Taiwanese director Lin Jing-jie says that his most recent film, The Most Distant Course, has confused some critics by presenting a type of realism for which they may not be ready.
'In creating the characters, I wanted to get rid of all stereotypes, and this has been difficult for some people to accept because they are not used to seeing it,' he says.
Yet the film was awarded the International Critics' Week Award at last year's Venice Film Festival, and its delightfully light take on modern life has won it many admirers, including Taiwanese film critic Lan Zu-wei, who called it 'the most mellifluous lyric [of a film] of 2007'.
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.