LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho
DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu
by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.
Start with Ho Miu Ki’s Love Lies, which opens like The Beekeeper, ends like You’ve Got Mail, and sandwiches an extended defense, nay, romanticization, of catfishing in between. Indeed, the first ten minutes are an action film involving a raid at a large cell-phone bank operation, which transitions to what seems like an infertility melodrama featuring stern gynecologist Veronica Yu (Sandra Ng). The two threads merge when a pregnant cop, Inspector Carrie Sit (Joman Chiang), comes to Dr. Yu’s clinic asking if she’s having an online relationship with some French guy she met through a fake dating site. She is. Turns out her silver-haired fox is actually pathologically lying twerp Joe (MC Cheung Tin-fu), the low rung on the elaborate catfish ladder we see broken up in the opening, tasked with tricking the good doctor out of cash. Helping Joe is office dramatist Joan (Stephy Tang), who has transitioned from soap-opera writer to chief romantic strategist for the evil scheming of Mr. White (Chan Fai-hung). You might ask if Joe and Dr. Yu fall in real love; you might ask if there’s some resolution to the pregnant-cop thing and the fertility-clinic stuff; you may even be curious about why the cops are interrogating a victim of a scam as though she were a suspect and why they allow this suspect to ramble on and on about finding love at last. If you ever find out, keep it to yourself.
I did like the bit where Joe gets Dr. Yu to come out of her shell a little and she tells him how unpleasant she is. How she saves the numbers of complaint lines for when she’s having a bad day so she can give someone else a bad day. She describes herself as controlling and frigid, as mean and antisocial. I think it’s intended to show how hard she is on herself, but really what it does is paint a perfect picture of a terrible human being who secretly revels in being a supercilious asshole under the umbra of having more interest in being a “useful” person than a well-liked one. When she says, “I can understand why men don’t like me,” I want to ask if this is also true of women, because I imagine it is. Neither do I like Joe, who starts the film as slack-jawed yokel and ends it as winsome John Keats, taking a secret selfie with Dr. Yu sleeping on his shoulder on public transit, unaware that the man she’s been spilling her guts to for months is this pissant sitting next to her and photographing her without consent. Senators have resigned over shit like that. Dr. Yu never grows suspicious when her phantom lover keeps coming up with excuses not to meet in person or speak over the phone; she never takes the logical steps to investigate her lover because she’s apparently too old to use the Internet (except when she does). An entirely extraneous subplot showing her getting dumped by a nice guy tired of dating Cruella de Vil again achieves the opposite of engendering sympathy for her. Honestly? I don’t even know if sympathy is Love Lies‘ intent.
At least with John Hsu’s Dead Talents Society, it’s clear that it wants to be a clever send-up of J-Horror and Taiwanese Ghost tropes, intermingled with a children’s-film homily about being happy with and proud of who you are. You heard me. What it might have in common with Love Lies is how scattershot and needlessly complex it seems. Start with the title, obviously a riff on Dead Poets Society, but to what purpose? For the sake of wordplay? As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with Weir’s film–nor does it have to, I suppose, but when you start out this way, you set the table for making references just because people will catch them. Although some have compared Dead Talents Society to Beetlejuice, its closest analogue is Shrek. The Rookie (Gingle Wang) is freshly-dead and largely nondescript. Her lasting legacy is a participation certificate for a swimming competition that her sister accidentally throws away when her family is doing a bit of cleaning. This causes the Rookie to start glitching out like Marty McFly in Back to the Future: Apparently, if you’re a ghost and the physical legacy anchoring you to the Afterlife is destroyed, you have 30 days before you die again. For real, this time. Wanting to avoid this for no clear reason, given that she doesn’t do much and appears to be miserable from the jump, the Rookie commits to learning how to scare influencers so that she can be remembered as a scary ghost. Also, there’s an annual contest, The Golden Ghost Awards, where viral legends Catherine (Sandrine Pinna) and Jessica (Eleven Yao) carry on their Michael Jackson vs. Lionel Richie grudge match.
Helping her get good at haunting is coach/agent Makoto (Chen Bolin), the head of a haunting agency also representing Catherine, who gives the Rookie a few Ghost rules (like how you can be visible to the living for a moment) that aren’t consistent from one moment to the next, though it doesn’t matter because that’s not what this movie’s about. What it’s about is doing slapstick and slapdash, rootless satire, then reaping an unearned, heartwarming uplift message. To get there, it hopscotches over hot issues like social-media addiction and the costs of fame in an entirely surveilled world, dumps gallons of digital blood in gory tableaux meant to be hilarious for their excess, and finally pronounces itself family-friendly entertainment. It’s not exactly about finding your people, because the lesson to be learned is about the bonds of family; yet it’s not really about the bonds of family, because as far as I can tell, the Rookie’s family has moved on and the swimming certificate was forged–a sign that the father wanted to either spare his daughter the pain of not being able to earn a participation award or spare himself that pain. Dead Talents Society is like Forrest Gump in that way. I understand how damaging it is to ask kids to be special when they’re not; I also understand how deadly it can be to reward resignation and non-participation. Maybe I’m taking it all too literally. I mean, people love the shit out of movies like this. Forrest Gump, too. Given the choice, though, I’d rather be Jenny: dead because I lived, not revered because I didn’t.
