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Bookmark this pageTaipei Exchanges (2010)
Director: Hsiao Ya-chuan
Movie review
From Time Out Online
A sickly sweet capitalist allegory that severely lacks substance, ‘Taipei Exchanges’ follows two go-getting sisters who open a trendy minimalist coffee shop and decide to stock it with trinkets that people can come in and exchange. Speckled with magical realist cine-thought bubbles which take the shape of line-drawn animations and even a dream sequence in which one sister has a discussion with her own alter-ego, the film singularly fails to say anything particularly complex or profound about the nature of object trading, and even at 82-minutes the film feels about an hour too long. It gets extra marks for the production design and ultra-clean shooting style, but you just wish director Hsiao Ya-Chuan put as much effort into his writing as his image making.Author: David Jenkins
Time Out Online 2010 London Film Festival
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