by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Lee Hong-Chi, Patricia Lin, Qing-Yu Zheng
Intro:
... definitely one for the big screen.
Writer, director and star Lee Hong-chi has fashioned an odd little film here. While its premise is extremely familiar – minor crim gets out of gaol and tries to go straight – the treatment is singular enough in its dreamily downbeat way.
Sweet Potato (Lee) is his own worst enemy, and none too popular with anyone else. He hates the nickname he acquired at school, but has been stuck with it ever since. After serving three years for shooting someone, in a failed attempt to impress the “Big Boss” he’s never met, he gets work renting out beach umbrellas. (A ‘friend’ remarks – as if this were some sort of fall from grace – “You used to get high on meth and wave that gun around; what are you now? Fucking useless.”)
The brooding and intermittently thuggish Sweet Potato moves to Taipei, fails to land a better job because he lacks a Good Citizen Certificate (i.e. a clean criminal record), and tries to patch things up with his former girlfriend. What follows is not quite what you might assume, least of all when it comes to a certain enigmatic young woman who likes fireworks because she loves to light them after “hiding her secrets in the darkness”.
There’s not all that much to Love is a Gun – lengthwise OR in terms of content – but some mysterious impressionistic elements and lyrical touches make it just about worth the (limited) time. From the crashing waves and richly green Taiwanese countryside to a few peculiarly arresting visual images – such as a bunch of silent and identically black-clad men strewing scraps of paper over a lawn – this is definitely one for the big screen.
