Lian ren

"Falling... In Love" revolve around torn relationships and the emotionally damaged human beings they bring with them. It's frustration, hope, anger, sex, deceit, despair - and small big city apartments. Everything played out in a very appealing, restrained fashion.

What director Wang showed glimpses of in his debut "Brave 20" feels already - in this, his second movie - completely developed. The acting is great and the cinematography by Chin Ting-Chang is simply brilliant (we're talking in the league of Chris Doyle here)! The fact is that it is impossible to get a fair picture of "Falling... In Love" if one doesn't speak more in detail about the visual. The colour range is fantastic. The film bathe in piercing hues of green, yellow and red, captured with a well-manoeuvred hand-held camera. Another thing which deeply impressed me is the creative work with extremely short depth in the sharpness of the photography and the way characters are sometimes out of focus, way off the traditional way of shooting such scenes. This give the pictorial language a very original expression.

Also, it's impossible not to think of another Taiwanese film when seeing "Falling... In Love, namely Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "Millennium Mambo", as that one also moves from Taipei to a snowy Hokkaido.