The strong elderly Taiwanese woman who silently endures a life of suffering under the shackles of patriarchy is a story that’s often explored in local cinema.
The theme takes center stage in Little Big Women, which tells the story of Shoying (Chen Shu-fang, 陳淑芳), the Chen family matriarch who turned her shrimp-roll stall into a successful restaurant after her philandering husband abandoned the family decades previously. The husband’s untimely death on her 70th birthday throws upends her life as she has to arrange the funeral with her three grown daughters.
Chen, who won last year’s Golden Horse for best actress for this role, also won the best supporting actress award for Dear Tenant (親愛的房客), where she played an ill, but dignified, woman who mourns over the death of her son.
Photo courtesy of Vie Vision Pictures
Chen has a much more complex and nuanced role to work with in Little Big Women. Shoying is playful in private, first seen singing a karaoke love song in the back of a taxi, but is also extremely proud and bitter about the past. She is deeply caring but often domineering toward her three grown daughters, who don’t seem to have the best relationship with her even though she practically raised them alone to become successful adults.
The daughters each have their own issues. The oldest, Ching (Hsieh Ying-hsuan, 陳宛青), is a dance choreographer with health issues. Yu (Vivian Hsu, 徐若瑄) is a plastic surgeon, while Jiajia (Sun Ke-fong, 孫可芳) constantly clashes with her mother while learning how to run the restaurant.
Despite the father being virtually absent for most of their lives, the three often defend him and fight with their mother, which provides a somewhat hard-to-believe yet effectively heartbreaking setting and serves as the basis of the bulk of the conflicts. In one defining scene, Jiajia follows her father’s lover’s wishes and invites a Buddhist prayer chanting group to the funeral hall, while Shoying immediately counters with a rowdy ceremony with blaring suona (嗩吶, a trumpet-like instrument) music.
Photo courtesy of Vie Vision Pictures
While the acting is superb and there are some charming and genuinely moving moments, Shoying’s brooding pride and simmering resentment dominate the atmosphere, leading to a suffocating and slow-burning two hours. Just like in their lives, the daughters’ roles are overshadowed by their mother in the movie, and more focus could have been placed on their relationships with each other, and why they responded as they did to their father’s death. There’s also not much background about the father, aside from his womanizing and squandering the family’s money, which makes it hard to sympathize with the daughters who side with him.
This is director Hsu Cheng-chieh (許承傑) first feature film, developing the script from a short film of the same name, and perhaps it should have been flushed out a bit more. It’s still a strong attempt, and the complex and often-chaotic family dynamics and subtleties it presents will speak deeply to Taiwanese audiences.
Nothing like the spectacular, dramatic unraveling of a political party in Taiwan has unfolded before as has hit the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) over recent weeks. The meltdown of the New Power Party (NPP) and the self-implosion of the New Party (NP) were nothing compared to the drama playing out now involving the TPP. This ongoing saga is so interesting, this is the fifth straight column on the subject. To catch up on this train wreck of a story up to Aug. 20, search for “Donovan’s Deep Dives Ko Wen-je” in a search engine. ANN KAO SENTENCED TO PRISON YET AGAIN,
Despite her well-paying tech job, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked for help running a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure. The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, hopes one day to start an online business importing furniture from her home country. “I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.” Li is among a new wave of Chinese migrants who are leaving their country in search of opportunities, more freedom or better financial prospects at a
When the Dutch began interacting with the indigenous people of Taiwan, they found that their hunters classified deer hide quality for trade using the Portuguese terms for “head,” “belly,” and “foot.” The Portuguese must have stopped here more than once to trade, but those visits have all been lost to history. They already had a colony on Macao, and did not need Taiwan to gain access to southern China or to the trade corridor that connected Japan with Manila. They were, however, the last to look at Taiwan that way. The geostrategic relationship between Taiwan and the Philippines was established
Sept. 9 to Sept. 15 The upgrading of sugarcane processing equipment at Ciaozaitou Sugar Factory (橋仔頭) in 1904 had an unintended but long-lasting impact on Taiwan’s transportation and rural development. The newly imported press machine more than doubled production, leading to an expansion of the factory’s fields beyond what its original handcarts and oxcarts could handle. In 1905, factory manager Tejiro Yamamoto headed to Hawaii to observe how sugarcane transportation was handled there. They had trouble finding something suitable for Taiwan until they discovered a 762mm-gauge “miniature” railroad at a small refinery in the island of Maui. On