Feeling sheepish: Taiwan adds to field of whimsical rom-coms

Hou Chi-Jan's When A Wolf Falls In Love With A Sheep.

Genre

Romantic Comedy

Running time

90 min

Director

Hou Chi-Jan

Actors

Ko Kai, Chien Man-Shu

OFLC rating

PG

WHEN A WOLF FALLS IN LOVE WITH A SHEEP  
Cinema Nova

THERE used to be complaints about Australia's fixation on quirky comedies, but nowadays quirk belongs to the world. The Taiwanese team behind When A Wolf Falls In Love With A Sheep have evidently clocked up the hours watching Amelie and the video clips of Michel Gondry, not to mention the collected works of Wong Kar-Wai.

Tung (Ko Kai), the young hero, is distraught when his girlfriend attaches a Post-It note to his forehead while he sleeps, announcing that she's off to the city to enrol in ''cram school''. Haunted by images of his lost love in overexposed close-up, he sets out to find her.

Upon arrival in Taipei, he gets a job in a photocopy shop and makes a new friend in Yang (Chien Man-Shu), a petite girl with a pixie cut and a tragic past, who draws cartoons of sheep and believes that the best way to find lost things is by counting to a hundred.

The director, Hou Chi-Jan, uses every whimsical stylistic device he can think of - jump cuts, fragments of animation, and a form of sped-up motion that turns the actors into puppets.

On the whole it works better than you might expect, partly because beneath all the whimsy the situations are relatively banal, true to the mixture of excitement and boredom that defines most young lives. Anything can be romantic, depending how you look at it - and there will always be a new generation ready to chase the dream of finding love and fulfilment somewhere in the crowd.