DRIFTING FLOWERS is another investigation of gender identity from Taiwanese director Zero Chou
DRIFTING FLOWERS (PIAO LANG QING CHUN) (Zero Chou, 2008)
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 23, free, 6:30
Series continues Thursday nights at 6:30 through June 30
www.nypl.org
“Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou” continues June 23 at 6:30 with a screening of Zero Chou’s 2008 lesbian melodrama, Drifting Flowers. Written at the same time she wrote her previous film, 2004’s Splendid Float, which was set in the world of drag queens, Drifting Flowers consists of three interrelated tales of romance and intimate relationships. The first section is told from the point of view of eight-year-old May (Pai Chih-Ying), who lives with her older sister, Jing (Serena Fang), a blind nightclub singer. Social services thinks May would be better off with a real family instead of doing her homework and falling asleep every night at the club, but things get even more complicated when both May and Jing come to rely on Jing’s new accordion player, the very butch Diego (Chao Yi-Lan), in very different ways. The second segment follows the elderly Lily (Lu Yi-Ching), who is wasting away at a senior citizens’ home until her husband, Yen (Sam Wang), suddenly shows up and instantly fills Lily with fond memories — although she mistakes him for the woman she loved, Ocean; it turns out that the “marriage” was a fraud just to fool their parents so Lily and Yen could actually live with their same-sex lovers. But as Lily feels a new vibrancy in her life, Yen is suffering terribly with HIV. The final part goes back to Diego’s teen years, when she worked in her family’s puppet theater and developed her first real crush on young burlesque singer Lily (Herb Hsu), linking the three stories. Drifting Flowers is bogged down by cliché after cliché, constantly telegraphing exactly where it’s going. Chou, the only openly lesbian Taiwanese filmmaker, regularly takes the easy, obvious route, not being fair to her characters, who deserve better. Although individual vignettes offer the promise of a more challenging narrative, the story inevitably returns to the lowest common denominator in dealing with gender identity, which is a shame, because Chou had so much more to work with. Continuing her goal of making six lesbian films, each one representing another color of the gay rainbow pride flag — Spider Lilies was green, Splendid Float yellow — Drifting Flowers is red. The series concludes June 30 with Chou’s 2001 film, Corners.