With Paradise in Service (軍中樂園), his fourth feature film, director Niu Chen-zer (鈕承澤) revisits a time when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime still clung to a pipe dream to reclaim China, as a way to pay tribute to his father’s generation. Although intended as a gripping tale of personal longing against a backdrop of sociopolitical unrest, the film never fully lives up to its ambitions and ends up telling a simple coming-of-age story in which history largely plays a subordinate role.
Set in 1969, Paradise begins with Pao (Ethan Ruan, 阮經天) arriving in Kinmen (金門) — then a cold-war frontline under intense artillery bombardment — to begin his military service. To this simple young man, life on the heavily fortified outpost only a few kilometers off the Chinese coast is at first formidable and baffling. Things worsen when he is assigned to an elite amphibious unit, where soldiers should expect to be treated “as dogs, not humans,” says Zhang (Chen Jianbin, 陳建斌), a sergeant major who leads the unit.
Despite their differences, Pao strikes up an unlikely friendship with Zhang, who as a teenager was forced from his rural home in northern China, by KMT troops that desperately needed soldiers to fight its doomed battles against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. Zhang has been out of contact with his family ever since.
Photo Courtesy of Honto Production
Soon after, it becomes clear that Pao’s fear of water is an obstacle to his training on the elite amphibious unit, and he is transferred to Unit 831, a military brothel that provides services to the KMT troops on the island. This is where Pao meets and falls for Nini (Regina Wan, 萬茜), a young woman with a secret who works at the brothel.
It’s also where Zhang sets his mind on marrying Jiao (Ivy Chen, 陳意涵), another sex worker with a troubled past. Sadly, the sergeant major’s dream of settling down and having a family eventually meets a destructive end.
Two years later, Pao is discharged from military service, no longer the innocent boy he used to be, but a man who has had a glimpse into the folly and the despair of humanity.
Photo Courtesy of Honto Production
Technically polished and narratively smooth, the film is ambitious in its attempt to capture a turbulent chapter in history that still deeply resonates in present-day Taiwan.
Central to Niu’s history is the character of Zhang, played by Chinese thespian Chen Jianbin. Chen delicately invests his role with a grand pathos and sense of fragility. A father figure to the young protagonist, his character embodies the fate of Chinese soldiers uprooted by civil war and trapped faraway in nostalgia for their homes. His final outburst of fury and anguish serves as a poignant coda to a particular moment in history marked by rootlessness and violence.
Nonetheless, history often recedes to the background in the two-hour long film, while most of the narrative revolves around Ruan’s character and his journey from the loss of innocence to disillusionment to regaining hope. Love and romance remain in the confinement of a private room, rather than reflecting on and resonating with the time the protagonists live in. A light critique of the military machine and relentless oppression during the Martial Law era is also thrown in, feebly channeled through a few scenes of harsh military training and the portrait of a soldier, aptly played by Wang Po-chieh (王柏傑), being bullied by his seniors.
Photo Courtesy of Honto Production
Made with ambition and an epic grandeur in mind, Paradise in Service somehow forgets what it sets out to do in the beginning, leaving history behind somewhere along the way.
Photo Courtesy of Honto Production
Photo Courtesy of Honto Production
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the fairest Disney live-action remake of them all? Wait, mirror. Hold on a second. Maybe choosing from the likes of Alice in Wonderland (2010), Mulan (2020) and The Lion King (2019) isn’t such a good idea. Mirror, on second thought, what’s on Netflix? Even the most devoted fans would have to acknowledge that these have not been the most illustrious illustrations of Disney magic. At their best (Pete’s Dragon? Cinderella?) they breathe life into old classics that could use a little updating. At their worst, well, blue Will Smith. Given the rapacious rate of remakes in modern
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
RSS