Isabella Leong and Rainie Yang star as potential lovers in Zero Chou’s award-winning SPIDER LILIES
SPIDER LILIES (CI QING) (Zero Chou, 2007)
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium
40 Lincoln Center Plaza (111 Amsterdam Ave. & 66th St.)
Thursday, June 9, free, 6:30
Series continues Thursday nights at 6:30 through June 30
www.nypl.org
Winner of the Teddy Award for best queer feature film at the 2007 Berlinale, Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies is an involving melodrama that starts out silly and quirky but quickly turns to far more serious topics. Rainie Yang is delightful as eighteen-year-old Jade, a kawaii innocent who tries to make money as a sexy web-cam girl but never goes too far, sometimes because her granny walks into her room and looks into the camera at rather inappropriate moments. When one of her loyal followers — an internet cop participating in a sting to entrap online sex sites but who harbors a hidden affection for Jade — suggests she get a tattoo, Jade goes to a local parlor run by Takeko (Isabella Leong), a slightly older young woman whom Jade had a puppy-dog crush on when she was nine. But Takeko, a serious person with a wild tattoo running up and down her left arm, doesn’t seem to remember Jade, at least not at first. When Jade asks for the same spider lily tattoo, Takeko refuses, claiming that they “are the flowers that grow along the path to hell.” Indeed, Takeko seems to live in a private hell all her own, filled with haunting childhood memories centered around an earthquake that killed her father and left her brother, Ching (Shen Jian-hung), with severe mental problems that require special care. She is also a surrogate older sister for Ah-Dong (Shih Yuan-chieh), a wannabe-rebel who finds strength and confidence from Takeko’s tattoos but uses them to bully unsuspecting students. Although the story, written by Singing Chen, goes off on too many tangents, Chou brings everything together as the characters approach a bittersweet finale. Leong and Yang make a fascinating potential couple; Chou, the only openly lesbian filmmaker in Taiwan, prepared them for their roles by having them watch episodes of The L Word. Spider Lilies continues Chou’s use of one of the colors of the gay pride rainbow flag in each of her films; in this case, she features green, seen in the flashy wig that Jade wears. Spider Lilies will be shown at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on June 9 at 6:30 as part of the series “Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou” and will be introduced by the director. The series continues on June 16 with 2004’s Splendid Float, June 23 with 2008’s Drifting Flowers, and June 30 with 2001’s Corners. Keep watching twi-ny for select reviews of these rarely shown but important and evocative works.