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Orz Boyz (Ya-che Yang, 2007)

no wikipedia or imdb entries

[asianmediawiki]

On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 8 May 2008, at 17:45.

I have not seen many Taiwanese films, but somehow this is the third one I’ve seen this year at the Clay Theater. Ya-che Yang is a new director, and Orz Boyz is his first film. This is probably why I can find neither the director nor his film on imdb or wikipedia. While I definitely liked this film, and it definitely had some of the more memorable scenes of any films I’ve seen in the last year, it was something of a mixed bag. For starters, even though it was half as long, it seemed at least twice as long as the four-hour A Brighter Summer Day (also Taiwanese, also about childhood, also by a guy named 楊).

The film is something of a collage of shared experiences of two boys, named Liar No.1 and Liar No.2 (No.2 is of course younger, shorter, and less well-tempered than No.1). No.2 was abandoned by his parents and is being raised by his grandmother. No.1 lost his mother (what happened to her I’m not sure) and his father is mad, mostly shuffling around silently. As a result of all of this abandonment, they have a copious amount of free time to wander around the city, their own derelict neighborhood by the water, abandoned areas of their school, etc., and involve themselves in dares, taunting each other, elaborate make-believes, and all kinds of trouble. There is a brief involvement with a slightly more mature girl, and those are perhaps some of the best scenes in the film (particularly memorable was the long scene with the fans and pillow feathers).

The director wants us to remember what it was like to be a child, and while very few people that will ever see the film are likely to have gone through anything resembling the childhood these kids are having, it somehow works. Perhaps it is because the film is something of an exaggerated version of the free time, self-involvement, alienation from the adult world, and need to escape reality that I had, that I am able to connect to it so well. Also, the fact that 110 minutes could seem so long reminded me very much of my childhood, when everything seemed like a long time.