YANG YANG review

'Stick to what you know' is theoretically sound advice that's launched many a promising career, but it's just as often led to aspiring writer/directors crowbarring the familiar in where it doesn't belong. Cheng Yu-Chieh's 2005 debut Do Over expended far too much effort working a mish-mash of garbled sub-plots and disparate visual styles around the central story of a director shooting a film he didn't believe in, and while the production values were fantastic the result was a pretentious mess that failed to make any lasting impact.

For his second feature, Yang Yang, Cheng brings back his most promising cast member - French-Taiwanese actress Sandrine Pinna, impressive in last year's winningly sweet little drama Miao Miao. The plot centres around Yang Yang, a Eurasian girl (like Pinna, half-French) struggling to balance her responsibilities to her new step-family with her inner conflict over her mixed parentage.

The tighter focus and clearer themes are a notable step up from Do Over, but despite a tremendous performance from his young lead Cheng remains far too dependent on his comfort zone - working in the film industry - and fails to elevate the kind of simple narrative that's been done far better elsewhere.

The story comes roughly in two halves. We open with Yang Yang's mother about to re-marry - her new husband is a local track coach, with a daughter, Xiao-Ru, whose handsome boyfriend Shawn (Bryant Chang, Invitation Only, Eternal Summer) has long been infatuated with Yang Yang.

When the attraction turns out to be mutual, the emotional fallout that results sees Yang Yang take drastic steps to avoid having to confront her own psychological issues, leaving her promising future as a sprinter behind in the second half of the film to follow a talent scout confident he can land her a career in showbusiness.

On a purely visual level, Cheng is a more than competent director, and he adjusts to a more intimate, character-centric plotline with aplomb. The handheld camera is subtle and restrained, never overly flashy - none of the obvious adman visual tics from Do Over remain. Cheng portrays Pinna with style and finesse, the script frequently catching Yang Yang at her most vulnerable but never objectifying or exploiting her.

The young actress makes a good case she deserves her current status as Taiwan's it girl; her performance seems disturbingly real at times, to the point her vulnerability becomes palpably unnerving. The opening scene is a marvel, absolutely naturalistic, with Pinna completely believable and Cheng steadfastly resisting the temptation to showboat.

But - maddeningly - his script doesn't live up to the promise of those first few minutes. Pinna is undeniably talented, but not good enough to rise above the constant narrative beats where Cheng seems intent on underlining each important plot point just to make sure his audience understands it.

None of the exposition or foreshadowing ever seems quite right, with either too much emphasis on supposedly inconsequential things or too little on what one would assume ought to be important. Yang Yang's stepfather is tough but fair, a strict disciplinarian - could this possibly lead to conflict later on? She dissolves into tears at the mere mention of her biological father - is this going to feed into the ending?

At the same time when Shawn confesses to Yang Yang there's no foreshadowing at all, meaning her reaction baffles as much as it enthrals. Obviously most people can sympathise with a teenage moment of madness but there's no buildup here, no fleshing out Shawn's obsession, beyond Xiao-Ru's anger her boyfriend's taste in porn stars runs to models who conspicuously resemble her new stepsister. Shawn should be charismatic, yet he ends up vaguely creepy at best.

While the comedy of errors that follows doesn't sink anywhere near as low as the trainwreck that was My So-Called Love it never really rises above the idea this is little more than melodrama 101. Pinna's visible effort even as the script becomes ever more trite erases a good deal of the sympathy she builds up earlier on, given her character's adolescent reticence starts to look a lot more like she's merely being stubborn for the sake of it. The final scene is pitched as some great epiphany, but it only succeeds in seeming both stupidly contrived and frustratingly inconsequential - Pinna's grief is commendable but it seems to belong in another film entirely.

Fans of the actress may want to take a look, but anyone else would be best not getting their hopes up - Yang Yang is hardly a bad film, and it shows Cheng Yu-Chieh making great strides from his debut, but it rates as a severe disappointment more than anything else, with a cast who deserved much better.