Taiwan
Lin Cheng-sheng
Former baker and documentary filmmaker Lin Cheng-sheng's debut feature A Drifting Life showed in Exhibition at Cannes in 1996. He returns this year with Murmur of Youth, his second feature, which contrasts the lives of two young girls in modern Taiwan. The film also involves a daring lesbian romance - possibly Taiwan's first film to deal with the theme in a sympathetic manner.
Murmur of Youth continues to explore a typical subject of Taiwan's New Wave directors - the problems of life in a rapidly changing society. Both Lin's protagonists are called Mei-li (meaning "pretty") and they are both young, but they come from two different worlds. One is from a middle-class family living in a Taipei tower block. She silently watches her siblings pursue a materialistic lifestyle as their parents endure their long, hard marriage. The other Mei-li lives in a rickety old house at the edge of the city. Her parents are construction workers - people who have had to endure hardship and are trying desperately to steer their children onto an easier path.
Fate brings the two girls together when they find themselves trapped inside the box-office of a cinema, and a bond develops as they share their fantasies and frustrations.
"Five years ago, I made a documentary by the same title. It was about a girl named Mei-li. I wanted to document her in her youthful innocence: the way she always fell in love and fantasised her affairs," says Cheng-sheng. "She had bizarre ideas about love and desire. As you get old, youth becomes a distant, sentimental memory." He conceived the film, he says, as "an ode to youth."
Richard James Havis
(with The Taiwan Film Centre)
Prod co: Central Motion Picture Corporation
Prods: Hsu Li-kong, Chiu Shun-ching
Dir: Lin Cheng-sheng
Scr: Ko Su-ching, Lin Cheng-sheng
Ph: Tsai Cheng-hui
Art dir: Tsai Zao-yee
Cast: Rene Liu, Tseng Jing, Tsai Chin-hsin
Running time: 106 mins
Int sales: Taiwan Film Centre