The story is of three Taipei residents who, following relationship meltdowns and general urban malaise, set off individually to wander Taiwan's spiritually virginal east coast, vaguely hoping for renewal and occasionally crossing paths.

One of them is a movie soundman (Mo Zi-yi), who continues to mail cassettes of sound poems to the girl who dumped him. Instead, they're received by a young office worker, played by Taiwan's good-girl idol Guey Lun-mei, whose life is quietly falling apart while she's having an affair with a married man.

The most exceptional of the three is a character that Taiwanese cinema has seldom, if ever, seen before. A-Cai is a middle-aged man with an utterly droll and detached take on life, and Lin introduces him in a hotel room making a slightly bizarre proposition to a prostitute - asking her to pretend that she's a cop and he's a hooker.

The immediate reaction from both the woman and the audience is that he's a pervert, but at the same time we are curious because the request is not psychotic, it's merely weird.

A-Cai is played brilliantly by Alex Jia Xiao-guo and what happens as he goes on coaxing the prostitute with his hypnotically smooth baritone drawl is hilarious, but also underpinned with the tension of the uncomfortably real and some very deadpan framing.

One cut later, we find out that A-Cai is a distracted psychologist who fidgets and cracks jokes to himself while middle-aged women bore him with their relationship problems. He's a slacker and his marriage is falling apart.

What is so different about A-Cai in the scope of Taiwanese cinema is that he doesn't represent any social segment or type. Compared to the characters of Taiwan's best known realist films, he doesn't represent anything about society but just happens to live in it.

In many ways, he doesn't even seem Taiwanese. In other words, he is a modern individual.

'He's about breaking the frame of expectations until you can't see the frame any more. But at the same time, his feet are rooted to the ground,' says Lin (left, with Guey). 'I wanted to show this character who's got exceptional energy. He is curious about everything and willing to play jokes with the world.'

Lin wrote the script for a real A-Cai - his friend, the actor Chen Ming-cai - 'to show his particular talents'. Chen entered Taiwan's drama circles in the late 1980s after the fall of martial law and was regarded as a prodigy, albeit a fickle one. By the late 1990s, however, he had left Taipei in frustration and wandered to Taiwan's east coast, where the film is set. In 2003, he committed suicide, swimming out from a beach and into the deep.

Lin, a mid-career director at the age of 41, further imbued the film with his own experience of a breakup-cum-spiritual crisis, one which left him living quietly on a mountain north of Taipei for three years doing little more than growing vegetables.

What he learned, he says, is expressed in a scene towards the end, where A-Cai finds some scuba gear by the side of a coastal road.

'When you go scuba diving in the ocean, it's vast and you have this incredible experience of freedom,' says Lin. 'But real life is like you're wearing the scuba gear, but you're not in the water. It's difficult, but you have to keep on living.'

The Most Distant Course is on limited release at Broadway Cinematheque Mar 17-24