Sci-fi from Taiwan? Director Hung Hung's 2007 movie [i]The Wall Passer[/i] is an audacious little film that wants to be everything at once; a genre flick on a microbudget, a thought-provoking, intelligent drama, a love story for the ages and a feast for the eyes. Is ScreenAnarchy better late than never, or is [i]The Wall Passer[/i] best bricked up and forgotten? Review after the break.
Science fiction is a little thin on the ground in territories where film-makers struggle to find anything approaching a low budget, at least by mainstream Western standards. Consider the idea of getting such a production started in Taiwan, where a movie is considered a triumph if it nets NT$3m (roughly $100,000) at the box office – to get out of the genre graveyard on that kind of money generally takes some seriously creative production design. Yet Hung Hung's [i]The Wall Passer[/i] has obvious ambitions beyond Midnight Madness screenings to crowds of screaming fans.
It starts when the young lead Tye (Chang Yung-Cheng, [i]PTU: Comrades in Arms[/i]) joins his parents in evacuating planet G40 after an earthquake lays waste to their home. The family arrive in Real City, a gleaming metropolis where, in the middle of a school trip, Tye discovers a radioactive rock which grants him the power to pass through walls. At the same time he begins a tentative romance with Nono, a young alien girl who works at a museum downtown. When Nono disappears following the return of her enigmatic ex-lover, Tye uses the rock to try and track her down.
This brief synopsis skips a bewildering amount of peripheral detail. A sometime collaborator with the late, great Edward Yang ([i]Yi Yi[/i], [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/a-brighter-summer-day-review/][i]A Brighter Summer Day[/i][/url]), Hung Hung's film is an ambitious narrative by any standards, a slow, cerebral genre piece reaching in all directions at once, with enough ideas for three or four separate pictures. [i]The Wall Passer[/i] is bursting with countless narrative devices, plot points and recurring props that feel like an earnest attempt at some deep philosophical statement one moment, then a desperate, throwaway gag to stop the viewer from losing interest the next. Nono is deaf – do her 'bionic ears' symbolise the innate failings of human interaction (how can we ever be sure what we say is what the other person really hears) or are they simply there to give the audience a nudge (look, look, bionic ears)? Hung doesn't help himself by intentionally making many of these questions even more difficult to puzzle through – why does Nono speak perfectly clearly as well as using sign language? Why is it she can converse fluently with her (French) ex-boyfriend?
[i]The Wall Passer[/i] is fascinating, but in a detached sort of way that never really comes together. The film uses the kind of loaded vocabulary that would seem to indicate the director would like people to take a great deal of this seriously, but the ambiguous slant to most of the narrative is both strength and weakness. It's obvious a fair amount of thought went into [i]The Wall Passer[/i], but though the convoluted plotting is never less than intriguing, the more contorted it gets the more the viewer's attention is likely to drift, and too much of the background detail (production design, pacing, continuity) is simply not up to concerted scrutiny.
The crew's attempts at visual invention are prolific but scattershot, too much of it falling flat, and DP Jake Pollock's cool blue-grey filters give much of the film a surprisingly professional aesthetic but still fail to make up for the lack of budget. All the camera tricks in the book cannot make the candy-coloured blue wig Tye's mother wears anything but a cheap affectation. Piecing together various glossy Kaohsiung locations shot from oblique angles does not magically transport us to the future, nor does dropping your camera into the ruins of an abandoned building automatically convince us this is the aftermath of the apocalypse. These mixed messages make the first twenty minutes or so a trial – a tedious parade of “What?”, “But –” and “How...?” that threatens to descend into a kind of genial high camp at any moment. Tye seems sullen, withdrawn and unlikeable, Nono stupidly contrived and Real City not even remotely believable.
Yet even if it fails to effect any real suspension of disbelief [i]The Wall Passer[/i] is still fascinating. Its bizarre grab-bag of glossy youth drama tropes, arthouse formalism, meandering orientalist spiritualism, shoestring fantasy and guerilla film-making lends it an atmosphere of dreamlike experimentation few other directors have ever managed. While many of the effects are nothing like as effective as they ought to be even those that fall flat are generally something distinctive, and the ideas that work are often eerie, haunting images that prove startlingly effective for all the film's failings. The use of back-projection is a standout example, the kind of unsettling, alien aesthetic people frequently struggle to achieve with hundreds of times Hung's budget.
For all the oddities in the script the cast are also surprisingly good. It takes time to realise this given the unrelenting strangeness of their roles, but every one of them manages screen presence and invests their lines with a startling amount of humanity. Tye is often unlikeable, frustratingly childish but in a generally credible way; Nono seems warm, friendly and genuinely hurt when called on to be upset. Hung's film calls to mind Mamoru Oshii's forays into live-action but where [i]Avalon[/i] struggled to establish its characters as anything approaching plausible human beings, Oshii's script bogged down in didactic pop-philosophy, [i]The Wall Passer[/i] manages to make its principals feel genuinely worth caring about – even if you wonder whether the director really knows what it is they're supposed to be doing.
It is a strange film; overall not a [b]good[/b] one in any sense, wildly ambitious (too ambitious?), frequently borderline incoherent, unable to overcome its lack of funding – perhaps most significantly we never actually get the chance to see Tye walk through any of the walls he 'passes'. The script leaves multiple plot threads hanging loose and never gives a direct answer to a single one of its own questions. But the obvious passion and intelligence behind [i]The Wall Passer[/i] make it much more than a trainwreck. For all it fails to accomplish it crafts more images that leave a lasting impression than most Asian science fiction films of the past ten years (those few that got released), and in aiming so high it makes everything it succeeds at that much more impressive. A cautious recommendation, then, but a recommendation all the same. Fingers crossed some other director follows Hung's lead, and that this brave, flawed, fascinating little oddity isn't forgotten.