The Trigger

Yang's highly idiosyncratic first feature (supported by his longtime mentor Edward Yang, no relation) is about the odd couple friendship of an elderly retired hitman (Ni) and a screwed-up young man (Cai) who met - off-screen - in a prison cell and now negotiate the moral and emotional treacheries of Taipei while trying to go straight. Their trajectories are melodramatically entwined: the ex-hitman starts to fall for the boy's estranged mother (Ko), while the boy gets hung up on the adopted daughter of the man who stole the hitman's wife. Very little of this is conventionally plausible, least of all when issues of political corruption, child abuse and religious hypocrisy crop up. But Yang (whose starting point was the death of one of his art school students in a pub brawl) extracts a high degree of emotional credibility and some unexpectedly poignant feelings from his curious characters and situations.