Ming tian ji de ai shang wo
Directed by:
Arvin ChenScreenplay:
Arvin ChenCinematography:
Shao-Yu HsiaComposer:
Wen HsuCast:
Richie Ren, Mavis Fan, Kimi Hsia, Lawrence Ko, Chin-Hang Shih, Shao-Huai Chang, Vivi Lee, Stephen Ka-Lok Wong, Hsing Chen YehVOD (2)
Plots(1)
Introverted Weichung has been married to Feng for nine years. They have one son together, and Feng would like to have another child with him. One day Stephen, an old friend who now organises weddings, appears and encourages Weichung to return to the gay life he had previously. Anxious not to lose his wife, Weichung tentatively begins seeing a flight attendant behind Feng's back.
Weichung's impulsive sister Mandy dumps her fiancée San-San in the middle of a supermarket. She is equally at a loss and dreams of being with a soap star. Good-natured but desperate San-San tries to woo her back with ever more romantic ideas. While Stephen and even Feng's mother persist in meddling in the couples' affairs, Feng becomes an independent woman.
Chen Arvin's charming film brings classical approaches to partnerships into playful disarray. He comically opens up the borders of the nuclear family, integrating it into a diverse community which manages to strike a balance between independence and the forming of bonds, friendship and sexual fulfilment.
(Berlinale)
Reviews (1)
This delicate melodrama with an occasional touch of magical realism superbly examines the theme of personal compromises in relation to social obligations and roles. However, it doesn’t approach the subject matter as some sort of rebellious pamphlet for teenagers, but as a subtle portrait of a family aimed at viewers aged thirty and above. But that doesn’t mean that the film is in any way more soothing or conservative. On the contrary, it is pleasantly surprising with its immediate combination of queer and straight motifs into a single whole, thus bringing the desired and still rarely seen emancipation of queer issues and liberation from the shortcomings and formulas of the enclave of festival queer production. The drama here is truly universal as it depicts the pressure of social expectations and obligations as a universal problem that fosters equal dialogue among people regardless of their sexual orientation. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is confirmation that, even though it may lag behind in the area of export genre films (action, thriller, crime, horror), Taiwanese film production has refined lighter genres such as melodrama, romance and comedy thanks to the favour of domestic and festival audiences. With his second feature-length project, Arvin Chen has progressed from the youthful exaltation of his first film, Au revoir Taipei, to a polished and literally uplifting film which, with its seeming serenity, brings inner conflicts to the surface and in which overfamiliar grand gestures and formulaic solutions known from pop culture do not bring the desired happiness.
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