This year’s Chinese New Year screening at HOME Manchester presented by the Chinese Film Forum UK and the Confucius Institute at The University of Manchester, was a Taiwanese film. We’ve had a variety of features over the last few years in Manchester and they have usually been films that haven’t been acquired for UK release. This is particularly the case with Taiwanese films which struggle to get any kind of profile in the UK. Godspeed introduced me to Taiwanese auteur Chung Mong-Hong who wrote and directed as well as photographed his film (using his cinematographer pseudonym Nakashima Nagao). Chung’s credits on IMDb suggest that his career began in his early 40s and that he has performed one or more of his three creative roles across seven fiction features and one documentary since 2008. This seems unusual and I wonder what he did before?
The screening was introduced by Fraser Elliott representing both HOME and the Chinese Film Forum. Fraser suggested that this was a ‘multi-genre’ film drawing on the repertoires of crime, comedy, the road movie and the buddy movie. It was successful both commercially and with critics in East Asia, winning various prizes. Director Chung is part of the renaissance of Taiwanese film at the start of the 21st century and there are several interesting features of Godspeed. Fraser explained that one of these was the casting of Michael Hui, one of the legends of Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, who then became an important figure in HK television. It has been suggested that Hui has not worked so often in Taiwan or the Mainland, partly because of the difficulties he has had learning Mandarin. His Hong Kong status is utilised in Godspeed by making his character ‘Old Xu’, a not very successful taxi driver who moved from Hong Kong to Taiwan in the 1990s. Fraser suggested that Godspeed offered something somewhere in between “Samuel Beckett and Golden Age HK Cinema”. What on earth did he mean?
It fairly quickly became apparent that Chung Mong-Hong belongs to that small group of directors who pitch their films somewhere between the arthouse and the multiplex. Similar directors often move some titles a little towards the arthouse and sometimes in the opposite direction, but always there is an intelligence and a ‘knowingness’ about genre. As I tried to make sense of Godspeed, the only handle I could grasp was my knowledge of Johnnie To, whose films seem to inhabit the same fictional universe. Godspeed opens with two seemingly separate stories. In one a Taiwanese man (Leon Dai) travels to Bangkok for some kind of trade that appears to go badly wrong. In the other a sad and overweight young man (Lin Na-Dou) answers a newspaper ad and gets a job as a courier to take a package to the South of the island from Taipei. He decides to take a cab and is approached by a yellow cab of some vintage with an equally vintage driver – ‘Old Xu’. The young man is reluctant and haggling ensues before an uneasy truce and the journey begins. Eventually we will realise that this is a drug mule choosing an unusual mode of transport and that the two stories are actually linked – but we won’t make all the connections immediately.
Chung is seemingly not interested in the kinds of conventions which enable genre films to be easily exported. I found the film’s opening hard to follow. In Bangkok there is a play on whether or not a large rock will contain jade if broken open – and if someone could tell, just by handling the rock. I know that jade is very important in Asian art and culture, but I wasn’t sure what the allusion was here. Was it about expertise or trust or being a good gambler? In the other story, the procedures the young man has to follow to accept the job and carry it out were tortuous and mysterious. I thought at first that Old Xu was ‘in’ on the drug run and that the young man was meant to take his cab. But apparently not. Fraser described the drug run as a mundane genre element and indeed there are aspects of the film narrative that do feel rather tedious in laying out the plot. If the film is to take off, it requires that interesting relationships are developed between pairs of characters. This is certainly the case and all the lead performances are excellent. Each relationship also has an underpinning of comedy. This is strongest between ‘Old Xu’ and ‘Little Boss’ (as he terms the young man) but it is also there in the meeting between Leon Dai’s character and his partner which involves an odd conversation about an enormously long sofa, still in its plastic packaging. Chung inserts many quirky plot details into scenes and creates a delicate ripple of absurdity. He then ups the violence and there are some very gruesome scenes at various points. These last might make the film commercially viable for an international audience (remember the ‘typing’ of ‘Extreme Asian Cinema’ used by Tartan Video to sell East Asian horror and crime?). However, the other features of this unconventional film are likely to deter Western buyers.
The last third of the film sold the whole package to me. This is when Little Boss and Old Xu learn about each other and a relationship develops which is genuinely moving. I confess I’d like to have followed this story into its next phase as a father-son relationship seemed to be developing. There are more comic moments and more emotional moments in this last third than in the rest of the film. I knew steamed buns were important in Chinese culture and this confirms it. I’ll certainly watch another Chung Mong-Hong film if I get the chance. The trailer below from the Seattle International Film Festival gives a good insight into the style of the film. I was taken by the landscape of levées and waterways and the unusual locations for events including the abandoned mini theme park and bowling alley.
The Case for Global Film 