Mirror Image

This engagingly modest first feature finds its young protagonist tending to the family pawnshop while his dad is hospitalised by a stroke; there he passes the time amiably enough with his girlfriend, fascinated that an accident has scratched his palm and, he's been told, rendered his life unpredictable. Then an attractive young woman starts frequenting the joint, and things take a turn for the complicated and confusing. It's also, regrettably, when the film goes off the rails; for its first half, Hsiao uses the confines of the pawnshop imaginatively and amusingly, but when its reluctant young proprietor steps outside, narrative focus is lost. Still, the characters are deftly written and played, and if the film finally doesn't add up to much, it does show great promise.