Film review: heist flick Meeting Dr Sun harbours a social agenda
At long last, Taiwanese writer-director Yee Chih-yen has made a new film — his third full-length feature. If you were once enamoured by the virginal awkwardness of his fêted second film Blue Gate Crossing (2002), which launched the acting careers of Kwai Lun-mei and Chen Bo-lin, chances are that you will be receptive to this offbeat offering, a vignette of innocent shenanigans taken to an absurdist extreme.
Starring: Zhan Huai-Yun, Matthew Wei Han-ting
Director: Yee Chih-yen
Category: IIA (Mandarin)
At long last, Taiwanese writer-director Yee Chih-yen has made a new film — his third full-length feature. If you were once enamoured by the virginal awkwardness of his fêted second film Blue Gate Crossing (2002), which launched the acting careers of Kwai Lun-mei and Chen Bo-lin, chances are that you will be receptive to this offbeat offering, a vignette of innocent shenanigans taken to an absurdist extreme.
But it's pointless to take a lofty view of Meeting Dr Sun, which is really a heist flick staged with hilariously low stakes. After all, the motivation behind the capricious plans of our poker-faced protagonist, Lefty (Zhan Huai-Yun), comes from nothing more than the school bully's repeated reminders to settle his outstanding class fees.
Raised by his grandmother in an underprivileged environment, the Taipei high school student is acutely aware of the impact these financial announcements have on his "golden boy image" in front of girls. So when he spots a life-sized bronze statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen, abandoned in a storeroom, Lefty sees the giant piece of scrap metal as a way out.
After he has recruited three equally naïve and impoverished classmates, and started planning the mission, the boy discovers the quietly treacherous Sky (Matthew Wei Han-ting) has sketched out the same heist in a notebook. To highlight his story's ridiculousness, Yee has Lefty and Sky compete for the rights to steal the booty by way of proving who's the poorer of the two.