Director – Giddens Ko – 2021 – Taiwan – Cert. 15 – 128m
***1/2
A man ripped from his true love by a fatal lightning strike partners with another dead person as gods of love linking romantic souls together – out in cinemas on Friday, March 11th
A young man is struck by lightning in a thunderstorm and dies. When you die, it seems, you have the choice of reincarnating and going through another life (in whatever form that might take for you) or of staying behind as a god to help people during their lifetimes. For instance, you could be a god of love who helps people to find their soul mate.
At least this is what happens to lightning-struck Alan Shi (Kai Ko from The Road To Mandalay, Midi Z, 2016) who discovers parts of his face burned off and allocated a bureaucratic caseworker in echoes of movies as diverse as Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) and After Life (Horokazu Kore-eda, 1998). After some indecision and an encounter with the none too happy girl Pinky (Gingle Wang from Detention, John Hsu, 2019) in the next compartment, he opts to become a god of love and starts training as such.
The role requires people to operate in pairs. Initially different trainees pair and unpair with each other, and Alan quickly comes to the conclusion that he definitely does not want to pair with Pinky, a feeling she reciprocates. Eventually, when everyone finally pairs off into a permanent bonding, only the two of them are left so they have to partner with one another.
As gods of love, they should be able to touch fingertips and produce a red thread that can be attached at one end to a person and at the other end to their soul mate, usually another person (same or opposite sex, although the film doesn’t explore the gay aspect beyond mentioning the possibility) although it might occasionally be an object. For this to work, chemistry is required between the two gods concerned, so this could be a problem for our hero and heroine. Only, despite their possible incompatibility, the threads seem to work fine and they go about attaching them to living people hither and thither.
There are a lot of flashes back and forward in time, including some sequences towards the end that go back some five hundred years, as well as from the world of the living and the other world in which people decide to reincarnate or become gods to aid the living. There are also people who fail to fit either category – perhaps they’ve become consumed by hate or some other emotional state – dangerous beings who live in a sort of limbo and could potentially turn into demons somewhere down the line.
We flash back and forward a lot with Alan Shi, both in his lifetime and outside it as a god of love. In his most recent life, he was in love with Mi (Vivian Sung from Nina Wu, Midi Z, 2019)), telling her when they were both at primary school that he loved her and wanted to one day marry her, that if she could only return his love for a single second, that would be enough. She likes him, but continually spurns him romantically. He often tells her that his love for her will last 10, 000 years. When they are grown, he asks her to marry him at various ages – 30, 31, 32, 60, 100, but she always makes excuses. One day, after playing basketball (and scoring), he’s talking with her in the pouring rain and his romantic efforts seem finally to be getting somewhere. At this point, although we don’t know anything of his romantic leanings the first time we see it happen, he is struck by lightning.
It’s this romance, not the one between Alan and Pinky, that forms the emotional core of the film. Once Alan has died in the lightning strike, leaving Mi alone, she has only her beloved dog for company (who will play a significant part in the drama later on).
Having laid all this groundwork with commendable precision, writer-director Giddens Ko then starts zinging around all over the place and the whole thing gets very confusing and irritating (at least, it does if you don’t speak Chinese and have to contend with subtitles on top of everything else). Full blown special effects fight scenes move in the blink of an edit from one world to the other, sometimes interrupting a romantic scene in the process. There’s a lavish, lush romantic score to boot in case you’re wondering what emotions you ought to feel. I really wanted to like this, and as it started off, I thought I was going to, but in the end it felt like a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Beautifully crafted sound and fury, mind you, with every Taiwanese dollar visible on the screen, but ultimately sound and fury nonetheless.
Till We Meet Again is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 11th.
Trailer: