Splendid Float

Splendid Float, Zero Chou's first film, depicts the life of a group of Taiwanese tranvestites in a travelling cabaret show. Roy (James Chen), dances and sings in drag (as "Rose") in the show at night, while spending his day as a Taoist priest conducting funeral rites. It's a clear dichotomy: his vie en Rose is filled with energy, while his life in the day, as a man, holds nothing but death.

At one of the shows, Rose meets Ah Yang (here translated as Sunny), and the two fall in love almost immediately, making love with that certain urgency that in films tends to portend something tragic - even to someone who went into the show without any sense of the plot, as I did. And indeed, Sunny dies in a freak drowning accident, and the rest of the film is about Rose's coming to terms with the death.

So Splendid Float becomes a film about the monopoly of loss, about the lover who dares not speak her name. Indeed, why the loss matters so much to Rose in the first place is not fully explicated - the Rose and Sunny relationship seems to arise sui generis, and while there are clear signs of affection, we're left to fill in what exactly the couple see in each other so much so that they talk about moving in together.

In an ironic turn of events, Roy is the priest chosen to summon Sunny's soul from the sea, which allows him the chance to mourn the death, if only covertly. Yet even the mourning is not untarnished by suspicions: Sunny had left a cryptic note just before he left, and the standard questions that might gnaw at any young person whose lover died mysteriously are magnified by the situation - did he kill himself to leave her? Rose throws the divination lots to check if she can take an icon of Sunny's with her from the funeral, and the answers seem to keep pointing to a "no".

Article Author: Daryl Sng

Daryl Sng writes about film and music on Delta Sierra Arts, the Red Sox on Singapore Sox Fan, and everything else on dsng.net.

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