SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED review

Fu Tien-Yu's debut Somewhere I Have Never Travelled is a deceptive little film. As a slice of life in rural Taiwan it promises many things overly familiar to anyone who's seen more than a handful of films from the country over the past five years or so. The story of Ah-Gui, a young girl in an unnamed coastal town, Somewhere... charts her emotional development as she grows up living with her extended family - chief among them an alcoholic father, a put-upon grandmother and her older cousin, Ah-Xian.

Educated and worldly, Ah-Xian is the only one who understands the girl is colour-blind, a simple bond between the two of them that develops over time into something she comes to rely on for emotional support. But in the older boy's case being 'different' means something else entirely, which threatens to upset what little future either of them had planned.

On a technical level Somewhere... starts off hitting all the right notes. The sleepy country landscapes and sun-baked, crowded city streets are nothing especially new, but they're competently framed and the easy, measured pacing seems an appropriate fit for the material.

The opening scenes are instantly engaging, too. The film spans two major periods of time, and child actress Yu Hsin as the younger Ah-Gui is a joy to watch - her repartee with her grandmother is more cinematic comfort food than anything genuinely captivating, but it still sings. Stylised or not the dialogue and the flow of the film in general for the first quarter of an hour is a pleasure to slip into.

But Fu's problem is her script seems determined to never let the viewer settle in. One after another, she throws in a steady stream of leaden visual quirks, character traits and plot points that only succeed in dragging the film further from the lighthearted, playful atmospherics of the opening and down into the relentless contrivances of the stereotypical American indie production.

Ah-Gui's colourblindness is the first warning sign. It doesn't serve any purpose other than to mark her out as different, and plausible or not, Fu's portrayal of her family's lack of understanding - calling in an exorcist - only seems like more clumsy ramming home the point.

Ah-Xian is no less a walking archetype. While his big character development (most of the synopses available do give it away in advance) is at least sympathetically handled, it's not done with any appreciable degree of subtlety. Fu resorts to far too many moments of almost hysterical melodrama that never feel as if they're coming from anywhere other than a cue card.

Even before this, Ah-Xian's portrayal as cultured and ambitious is so painfully obvious he might as well be wearing a sign - is, rather, going by the movie posters on his wall, never mind the constant references to wanting to travel and see the world. Their recurring dream of finding an island in the Pacific where all the inhabitants are colour-blind is as clumsy a piece of symbolism as it gets, never explored or given any real depth (possibly given the reality isn't quite so dramatic).

Somewhere... is hardly a bad film; indeed it comes maddeningly close to being far more than the sum of its parts. When it doesn't pester the viewer it's often a beautiful film, and there are moments beyond the first fifteen minutes where it still proves enchanting, like a conversation between Ah-Xian and his significant other, the cousins' childlike back-and-forth or Ah-Gui staring out to sea at night.

But invariably Fu brings the movie crashing back to earth, whether through the cloying, saccharine score, the empty, pointless gags (the father wandering home drunk in the arms of a shop mannequin, or the charmless animated interludes) or the moments where she seems to stop trying altogether, like a solid minute of the cinematographer swapping filters on his camera to remind us Ah-Gui sees things differently.

There are bits and pieces here for the ardent cinephile or the completionist to pick up on, but pretty much every aesthetic choice or subtext in Somewhere... has been done before, and usually better. Fu Tien-Yu's debut is heartfelt enough, and an appreciable degree of talent obviously went into making it, but the muddled realisation and lack of any real reason to keep watching mean it can't really be recommended.