Ethereal, elliptical, and moving, Cheng Yu-chieh's feature-length debut "Do Over" gives the mystic moviegoer ample reason to celebrate.
Starting with a mirthful image of a young, tense production assistant barring three carloads of gangsters from driving through his director's shot, and ending as a meditation on rebirth and second chances, Cheng Yu-Chieh's Do Over creates an ethereal world where questions of time and perception wander playfully through the rich, funny and complex lives of five characters on the first and last day of the year.
Do Over is the only Taiwanese entry in the Taipei Film Festival's 12-film International New Talent Competition, established in 2005 to raise the festival's international profile. As the sole film entered into both the international competition and the local eight-film Taipei Grand Award for Narrative, and following invitations for his debut short to the Tokyo, Pusan and Vancouver film festivals, Cheng's work is already being recognized on both domestic and international levels.
Composed of five non-linear sequences over 12 hours, each centering on the perspective of a different character, Do Over's structure holds together well given its complexity. Beginning with the film's first brief, comic interlude -- set at 10:30 am on New Year's Day -- Cheng begins his yarn with Xiao Pang (Wang Jingguan), a young, exploited production assistant who realizes that he can stop time, if only for one second at a time. Moving back 12 hours, the film cuts to a late night roadside transaction between spastic raver, Rat (Ke Yulun), and soulful gangster, Ding An (Huang Jianwei). As Rat departs for a New Year's party, the complexity of Ding An's position slowly reveals itself. An illegal Thai Chinese immigrant whose identity card has been withheld for eight years by his mob boss, Ding An takes matters into his own hands and steals back his identity. Escaping from mob headquarters, Ding An faces a hallway fight scene evoked by cinematographer Jake Pollock in the same slow-moving, bluish-bloody vein as Park Chan-wook's Oldboy.
Moving back to 11:30 pm on New Year's Eve, Rat is popping pills in front of a Taipei club with his hapa girlfriend, Xiaohui (Zhang Rongrong) and her friend, Hudie (Ke Jiayan), a recent returnee from Japan. Before the clock strikes 12 Rat "wakes up" either tripping or dead, in an empty dreamlike hospital with blood on his shirt. When Xiaohui discovers Rat in the hospital, complaining of a suspicious loss of sensation and memory, the bedraggled party escapees flee from hospital to Chinese countryside scene, as two anachronistic swatches of flowing fluorescent color are muted by the grey swaying grasses reminiscent of a Tang dynasty scroll. Cadaverous in color palate and softened by the sound of sloshing water, the scene of two Taipei club kids in the countryside suggests, on more than one level, a poetic rendering of material transcendence. As the two emerge from the belly of a cave into view of Taipei, Cheng's allusions veer even further into the world of metaphysical renaissance.
Cheng continually revisits the theme of rebirth and transcendence throughout the film, with often breathtaking results. After peering into a dark abyss while, quite literally, seated on the edge of an incomplete road, the director (Mo Ziyi) to Xiao Pang's production assistant burns the corpus of his first work. Before the viewer's eyes, the film on the screen burns to pieces. Hudie and the director, Hui Lixiang (whose first name, incidentally, is a Chinese homonym for "great hope"), then wake up together to New Year's Day. As all of the film's characters relive the day the viewer has just encountered, the world is slightly different. The director starts his shoot afresh, complete with a clapper scribbled with the title, "Do Over," the first mark on a literal and metaphorical clean slate.
Do Over tackles big questions with imagination, clarity and aplomb. Within the film's ruminations on the possibility of personal rebirth exist further questions of nation-based identity. Xiaohui is a fluent Chinese-speaking hapa, but, notably, her identity is unaddressed for the entirety of the film, with the exception of a brief reference to a dual lifeline on her palm. Instead, Do Over represents Xiaohui's plural identity as an organic part of the world of contemporary Taipei. Hudie goes to the airport every day to meet the planes from Japan, ostensibly awaiting the arrival of an unknown visitor, but all the while channeling the helpless angst of being trapped between two cultures. Thai Chinese illegal immigrant Ding An is a man long deprived of a Taiwanese identity, yet unable to return to his Thai homeland. Just as the director, Lixiang, finds personal definition by peering into undefined darkness at the end of a road, so do these characters grow to find their place in an ever-malleable global space.
True to the translation of its Chinese name, New Year's Day, the film evokes a feeling of giddy redemption and self-acceptance, particularly in the final "do over" scenes. Pacing to the beat of Taiwanese star composer Lim Giong's superb soundtrack, the film works on a rhythmic meter nearly unrecognizable to fans of the Taiwanese New Wave. If Taiwanese cinema is like a drug, Do Over is a marvelous gateway to addiction. Playful, beautifully shot, and rich with the kinds of themes that have occupied the minds of daydreamers for generations, the film creates hope not only in its final message of renewal and reconciliation, but in its willful determination to bring complex, human ideas to the screen in an accessible format. Cheng Yu-chieh is one to watch, not just because of his rising star, but because you'll have a great time.