Casting: Bin-Bin PAI、Kuei-Mei YANG、Hsien-Tang YANG、Neil FENG、I-Chun PAN
Synopsis Ms. Chen is a middle-aged working housewife not unlike most Taipei women of her status. She has a teen-aged daughter whose insolence lies in her preoccupation with her English professor and a husband who seeks excitement in liaisons with their next-door neighbor. Adding to her list of concerns is Chen’s purportedly senile mother-in-law, a silly old woman who needs attention more than supervision. Chen’s life is sheer drudgery until the day she meets Long, a young office boy with a coy smile and a discreet gay preference. Spurred by her colleague Miss Lin, who is immediately attracted to Long, Chen also casts her hopes for romantic escape on this new office boy. As the hopelessness of her infatuation appears clearer and clearer to th audience, her desperate attempts to come to grips with her last chance to escape from a woman’s destiny become more and more comically tragic.
Synopsis Veteran director Wang Tong of STRAWMAN, HILLS OF NO RETURN, continues his exploration of one of the key themes in Taiwanese cinema : the trauma caused by the country’s separation from Mainland China. RED PERSIMMON follows a family struggle to survive on a new land. It’s the director’s autobiographic work. The story comes from director’s real-life grandmother. Grandmother leads a team of grandchildren immigrating from china to Taiwan in the 40s, setting down, making a difficult transition, and then bringing up the kids. Three days before the Wang Family was to make their escape from the mainland, the grandmother hid in a closet, claiming that she did not want to leave behind her beloved persimmon tree. The scenes of the film come straight from Wang’s own childhood, right down to the scene where the grandmother ties her ten children together with rope so that they would not get lost. Though Wang’s family lived a comfortable life in China, they lost everything when they came to Taiwan : their houses, their savings, and their land. The film focuses on the relationship between the strong grandmother and her ten grandsons as they adjust to life in an entirely new world.
Synopsis Yu Jane, a high school teacher and Xiang Guo-Chen, a successful industrialist, are secretly baving an affair outside of his marriage. Xiang is on his way to a political career. His campaign advisor wants him to break off his relationship with Yu so to present himself as a candidate with an untarnished image. Xiang arranges to meet Yu at a distant city for the last time. Being away from their normal environment, the two are free to enjoy each other’s love and passion more than ever. The affair thus continues and the strange city subsequently becomes their regular, rendezvous. Every time Yu Jane visits the city, is foreibly reminds her of her brother who died in a foreign country. Also, being able to see the innocent side of Xiang in the strange city somehow confuses her. Yang Dan-Zi, a troubled student in Yu Jane’s class, gains Yu’s curiosity and sympathy with her unusual background and personality. Yu feels she can relate to Yang in many circumstances. Nan-nan, Yu’s best friend, tries to talk Yu into investing in her herbal medicine business. Jimmy, Nan-nan’s new boyfriend and a rising pop singer, reads Yu as a romantic and becomes fond of her. Before long, Jimmy tells Yu that Nan-nan has fled the country with all the investment money, which Yu jane finds in hard to believe. Xiang is shot and wounded during his campaign rally. It soon becomes a media frenzy. Yu Jane, finding herself pregnant, pays a visit at Xing’s residence, where she discovers that the shooting incident was a conspiracy as part of Xiang’s campaign stretagy. Yu Jane then realizes her relationship with Xiang is also a sham. Yu Jane is suddenly notified of Yang Dan-Zi’s suicide. She is shocked and saddened by this occurrence. While Xiang is being blackmailed by the mobsters who contributed to his conspiracy. Yu Jane is going throught her abortion in a clinic. Under sedetion, she is lost in the reminiscence of the days and nights in that far away strange city.
Synopsis The original story from which this film draws its inspiration is a four hundred-year-old classical Chinese opera called “The Peony Pavilion” (also known as “The Resurrection”). A metaphor on the closed nature of Chinese and Chinese society, this is a tale of an offical’s daughter whose cloistered life within the family estate leaves her little knowledge of the outside world. Her maidservant tells her one day of a beautiful garden behind the estate. Though at first she tries to disregard this information, believing her duty is to think only of her studies, the girl finds herself thinking more about this place and eventually asks her maid to take her there. The girl has never known of the garder’s existence even though it lies just behind her house and she finds herself happily ensconced in the tranquil beauty of the place. When she returns home, she sleeps and dreams that she is back in the pavilion of the garden being made love to by a young scholar she has never met before, either in the dream or real life. Upon waking, she finds her mind cannot return to reality and she dies still obsessed by her vision of the world inside her dream. In her next life, she comes back to find the young scholar and the two are finally united. The difficulty of portraying such a tale on its own is that the style and unique language of the drama, drawn as it is from classical Chinese literature, makes it practically inaccessible to a modern Chinese audience. But there is much in the story—the Chinese concept of love and personal freedom—that has relevance today. In adapting it to film, then, the original is used as a parallel discourse to a modern story. The modern story is of two women who are unknown to one another but who both dream of the Peony Pavilion in the classic tale. In their common dream, one of the women takes the role of the girl, the other dreams she is the scholar. Both women are bound by the restrictions of their daily lives and have known disillusionment and disappointment in love; only in their dream do they find a truly romantic and sensible world in which they have the freedom to be themselves.
