Director – Hsaio Ya-chuan – 2023 – Taiwan – Cert. – 112m
*****
In 1990, against the backdrop of burgeoning share prices, a young boy starts taking car rides from his father’s landlord – is Taiwan’s entry for 2025 Best International Feature – was out in US cinemas on Friday, January 18th 2024
11-year-old Jie (Bae Run-yin) lives with his widowed dad (Liu Kuan-ting), the Maitre d’ at a posh, local restaurant, in their small, cramped apartment above Li’s cafe. Every week, Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), who the boy calls Miss Pretty, calls by to collect the rent, which both Li (Ban Tie-tsiang) and Jie’s dad regularly pay. Li plans to better himself, and his friend The Major (Kao Ying-hsuan) helps him out by investing cash in stocks and shares and earning Li massive returns.
Jie’s dad is involved in no such scheme, but Jie yearns for a bigger home and with his savings has told the boy they should be able to afford to buy their own place in about three years. But rapidly rising share prices, dragging property prices up along with them, kill his three-year dream.

His dad is a resourceful sort who sews all Jie’s clothes. However, that doesn’t stop Jie being taunted by a local bully and his two mates. His dad is also a keen sax player, playing along to LP records in the flat.
Before their homeownership dream bubble bursts, Jie is counting down the days to owning their new home. One day, caught in the rain and refused access to the shelter of a dry doorway by the bully’s gang of three, he shelters by a nearby food stall until the chauffeur-driven car of Boss Xie, aka Old Fox (Akio Chen) gives him a ride home. While others speak of Boss Xie with the sort of reverence accorded those people of whom it would be unwise to get on the wrong side, the boy addresses him fearlessly and speaks his mind.
In this, the first of many car rides, the landlord starts to mentor the boy. The boy is a fast learner, and will never be the same. However, he has much to learn and will make some terrible mistakes which will cost those around him dear.

One key lesson Old Fox teaches Xie, when they are alone in the old man’s lavish home, constitutes a three-step means to absolve oneself of responsibility towards one’s fellow man. Drink iced water, close your eyes, and say: “It’s none of my damn business.” The boy takes this very much to heart, and is soon heard uttering this phrase by his shocked father.
Another of Old Fox’s lessons is, you can’t change the world, but you can change your position in it. As the tale moves on, it’s clear that the old man sees himself in the boy. Both youngster and old timer have a ruthless side, and yet, in both cases, there are flashes of redemption.
Jie’s dad, meanwhile, has possible romantic regrets in the form of Mrs Wei (Mugi Kadawaki), a well-to-do customer at the restaurant who, it turns out in a series of flashbacks, was his teen sweetheart who later married an associate of Boss Xie. Jie’s dad also has a past of which he’s ashamed, in which he related information about various people to Boss Xie, without understanding the applications of so doing. Jie himself will later be confronted with similar moral dilemmas.

Perhaps that’s what’s so fascinating about this film: it takes a look, though a handful of characters, at their relative positions in the social pile and asks questions about their mobility within it and the moral (or immoral) choices those who have climbed the social ladder have made to do so. Thus, it’s also asking big questions about community and social responsibility.
In the end, though, what you remember are the images. A child BMX biking though the rain venting his frustration at the world, a man receiving as a Christmas present an LP of When I Fall in Love from an unrequited love that can never happen, and the child and the old man arguing in the car, turning into two versions of the old man arguing.
A truly extraordinary study of a father and son relationship. A masterpiece.
Old Fox, Taiwan’s entry for 2025 Best International Feature, was out in US cinemas on Friday, January 18th 2024.
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