middle of a messy, dusty room next to a cracked window. At one point, it brought someone joy.

The film begins in a hospital, where a doctor’s unintended act of cruelty leaves a ten-year-old boy alone in a room with his dying father. The boy is told to inform the doctor when his father stops breathing, and then he and the nurse leave the room. Perhaps there are other patients that require their attention. Perhaps they have just become numb to death and the people it affects. When death indeed comes, they ask the boy to return home and retrieve a good photo of his father and some clothes that are appropriate for a burial. The boy goes home, washes his father’s best shirt, and draws a beautiful portrait of him in pencil. It is the first of the film’s four portraits, and their significance grows as the film progresses

As the film moves along, people enter and exit the boy’s life. Unfortunately the ones that could help him exit too soon, and the one that could hurt him becomes a daily presence. With each new character, we learn a piece of the pain that exists in this seemingly distant land – an older man who lost everyone he loved fifty years earlier in a war-ravaged part of China during the Second World War, an awkward young man who he befriends a child just because he is kind to him, and a woman for whom life is and has been a constant struggle. In one scene, she holds up her Taiwanese identification card as if to prove that she deserves to be where she is. She’s wrong. In fact, she’s deserves much better. Who is this film doesn’t? Practically everyone is haunted by either earthly evil or the kinds of memories that some people drown themselves in alcohol to forget. Nowhere can the majesty of Taipei 101 or Kaohsiung’s Sky Tower be seen. In its place are the flickering lights of an outdoor lounge where men go to find pleasure in the arms of someone they couldn’t care less about. And then there is the ghost that haunts the boy, his mother, and his stepfather, the specter of a lost family member who should be there but is not.

The Fourth Portrait bares a slight resemblance to King of the Hill, Steven Soderbergh’s 1993 Depression-era drama about a young boy who is forced to fend for himself during trying times, especially in the film’s early scenes, when it is unclear just how the boy will survive. In one scene, we watch as he takes someone’s lunch from the refrigerator in the teacher’s room at school. What’s different about this film is its absence of a hero. In King of the Hill, we were always aware that the boy’s parents were out there somewhere, trying their utmost to return. That kind of hope is hard to find in The Fourth Portrait. Even the reappearance of the boy’s mother offers little in the way of relief. Quite the opposite, actually. In one scene, she explains to him the unfortunate circumstances that he now finds himself in. His mother has remarried, and she has had a child with her husband. This makes her son essentially a stranger in his own mother’s house. It seems an awful thing to say to a child, but to her, she is being honest. When she left him, he was in what she thought were safe hands, and it’s doubtful that a reunion was ever intended. As she puts herself puts it, how was she supposed to know his father would die? Sometimes honesty can be its own form of cruelty, regardless of intentions.

Like Chung’s previous film, 2008’s excellent Parking, The Fourth Portrait is not an easy film for viewers, and at a time when many Taiwanese films are focusing on much more light-hearted topics, such as love-struck teenagers, bread, and patriotic uprisings, it is refreshing to see a director who knows how to craft a story and create characters that the audience will sympathize with without having to make them slight caricatures. In fact, the only character that seems slightly out of place in the film is the boy’s newfound older friend, and yet even this character is oddly logical given the circumstances of the film. In fact, in The Fourth Portrait, each of Chung’s characters exudes a sense of realism that I’m sure many other directors wish they could create. That Chung has done it twice in a row is quite astonishing, and he remains a director to watch.

Once again, Chung also gets some incredible performances from his cast. Bi Xiao-Hai is mesmerizing as the ten-year-old boy, and Hao Lei gives a truly heart-breaking performance as his long-suffering, deeply troubled mother, a role that earned her Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Horse Awards. TV actor Na Dow is also affective as the troubled man who becomes the boy’s surrogate brother. This character’s actions don’t always make sense, but they do by the end of the film, and Dow’s last scene in the picture is quite moving. However, perhaps the character that stuck with me the most was the school janitor, played by Shih-Chien King. His delivery of a timely anecdote is absolutely perfect, and I have no doubt that his message will resonate with many viewers. The Fourth Portrait will not be easy to find or easy to muster up the impulse to watch, especially after this review, but I have no doubt that those who do will be moved by the experience. (on DVD in Region 3 and Blu-ray in Region A)

3 and a half stars

*The Fourth Portrait is in Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitled.

