Benevolent Misanthropy

Rain in Taipei. A crosswalk. The light is red, and both corners are populated with umbrellas. All the umbrellas are black, save two. On one corner, at opposite sides of the cluster of black umbrellas, are one that is green and one that is red.

Under the red umbrella stands young woman, reading a poem to herself in Polish.

The light changes. The man under the green umbrella crosses. Red remains, still reading.

And then the credits roll.

One of the joys about Hong Kong filmmakers is how cheerfully they leap into genres. There is no agonizing over how “valid” a filmmaker is after doing a genre piece. They just decide to make what they want, and then have fun doing it.

Wong Kar Wai, for example, is famous for his artistic (read: wandering, plotless) efforts in the US, especially Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. But he’s also directed at least one star–studded martial arts epic, Ashes of Time. Nobody suggests that that film is “beneath” him, or any of the other arrogantly condescending dismissals US critics would offer such a move from an American director.

Johnny To, director and producer, demonstrates this with abandon. His work since about 1997, especially when co–produced with Wai Ka Fai, has been a long, magnificent, lusty embrace of any genre that suits his fancy. From gangster dramas to two–hero epics to police pictures to romantic comedies to team–on–a–mission adventures to… well, you name it, and he’s had a hand in it. And each time the goal behind the story seems to have been both to do the genre as well as possible, and to push its limits in some way.

Turn Left, Turn Right is not only a romantic comedy—one that, quite frankly, blew me away—it is also the absolute final word, the ultimate realization, the dizzyingly insane extremity of what Roger Ebert calls the “meet cute.”

There’s this guy, John Liu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), see, living in Taipei, Taiwan. He is a skilled violinist, but too classical to keep gigs at recording studios, so he plays in a restaurant instead. He’s intensely handsome. He’s intensely shy. He lives in an apartment, and outside his building’s door, just a bit to the left, is a newsstand on the sidewalk.

There’s this girl, too, Eve Choi (Gigi Leung), also living in Taipei, Taiwan. She works as a translator at a publishing house, translating horror novels (and, in her own time, poetry) from Polish or German or English into Chinese. She’s intensely disorganized. She’s intensely shy. She lives in an apartment, and outside her building’s door, just a bit to the right, is a newsstand on the sidewalk.

Whenever she comes out of her building, she turns left.

Whenever he comes out of his building, he turns right.

They never quite meet.

Now perhaps you are thinking “this sounds stupid, trite, and forced.” In fact, you might even think, as I did before watching it, “this sounds like Serendipity, only dumber.”

Stupid? Dumb? No. A thousand times no!

Trite? Hell no!

Forced? Oh, you have no idea.

These two people are meant to be together. I don’t mean that figuratively, either. Some force—call it destiny, god, the screenwriter, whatever you will—insists that these two people be together. Insists most forcefully.

One day, each goes to eat lunch in a park. Each sits down on the edge of a fountain. Eve has pages of translation she needs to proof. Being disorganized, and a klutz, she drops them all into the fountain. Seeing this from the other side, John wades in, grabs each page, and hands them to her.

When their eyes finally meet, that’s it. They know. They spend a day together, drying out the pages, him reading her translations, her listening to his playing. Then, as they are riding a carousel, he asks her the last time she rode one. “When I was 13. How about you?” “15. Where?” “Janfusun,” which is a theme park in Taiwan. “You?” he asks. “Janfusun.” What a coincidence, he thinks.

After the ride, he tells her (and we see in flashback) the story of his school trip to Janfusun when he was a 15–year–old. How he saw a girl on the train who was really adorable, “But I was even more shy then than I am now.” He couldn’t muster the courage to speak to her the whole day. And she never once looked at him. He rode behind her on the carousel.

But then he saw her drop some papers into a pond. And he waded in and retrieved each one for her. “…even after that, she still didn’t look at me.” On the train ride back home, he still couldn’t get himself to go speak to her. His station came, and he got up to leave the train. But girl stood in his way.

“Give me your phone number.” He wrote it down for her, and was quite happy. But she never called him. Maybe he’d written the number wrong?

“All I remember clearly is her student number, 784533.”

John hasn’t noticed, but Eve has been gaping at him through most of this story. Once he says this, she points at him:

“Are you… 763092?”

And of course, he is. And you see, in counter–flashback, that she did look at him, but every time she did, he was already running away.

“I waited twenty–one stops for you! Waited for you to get off!”

Now if you’re a cynic, fare thee well, because this movie is not for you.

If you’re an insufferable romantic like me, then you are now merely 25 minutes into the movie and completely hooked.

(There’s a reason she never called, though she wanted to, which is completely in character. To discover it you must watch the movie.)

I don’t wish to give away too much more, because the charm and excitement of watching this film is, in large part, the joyful amazement at how incredibly far the creators took the story. Each ridiculous coincidence, you think, must be the last one. There’s just no way they would dare another. And then they do, and you expect to be disappointed. Instead, you stand up and cheer for how cleverly they carry it off. But you still haven’t met the complications.

Because, of course, after this meeting, they can’t meet again. Neither got the other’s real name, and though they exchanged phone numbers, both the numbers were fatally smudged in the rain.

A guy like you needs a tough woman. We’re really destined for each other.

The characters in this film are not idiots, though the two protagonists can be foolish. Restaurant delivery girl Ruby (Terry Kwan) decides that John is going to be her boyfriend, whether he likes it or not. She forces herself into his life, realizing from the get–go that he’s in love with his neighbor, and further knowing that neither of the two has any idea that they are neighbors.

Since he can only remember Eve’s student number, Ruby keeps feeding him different, similar numbers: “Did 709394 ride on this horse!?” “It’s 784533.”

Later, when another man—a doctor (Edmund Chen) who is to Eve what Ruby is to John—receives a report from a private detective he hired, it’s in the restaurant where Ruby works. The doctor was afraid that “his girlfriend” was “cheating” on him, but the detective found no evidence of it. He provides photo after photo of her alone.

Ruby, knowing full well that something—fate, god, the screenwriter, whoever—is working against her, picks up the photos and, after a cursory glance asks “Why is my boyfriend in every shot!?”

And there he is. Every single picture of one has the other somewhere else in the image. Never together, but never fully apart.

I must make special mention of Terry Kwan. While all the actors are damned good, her Ruby is on a whole other level. She’s a force of nature, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off her when she’s onscreen. You’ll laugh yourself silly over her, and hope you never ever meet anyone remotely like her.

Turn Left, Turn Right isn’t really available in the US, and I don’t know why. (You can get a Region 3 coded DVD of it here, though.) It was co–produced by Warner Bros., and you’d think they’d be happy to get some extra cash from marketing a lovely little film like this.

But that’s the way it is right now. If you have a region free DVD player, you can see it. If not, well, keep an eye out for it anyway.

It’s really, really good.