Days Before the Millenium (徘徊年代) is one of those well-meaning films that tries too hard to be artsy and clever. The slightly surreal, two-part epic on the struggle of Vietnamese brides in Taiwan is stylishly shot and deeply layered but the result is a plodding, disjointed and often confusing viewing experience that seems to go on forever.
There’s a lot of issues director Chang Teng-yuan (張騰元) wants to explore, but his delivery is too deliberate. Character development and storytelling should be the first priority, but most of them become one-dimensional vehicles to illustrate the problems and flaunt his cinematic references.
The film begins in the mid-1990s on the eve of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and follows the life of Van Tue (Annie Nguyen) who lives in the rural south with her abusive construction worker husband Chung-ming (Steven Chiang, 江常輝) and unforgiving mother-in-law (Chen Shu-fang, 陳淑芳).
Photos courtesy of iFilm
The sullen, spiritless Chung-ming spends his time slowly trying to build a brick house with materials stolen from work. The mother-in-law seems to only be concerned about pressuring Van Tue to have children, and despite their poverty they both frown upon Van Tue’s attempts to help the family financially by opening a food stall.
There’s a lot going on in the film, but the only character who gets any depth and sympathy is Van Tue, who eventually decides to run away.
Chang should be commended for not turning the movie into another unfortunate story that many such runaway brides suffer, such as being forced into sex work. Van Tue keeps a diary throughout the marriage, and the contents are briefly shown on the screen just twice, which is a bit abrupt and doesn’t really fit into the general atmosphere.
Photo courtesy of iFilm
The second part starts 90 minutes in, when it feels that the film is wrapping up. It takes place in the present day, and follows Thu Lan (Nguyen Thu Hang), an educated and ambitious Vietnamese immigrant who married a Taiwanese for love, and works at a private detective agency that mainly helps foreign brides catch their husbands cheating.
The cinematography completely changes and, for some reason, Thu Lan always has her back to the camera and never shows her full face. This is probably supposed to illustrate a point but it ends up being irritating and dehumanizing, as if she’s just a carrier for the narrative instead of being a real person. It’s a huge let down, especially after being invested in Van Tue’s character for the first 90 minutes.
The second part gets very confusing due to the many surreal devices Chang uses to connect it to Van Tue’s era; it’s obvious enough that while a lot has progressed, the immigrants still face similar struggles. Compared to the atmospheric, slow-burning first half, Thu Lan’s story is almost like a glossy commercial for the agency, and while the plot does have some connections to Van Tue, it could have just been an epilogue to the story instead of occupying another hour of the film.
Photo courtesy of iFilm
The magical realism Chang employs works in some places, such as the ageless pair of land surveyors who appear several decades apart looking exactly the same, continuing on with their casual banter on social issues and morality that provide the philosophical framework for the film. Use it too much, though, and it gets distracting when the same actors start appearing all over the place in seemingly different roles.
And it’s fine to leave some things up to the audience’s imagination, but doing it too much throughout the film creates plot gaps that bog down the story and prevent the viewer from seeing the bigger picture. It doesn’t even have to be one of the larger holes, little things such as Chung-ming appearing in one scene with an injured arm with no explanation are bothersome enough.
Being a Vietnamese bride in Taiwan is an important and interesting aspect of the immigrant experience, and Chang seems to genuinely care about the subject. Unfortunately, his ambitions get in the way.
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the
RSS