As one of the six selected films in the newly added competition unit ‘New Chinese Cinema’ of the 3rd edition of the International Film Festival & Awards • Macao (IFFAM), the Taiwan production ‘Dear Ex’ was screened at Macao Tower. Two directors, Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu, and the leading actress Ying-Xuan Hsieh, attended the Red-Carpet session before the screening.
With a budget of just 35 million NTD (around 9 million MOP), ‘Dear Ex’ won eight nominations and three awards (Best Leading Actress, Best Original Film Song, and Best Film Editing) in the 55thTaipei Golden Horse Awards, one of the most prestigious film events in Chinese cinema, announced on November 17 this year.
The film starts when a woman, Liu Sanlian, finds out that the insurance beneficiary of her recently deceased husband, who had left their common flat three years earlier, has changed: it is not any longer their son, but a man named Jay. Liu Sanlian, filled with rage, rushes to Jay’s apartment with her son and discovers that Jay was her husband’s lover. Fed up with his histrionic mother, Liu Sanlian’s rebellious son wants to find out the “truth,” and decides to move in with Jay. Putting a spoke in Liu Sanlian’s wheel, her son causes subtle changes to the relationship of Jay and Liu Sanlian.
The film team expect to highlight the awkward and stressful situation of homosexuals and people around them, in particular ‘tongqi’, women who have married gay men. Mag Hsu, one of the directors, said in an earlier interview, ‘I started to read about tongqiafter deciding to make this film. It was only then that I realised there are so many unfortunate women. There is an estimate of 16 million tongqiin the Chinese mainland, and I believe there are also many in the same predicament in Taiwan.’
Zhang Beichuan, a scholar dedicated to the studies of homosexuality, believes the problem results largely from the Chinese traditions, ‘Gay men in China are different from those in the West. In western countries, gay men mostly stay unmarried or get married where same-sex marriage is allowed. But in China, the enormous social pressure, along with families’ overwhelming urge to have offspring and continue the family line, forces around 80% gay men to enter marriages with women. The gay community in China still bear the stamp of an agricultural society.’
The lead character Liu Sanlian exemplifies the miseries and struggles of a tongqi, presented in a lively and comic way in the film. As the story unfolds, it becomes clearer that she is not keen on the insurance money, but on finding out if her late husband had loved her.
The Chinese title of the film literally means ‘Who Loved Him First’, but Mag Hsu emphasised, ‘Love does not follow the rule of “first come, first serve”. After watching the film, you would not haggle over who loved first, because it doesn’t matter. Also, we want to bring attention to the notion of “first”: who has the right to first define which people are “normal”? Who could define what kind of love is “normal”?
Playing a woman whose husband and son are ‘taken away’ by a man, the leading actress Ying-Xuan Hsieh said, ‘The character I play is a typical Asian mother. She never answers her son’s questions directly and is always blaming others. She is very unhappy. The film starts with the burst of her rage that has accumulated for years and years. The directors and I reached agreement on the opening scene—we have to let viewers see her worst at the very beginning, only this way can the story really begin. Only this way can they understand and resonate with her later.’
The desperate woman decides to take revenge in the end. Mag Hsu remarked, ‘I understand Liu’s decision. Just imagine: you have been fooled the whole time, by a love that you one thought were pure and true. You lost your husband’s love—probably he never loved you at all—and now you’re going to lose your son too. You don’t believe you’ll ever be loved. When filming the last scenes, I told Ying-Xuan, please tell the other side of the story for all women like Liu Sanlian in the world. She is not a nagging clown. All she asks for is that she has been loved by her husband.’
When the film was being made in 2017, Taiwan’s high court had just passed a resolution ruling it was unconstitutional to ban same-sex couples from getting married, raising high hopes that the island would become the first place in Asia to allow same-sex unions. But on November 24 this year, Taiwanese voters rejected same-sex marriage in a referendum. On the same day, Mag Hsu expressed her stance at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, ‘No one has the right decide whether other people’s love is valid or not.’
