Lin Jing-jie's (林靖傑) directorial debut, The Most Distant Course (最遙遠的距離), is one of the most talked-about art-house movies of the year, attracting attention with a high-profile cast led by actress Guey Lun-mei (桂綸鎂) and a story about lone individuals struggling to find their inner selves.
The film follows three emotionally and spiritually crippled Taipei urbanites who are alienated from society.
Psychiatrist A-tsai (Jia Xiao-guo, 賈孝國), who has a talent for piercing the souls of his patients but is unable to cure his own wounds, journeys to Taitung in search of a lost love.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHI HSIA FILMS
Young sound recordist Tang (Mo Zi-yi, 莫子儀) is a mess after being dumped by his girlfriend. Hoping to salvage the relationship, Tang circumnavigates Taiwan, recording sounds of the island and sends tape after tape labeled "Sounds of Formosa" to his lover's apartment, now tenanted by Yun (Guey Lun-mei), an office worker suffocated by daily routines and her involvement in a love triangle.
Gradually brought back to life by the simple sounds of the land, Yun sets out on a journey to trace the source of the recordings. The three travelers have different reasons for escaping the capital, but their goal is the same: to find their true selves, which have long been buried and forgotten in the monotony and travails of life.
The script was originally written for director Lin's close friend Chen Ming-tsai (陳明才), an actor who suffered from bipolar disorder and took his own life at Dulan Bay (都蘭灣), Taitung, one year after the screenplay was finished. Nevertheless, hoping to reflect the quest for truth and reality, Lin saw the project through.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHI HSIA FILMS
The scene near the end of the film in which the psychiatrist snorkels on the freeway in a diving suit echoes the uncompromising spirit of the late artist who, in the eyes of Lin, refused to become a part of mainstream society and chose to walk a lone path rarely understood by others.
Though the story behind the film sounds depressing, the movie is beautifully shot and interspersed with humor. Mo is decently cast, while Jia delivers a slightly theatrical performance for the role originally written for Chen. Now a regular lead in local productions, Guey exposes her limits as she struggles to express the feelings of the paramour.
Although The Most Distant Course won the best film accolade at the International Critics' Week in Venice and the special jury award at the Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節), the plot is predictable and the story feels a little too familiar. The juxtaposition of gloomy urban landscapes and colorful, soothing scenes of nature is formulaic to the point of being cliche. Despite that, the movie does touch viewers' hearts.
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
RSS