Ching-Teng (Ko Chen-Tung, front center) becomes a diligent student at the pushy hands of Chia-Yi (Michelle Chen) in Giddens Ko's box office hit, You Are the Apple of My Eye.

The Taiwanese film industry is in the middle of a rebound at home thanks to films like this. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

Taiwan is having a banner year at the movies. Since the massive domestic success of Cape No. 7 a few years back it's been followed by a heavy slate of increasingly ambitious high profile films, both in theme and budget: The gangster drama Monga, the upcoming historical epic Seediq Bale, the coming-of-age romance of Starry Starry Night, the understated surrogate family drama Buddha Mountain and the inspirational sport film Jump Ashin! are just a few. Production has doubled in the Taiwanese industry in the last year, and Taiwanese producers and distributors were like the most popular girl at the dance at the recent Busan International Film Festival Asian Film Market.

Ching-Teng (Ko Chen-Tung) takes frustrations rooted in regret out on himself in a brutal street fight in the otherwise sunny You Are the Apple of My Eye.

Where all the activity is suddenly comeing from when anyone or anything has a "moment" is always a mystery, but like economics, filmmaking is cyclical. The last surge in Taiwan was during the 1980s and was headed by Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-Liang. Now there's a new wave washing over cinemas. The notable difference this time around is that Taiwanese audiences are embracing their own: domestic box office for local films jumped from $250,000 in 2001 to $35 million for just the first half of 2011. The days of doom and gloom and introspective navel-gazing seem to be over for the time being, replaced by a more upbeat, romantic national cinema that is less interested in personal anguish than in finding its place in the world.

The latest in the new Taiwanese wave (see ya, Korea, at least for the time being) is prolific author and now director Giddens Ko's (sometimes known as Jiu Ba-dao) clumsily titled You Are the Apple of My Eye, a big slab of the same old song and dance about doomed romantic pursuits with just enough of a contemporary edge to make it worth the price of admission, if high school nostalgia and first love is your thing (it's not mine). This was a hit in Taiwan too, and islanders aren't the only one who seem keen on Ko's work: in February the director told the Taipei Times that a Hollywood studio had purchased the rights to one of the stories in his 2005 book A Killer Who Never Kills. Best catch him now while he's still a local boy.

If You Are the Apple of My Eye can be summed up in one sentence, it's that it's about the proverbial "one who got away" - on top of being a coming of age story and a high school romance. It's all very familiar, and Taiwanese filmmakers have fixated on the fleeting and fragile nature of youthful affection many, many times in the past. The current tone from Taiwan is that of bittersweet sentimentality. But as conventional thematically as Apple is, it diverges away from the norms just enough to get noticed. This is mainstream commercial filmmaking that clearly understands its market.

BLast chance? A disaster lets Chia-Yi (Michelle Chen) reconnect with the manchild that may be the love of her life in this year's most ungainly and embarrassing title, Your Are the Apple of My Eye.

Apple begins with generally disinterested high school boy Ching-Teng (Ko Chen-Tung) and his buddies, the perpetually excited and appropriately named Boner (Yen Sheng-Yu), and the requisite fat kid, A-Ho (Steven Hao), show off, Kuo-Sheng (Owodog) and general oddball Ying-Hung (Tsai Chang-Hsien) being disinterested high school boys. They nap in class, tease each other, and take out their personal and sexual frustrations on their bodies; Ching-Teng sees himself as a Bruce Lee type. The object of affection is the diligent and studious Chia-Yi (Michelle Chen), who dislikes Ching-teng on principle, but after he gets her off the hook for a bit of trouble in class, she strikes up a tentative friendship with him. She also makes it her mission to make him into a straight-A student. By the same token, Ching-Teng fancies himself above academics and so initially claims to have no romantic interest in Chia-Yi. Rounding out the bunch is the "homely" and unassuming Chia-Wei (Wan Wan), Chia-Yi's best girlfriend.

The first part of Apple focuses on the budding relationships and soon to emerge rivalries during the characters' late-teens and then spends a good chunk of the middle of story deconstructing those same relationships. It's almost as if Ching-Teng and Chia-Yi take their first tentative steps as a couple specifically so that Ko can tear them apart. As they mature, change and move to different parts of the country for university, the pair - as well as the rest of the gang - grow apart. It concludes in the present, which isn't what any of the characters expected for themselves.

And that's the kicker in Apple - that nothing turns out as it should. It's a facile, somewhat trite concept, but it's very often true - and not something the movies are very interested in addressing. When was the last time Katherine Heigl didn't get the guy? Apple is by no means less than sentimental and corny, and it's far from cutting-edge filmmaking but it is accessible and reasonably diverting. Ko does a nice job filling the screen with action, be it random people wandering in and out of frames or simple sight gags, and it's where much of the better humor can be found. Juvenile toilet humor abounds, but there's clearly a lot lost in translation: if you're relying on the subtitles, you may not find Apple as hysterical as the majority of the preview audience did.

There's little doubt that the Ching-teng character is a stand in for Ko, and so the personal angle to a story of regret and "what-ifs" has an extra connective element to it that informs the narrative and may speak extra loudly to anyone that has second-guessed themselves romantically. The actors are competent if not overwhelmingly memorable, and not changing the actors to play the same characters years down the road is questionable. Smart for continuity's sake and avoiding a shock to the viewer system but boneheaded for trying to pass of 17-year-olds for twentysomethings. It never works. You Are the Apple of My Eye may not be the most challenging film to come out of Taiwan in the last year, but it's certainly one of the most crowd-pleasing. And for an industry struggling to regain its artistic and popular mojo, it doesn't get better than that.

You Are the Apple of My Eye opens in Hong Kong on Oct 20.

(HK Edition 10/15/2011 page4)