Darkness and Light

A girl student comes home for the holidays (her father, blinded in an accident, runs a traditional blind-massage clinic in the port of Keelung) and falls for a new boy in town - thereby infuriating the local gangster kid who considers her his girlfriend. With his brilliantly chosen non-professional actors, some of them genuinely blind and one genuinely retarded, Chang constructs achingly plausible accounts of both small town life and volatile teenage passions. An extraordinary wish-dream ending seems anomalous until you realise that the film's realism is primarily psychological, not social. A former assistant to Hou Xiaoxian, Chang might make films that fit a certain template for Taiwan cinema, but they are quite different from other Taiwanese movies in tone, form and approach to performance.