Doris’s coffee shop has come up with a unique way to offer merchandise
TAIPEI EXCHANGES (Hsiao Ya-Chuan, 2010)
Clearview Cinemas Chelsea
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday, October 21, 6:00
www.cmj2010.com
www.taipeiexchanges.com
Commissioned by Taipei’s tourism bureau and made by longtime television commercial director Hsiao Ya-Chuan, TAIPEI EXCHANGES borders on being too sickly sweet, lacking any type of real edge. Yet the tender tale about the value of things, from random objects to memories, still manages to hold its own, avoiding being an eighty-two-minute ad for Taiwan travel. When Doris (Gwei Lun-mei) opens up a coffee shop, her friends bring her lots of odd gifts that she doesn’t know what to do with. Her sister, Josie (Zaizai Lin), comes up with the novel idea that people can exchange their own objects for those in the store — of course, while they’re also buying coffee and pastries so she and her sister can pay the rent. Doris and Josie refuse to put a price on anything, instead creating a barter system that could involve storytelling, plumbing emergencies, or a song. Doris becomes particularly intrigued by one customer, Han Chang (Chou Chun-Ching), who has brought thirty-five bars of soap, each one with its own tale. Like Doris herself, TAIPEI EXCHANGES is charmingly innocent but not nearly as quirky as its most obvious predecessor, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s endlessly entertaining 2001 hit, AMÉLIE. Hsiao likes his characters too much to give them the necessary depth, but he does manage to make some commentary on materialism and ethics. On three occasions he adds people-on-the-street interviews, getting strangers’ general reactions to questions that come up in the course of the film — which is set in a space that was transformed into a café and is now a real place where visitors can stop and get coffee and pastries (but can’t exchange anything).
After being chosen for the Berlin and Hong Kong International Film Festivals, Hou Chi-Jan’s debut feature, ONE DAY, makes its U.S. premiere Thursday night as the centerpiece selection of the CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival. On a military boat heading out to Kinmen, an island off Taipei, a young woman who works on the ship, Singing (Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh), sees a young soldier, Tsung (Bryan Shu-Hao Chang), looking at a compass, an item that has special meaning for her. Soon the two are huddled in a tiny space together, hiding from a hatchet-wielding crazy man on an otherwise suddenly empty ship. “We’re not in the real world,” Tsung tells Singing. ONE DAY is a fantastical love story that jumps between dreams and reality, often in confusing ways, but its innate charm overcomes its sci-fi problems. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Mahua Hsin-Hua Feng, the film’s dreamlike pace works well with the story as Singing and Tsung go from the past to the present to the future in constantly shifting states of mind, even if you might need your own compass to figure out just where the story is at any given moment. ONE DAY, from executive producer Hou Hsiao Hsien, is screening at CMJ on Thursday night at 7:50 and will be followed by a Q&A with the director.
