By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Hou Chi-ja
Starring: Chien Man-shu | Kai Ko | Kuo Shu-yau | Nikki Hsieh | Tsai Chen--nan
Original language title: Nan fang xiao yang mu chang
Country: taiwan
Year: 2013
Running time: 86
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2636362/combined
Kyle says:”A welcome respite from gangsters and ninjas, the New York premiere of this delightfully whimsical comedy is the remarkably assured work of director Hou Chi-jan, who directed the insightful documentary on Taiwanese cinema history called TAIWAN BLACK MOVIES — also on the roster of the 12th New York Asian Film Festival. Declared the runaway hit of the current festival by its promoters, combining the unexpected romantic bliss of Ernst Lubitsch’s classic THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940) with the exuberant energy of the new Taiwanese popular cinema, it was very popular with audiences. There is undeniable pleasure in encountering something that everybody likes.
“Tung wakes up one morning with a yellow post-it note on his forehead, announcing that his girlfriend has left him to attend a cram school on Nanyang Street in Taipei (Cram schools specialize in imparting as much information as possible in as little time as possible in preparation for university entrance examinations). Tung is determined to find and get back together with his former girlfriend, taking a job in a local copy shop that prints examinations for these cram schools. He notices a cute little drawing of a sheep with a witty aphorism in the corner of the exams and responds by doing his own drawing of — you guessed it — a wolf. As with the letters exchanged unknowingly between James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, the cartoon sheep and wolf exchange smart observations and genuine intimacies that their writers are unable to communicate. And increasingly, the doodles are given animated lives of their own, achieving obsessive teenage fan following on social media. So adorable are Tung (Kai Ko) and teaching assistant Yang (Chien Man-shu) that you root almost helplessly, even fanatically, for them to get together. In the climactic scene, cram school students launch hundreds of exam pages as paper airplanes from the rooftop into Nanyang Street, and subsequently they do.
“I could not possibly disagree with the author of the remark that WHEN A WOLF FALLS IN LOVE WITH A SHEEP is ‘a luminous fable for the amateur cartoonist or community organizer in all of us.’ Director Hou proves every bit as engaging at the Q & A afterward as the characters in his very attractive film. The emotional resonance Hou builds from attention to many small details is very special, with a personal salute to the animation, color cinematography, acting by the two principals, and an outstanding score by Owen Wang. A graduate of the film scoring program at New York University, Wang lives and works in Taipei, where he started his own theatre company to develop original Chinese-language musicals and to promote musical theatre education in Taiwan. His amalgam of rock, jazz, blues and Western classical orchestral tradition can be heard throughout this characterful soundtrack, and I swear I heard references to Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ (1936) at various points. 5 cats
“Saturday, July 6, 2013, New York Asian Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.”
Jason says: “One thing that struck me while watching this movie is that you don’t see many Hollywood romantic comedies with young characters – it’s always bankable stars who are by their nature at least in their thirties. The sort of just-out-of-school adults who play out WHEN A WOLF FALLS IN LOVE WITH A SHEEP seem to be a relative rarity. Which is sort of a shame, because this is a charming as heck little thing that doesn’t have a whole lot of anger or bitterness to it at all, and it would be fun to see more like it.
“Things open up with Tung (Kai Ko) being dumped by his girlfriend Ying (‘Nikki’ Hsieh Hsin-ying) via a post-it note on his forehead which says nothing aside from that she is going to a cram school on Nanyang Street. Apparently that’s where a lot of those test-prep places are in Taipei City, though, so Tung goes there, gets a job in a photocopy shop that has a bed in the back and waits for their paths to cross. She never comes into the shop, but Hsiao Yang (Jian Man-shu) does, copying tests for the ‘Sure Win’ school. She takes to drawing cartoon sheep on them; one day he draws a wolf in response.
“Other stuff goes on – there’s a lost dog, and when Tung is asked to clean out a bunch of storage lockers, he endeavors to return their contents to their owners. Yang dreams of being a cartoonist but is also waiting for her boyfriend to return from college in America. There are, in retrospect, a lot of stories about knowing when to hold and and when to move on, and writer/director Hou Chi-jan manages to be plenty clear about this without the movie feeling like it’s trying to impart any sort of lesson or rule about the subject. There’s a nice combination of randomness and synchronicity to how the various side-stories come together.
“One of the things I like most about it is that it doesn’t feel the need to jam things into capital-r Relationship statuses; Tung and Yang can meet, do stuff, and clearly start to like each other without going into what it means for the future. Sure, they’re going to end up together, but mechanically getting them to that point doesn’t feel like the film’s first priority. Hou Chi-jan has fun with his airy script, making this street its own little world that manages to be kind of ramshackle without ever seeming decayed, having visual fun animating Yang’s sketches and other flights of fancy. The soundtrack is light and clever; I particularly like the version of ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ that shows up about midway through. He also finds a good voice for Tung’s narration that’s down but not so self-pitying as to make the movie a drag.
“Kai Ko takes that attitude and translates it to both voice-over and action. His Tung is a believable sort of sullen that persists after the raw hurt may be gone out of obligation, and he quietly shows the paradox of how a new connection lifts him even though he’s not yet ready to feel good. Jian Man-shu and Yang make a nice complement; Yang smiles and jokes and has a practical system and while Jian succeeds in making her the outgoing one, there’s always the proper sort of sense that this isn’t quite real. They don’t have to carry the entire movie alone – a very entertaining supporting cast is able to sell a lot of jokes to keep things from getting too mopey without upstaging the leads or falling into self-parody – but they’re good enough to seldom be found wanting.
“They’re charming, as is the movie as a whole. I like that there’s a lot more friendship to the central relationship than desperation or lust; it may not lead to the most dramatic or frantic sort of story, but Hou shows that there’s plenty of room to be funny while still being warm. 4 cats
“Seen 5 August 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festival, HD)”