Review – Parking

May 22, 2009

Parking – Taiwan, 2008

Parking opens with a shot of a man (Chang Chen) sleeping in his car along the side of a road. He is suddenly awakened by the unmelodious sounds of his cell phone going off, for his wife has just now noticed that the man did not return home the previous night. There may not be any way to spin this moment in their relationship. I suppose it’s possible that such obliviousness is natural, the normal by-product of a double-income family trying so hard to make ends meet that it not uncommon for one of them to come home at a rather ungodly hour. However, as I watched the scene unfold, I had the notion that there was more going on than what is immediately apparent. Happily-married men who find themselves in such a situation smile when they talk to their wives; they assure them that they are well in a voice so sweet and tender that it simultaneously conveys both an apology and a reassurance of their own security. The man’s words do not reflect these emotions, nor do they convey any harshness, I might add. It’s as if all of his feelings have left him and he has nothing left to give.

We learn that the man and his wife have a date planned for that evening, which is a little peculiar, for as Billy Crystal said in When Harry Met Sally, the last thing a man wants to do is date his own wife. The man is given what seems like a simple task: to pick up some cake for later. It’s so simple in fact that logically he should be in and out in no time. Fate however has a funny way of making even the easiest of undertakings difficult, for after purchasing the desired desserts, he returns to his car only to find it blocked by someone illegally double-parking. What follows is a descent into a part of the world that few relish being a part of. It is the world of pimps and prostitutes, gangsters and hoodlums, of those who have lost hope and of those barely clinging on to it.

In this world, we meet an elderly man and his blind wife, two people who for six years have apparently been waiting for their long-lost son to return. For little Nini (Kai Jung Lin), the couple’s granddaughter, those years have been even more excruciating. In addition, we meet Lee Wei (Peggy Tseng), a beautiful young woman from China who had come to Taiwan with romantic visions of a better life, only to be forced to work in the most degrading of professions for one of the most immoral of men (Leon Dai). The area that the lead character finds himself in is also home to a barber (Jack Kao) who is the kind of man who opens his business just so that he can serve one of oldest customers and a tailor (Chapman To) who failed at his father’s business and now finds himself in debt and hiding in the shadows. As night falls and the darkness sets in, the area, which was already half-empty to begin with, becomes the location of secret rendezvous, illicit business transactions, and a steadily increasing level of violence.

One of the reasons that Parking works so well is that it is incredibly successful at making the audience care about its characters. Simply put, as the movie progresses we want these characters to find a way out of the precarious situations they has found themselves in. The movie makes us feel this way by revealing small but pertinent details about many of the film’s more sympathetic characters. We see the tailor in what to some would have seemed like better days, but to him felt like being incarcerated. We see Lee Wei speaking with such innocence about what Taiwan will be like for her. And we hear the words of the unseen but ever-present Little Ma, a man whose actions six years earlier had the unintended affect of leaving Nini and her grandparents to fend for themselves. And yet many of the details concerning the film’s central character remain a mystery until the film’s last act, an act which takes us back in time a day to a doctor’s office. There, words that are probably best left unsaid are said in the most hurtful of tones to the two people most vulnerable to such words. The damage, however inadvertent, is done, and whether their marriage can survive now depends on whether the man makes it through his long and perilous evening.

Parking is one of those rare films that pulls you in and doesn’t let go, and as I watched it, I knew I was observing something unique. That the film is director Mong-Hong Chung’s first makes it even more astonishing. We may be witnessing the beginning of an amazing career. In addition, the performances in the film are all top-notch. I especially like the portrayal of the barber and the blind woman. Her reaction when she hears her son’s letter read aloud is heartbreaking. I also liked Lun-Mei Kwai’s brief appearance as the man’s wife. In only a few moments, she was able to make all of the man’s earlier actions completely understandable, and she is an actress I hope to see more of in the future. The end of the film finds some characters heading toward better yet uncertain futures; others though seem stuck in place. If you couldn’t tell, I was trying to throw in a reference to the title just them, but I couldn’t find one that worked well. No matter. I’ll let the film speak for itself on that one. (on DVD in Region 3)

3 and a half stars

*Parking is in Mandarin with English subtitles.