Kudos to Taiwan for being the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, and I'm thankful to this film for presenting that subject in a heartfelt and empathetic manner. However, this film is quite grating, half-baked, and unsatisfying.
The filmmakers have, I assume, stacked the deck far too generously in favor of the gay character. Perhaps they were anxious that viewers would be a little homophobic and would too readily side with the widow/mom. To prevent that, they've made the mother as outrageously obnoxious as possible. She screams, she squeals, she rages. She bursts into self-pitying sobs. She is self-centered, obsessed with material things, overbearing, and LOUD. Certainly there are people like that in the real world, but the actress's performance never made it anything more than an annoying caricature. Perhaps a Taiwanese audience would find some particular humor in her performance, but I saw only poor acting, confusing motivation, and a person that was a chore to watch.
The gay character has a bit of an arc. He becomes more nuanced and (somewhat predictably) more sympathetic as the film progresses, yet the movie never gives the same degree of depth to the mother. There are scenes late in the film that lend pathos to her plight--such as when she desperately tries to appear sexy to her husband, using her coworker's demeaning advice and her research into pornography as inspiration--but the extreme register at which these scenes are keyed in (every moment with the mom is dialed in at 11) undercut their effectiveness. The filmmakers seem to have been so convinced that the mother would be the natural source of empathy that they haven't bothered to make her a meaningful, worthwhile human being.
The son is supposedly the main character of this movie, and he awkwardly narrates much of it. Some hand-drawn animation gives us insight into his imagination (I guess?). The son is one-dimensional, however; he is essentially interchangeable with any other teenage male high school student, and in no way does he develop as a protagonist or "come of age." His motivations are likewise very strange throughout the film.
The final act of the film is surprisingly subdued and poignant, and I thought the filmmaker was nicely restrained in showing us the gay character's magnum opus without ever really explaining what it all meant or how/if it meaningfully reflected his relationship with the dead father. The pleasant, nuanced thoughtfulness of the ending was enough to lift my rating to a 4/10.
But then there are also very loud, on-the-nose elements to the ending that counteract its success. While the actors are giving their stage bows, the gay characters possibly homophobic mother emerges from the back of the theater, holding a bouquet of flowers and beaming her love towards her son. She still loves him! She approves! She hasn't rejected him now that she knows he is gay! And yet... There were roughly eight people in the audience, and they all would have been visible throughout the performance. Did the guy not see his mother in the crowd all this time? Or did she somehow purposely wait until after the play was over until entering? If so, that seems like a really misguided way of showing support. The scene doesn't make much sense. It's supposed to be a warm, fuzzy moment of redemption, but its message is muddled by the fact that we know next to nothing about the mother's character. If she so readily accepts his sexuality, then maybe she never really had a problem with it to begin with? And if she had to struggle to accept it, then what did that struggle consist of? Certainly she didn't see the play--that wasn't part of her struggle. So what lesson are we supposed to get from this?
Other elements of the movie likewise ring with falseness, like the gay character's apartment, which is simultaneously "filthy" and yet very colorful and artistically arranged... like a set, i.e, a fictional idea of filthy rather than a realistic filthy apartment.
Taiwan has a great history of cinema, from the blockbusters of Ang Lee to the artful meditations of Edward Yang to more mainstream pleasant fare like Starry Starry Night. This film, unfortunately, doesn't quite cut it.
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