It’s Always Mom
Arvin Chen’s latest is an ode to mamma’s boys? An unlikely romance? A coming-of-age story? Who knows?
Mama Boy
Director: Arvin Chen • Writers: Arvin Chen, Sunny Yu
Starring: Kai Ko, Vivian Hsu, Sara Yu, Fandy Fan, Hou Yen-hsi, Debbie Yao, Joanne Missingham
Taiwan • 1hr 39mins
Opens Hong Kong October 6 • IIA
Grade: C+
Who, exactly, am I supposed to “like” in Mama Boy | 初戀慢半拍? It was easy to root for those crazy kids in Taiwanese-American filmmaker Arvin Chen’s debut, Au revoir Taipei, a kind of Before Sunrise-lite that was as light as air. Ditto for the middle-aged husband and father in the 2013 LGBTQ+-positive rom-com Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? That was fluffy and kinda sorta facile, but it was genuinely funny, and Richie Jen turned in a career-best performance. It was hard not to like the characters, and so overlook both films’ moderate flaws.
But Mama Boy is just plain baffling in its alienating characterisations and smackable behaviours. What’s even more amazing is how miserably Chen fumbles the ball when the pedigree on the crew and the cast are so stellar. Am I supposed to care about the shrinking violet and shitty fish sales clerk living under his mother’s considerable thumb? Said overbearing mother, who’s impressed such a sense of nothingness on her son and just can’t get over herself? The single mother brothel manager who’s so bored she befriends a vulnerable man for her amusement? Her get-rich-quick-scheme fixated thug of a son? Why am I watching this movie?
Beyond tiger mom
Hsiao Hung (Kai Ko, Till We Meet Again, Moneyboys) is a painfully shy aquarium shop worker with next to no social skills and staring down the barrel of 30 years old with no girlfriend and fewer prospects. His mother, Meilng (Sara Yu Tzu-yu), rules his life. She makes his food, organises his schedule, finds him dates. And this is not “culture” and Tiger Mom-ing. This is a dangerously domineering parent controlling their child. And the child doing nothing to push back.
One night, after another busted blind date (I can’t blame the woman for pulling the old, “Call me at 9:30 with an ‘emergency’!”), Hsiao Hung’s troublemaker/comic relief cousin takes him to a sex hotel where he encounters the enigmatic Le Le (Vivian Hsu, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, Light the Night). They strike up an awkward May-December quasi-romance: He’s gingerly exploring desire and courtship (this dude “courts” for sure), she finds a surrogate for her hopeless son Weijie (Fandy Fan), from whom she’s vaguely estranged. You can well imagine how things go when Meiling finds out.
Animal attraction
So not a madame
Even though it’s been nearly a decade since his last work Chen clearly still knows a thing or two about constructing a film and composing a striking image, which is why it’s strange that Mama Boy falls so flat. The film has its share of vivid moments – Hsiao Hung and Le Le dancing to an Anita Mui ballad, Hsiao Hung trying to emerge from behind his fishbowls in sequences that bookend the story (we get it, really we do), the quiet stillness that runs beneath Hsiao Hung’s interactions with Meiling notably contrast with the colour and life that sparks up when he’s with Le Le, most of that thanks to cinematographer Jake Pollock’s (Starry, Starry Night, Monga) evocative images. But no matter how Ko and Hsu try (both normally engaging actors), Hsiao Hung and Le Le as people remain so diffuse, and such a test of one’s patience in their spinelessness (him) and self-involvement (her) – without any grounding that we can empathise with – that they keep us at a distance when the urge to slap some sense into them subsides. I’m not pulling for this unlikely couple. I just want them to get a grip. — DEK