Outgunned
Taiwanese actor-turned-director Lee Hong-chi boards the festival bus for his first feature and takes a shot of D&M Kool-Aid.
Love is a Gun
Director: Lee Hong-chi • Writers: Lee Hong-chi, Lin Cheng-hsun
Starring: Lee Hong-chi, Patricia Lin, Zheng Qing-yu, Lin Ke-ren, Lee Yu-ayo, Edison Song
Taiwan • 1hr 21mins
Opens Hong Kong March 7 • IIB
Grade: C
In Love is a Gun | 愛是一把槍 actor-turned-director Lee Hong-chi (Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Last Suspect) has turned out precisely the kind of “artistic” debut that’s custom-engineered for film festival success. Every joke Ning Hao made in The Movie Emperor about festivals is exemplified in this wilfully opaque mood piece that fancies itself profound and form-busting but is, in reality, unfocused toss. Totally unsurprisingly, Love is a Gun had its world premiere at Venice (because of course it did, though technically at Critics’ Week), where the existential ramblings and alleged visual poetry fit right in. On top of it all, this is a damn short film. This story needed, maybe, 20 minutes to tell completely, not the numbing (and may I add, officially feature length by the skin of its damn teeth) 81 it prattles on for. And don’t even start me on buddy’s weed trip. Or hash. Whatever it was, weed and hash don’t work like that. Though Lee clearly has something on his mind about millennial Taiwan and twentysomething malaise, he’s so wrapped up in artistry he gets lost up his own colon.
The symbolism…
Ex-con Sweet Potato (Lee pulling double duty) is doing his best to stay on the straight and narrow in the small Gueishan Island town he lives in. He did a three-year prison bit for his Big Boss, some dude he’s never met, and has vowed never to return to that life. But we all know what happens to ex-cons in movies who vow they’ll never go back to “the life”. Ultra-touchy about his gig peddling beach umbrellas to tourists for crap pay, irritated by a shrill, money obssessed girlfriend, betelnut beauty Lulu (Zheng Qing-yu), harrassed by his mother, who’s constantly asking him to pay her gambling debts, and somehow still drawn to a wealthy school friend, Seven (Patricia Lin Ying-wei), Sweet Potato accepts a job collecting debts for an acquaintace from “the life”, Maozi (Lin Ke-ren). He may as well, he’s at loose ends. But as he goes about his vaguely thuggish business, he starts demanding to meet Big Boss as a way to get some kind of control over his life. Naturally, this being an existential crime thriller, that doesn’t work out so well for Sweet Potato.
There are some astute observations in Love is a Gun (though the title is bullshit), even if they are sybolised via some pretty hoary visuals. Gueishan is rocky (oooh), Sweet Potato’s life goes up in flames on a few occasions (aaah), he’s probably eternally bound by the confines of the life he chose – just look at Zhu Yingrong’s restrictive 4:3 aspect ratio photography if you need proof (waaah). That doesn’t mean Lee and co-writer Lin Cheng-hsun’s observations of a Taiwanese generation’s malaise and sense of disaffections aren’t frequently vivid, and more subtle than they have a right to be. The stresses of economic anxiety wear down on everyone in Sweet Potato’s sphere, and it make almost every single one of them intensely unlikeable – to the point they are inconsistent rather than understandable. Lulu’s back-and-forth is egregious (for the little bit of time Zheng gets to work with the character), and she seems less unsettled than simply flighty. Maozi is a paper-thin sketch, and Seven’s obvious wealth never really comes to mean anything for Sweet Potato. Like everyone else, she’s just there.
Sweet Potato is one of those philosophical gangsters the movies adore: a dude running in place, deep down knowing he’s never getting out of the mire. Truth be told Takeshi Kitano and Sabu love these guys, even Johnnie To’s The Mission dips into the trope a tiny bit (they’d all fit in with the film’s bored gangsters kicking a ball coda), so Lee and Lin’s ruminations are only delivered about half as cleverly as they’re convinced they are. We all know where Love is a Gun is going, and when it finally gets there, it leaves little impression, other than one of familiarity – with both the film’s content and its mannered artifice. It makes the protracted closing shot feel like a way to hit that official feature threshold rather than a considered comment on dead ends. Yeah, it should have been a short film. — DEK