The Taiwanese movie The Moonlight in Jilin is currently playing at the Spot Taipei Film House. If you want to see it, you’ll have to move fast. It’s only playing until May 25th.

Tuesday May 22 – 18:40

Wednesday May 23 – 12:50 and 20:50

Thursday May 24 – 12:50 and 20:50

Friday May 25 – 11:00

So, we’ve established that you have to move fast if you want to see it. But should you see it? I would say definitely.

It is one of four films in the Spot’s mini-festival We Are Family: Festival of New Immigrants about foreign brides in Taiwan. The other three films are The Happy Life of Debbie, My Little Honey Moon, and The Golden Child. I’ve already seen these three movies at the Spot, and the foreign brides in them settled in rural parts of Taiwan. Two married farmers and one married an army veteran. The Moonlight in Jilin is different in that it is set in Taipei. I really enjoyed that because as much as I try to make time to explore Taiwan’s rural countryside, Taipei is what I know best, and it’s great fun to see the streets of Taipei in a movie.

This urban setting also made it easier for me to relate to the heroine of the movie. People on farms have to work so hard and they seem to have little free time to enjoy themselves. I know it’s a good life, but I guess I’m a city boy at heart and I can’t imagine a life without daily opportunities to relax with a good cup of coffee in a coffee shop. (A less generous point of view would be that I’m just lazy…)

The three women in the other movies also struck me as far too submissive – even passive. The heroine in The Moonlight in Jilin was different – stronger. She was proactive and independent and in control of her own destiny to a large extent. Because of that, there was pleasure in her life. She carved out a life of her own in a typical Taipei apartment. She enjoyed certain foods and cooked them for herself. She liked certain snacks and would go out to enjoy them at typical roadside snack stands in Taipei. She earned a decent salary and could see this sum added to her bank account each month to be sent back to China, where it was desperately needed. This was in stark contrast to the women in the other movies, who, for the most part, accepted their dreary lot and simply worked all the time either on the farm or in the home. They had no personal space and no private time in which to relax, read a book, watch some TV, go to a movie, or anything like that. They had no independent income of any kind either. I saw no advantages to their life, so their desire to move from their home country to Taiwan didn’t make much sense to me and therefore I couldn’t buy into the movies as much.

The Moonlight in Jilin also provided, through flashbacks, a very strong and compelling reason for this young woman to move from her cold mountain town in China to Taiwan. Unfortunately, things did not work out quite the way she wanted once she arrived in Taiwan, and she found herself embroiled in a very dramatic situation.

I read one review of this movie online which called it “uneven”. I don’t know that I agree with that. I didn’t find it uneven. However, I can understand how the reviewer might feel that way. It probably comes from the plotline that kicks in halfway through the movie – one that was perhaps a bit ambitious for a movie of this kind. It introduced all kinds of complications and plot points. I’m not sure that any director/writer could have taken all of the elements in this story and brought them together smoothly in a two-hour movie. As it is, I think they did a pretty good job. The actors were largely excellent and I bought into all their characters and I cared deeply about what happened to them.

By chance, I had shown up for a screening with a Q&A session afterwards. When the movie was over and the lights came up, one of the actors in the movie went to the front of the theater and fielded questions from the audience. Without his character’s trademark dyed blond hair, I didn’t recognize him for a while. I thought he was the director or the writer of the movie, and it was only when he started to make jokes and laugh that I recognized him as the actor. He was very much like the character he had played – carefree, funny, and warm.

When I left, I chatted with a young woman who seemed to have organized the event. She handed me her business card and told me that she was a marketing specialist for the production company that was behind all four films – Zeus International Production Ltd. I could have talked with her for a long time, but she had to get ready for the next movie playing that day. This next film was another screening of My Little Honey Moon, and, to my pleasure, the star of the movie, Vietnamese actress Helen Than Dao, was there again to participate in a Q&A session of her own. I was surprised when she recognized me. If I hadn’t had other plans, I would have turned right around and gone back into the theater to watch My Little Honey Moon a second time. Judging by the size of the lineup of people waiting to get in, it is one of the more popular of the four movies in the mini-festival.

There are only a few days left to catch all four of these excellent films at the Spot. Better hurry up. The schedule at the Spot is online right here. Check it out and take in some good Taiwanese cinema before it’s too late!

 

Tags: China, job, Spot, Taipei, Taiwan, TV