The Fourth Portrait 第４張畫

Story

An economically depressed coastal region of Taiwan, the present day. Ten-year-old Chu Wen-hsiang (Bi Xiao-hai) has to care for himself after his father dies in hospital, and his only friend is the school's caretaker (Chin Shih-chieh). His mother Wu Chun-lan (Hao Lei), whom he hasn't seen for years, takes him to her new home with her second husband (Leon Dai), an unfriendly type who runs a small fish stall in a night market. The couple have a baby of their own, and Chun-lan, who came from China 10 years ago, works nights as a hostess at a ramshackle KTV girlie bar. Ignored by his stepfather, Wen-hsiang falls in with a petty thief (Lin Yu-chih), though he's still plagued by dreams about his elder brother Hsiao-yi, who left with his mother when she divorced and who mysteriously disappeared three years ago.

Review

After his precision-crafted urban black comedy Parking (停車, 2008), director Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏) moves to the countryside with this somewhat different second feature, an interior drama of a boy's lonely emotional life that exists on a plane somewhere between dream and reality. The setting is real enough — a lethargic, economically backward community, with petty criminals, seedy KTV joints and morose locals — but the point-of-view is anything but. Though a clever student, with a special gift for drawing, young Wen-hsiang (played with quiet defiance by Bi Xiao-hai 畢曉海) drifts through an unfriendly universe in which his stepfather is hostle to him, his tough Mainland-born mother is doing her best to make something of a rotten life, and his only panacea is finding what happened to his long-lost elder brother. Parking inhabited a similarly bleak world, populated by petty criminals and prostitutes, but was energised by its black comedy and After Hours-like structure. The Fourth Portrait (第4張畫), set in a rural world very familiar from '90s Taiwan cinema, offers much less hope.

It's an elusive film which keeps slipping in and out of focus — part family drama, part Turn of the Screw-like "ghost" story, part separate character studies. Mainland actress Hao Lei (郝蕾), almost unrecognisable from her big-screen debut in Lou Ye's (婁燁) Summer Palace (頤和園, 2006), makes the mother a powerful study of emigree disillusion — a mainlander who came to Taiwan in search of a better life but has ended up in a depressed backwater servicing petty gangsters and re-married to a half-psychotic loser. As the husband, actor-director Leon Dai (戴立忍, The Cabbie 運轉手之戀, Parking) is similarly impressive as a human grenade who's always on the verge of pulling the pin. Either of these characters could have been a movie of their own, as too could veteran Chin Shih-chieh's (金士傑) grumpy by kindly school caretaker, who still dreams of Shanghai 50 years after he left. Because of the strength of these characters, the more vaguely defined boy often seems like a spectator in his own movie.

The gradually developing central drama — what happened to the boy's elder brother? — hangs over the film like a ghost that won't go away, and at the halfway point, in a powerful scene between the mother and the boy's teacher (nicely played by Terri Kwan 關穎), it finally seems to be driving the movie. But the focus then slips again and, instead of going with the flow, Chung the dramatist takes second place to Chung the director. Parking also had its share of unnecessary stylistic affectations, but in a far more fragile structure like The Fourth Portrait they dilute the drama: a too-long tracking shot here, a too-slow scene there, and a general desire to grudgingly feed the audience information. The movie is always engrossing, but ultimately frustrating.