the letter my father wrote
by Douglas Messerli
Mag Hsu, Shih-yuan Lu (writers), Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu (directors) 誰先愛上他的 (Dear Ex) / 2018
Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu’s original film for
Netflix, Dear Ex, spins out its tale
in a rather simplistic plot, but through small complications, mostly centered
around the discoveries of a young 13-year-old, Chengxi (Joseph Huang), turns
this film into a far more complex study in family relationships.
The movie begins with the Medea-like anger of Chengxi’s mother Sanlian
(Hsieh Ying-hsuan), having just discovered that her former husband, Song Zheng
Yuan (Chen Ru-shan) has died, leaving his insurance policy entirely to his gay
lover, Jay (Roy Chiu) instead of as she has hoped that it might be left to her
son for his education.
Try as hard as she might, however, Chengxi, it appears, is not a great
student, and is simply frustrated by all adults, particularly his shrill-voiced
mother, but by his father as well who abandoned his mother before he was even
born. All adults are the problem, he declares, doodling over their on-screen
images in a process of teen erasure. At one point during the early battle
between his mother and Jay, who unnecessarily taunts the “ex” wife by calling
her Auntie, Chengxi seems to threaten suicide as he straddles a high balcony
protective barrier.
When Jay pulls him inside to safety, he determines, against his mother’s
screams of horror, to abandon his own home to join Jay, who dresses in campy
clothes and works as a theater director-actor. Even the boy’s escape from home,
however, leads to Sanlian’s intrusions upon his life, as she shows up to make
sure her boy is getting to school on time and receiving enough nutrition. While
she prefers what Jay calls grass, he eats carry-in fast foods.
Even though Jay perceives that, whether he likes it or not, he is not
Chengxi’s “father” or, perhaps, as he jokes, his “step-mom,” he is no more
pleased in having to now be responsible for the boy than Sanlian is for
Chengxi’s absence and shift of affections. To her, surely, it must appear that
she has now been abandoned by both males she has loved and attempted to
nurture.
As
The New York Times Karen Han
observed, the film often borders on melodrama and, I might add, skirts at the
edge of farce. Yet, fortunately, the sparks that fly between Yuan’s ex-wife and
his male lover create a kind of furnace for Chengxi in which he gradually
perceives that all the adults involved, in essence, loved him and one another.
It
may be a rather clumsy device to present important scenes from the past in
flashbacks, none of which the young boy could possibly have observed, but it
does gradually reveal his perceptions, as he discovers that his father, upon
realizing, as it puts it, that he simply “loves men,” did not leave Sanlian out
of anger or hatred; that Sanlian had desperately sought to keep Yuan close to
her; and, most importantly, that Yuan left his insurance policy to Jay because
his lover had scraped together his own funds and money he borrowed to pay for
Yuan’s cancer treatments.
Despite their hate for one another, the “ex” and the lover do often
function as an odd couple in their attempts to parent the troubled boy.
This film, finally, is not remarkably profound. It does not answer the
early angst that Chengxi feels. But we do surmise the slow revelations he has
made might help him in the future. And we do realize that, if nothing else, his
two parental opposites have moved ever so slightly closer.
We
are not quite told what exists in that last letter his father wrote, but it is
clearly a gift for the healing of the 13-year-old, a recognition that love is
never simple and often leads to what others might even perceive as a kind of
hate. In the end, one has to accept love on its own terms rather than what one
might imagine it to be.
Los Angeles, March 12, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).
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