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Hidden Whispers

By Kimberly Chun

All dressed up and no place to go? That’s the main dilemma of Hidden Whispers, a debut feature written and directed by Taipei, Taiwan, native Vivian Chang. Mother-and-daughter relationships are also a subject here, but Chang’s music video background dominates. Hidden Whispers has some of the gorgeous cinematography and snappy editing of Betty Blue or Chungking Express, with even less substance or story. The title is a misnomer: Those searching for hidden messages or depths will be disappointed. Still, film buffs who are seduced by well-appointed newcomers — accessorized by Yi Yi veteran actors such as Elaine Jin, Hsiao Shu-shen and Leon Dai — will fall for this good looker.

The pretext for all the pretty visuals is the three stages of a girl’s life. The first part of the film focuses on a 5-year-old girl (Huang Pin-hsuan), who pedals on her tricycle through the blue and yellow-saturated, rain and oil-slicked streets of a city, selling cigarettes to diners at street food stands. Her handicapped father (Hsia Ching-ting) begs nearby. Her glamorous mother (Hsiao Shu-shen), forever clad in pricey-looking black sheaths, meets lovers and hangs out in her moldering, lime-encrusted and water-dripping slum surroundings in aesthetically appealing ways that would do an art director’s heart good. Maybe it’s all in the mind of the little girl, clearly a budding artist by the look of the film: In her eyes, her father and mother’s violent fights materialize into beautifully lit still-lifes and tangos between perfectly matched partners.

At 17, the girl becomes a disgruntled, lonely teenager (Tammy Tseng) who wants to assume a new identity far from a mother who is only interested in gambling and crushing the girl’s imaginative daydreams. So, the girl steals ID cards from her job at a comic book rental store, and tries on new identities. That routine shifts when she runs into a man suffering from amnesia after a moped accident (Leon Dai).

In the last segment, the girl is a 30-year-old woman with a secret pregnancy. It’s pretty secret because, as played by Shu Qi, she’s model-thin and fairly incommunicative. Visiting her mother (Elaine Jin) in the hospital, the woman thinks about their linked lives, her married lover and a flirtatious doctor, and shows off her artistic abilities by sketching lonely, lovely scenes of the city. “I wonder if other mother-daughter relationships are like mine. Interminable. Without escape. Inexplicable,” she wonders with an all-too-familiar ennui.

What goes around comes around here. But one wishes there was something more substantive behind the style, and that Chang would dare to make a bolder statement. The director/writer does get credit for pausing to focus on intriguing, impressionistic details like spots of blood blossoming into minimalist, delicate watercolors. And she excels at giving the actors enough room to express emotions that go beyond words. Good thing — because the audience doesn’t glean much meaning from the dialog. Kudos also for the striking primary palette, particularly in the first third of the film, to cinematographer Shen Rai-yuan.