「美麗時光」影評 by Tony Rayns

作者  SsSy.bbs@bbs.cs.nccu.edu.tw (SEIJYO#7),          看板  movie
標題  「美麗時光」影評 by Tony Rayns
時間  政大資科貓空行館 (Wed Sep 25 16:06:57 2002)

溫哥華電影節 (Vancouver film festival) 影評 by Tony Rayns

The wayward lives of adolescents on the fringes of the criminal underworld
are not a subject neglected by the cinema, but nobody does teenage
frustrations and dreams like Chang Tso-Chi. The placid Wei and his volatile
best friend and neighbour Jie are 19-year-olds living with their families
in the suburbs of Taipei. Wei has a tight bond with his twin sister Min,
who's going through chemotherapy for leukemia, but Jie isn't close to
either his devout Christian father (a retired soldier, originally from
China) or his retarded elder brother. Pushed by Jie, Wei asks Brother Gu--
owner of the nightclub where he works as a parking valet--to trust them
with jobs in his gang. They are sent out as debt collectors. Soon they're
the proud, nervous owners of a gun and a single bullet...

Chang very smartly rhymes his subject (the boys' longing for status and
power) with a journey into their inner lives; the painstaking surface
naturalism is underpinned by a wry awareness that subconscious desires
and impulses are just as real as the fish in the living-room tank. He even

pulls off the Borgesian trick (used by Bertolucci in The Spider’s Stratagem
of suggesting that dreams can be more real than anything else. Poetic,
visually beautiful and immoderately moving, The Best of Times--like Chang's
previous films--gets indelible performances from everyone in its non-pro
cast.