Artemisia
I've stuck with my Taiwanese obsession by watching feature-length movie Artemisia. I went into this movie cold, not knowing anything about the storyline except that there was a gay-themed subplot.
SPOILERS ALERT: I give away some of the ending in this review, beware. I've marked the section with spoilers so you can avoid them if you want to.
Summary: A middle-aged widow leads a lonely life and struggles to fill in her days. Her two children are in their thirties; her closeted gay son looks after her, and her daughter studies in France. She also regularly looks in on her elderly mother, a malicious, cantankerous woman who is a chronic miser. She secretly longs for a large family, all living together, but is increasingly resigned to the fact that it probably won't happen. She finds it extremely difficult to understand her children and the way they live their lives. Knowing her temper and conservatism, her children generally give their mother plenty of distance from their personal lives, but when the daughter returns home for a visit, some very harsh realities bubble to the surface and threaten to tear the family apart.
This is a really decent movie with a gentle slow pace and - surprisingly for a family melodrama - almost no raised voices. Its focus is very much on the mother - a complex, challenging woman who has a limited understanding of modern society, despite being something of a rebel when she was younger.
The heart of the movie's drama arises from the tensions between the mother's traditional Chinese way of thinking and her children's more contemporary individualistic desires for self-fulfilment and happiness. This tension produces some difficult moments for a Westerner with limited experience of the complexity of the traditional Chinese mindset to get a proper handle on (such as myself). It's simply too foreign. While the concept of 'saving face' is not unfamiliar, seeing the way it's dealt with in this movie makes it clear that it can have serious detrimental effects on a family unit when it's prioritised over just about everything else, even the love of one's own children. The fact that the mother is willing to disown at least one of her children due to loss of face is incomprehensible to me. How on earth can maintaining 'face' be more important than a relationship with your children? Similarly, the daughter makes some quite reasonable arguments to counter her mother's pig-headedness - along the lines of "she herself stubbornly married someone inappropriate and much older, against her family's wishes, so why can she not accept her own children's independent choices?" - only to hear her mother retort angrily that she has a response for everything. The subtext is that children should be seen and not heard, and parents must be respected at all times. This is obviously the opposite of Western culture, where children are actively encouraged to voice dissenting opinions, and are told their ideas and opinions have equal validity with everyone else's. This culture has its own glaring weaknesses as well (not all opinions are worth expressing!), so ultimately there's no value or truth to be found in making judgement calls about either of them here. When it comes to a non-Chinese person watching this movie, it's best to approach it in the spirit of learning and cultural understanding. It's certainly an eye-opener from this cultural perspective. But for a Chinese person, I would imagine this movie is both a distressingly painful and a moving experience, with lots of points of recognition and identification that must sometimes taste like ashes.
As far as the BL component of the movie goes, it's a minor theme and not explored in any depth, but that's not the purpose of the movie anyway. What we do get is a really sweet couple of guys who are obviously deeply in love and who are trying to balance the secrecy of their relationship with a desire for more openness. They even discuss getting married and having children. Their story is given a stronger focus in the first half of the film, but they disappear into the background once the daughter returns to Taiwan, giving everyone a surprise shock. SPOILERS FOLLOW. When the shock subsides, the son decides that he will never come out to his mother, as she has experienced enough hardship in her life. It's hard to think of another modern gay movie from any country that comes to this conclusion about the value of coming out to one's parents. It makes absolute sense here, and adds even more depth to the story's main theme of traditional Chinese vs modern culture. SPOILERS FINISHED.
But nothing can prepare the viewer for the virulent misanthropy of the grandmother. She's a disgraceful excuse for a human being, without a single redeeming feature. When she is not counting her small change and accusing her maid of theft, she's very dangerously adulterating the alcohol she sells in her corner shop so that she can make more money. She takes the winning stubs out of lottery tickets before placing them in the shop for sale. If she dislikes some food she's made for dinner, she hands it instead to her maid - and then, when the maid politely refuses the bad food, she upbraids her cruelly for wasting it. The less said here about her opinions of her grandchildren's conduct, the better. It's no wonder her own daughter has become so bitter and resentful. She easily gets the best and most interesting scenes in the movie, probably because she instantly makes the viewer feel revulsion and contempt.
With a fascinating story, great acting (the actress playing the lead role of the mother is exceptional) and a fine screenplay, this is a movie worth seeing if you're after something different, artistic and more serious than the usual BL drama or film.
