GHOSTED review

Monika Treut's Ghosted is an abject lesson in how good intentions can overwhelm a film, whatever the director's talent. Her latest production in a twenty-year career in which she's already repeatedly explored lesbian and transgender themes, Ghosted is fundamentally a very simple love story - girl finds girl, loses girl, needs to learn to move on. But for all the obvious empathy and understanding Treut lavishes on the material she wanders much too far off track with her insistence on pushing the kind of heavily weighted dialogue and symbolism that suggest this is supposed to be a narrative for the ages.

Hopping repeatedly from Taipei to Hamburg, Ghosted first introduces us to Ai-Ling (Ke-Huan Ru), newly arrived in Germany to stay with her uncle (ubiquitous character actor Jack Kao) while she investigates some sensitive family history.

Skipping forward in time, we meet artist Sophie Schmitt (TV actress Inga Busch) who's recently travelled to Taipei to open a video installation commemorating Ai-Ling, now dead, with Sophie very obviously deeply affected by her loss. Attending the ceremony is journalist Mei Li (Hu Ting Ting), openly displaying a rather more than professional interest Sophie and her story, to the point where the artist begins to question whether something very strange is going on.

As an objective view of a same-sex romantic entanglement Ghosted has few flaws. Treut, who co-wrote the script, takes a matter-of-fact approach that's deeply gratifying - not the hands-off rose-tinted fluffiness common to so much Taiwanese queer cinema, just an unspoken disregard for the L-word and its attendant clichés that elevates the film a surprising amount. Obviously what gender the protagonists are is (ideally) irrelevant, at least in one sense, but it's rare to find a film that locks this issue down so fast.

Indeed, Ghosted means well in every respect; Treut's direction is agreeably cosmopolitan. Other than the odd technical slip-up she never falls into any obvious tourist traps, with both Sophie and Ai-Ling credibly overawed by the alien locales they wander through. Bernd Meiners' cinematography manages a genuine sense of wonder without ever resorting to the predictable coffee-table gloss beloved of so many Sinophile European productions.

Which makes it all the more frustrating when Treut is so intent on conveying the sheer pathos in the whirlwind attraction between these two women she doesn't seem to notice how badly she's letting her film down in the process. All three leads are hamstrung by dialogue that far too often seems so hell-bent on imbuing the proceedings with Deep Meaning it teeters desperately on the edge of unintentional hilarity.

Ghosted suggests Treut as a person may very well have a laudable sense of how people are just people regardless of sexual preference, but she seems to have far less grasp of how to convey this as an auteur. There are times when the actresses manage some very moving chemistry, but just as many when their exchanges seem less like something any actual human being would ever say and more as if they're designed solely to hammer the audience over the head with what's going on under the surface.

In one sense this is plainly obvious - we can see for ourselves when two of the leads fall in lust - and Treut's script can't help but feel patronising as a result. In another, the director crowbars in a supernatural element (predictably, the title is far from accidental) that never gets clarified, and when the narrative falls into vague platitudes about Eastern mythology and the dead exerting a hold over the living that never amount to anything concrete it feels frustrating and inconclusive.

Treut's passion for the material is obvious, and along with her cast and crew this elevates the proceedings enough Ghosted deserves a cautious recommendation for fans of the genre willing to accept a few compromises. It's simply a shame the halting, stilted, unbelievable tone to much of the back-and-forth over the whole ninety minutes squanders most of the effort that's been put into it, when with a little more attention to detail the film could have been so much more.