Solitary Taste: Women Who Reconcile With The Past

Liu Ying / Wen

After a lifetime of hard work, Lin Xiuying ushered in her 70th birthday. Although the restaurant has been handed over to her third daughter Jiajia, she is still busy with her birthday party. On the day of the celebration, the guests were full, and the daughters returned to Tainan, where Xiuying lived. Unexpectedly, the same day came the news of her husband's death. Overnight, the celebration turned into a memorial ceremony. The husband has been away from home for more than 20 years, but his wife and children are both nominal. In the process of preparing for the funeral and the wake, Xiuying and her three daughters finally had a chance to look back on the family's past experience and try to relieve their feelings temporarily

"Lonely taste" opens the curtain of narration in the scene full of smoke and fire. The preparation process of the birthday banquet can not do without the display of Chinese food skills. However, the film is not willing to pay homage to the depiction of the "Chinese family on the dining table" in "men and women", but quickly presents a dramatic and explosive turn. The death of her husband brings not only the bad news of the death of her relatives, but also the most difficult thing for Xiuying to accept is that he has been wandering in Taipei for many years as a prodigal son, and has his own life with another woman 。 The long overdue divorce agreement is still in the drawer, and she will have to meet her husband's new love at the funeral.

The matter of life and death leads to the unsolved dilemma of Xiuying's family. At the same time, the gathering of the daughters also brings their own troubles. Growing up with their mothers, they try their best to find a way to escape from their families when they grow up. Although their relatives love each other, they prefer to live a life with clear boundaries and have different attitudes towards their father. "Lonely taste" gives the performance space to this group of women with different ideas. They share the closest blood relationship with each other, and they are also independent individuals. In a field where men are absent, they find a way to overcome this dilemma. In this sense, "lonely taste" has no unique protagonist, it is a group of women's plays. That's why, in the first half hour of the film, she chose to give a detailed account of Xiuying and her three daughters. Ah Qing, the eldest daughter of the ballet dancer, is anxious all day in the face of recurrent disease and a long-standing divorce lawsuit. Her second daughter, a Yu, has a good life, but her husband is busy and her daughter does not want to listen to her arrangement to study in the United States. Jiajia, the third daughter, is often around her mother and takes care of the restaurant. The pressure is increasing day by day. Sometimes he left home to visit his father and his new partner in Taipei, but he was also condemned by his conscience.

After patiently laying out the group images of the characters, the film does not rush to intensify the possible contradictions, but sets up a small obstacle in the long stream of narration, and quickly dispels them. How should the funeral be held? How does ah Qing deal with the operation that he will come? Should father's lover attend the farewell party? These problems in daily life, must be quite difficult, and even make people sad. In the film, however, the director deliberately adopts a desalination approach, and solves the problem through one or two conversations or minor quarrels. The enlargement of the film highlights the fact that East Asian women are willing to take into account the overall situation, which makes the story look like a dog's blood, without the color of catching horses, but adding an extra layer of flavor.

However, although the film tries very hard to depict the female characters in a delicate way, and abandons moral judgment as much as possible, so that each character has breathing space. However, due to the limitations of the creators themselves, male directors have not effectively constructed the function of male roles, which makes female characters seem too tolerant. The absence of husband / father for more than 20 years is regarded as a helpless regret by the women in the family. At the very emotional ending of the film, the solution of "crossing the emotional ridge" is also given. It is true that in real life, perhaps most women will choose to reconcile with the past, so that they can better face the future and themselves. But in the movie world, it is too easy to use the flashback of a good life 20 years ago to eliminate the harm that the absence of male characters brings to the family.