Au Revoir Taipei
24 June 2010
I got a free ticket to see Au Revoir Taipei last night, its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It’s a light-hearted buddy-caper-love story. I liked the contrast with the usually overwrought Taiwanese drama available on teevee.
Kai, a young Taiwanese man, bids farewell to his girlfriend, who’s moving to Paris. Things between them work out in a predictable fashion, and Kai needs to find the money to fly to Paris to see her. He ends up getting his best mate, Gao, involved in something seemingly shady by borrowing money from Big Brother Bao in exchange for delivering a package. There are gangster-ish Ah Bengs with an effeminate leader (he ain’t exactly Omar) and they all wear bright orange suits. There are a couple of hapless policemen whose personal problems outweigh getting to the bottom of things.
All in all, it wasn’t exactly life-changing, but it was an amusing way to spend an evening with my best (edible) friend (read: popcorn). Being bilingual and also Hokkien (but unable to speak the dialect beyond those seven words one should never use), I thought it was pretty hilarious, especially when they subtitled ‘Sui!’ (beautiful) with 水 (‘shui’, or water).
(The film’s dialogue was mostly in Mandarin, but had quite a few lines in Hokkien as well.)
And OMG, the food. The street market scenes and in Kai’s family noodle and dumpling stall made me whimper with need. Also, the boy who plays Gao looks a helluva lot like my wee cousin Kai (who’ll always be wee to me, despite being pretty damn tall). And it’s the same Kai (凯). But Gao is a lot dopier than (my cousin) Kai, I just thought I’d clear that up right now.
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