Prêts? Not quite
First-timer Nelicia Low’s ‘Pierce’ has its moments, just not enough that make any sense.
Pierce
Director: Nelicia Low • Writer: Nelicia Low
Starring: Liu Hsiu-Fu, Tsao Yu-ning, Ding Ning
Singapore / Taiwan • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 20 • IIB
Grade: C
First time writer-director Nelicia Low’s Pierce | 刺心切骨 comes with some high hopes. The film won Low a directing award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year, which is not nothing, and during the course of the five years Low spent developing the script at major co-production pitching programmes and writer’s labs around the globe she got tips from industry heavy hitters at Rotterdam, Golden Horse, Berlin Talents Tokyo and FEFF. She even picked up a serious DOP in Michał Dymek; this guy is no joke and he shot EO and The Girl with the Needle among others. As if that weren’t enough, Low was on Singapore’s fencing squad at the 2010 Asian Games (the team placed fifth) and she attended Columbia and Tisch. Let’s just say all the dominoes line up for a decent debut.
So how exactly did Pierce fall apart so insidiously? Loosely based on the 2014 Taipei Metro mass murder and Low’s own opaque, often one-sided relationship with her older autistic brother, the film has a nicely realised atmosphere of suppressed emotion, raging denial on multiple fronts and simmering violence. A brooding and bleak examination of hero worship, identity and the demands of familial connection, Pierce is so frustrating because it’s so easy to see where it might have gone with one more pass at the script stage and a little less indulgence of a first time filmmaker. The hype is there; the film is not.
Zijie (Liu Hsiu-Fu, Plurality, the mess that keeps on giving) is a not-terribly-good fencer trying to make his way onto a school? regional? fencing team but is struggling to fit in at the school he practices at. There’s some whispering about his “psycho” brother Zihan (Tsao Yu-ning, racing movie Nezha), who it turns out is in prison for manslaughter and is getting out – Friday. There’s a question of whether Zihan is actually guilty of a crime, and also one of whether he’s a powder keg ready to blow again. Their mom Ai Ling (Ding Ning, Goddamned Asura) wants to keep Zijie as far away from Zihan as possible – she’s convinced Zihan tried to drown the younger boy when they were kids – and she really wants to pretend he doesn’t exist for the sake of her engagement to her beauhunk Zhuang (Lin Tsu-heng), who’s actually a decent guy. She brushes off Zihan’s absence at Zhuang’s swish family dinner by saying he’s studying medicine at Johns Hopkins. Well, if you’re going to lie…
Of course, Zijie wants to see his big bro, and despite his mother’s warnings he reaches out to him when he gets out of the clink. Zihan was a champion fencer himself so he starts coaching Zijie on the down low and before you know it, Zijie’s on the team. He’s also making inroads in his budding romance with fellow fencer Hui (Rosen Tsai) – thanks to Zihan’s interpersonal mojo (um, he’s been in prison people but whatever). Low cites the dynamic between the Taipei subway killer and his little brother as Pierce’s bedrock; one brother’s unfailing support of the other in the face of overwhelming evidence. Zihan is all sharp angles and prison steeliness that frightens little children, and he looks like a threat to Zijie, the soft-edged, doe-eyed innocent whose fatal flaw is his commitment to believing his brother is too.
It’s good casting, even if Liu and Tsao are so stilted as to be inert, which is the order of the day for the performances in Pierce. Even still, those wouldn’t be enough to really sink the film if the storytelling weren’t equally stilted en route to a left field, misguided conclusion. Low taps her knowledge of fencing to exploit the minutiae and imagery – the clang of discord, the obscuring masks, the stab to the heart – of the sport, and that mostly works. At least until the climactic final match where people are just milling around all over the damn place and running the risk of getting in the fencers’ way or getting poked. Is this normal at fencing tournaments? It needs to be there for the narrative, sure; for the closing shots of Zijie and Zihan finally connecting honestly as brothers. But the simple illogic of all that surrounds that moment, of the decisions the boys make, takes you right out of the movie and straight into WTF? territory. That’s not the first time either. It happens again and again and again, and it drowns out the themes Low is trying to explore and mutes the impact of Dymek’s frequently evocative images. Pierce can be summed up by Zijie’s sweet awkwardness around Hui in moments Low stretches to the breaking point. Ditto for a dinner with Zhuang, for a stab wound at practice, for learning a new parry. There’s a fine line between embracing one’s sexual identity and insecurity and just sucking at life. Dude, get on the damn bus.