The Personals

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1999

Zheng Hun Qi Shi | The Personals
Chen Kuo-fu
Taiwan, 1999
104 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Zoom Hunt International Productions Co. Ltd./ Central Motion Picture Corporation
Producer: Hsu Li-kong
Screenplay: Chen Kuo-fu, Chen Shih-che
Cinematographer: Ho Nan-hong
Editor: Chang Dar-lung
Production Designer: Wang Yi-bai
Sound: Tang Hsiang-chu
Music: Steve Liu
Principal Cast: René Liu, Chin Shih-chieh, Chen Chao-jung, Wu Bai, Gu Bai-ming Production: Zoom Hunt International

Du Jia-zhen is an ophthalmologist, deeply in love with a married man. Like many women in this situation, she is aware of how untenable her position is, but unable to change it. One day the man disappears; their meetings end and he does not return her daily phone calls to his answering machine. Unable to numb the pain of her personal life through a heavy work schedule, Du Jia-zhen places an ad in the paper and begins the dating game.

The men she meets constitute a frightening, often pathetic cross-section of Taiwanese male anxieties and thwarted dreams. The individual vignettes are beautifully directed and satisfying in their own way, but it is their cumulative power, with two unexpected accents towards the film’s end, that astonish us. Ultimately it is our strong-willed, proactive heroine who has the most to lose from the pursuit of love.

With the camera squarely facing her in every scene, the modulated subtlety of René Liu’s performance as the lonesome woman with a bag full of secrets is a wonder to behold. A new major talent has arrived. Cameos by several known and non-professional performers as her dates are uniformly excellent.

Chen Kuo-fu is the most important voice in young Taiwanese cinema, expressing the social discontent wrought by a makeshift, hyper-capitalist society. While rarely explicitly political, his career, from the alienated teens of Highschool Girls to the thwarted yuppie romantics of Treasure Island, is a wondrous prism into a deeply dissatisfied society. He is also a masterful visual stylist, creating rich tableaux of overlapping colours that reflect the incessant throb of a major urban centre with a serious attitude problem.
—Noah Cowan