My Elder Brother in Taiwan

酒是故乡浓

China/Taiwan, 2012, colour, 16:9, 85 mins.

Director: He Weiting 何蔚庭 [Ho Wi Ding].

Rating: 7/10.

Slim but likeable second feature by the director of Pinoy Sunday.

STORY

Gaoxiong, Taiwan, the present day. Sunday. Pan Huajin (Ding Qiang) meets his younger sister, Pan Huafeng (Song Xiaoying), and her daughter Li Yingchen (Zhao Hanxue) at the airport when they arrive from China. The siblings haven’t seen each other in 60 years; Pan Huafeng has come for a cross-straits medical conference, intending to stay until Friday. Eager to make an impression, Pan Huajin, who says he works in import-export, puts them up at a luxury hotel and invites them to a splashy dinner. In fact, he works as a cleaner at the hotel and has managed to get three days’ holiday and a three-month advance on his wages, as he is an old friend of the father of the assistant manager, Wang Mushan (Deng Fei). Monday. Driven by Wang Mushan in a hotel car, Pan Huajin and Pan Huafeng visit their father’s funerary urn, though Pan Huajin is forced to hide when he sees the hotel’s manager, Geng Ya’nan (Zhang Shiying), also there by chance. Tuesday. Pan Huajin takes Pan Huafeng and Li Yingchen to Taibei for sightseeing, while Geng Ya’nan ticks off Wang Mushan for surreptitiously helping Pan Huajin and giving him holiday time. Wednesday. Wang (Li Meihua), a maid at the hotel, asks Pan Huafeng to visit her sick husband. Pan Huajin, who lives opposite, hears Pan Huafeng and her daughter outside and hides away in his small, run-down old house. Over the next two days, Pan Huajin finds it harder and harder to conceal the truth from his sister and niece.

REVIEW

Pinoy Sunday 台北星期天 (2009), the first feature by Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director He Weiting 何蔚庭 [Ho Wi Ding], was slim but very likeable, and the same adjectives could be applied to his second full-length movie, My Elder Bother in Taiwan 酒是故乡浓. A gentle comedy-of-manners about a Mainlander who visits her elder brother in Taiwan after a gap of 60 years – only to find he’s hiding a guilty secret – says far more in its simple, unambitious way about the emotional side of cross-straits family reunions and the way in which “face” is alll-important than, say, recent food movie Joyful Reunion 饮食、男女  好远又好近 (2012). It also shows He, though still painting on an intimate, small canvas, really developing from his origins as a short film director into a feature film-maker.

Despite being divided into chapters (Sunday to Friday) that span the visit by a Mainland doctor and her daughter to the former’s elder brother in Gaoxiong, southern Taiwan, the movie is far less episodic than the vignette-ish Pinoy Sunday. The latter film charted two Filipinos trying to move a red sofa through the streets of Taibei one afternoon, and was basically an allegory about the outsider status of immigrants to the island. Brother has a much stronger emotional arc running through the movie as the brother does his financial utmost to ensure his relatives have a good time but hides the fact that he’s actually a hotel cleaner with almost no money at all.

The audience is told about his secret early on, and the film becomes a low-key comedy as Pan Huajin narrowly escapes being found out time and again. Directed in an unfussy but well-composed way, Brother is all the more moving for its absence of buckets of emotion and leaving more things unsaid than said, and the simple musical score (largely piano, plus snatches of perky music) supports director He’s light touch. Taiwan veteran actor Ding Qiang 丁强 (the head chef in Joyful Reunion) is perfectly cast as the resilient brother, for whom “face” and family duty is everything, and he’s well balanced by Mainland actresses Song Xiaoying 宋晓英 as his younger sister and Zhao Hanxue 赵寒雪 as her daughter, both of whom underplay their roles to fine effect.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing New Era Filming (CN). Produced by Beijing New Era Filming (CN), Changhe Films (TW).

Script: Fang Hongren, Huang Tong. Photography: Wang Junming. Editing: Lin Hongjun, Xu Weiyao. Music: Ren Yasong, Feng Shizhe. Art direction: Chen Tianqu. Sound: Zhou Yunpeng, Chen Weiliang, Xu Xusong.

Cast: Ding Qiang (Pan Huajin), Song Xiaoying (Pan Huafeng, his younger sister), Zhao Hanxue (Li Yingchen, her daughter), Deng Fei (Wang Mushan, assistant hotel manager), Li Meihua (Wang, room maid), Zhang Shiying (Geng Ya’nan, hotel manager), Gao Zhenpeng (Lin), Gong Yanwen (Xiaozhuang), Li Yusheng (limousine driver), Ye Jinchun (taxi driver), Lin Liwei (doctor).

Premiere: Beijing Film Festival (Sino-Style Unit), 27 Apr 2012.

Release: China, 1 Jul 2012; Taiwan, tba.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 18 Jun 2012.)