Advertisement
Advertisement
Film reviews
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Vivian Sung in a scene from "Our Times" (Category IIA; Mandarin). The film also stars Darren Wang Da-lu and Dino Lee Yu-hsi, and is directed by Frankie Chen Yu-shan.

Film review: Our Times - Taiwanese teen romance has a new winner

Like huge Taiwanese hit You Are The Apple of My Eye, this film is a romantic comedy, set in Taipei and made by a first-time director, that recollects the bittersweet high-school years from a grown-up protagonist’s perspective

Film reviews

The unprecedented success of You Are the Apple of My Eye  – author-turned-director Giddens Ko Ching-teng’s  2011  film adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical novel – has set the box office benchmark for Taiwan’s teen romances. It is a feat that Our Times sets out to replicate.

Currently 2015’s highest grossing Taiwanese film, this feature debut by experienced TV drama producer Frankie Chen Yu-shan is another Taipei-set romantic comedy made by a first-time director that recollects the bittersweet high-school years from a grown-up protagonist’s perspective.

Delayed consummation is again the key in Our Times, which, like You Are the Apple of My Eye, stretches out the obvious attraction between its central pair of a good girl and a campus troublemaker to  more than two hours. The viewer is advised to simply surrender to the wave of sentimentality.

When the adult Truly Lin  (Joe Chen Chiau-en)  feels increasingly disheartened with her unrewarding office job, memories of her high-school years – during which her teenage self had fallen into the latter of what she terms the “popular” and “not pretty” camps before a belated makeover – flood her mind.

Sung and Darren Wang in a scene from the film.

Back in the 1990s, the young Truly  (Vivian Sung Yu-hua,  star of the film adaptation of another Ko novel, Café. Waiting. Love)  is initially smitten with handsome schoolmate Ouyang  (Dino Lee Yu-hsi),  but a zany run-in with the campus hoodlum Hsu Taiyu (Darren Wang Da-lu)  dramatically changes the equation.

In the excessively saccharine will-they-won’t-they affair that ensues, Taiyu and Truly go out regularly on the pretext that they’re helping each other court their respective crushes. Plot twists: Taiyu used to be a wonderful student before a traumatic incident; Truly turns out to be a hottie.

In a convenient stroke of mutual promotion, Our Times also takes Truly’s fascination with Canto-pop star Andy Lau Tak-wah  – an investor in the film – to nostalgic, and rather emotional, ends. Though unpersuasive to a fault, its fairy-tale ending might feel hugely cathartic for the already converted.

Our Times opened on October 15

Post