A Leg

腿

Taiwan, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 115 mins.

Director: Zhang Yaosheng 张耀升.

Rating: 6/10.

Delicious black comedy is weakened by too many flashbacks that lack the main story’s absurdist tone.

STORY

Taiwan, the present day, July. Zheng Zihan (Yang Youning) goes to hospital to have his foot amputated, following an accident a while ago that left him limping. The operation appears to go well, but then septicaemia sets in and he dies. As his body is taken to the undertaker’s, his wife Qian Yuying (Gui Lunmei) tells the driver (Na Dou) to return to the hospital. (Zheng Zihan remembers when, at the age of 28, he first saw Qian Yuying’s picture in the shop window of his photographer friend Yuehan [Zhang Shaohuai]. He had been immediately smitten. Yuehan had introduced her – a professional ballroom dancer who won her first award at junior high – and Zheng Zihan had immediately asked to become her dance partner. They had entered an international competition together; they didn’t win but they won much applause. An only child, she had then introduced him to her Hokkien-speaking parents.) Back at the hospital, Qian Yuying demands her husband’s foot so that his body can be cremated whole. As Gao (Li Liren), the surgeon who performed the operation, has left for the day, she is forced to deal with an officious security man (Wang Ziqiang). Both she and he separately call the police and two teams turn up. The senior police officer (Chen Yiwen) takes charge but nothing is decided. (When Qian Yuying and Zheng Zihan had a chance to compete in a UK ballroom dancing competition, he had let her down badly by failing to show up. He had been gambling in an underground den where he won big; but he had then lost everything in another casino and ended up owing NT$6 million. Fleeing to the countryside, he’d hidden out for several days in a small hotel but been tracked down; while jumping barefoot into an alley, he’d badly sprained his ankle. Afterwards he had reunited with Qian Yuying and apologised to her parents.) Next day Qian Yuying visits Gao at work and won’t leave him alone till he agrees to help. He takes her to the pathology department but the section manager responsible (He Long) can’t find the foot due to a bureaucratic mix-up. (As Zheng Zihan’s professional dancing days were over due to his ankle, he and Qian Yuying had opened a ballroom-dancing school, Flying Dream 菲梦. The number of students had been small until Zheng Zihan asked the help of the gambling den’s head, Chen (Shi Mingshuai), who had once told him he was a dance fan. Business had magically improved, though Zheng Zihan then had to deal with gangsters who occupied the building and demanded money to leave.) Gao tells Qian Yuying to speak to Wang, the hospital’s waste collector, who bends the rules by letting her rummage in various plastic bags waiting to be taken to the bio-medical waste incinerator outside the city. (Qian Yuying had discovered Zheng Zihan having sex with one of his pupils. She hadn’t divorced him but they lived apart. Zheng Zihan had stayed with his friend Yuehan.) Unable to find the right foot among all the plastic bags, Qian Yuying again meets Yang (Yang Liyin), the pathology department’s head. While they are arguing, the hospital’s smooth-talking head (Jin Shijie) arrives, apologises for the mistake, and proposes a novel solution.

REVIEW

Taiwan author-turned-scriptwriter Zhang Yaosheng 张耀升 makes an interesting, but flawed, feature directing debut with the blackly comic A Leg 腿. Now in his mid-40s, Zhang began co-writing with Taiwan director Zhong Menghong 钟孟宏 on the latter’s A Sun 阳光普照 (2019), and more recently The Falls 瀑布 (2021), and Zhong’s fingerprints are all over A Leg, on which he was also creative producer 监制 and d.p. (under his regular pseudonym Nakashima Nagao 中岛长雄). Zhong’s own films as a director have always had an offbeat tone (Parking 停车, 2008; Godspeed 一路顺风, 2016) but sometimes suffered from weak writing and development (The Fourth Portrait 第四张画, 2010; Soul 失魂, 2013). A Leg is weakened not so much by its writing but by its basic concept of interlarding a delicious, very black comedy with flashbacks that have no humour at all, resulting in a Janus-like product that’s neither one thing nor another and would benefit from drastic cutting to give it focus. Despite that, there’s still enjoyment to be had, especially from the performances (with Taiwan actress Gui Lunmei 桂纶镁 in one of her best roles) and Zhong’s nicely-composed widescreen photography. In Taiwan it took a nothing NT$7.8 million.

