Song-shu Zisha-shijian
Taiwan/Japan,
2006, 118 min
Shown in 2007
CREDITS
- dir
-
Wu Mi-sen
- prod
-
Wu Mi-sen, Dai Wei-lun
- scr
-
Hao Yu-xiang, Wu Mi-sen
- cam
-
Jack Pollock
- editor
-
Chen Bo-wen
- mus
-
Ma Nian-xian
- cast
-
Yosuke Kubozuka, Rachel Ngan
- source
-
Ryefilms Ltd., P.O. Box 57-120, Taipei, Taiwan FAX: +8862-2732-5885. EMAIL: office@ryefilms.com.tw.
- premiere
-
International Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Wu Mi-sen attended.
OTHER
They say no man is an island, yet Oshima, the protagonist of amour-LEGENDE, means “big island” in Japanese. In this stylish puzzler, Oshima journeys to a remote island, arrives suffering from memory loss, finds himself with a different young woman than the one he started out with and begins to question his own existence, island or no. A married man caught in an affair, Oshima has fled the high-rises of Taipei with his paramour, May, to vacation at Snow Mountain, “somewhere in South America,” hoping things will return to normal when they get home. But a series of misadventures as mundane as getting locked out of a rental car and as strange as dodging a prairie full of suicidal squirrels leaves him unconscious and unremembering, waking up on a sand dune next to a polyglot young woman named Coco. Accepting her offer to help find May, he heads with her toward Snow Mountain, along the way hearing ominous stories about that destination’s effect on couples who think they have a future together. This elusive romantic drama rumbles like a rented Mercedes across rough psychological terrain, opening up the viewer to a surreal and disturbing landscape most would rather avoid on a vacation, no matter how exotic (All scenes were reportedly, and surprisingly, shot in Taiwan). Yosuke Kubozuka, the Japanese pop idol who was so effective in Go and seems to have recovered from his 2004 fall from a ninth-floor balcony, captures the frustrations of a mind-traveler stuck somewhere between the improbable and the inevitable.
—Frako Loden
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
