Gender issue surfaces at Taiwanese Film Festival

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): When has gender ever not been an issue in film?

Of late, a theme of woman as deadlier than the male has run through a number of mainstream movies and was rendered unforgettable in the thriller Basic Instinct. Even Speed and Wolf had their indomitable female heroes, with Sandra Bullock and Michelle Pfeiffer as gutsy buddy types, able to match their male partners yet no threat to their masculinity. What it means to be female is the question which complements what it means to be male. Masculinity and femininity in a world of shifting values are a major preoccupation of the popular film.

A recent film from Taiwan which received worldwide critical acclaim, The Wedding Banquet, directed by Ang Lee, has worked on these themes, as has his latest film, Eat Drink Man Woman. It was no surprise then, to find these issues also reflected (but oh so superficially) in one of the films at the Taiwanese Film Festival which is screening at the Taman Ismail Marzuki until today.

This was Chung Shao-Hsiung's Two Unremitting Women which is a police drama with a central female character, Wenine, a young police officer who wears tight spandex slacks and a low-cut sweater under a jacket, which it seems is the only outward sign of professionalism she allows. The film would have it that she is a top cop -- a top gun if that is no contradiction in terms -- and like all good operators she is part of a team. She has two companions/sisters-in-arms -- Yo and May -- and together they make quite a triangle: Yo as nurturer and support with the glamorous May as informant they complement and enhance the professional in action-hero Wenine. Additionally, and definitely most significantly, three-in-one enhances the glamour quotient.

Wenine's assignment is to stop a gang of gun smugglers. Every self-respecting moviegoer understands well the significance of the gun -- the pistol is a visual metaphor as old as the institution of cinema. And it provides the best excuse for a dazzling display of fast-cutting as the scanty scripted narrative limps on while sound and image take over completely with extended sequences of exploding firepower.

Wenine's trawling throws up all sorts of low-life and eventually it closes in on the gang and the screen explodes in an even more dazzling display of light and noise as the film crunches a gear change to hyperviolence. And yet, you could argue that the ever more frequent armed confrontations begin to develop a contrary logic as, desperate to stop an unstoppable foe, the police and friends (it is quite difficult to be sure who is who at this stage) use refrigerator doors as shields and stoves as weapons, and kitchen tables and overhead fans are pitted against the gang of AK-47 brandishing criminals.

Violence against women and children is something which I find particularly hard to watch on screen and so it was when Yo received a knife in the thigh in the final confrontation with the arch villain. The rest of his gang had been depleted one by virile one, yet the villain seemed to be able to drag himself out of the jaws of death time and again. Until the final showdown and he is ultimately dispatched. As the two surviving young women Wenine and Yo turned their back to the camera and walked away from the final conflagration my thoughts turned for a moment to some of the visual pyrotechnics of gun-toting and petrol tanker explosions in Thelma and Louise. Only with the thought that this final scene might be quoting the American film at this point.

Violence

No sister to this film otherwise, Two Unremitting Women is only breathtaking in its delivery of (mindless) violence and the simulation never touches you in the same way as it does in another film on the festival program, The Noblest Way to Die, directed by Chou Tan. From law enforcement to the ethics of warfare it is a film perhaps less representative of current Taiwanese audience tastes in surreal fantasy and superaction. Also a cinema release of 1992, The Noblest Way to Die revisits the Japanese occupation of China during the World War II.

It is seen through the eyes of a young man accompanying his grandfather who was then a young officer in the Japanese Imperial Army. In a journey of atonement: the elderly man wishes to relive his wartime memories and to rediscover the few pathetic human remains which will confirm it was all not just a horrible dream. How could man have been so cruel to man among the grandeur of the sweeping mountain slopes? The mountain heights seem to frown down on such inhumanity in the name of war.

The old man was Lieutenant Inagawa during the war, posted at a Japanese military prison under the control of his superior, an utterly psychopathic individual, Lieutenant Iu. As a young officer Inagawa was gentle in his attitude towards the female sex -- earnestly awaiting news from Japan of his mother's health, not visiting the young woman held captive within the prison and obliged to give favors for a fee. He found utterly repugnant the torture inflicted on those Chinese unlucky to be captured and brought within the prison walls for questioning. International conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war were of no use in this den of murderers, where many were apparently deemed suspect spies and had to submit to interrogation.

Inagawa is a Buddhist and represents the other face of Japan during the War. Those Japanese unwillingly caught up in a war and obliged by nationalistic, imperialistic rhetoric to subsume their personal ideals to their country's war machine. A wretched Inagawa is "asked" by his superior to gun a prisoner down like an animal as he is running away, having been tricked into thinking he might reach freedom; Inagawa is seen first involved in the death of the "enemy" and he is seen confronting the betrayal of his beliefs in the truly awful scenes of torture which crowd the film.

There is a young Chinese at the prison. Unlucky Tien Shih, whom we suspect of being nothing more than a student, has been captured by the Japanese. He is the only one to survive a blast which killed a group of guerrillas, whom he was visiting, but is held as a spy. Cruelly abused and interrogated by his captors, the young man is by turns cynically manipulated by a fellow prisoner, a callow Chinese businessman whose scruples know no base except the business ethic (and self preservation) which, he declares, is all.

Inagawa is compelled by Lieutenant Iu to demonstrate his "self-confidence". This is the thing that the Japanese soldier lacks, according to Iu; the Japanese soldier is to the German as iron is to steel. He is required to do this by removing the fingernails of the young prisoner in an effort to prize information from him -- data which he of course does not have. The systematized brutality in The Noblest Way to Die, is conducted in "real time". That is, without merciful cuts to shorten the sequence and no cutaways to take you away from the action, the camera and the viewer's eye is trained on the event for the length of its real-life duration, the only escape is to close your eyes and your ears if you are able! It was almost, for this viewer, too much to bear.

The immediacy and the horror of the representations of torture in The Noblest Way to Die linger long after the sound and image cease. Yet the integrity of this film cannot be denied. The script is thoughtful: "If death is awful, is it because life (in wartime) is lovely?" and the characterizations extremely convincing.

Acting is very strong. This is no choreographed dance with death like Two Unremitting Women. This is more like an encounter with the violence that sleeps at the bottom of the well of the murky depths of the soul. See it, but be warned.

The Noblest Way to Die and Two Unremitting Woman are to be screened again today. The other films which have been screened were Little Shaolin Boxer, Love in Venice and Painted Skin