The central idea is a tasty one. After having his damaged foot removed by surgery, a husband suddenly dies of septicaemia; but when his loving wife (a ballroom dancer) tries to retrieve the foot so her husband’s body can be cremated “whole”, she comes up against a wall of hospital bureaucracy. These scenes are beautifully written and played as an absurdist black comedy, with Gui (Parking; Ocean Heaven 海洋天堂, 2010; Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火, 2014; The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会, 2019) terrific as the quietly determined, relentless pursuer of her husband’s bodypart who is also mistress of a withering stare when confronted by yet another meaningless roadblock. She’s supported by a strong cast, including Taiwan veteran Jin Shijie 金士杰 as the hospital’s oily head, Chen Yiwen 陈以文 as a double-talking police officer, actor-singer Li Liren 李李仁 as the harassed surgeon, and Yang Liyin 杨丽音 as the bureaucratic head of the path lab. Most of the cast, including Gui, have been in previous films by Zhong, creating a nice feeling of ensemble and complicity. And for Gui, who’s worked regularly in both Taiwan and the Mainland the past two decades, and is now in her late 30s, this is one film she really does carry for once.

Her co-star, the variable Yang Youning 杨祐宁, also in his late 30s and a cross-Straits regular, is in relaxed form here, with only a hint of the woodenness that sometimes afflicts his performances. Unfortunately he’s mostly just in the flashbacks, which give him more limited acting scope. The writers’ basic idea of showing first a devoted wife on a quest to honour her late husband, and then, via flashbacks, showing that neither he nor their marriage was at all worthy of such devotion, is clever. But the flashbacks (occasionally narrated by Yang’s character, from his p.o.v.) start to dominate the movie without adding much new – for a start, a section dealing with some squatting gangsters could easily be eliminated. They also further detract from what should be the film’s core, the present-day comedy of the absurd.

Throughout, Zhong’s widescreen photography is as precise and well-composed as usual, and the ballroom-dancing sequences memorably combine music and images, with often droll use of classical extracts. Contributions by other Zhong regulars like editor Lai Xiuxiong 赖秀雄 and art director Zhao Sihao 赵思豪 are fine. A more correct title for the film would be A Foot, as that is what has actually been amputated. And at 80-plus minutes, with the flashbacks heavily cut, the film would really be the offbeat black comedy it promises to be at the start.

CREDITS

Presented by Creamfilm (TW), Mirror Fiction (TW), Mandarin Vision (TW). Produced by Creamfilm (TW).

Script: Zhong Menghong, Zhang Yaosheng. Jokes: Na Dou. Photography: Nakashima Nagao [Zhong Menghong]. Editing: Lai Xiuxiong. Music: Lu Lvming. Art direction: Zhao Sihao. Styling: Xu Liwen. Sound: Du Juntang, Du Duzhi, Wu Shuyao.

Cast: Gui Lunmei (Qian Yuying), Yang Youning (Zheng Zihan), Zhang Shaohuai (Yuehan/John), Li Liren (Gao, surgeon), Jin Shijie (hospital head), Chen Yiwen (senior police officer), Liu Guanting (William), Shi Mingshuai (Chen, gambling-den head), Lin Zhiru (Wang Qian, hospital waste collector), Yang Liyin (Yang, pathology department head), Liu Liangzuo (Pan, hospital general affairs director), Huang Jianwei (Huang, hospital waste lorry driver), Na Dou (ambulance driver), Wang Ziqiang (hospital security man with messy hair), Zhang Lidong (junior police officer), Han Yazhao (Xiaoshi), Tu Shancun (hospital head’s assistant), Chen Hanqing (Zhu, wood carver), Zhang Zhongrui (clinic doctor), Chen Weijuan (ballroom-dancing instructor), He Long (Wang, pathology department section manager), Xiao Hongwen (gang boss), Hong Yujing (identity-card forger), He Qiucai (Qian Yuying’s father), Zhong Xiaohua (Qian Yuying’s mother).

Premiere: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (Co-Opening Film), 5 Nov 2020.

Release: Taiwan, 24 Dec 2020.