Law & Disorder
Debuting filmmaker Freddy Tang takes the law he knows so well into his own hands in a legal thriller that isn’t sure how to argue its case.
Fantasy•World
Director: Freddy Tang • Writer: Freddy Tang
Starring: Joseph Chang, Cammy Chiang, Lee Kang-sheng, Ivy Yin, Kimi Hsia, Tsai Ming-shiou, Jeff Wang, Wang Yu-ping, Yu An-shun
Taiwan • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong December 15 • III
Grade: C+
Hey, did you know that people who have been subjected to sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape are often victim-blamed, treated like criminals themselves, re-assaulted by the courts and have the law stacked against them? Did you know that water is wet?
That’s the basic idea behind lawyer-turned-director Freddy Tang Fu-jui’s scattershot but well-intentioned Fantasy•World | 童話‧世界, which pivots on a draconian Taiwanese law (since repealed) that puts an adulterer’s, erm, extramarital partner in jail alongside the main player (adultery was decriminalised in 2020). This is a dour and often confounding drama that changes tack so frequently its gets lost in the fog by attempting its hand at legal thriller while also flirting with romance (which, just, no, not today). Fantasy•World has plenty on its mind, but isn’t quite mature enough to articulate it fluently. Tang, a lawyer by trade who studied filmmaking in the US just as the #MeToo movement took off, has a knotty story on his hands; the kind of chewy, stranger than fiction material that comes inherently loaded with burning questions and righteous indignation. But the handful of short films Tang has to his credit haven’t given him enough in the way of cinema experience to flesh out the themes he wants to grapple with. That, and you can almost hear a producer or a distributor – or a funder – asking why there can’t be more romance in the film. Because nothing says romance quite like stat rape.
Needs more Perry Mason
It’s sometime in the 1990s, and Taiwan’s adultery law is in full effect. A young hotshot lawyer fresh out of law school, Zhang (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan, more dogged than compelling) is working for an even hotter shot lawyer, Tu (Ivy Yin Xin) and together they’re defending cram school teacher Tang (Tsai Ming-liang regular Lee Kang-sheng, at his most implacably stoic) from accusations of, if not rape (as it is generally regarded), sexual impropriety with one of his students. He’s new to town and strikes up a friendship with a high school girl he meets on a train, Chen Xie (an appropriately starry-eyed Cammy Chiang Yi-jung). Okay, so the hinted-at romance that develops between them is… problematic. While Zhang and Tu get to work helping Tang squirm of the hook, Chen gets caught in his bullshit “We’re dating, I love you” trap. This “relationship” as Tang calls it ends when he sets his sights on another student. Chen is devastated, and devastated a second time when she finds out she wasn’t the first – in the most humiliating way possible.
Seventeen years later, Zhang is still a hotshot lawyer, but he’s struck out on his own. When his social worker wife calls him for help one night after a student she knows, Guo (Wang Yu-ping), claims she’s the victim of yet more of Tang’s predations, he decides it’s time to atone for his crimes from back in the day. That atonement is hard to achieve, however, as that pesky adultery law has Guo hesitant to testify in open court. Add to that her father stumping to accept a cash settlement for his “ruined” daughter and make the whole thing just go away.
Just. No
So, why’s she goin’ to jail?
Needless to say Fantasy•World has plenty of dense moral and legal quagmires to wade through; even the title suggests the stark division between what can be in a teen girl’s head and reality. Can, or should, a teenager legitimately consent to sexual encounter with a much older person who’s also in a position of power? Where’s the line between morality and the law? Everyone has the right to a defence, but at what cost (Zhang’s demolition of the complainant in the first trial is rage-inducingly familiar)? When are women going to be given the safe space to pursue justice? Better still when are we going to teach men they’re not entitled to women’s bodies?
The problem is that Tang’s steered away from a straight-ahead, contemplative drama and hung all these issues on the framework of a flash-back based legal yarn that isn’t yarny enough for the genre and doesn’t quite know what it wants to say. The silly, century-old adultery law forms the crux of the story, but it’s never interrogated given its inciting incident status. Chen keeps a detailed diary of her affair, and yup, you’re indeed free to call it Chekhov’s Diary. Tang has a silent, put-upon driver (Tsai Ming-shiou), who’s set up to be at the heart of a classic “Your honour, allow me to call one last witness…” moment, but that never truly becomes the courthouse bombshell it should. By jumping back and forth between Zhang and his quest to finally get Tang away from vulnerable students and nail him for the same incident he got him exonerated for almost two decades before Tang (the director) muddies the waters and diffuses his point. Fantasy•World stops rather than ends, sinking any larger statement in mid-stride. Tang’s decided to wrestle with a worthy issue – several actually – that can’t be spotlighted enough, but a little less ambition might have gone a longer way. — DEK