LEE Kang-Sheng's(李康生) remarkable debut feature has an obvious family likeness with the films of his mentor TSAI Ming-Liang(蔡明亮), but its sensibility... More

LEE Kang-Sheng's(李康生) remarkable debut feature has an obvious family likeness with the films of his mentor TSAI Ming-Liang(蔡明亮), but its sensibility and rhythms are all its own. Two unrelated people go missing on the same day, an infant and a pensioner. One disappearance is noticed almost immediately, the other not until hours later. We follow the missing people's careers - a grandma and a grandson, respectively - as one searches for the missing child with increasing desperation and the other squanders his day on virtual-reality war games. In the background, other people are going down with a SARS-like virus; off-screen somewhere, a real war is raging and filling body bags. The grandma calls on both the living and the dead for help in her frantic search, but neither can give her what she needs. The grandson (tough and self-sufficient, as kids are) asks for no-one's help in his search, but he goes round in circles too. Across this one-day, through these fragments of dislocated experience, we get a picture of a contemporary malaise which no antibiotic can cure. The picture is crystal-clear, and very beautiful. Close