Rating: 14 out of 20
Ending: happy
Best scene: the grandmother's birthday party
SPOILERS ALERT: I give away some of the ending in this review, beware. I've marked the section with spoilers so you can avoid them if you want to.
Summary: A middle-aged widow leads a lonely life and struggles to fill in her days. Her two children are in their thirties; her closeted gay son looks after her, and her daughter studies in France. She also regularly looks in on her elderly mother, a malicious, cantankerous woman who is a chronic miser. She secretly longs for a large family, all living together, but is increasingly resigned to the fact that it probably won't happen. She finds it extremely difficult to understand her children and the way they live their lives. Knowing her temper and conservatism, her children generally give their mother plenty of distance from their personal lives, but when the daughter returns home for a visit, some very harsh realities bubble to the surface and threaten to tear the family apart.
This is a really decent movie with a gentle slow pace and - surprisingly for a family melodrama - almost no raised voices. Its focus is very much on the mother - a complex, challenging woman who has a limited understanding of modern society, despite being something of a rebel when she was younger.
The heart of the movie's drama arises from the tensions between the mother's traditional Chinese way of thinking and her children's more contemporary individualistic desires for self-fulfilment and happiness. This tension produces some difficult moments for a Westerner with limited experience of the complexity of the traditional Chinese mindset to get a proper handle on (such as myself). It's simply too foreign. While the concept of 'saving face' is not unfamiliar, seeing the way it's dealt with in this movie makes it clear that it can have serious detrimental effects on a family unit when it's prioritised over just about everything else, even the love of one's own children. The fact that the mother is willing to disown at least one of her children due to loss of face is incomprehensible to me. How on earth can maintaining 'face' be more important than a relationship with your children? Similarly, the daughter makes some quite reasonable arguments to counter her mother's pig-headedness - along the lines of "she herself stubbornly married someone inappropriate and much older, against her family's wishes, so why can she not accept her own children's independent choices?" - only to hear her mother retort angrily that she has a response for everything. The subtext is that children should be seen and not heard, and parents must be respected at all times. This is obviously the opposite of Western culture, where children are actively encouraged to voice dissenting opinions, and are told their ideas and opinions have equal validity with everyone else's. This culture has its own glaring weaknesses as well (not all opinions are worth expressing!), so ultimately there's no value or truth to be found in making judgement calls about either of them here. When it comes to a non-Chinese person watching this movie, it's best to approach it in the spirit of learning and cultural understanding. It's certainly an eye-opener from this cultural perspective. But for a Chinese person, I would imagine this movie is both a distressingly painful and a moving experience, with lots of points of recognition and identification that must sometimes taste like ashes.
As far as the BL component of the movie goes, it's a minor theme and not explored in any depth, but that's not the purpose of the movie anyway. What we do get is a really sweet couple of guys who are obviously deeply in love and who are trying to balance the secrecy of their relationship with a desire for more openness. They even discuss getting married and having children. Their story is given a stronger focus in the first half of the film, but they disappear into the background once the daughter returns to Taiwan, giving everyone a surprise shock. SPOILERS FOLLOW. When the shock subsides, the son decides that he will never come out to his mother, as she has experienced enough hardship in her life. It's hard to think of another modern gay movie from any country that comes to this conclusion about the value of coming out to one's parents. It makes absolute sense here, and adds even more depth to the story's main theme of traditional Chinese vs modern culture. SPOILERS FINISHED.
But nothing can prepare the viewer for the virulent misanthropy of the grandmother. She's a disgraceful excuse for a human being, without a single redeeming feature. When she is not counting her small change and accusing her maid of theft, she's very dangerously adulterating the alcohol she sells in her corner shop so that she can make more money. She takes the winning stubs out of lottery tickets before placing them in the shop for sale. If she dislikes some food she's made for dinner, she hands it instead to her maid - and then, when the maid politely refuses the bad food, she upbraids her cruelly for wasting it. The less said here about her opinions of her grandchildren's conduct, the better. It's no wonder her own daughter has become so bitter and resentful. She easily gets the best and most interesting scenes in the movie, probably because she instantly makes the viewer feel revulsion and contempt.
With a fascinating story, great acting (the actress playing the lead role of the mother is exceptional) and a fine screenplay, this is a movie worth seeing if you're after something different, artistic and more serious than the usual BL drama or film.
Rating: 14 out of 20
Ending: happy
Best scene: the grandmother's birthday party
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