The Personals

Du Jia-Zhen, an otologist, is madly in love with a married man who has not been in touch for months. She gets increasingly desperate. She can no longer survive on pleasant memories, so she places an ad seeking a marriage partner. The responsive is overwhelming in quantity, but the prospects on quality are not rosy. She agrees to meet each of the candidates in the same virtually deserted restaurant in Tapei. In the film each encounter is formally introduced with the announcement of the name, age and profession of the relevant candidate. The film offers a fascinating collection of portraits of unmarried men. The lonely, old widowers, an expert in Japanese pornography, a poor man who wants to buy a house for Dr. Du, a crazy restaurant-owner and a couple of normal people. The outpourings that Dr. Du hears are funny, strange or moving, as is the beautifully written and acted monologue by Yu-Wen about loneliness. Gradually Dr. Du starts feeling like a voyeur sniffing around in other people’s lives. But she also reveals herself: not to the men facing her, but when she calls her long- lost lover and pours out her heart to his answering machine while his wife listens to her message. ‘I feel like a voyeur, he in the light, me in the shadow, but how do I get into the light?’