Since the Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers emerged in the mid-1980s, Taipei has been presented in many guises. Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example, sees it as a melancholic organism scarred by the island's turbulent political history. In Edward Yang De-chang's films, the capital is peopled by drifting, alienated individuals lost in an inhuman urban sprawl. And for the Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang - and his protege Lee Kang-sheng - the city is defined by its dark, sleazy underbelly. More recent commercial films tackled the city through gangs (Monga) and political intrigue (Ballistic, by Hong Kong's Lawrence Lau Kwok-cheung).
And now, with his first feature-length film, Arvin Chen Chun-lin has shown yet another side of Taipei - and one which differs greatly from those in the past. In Au Revoir Taipei, which is screening in Hong Kong now, the Boston-born director paints the city as a bastion of human warmth and innocent romance, where people 'are very sweet and na?ve' and 'there are no bad guys', lovelorn youngsters meet in bookstores, and gangsters are benign uncles yearning for early retirement.
'It's a kind of magical realism, this version of Taipei,' says the 32-year-old Chen. 'I don't think anyone has the right to say Taipei is like this or that, but people have asked me how I feel about Tsai Ming-liang's Taipei, or Hou Hsiao-hsien's ... sometimes people criticise Tsai by saying, why shoot Taipei as so dark and perverted? But that's his version and his world, and that's okay. Hou has an elegiac and poetic sense of what Taipei is, while Edward was more about alienation and urbanism. What's great about cities is that you can make them seem like anything you want.'
Chen's decision to paint Taipei as 'a city of love' stems from a conversation he had with his editor, Justin Guerrieri, as they travelled through the city after finishing work on the director's 2006 short film Mei. Guerrieri's remarks about how Taipei reminded him of Paris sat with Chen's observations of how the young in Taipei aspired to live in the French capital. 'People are obsessed with [France], and you see a lot of kids at these bookstores reading French literature and listening to French music. So it's the idea of people wanting to leave, even if Taipei's a nice place.'
The film's protagonist, Kai (Jack Yao Chun-yao), is among those seeking to leave for Paris, where his girlfriend now lives. Spending his evenings reading French-language manuals in a bookstore, he meets sales clerk Susie (Amber Kuo Tsai-chieh). The pair meet again in a street market on the eve of Kai's departure for France, beginning a night of unexpected twists among Taipei's labyrinthine back streets.
His film is a continuation of Taiwanese arthouse cinema's long-running appropriation of European elements, Chen says. 'I wanted to put the French New Wave and Paris in there, but to play around with that. I wanted to take the more stupid things and the silliness - the dumb gangsters, the dumb kids, the non-sequitur dance sequence, the not so heavy, fun stuff.'