With Beautiful Crazy (亂青春), director Lee Chi-yuan (李啟源) breaks from the conventional approach to storytelling in an attempt to capture the fluidity of time, love and memory. The result is a cinematic poem about three teenage girls and their friendship, desires and betrayals, in which the time in a linear sense collapses and non-chronological montages drive the story. Fragments of the characters’ lives from the past, present and future intertwine, and the past is juxtaposed with and thrust into the present in the same way that one’s memory is constantly filtered, transformed and re-interpreted.
Angel (Angel Yao, 姚安琪) and Xiao-Bu (Amiya Lee, 李律) are best friends. They like to ride on a swing and play together in their secret hideout. Like her alcoholic father, Angel doesn’t talk much, but she feels her heart pounding the day when Xiao-Bu makes her burn a love letter a boy had given her.
Years later, Xiao-Bu, her boyfriend, and Ah-mi (Liao Chien-hui, 廖千慧) enjoy a summer day at an amusement park. “We will always be like this. Always,” says Ah-mi.
The three hold hands as the sun sets, and, for a moment, Xiao-Bu remembers Angel, the field with sunflowers where they played, and how they once fought over a cigarette in the pouring rain.
As the film moves back and forth in time, audiences are able to piece together the girls’ stories and their relationships to each other, even though initial perceptions often change as new perspectives, anecdotes and scenes are brought into play.
Lee would not have been able to pull off this kind of lyrical cinema if not for the mesmerizing camerawork of Dutch/Indonesian documentary filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, whose 2004 Shape of the Moon won top prizes at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Sundance Film Festival. Helmrich, who makes his debut as a cinematographer for a fictional film with Beautiful Crazy, is known for his long takes which he produces using a mount that frees the camera from conventional movements for a method he calls “single shot cinema.”
Moving freely around the characters and spaces, Helmrich’s improvisational, handheld camera focuses on the intimate and immediate rather than the narrative, capturing shifts in mood and the fluidity of emotions.
The acting is also improvised. Rather than reciting lines from a script, the three leads appear to spontaneously react and interact with each other and to their surroundings.
More often than not, the film’s landscapes and settings assume a poetic significance. A scene where Xiao-Bu and Angel fight in a junkyard next to a lotus pond represents Lee’s idea of youth, which is simultaneously tender and rough, beautiful and ugly.
In Beautiful Crazy, Lee has created a unique cinematic vocabulary that invites us as the audience to actively experience rather than passively watch what the characters experience and feel, giving us a glimpse of old but familiar feelings and images that belonged to our own youth.
July 1 to July 7 Huang Ching-an (黃慶安) couldn’t help but notice Imelita Masongsong during a company party in the Philippines. With paler skin and more East Asian features, she did not look like the other locals. On top of his job duties, Huang had another mission in the country, given by his mother: to track down his cousin, who was deployed to the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II and never returned. Although it had been more than three decades, the family was still hoping to find him. Perhaps Imelita could provide some clues. Huang never found the cousin;
Once again, we are listening to the government talk about bringing in foreign workers to help local manufacturing. Speaking at an investment summit in Washington DC, the Minister of Economic Affairs, J.W. Kuo (郭智輝), said that the nation must attract about 400,000 to 500,000 skilled foreign workers for high end manufacturing by 2040 to offset the falling population. That’s roughly 15 years from now. Using the lower number, Taiwan would have to import over 25,000 foreigners a year for these positions to reach that goal. The government has no idea what this sounds like to outsiders and to foreigners already living here.
Lines on a map once meant little to India’s Tibetan herders of the high Himalayas, expertly guiding their goats through even the harshest winters to pastures on age-old seasonal routes. That stopped in 2020, after troops from nuclear-armed rivals India and China clashed in bitter hand-to-hand combat in the contested high-altitude border lands of Ladakh. Swaths of grazing lands became demilitarized “buffer zones” to keep rival forces apart. For 57-year-old herder Morup Namgyal, like thousands of other semi-nomadic goat and yak herders from the Changpa pastoralist people, it meant traditional lands were closed off. “The Indian army stops us from going there,” Namgyal said,
A tourist plaque outside the Chenghuang Temple (都城隍廟) lists it as one of the “Top 100 Religious Scenes in Taiwan.” It is easy to see why when you step inside the Main Hall to be confronted with what amounts to an imperial stamp of approval — a dragon-framed, golden protection board gifted to the temple by the Guangxu Emperor that reads, “Protected by Guardians.” Some say the plaque was given to the temple after local prayers to the City God (城隍爺) miraculously ended a drought. Another version of events tells of how the emperor’s son was lost at sea and rescued