The Best of Times

The wayward lives of adolescents on the fringes of the criminal underworld are not a subject neglected by the cinema, but nobody does teenage frustrations and dreams like Chang Tso-Chi. The placid Wei and his volatile best friend and neighbour Jie are 19-year-olds living with their families in the suburbs of Taipei. Wei has a tight bond with his twinsister Min, who's going through chemotherapy for leukemia, but Jie isn't close to either his devout Christian father (a retired soldier, originally from China) or his retarded elder brother. Pushed by Jie, Wei asks brother Gu -owner of the night club where he works as a parking valet- to trust them with jobs in his gang. They are sent out as debt collectors. Soon they're the proud, nervous owners of a gun and a single bullet...Chang very smartly rhymes his subject (boys' longing for status and power) with a journey into their inner lives; the painstaking surface naturalism is underpinned by a wry awareness that subconscious desires and impulses are just as real as the fish in the living-room tank. He even pulls off the Borgesian trick (used by Bertolucci in The Spider's Stratagem) of suggesting that dreams can be more real than anything else. Poetic, visually beautiful and immoderately moving, The Best of Times -like Chang's previous films - gets indelible performances from everyone in its non-pro cast. Tony Rayns