In the Mood for a Misunderstood Love, A Look at Arvin Chen’s MAMA BOY
Feature Film Review
by Reza Sameni
This review is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative IV, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 26th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
Taiwanese-American filmmaker, Arvin Chen, returns to the Reel Asian with MAMA BOY, featuring an unlikely romance, after the 2010 screening of his feature debut, AU REVOIR TAIPEI, at the festival. The decade-long gap between his second feature, WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? (2013) and MAMA BOY, (2022) brings more maturity and consistency to his technical execution, although his writing still seems to be stuck in trial-and-error mode.
In MAMA BOY, Xiao Hong, a young clerk in a fish store, is given an unusual gift on his 30th birthday: a chance to lose his virginity in a luxurious yet illicit love hotel. Innocent Xiao-Hong never unwraps the present, falling in love, instead at first glance with the brothel’s manager, Sister Lele, who is the same age as his mom. To demonstrate his love and get a glimpse of Sister Lele at the reception booth, Xiao Hong books multiple routine appointments with a sex worker dashingly named Apple, but this Forbidden Fruit never gets touched in these tempting visits, bringing her painless income and glory for Saint Xiao Hong! Tired of being seen as an object of desire by other men, Sister Lele gradually falls for Xiao Hong’s innocent love too and opens her heart to him, regardless of the possible consequences of her decision in a traditional society.
Love is at the center of all of Chen’s feature films. Against the backdrop of confrontations between good and evil, he examines true love and challenges the socially-approved norms of a typical romantic relationship. In MAMA BOY, he scrutinizes a heart-to-heart relationship in five various situations and scales:
1. An overprotective mom whose motherly love dominates the private life of her 30-year-old son Xiao Hong.
2. Inexperienced Xiao Hong’s misunderstood love for middle-aged Sister Lele, a heartbroken lady boss of a sex work business.
3. Sister Lele’s failed relationship with her rebellious son, Wei Jie.
4. The profitable relationship between Xiao Hong’s mom and a retired police officer in which her hesitation for the retired police officer’s adoration only goes away when she desperately needs his professional contacts in the police department to ruin Sister Lele’s illicit business in order to save her son.
5. The short encounter scenes between Xiao Hong and a same-aged customer at the fish store — in the beginning, near the middle, and at the end of the film — produce a significant impact on the viewer’s conclusion to interpret them as a love-at-first-glance possibility.
The film mainly centers around the second situation, and the anecdote of Hong’s controlling mom supports its advancement. Even though the story is not original, the conceit of referring to Xiao Hong-Apple-Sister Lele’s connection to Adam-Eve-Forbidden Fruit is pretty clever as Chen uses the image to insistently grow the viewer’s expectations to assume that Xiao Hong-Sister Lele’s tie would be eternal, that they will live peacefully in the Garden of Eden for good, despite all unlikelihood. However, the final arc brings it to a predictable, conventional, and preachy ending. Chen undermines everything he had planted before, marking their relationship as a misunderstood love, leaving the audience with a bunch of unanswered questions, and concluding his film in favour of the general public’s interest by offering a hassle-free relationship between Xiao Hong and a more age-appropriate customer at the fish store.
It’s indigestible to see that Xiao Hong and Sister Lele never fight to save their love after the massive storm started by Xiao Hong’s mom. It feels like they both surrender too easily to their fate. Xiao Hong moves on and falls in love with a younger girl, making us wonder whether his craving for Sister Lele was a short-term desire and whether we were wrong to see him as different from other men. It also feels implausible that Sister Lele simply changes her career and gets an easy fresh start, in contrast to the reality of many people involved in the sex work industry. Given that Chen employs fanciful language to skip these sensible questions, he still has to convince us why Sister Lele didn’t quit earlier if it was as easy as shown here. Her depressed face and melancholic conversation with the bartender in the bar scenes early on do not match up to her look of satisfaction with her new position at the end of the film. If her despair is rooted in her job, why didn’t she leave it earlier? If it comes from the lack of a faithful romantic relationship, why didn’t she make any effort to save her love with Xiao Hong?
Perhaps Chen’s approach to a love story through a merely masculine lens is another drawback in his storytelling. The female characters of his male-dominant stories never get the required room to come forward and create a gender balance in the narrative. In MAMA BOY, two women have the most impact on the male protagonist, but Chen fails to explore these multilayered characters thoroughly and leaves the responsibility to the spectators to perceive them based on their prejudices. As a result, some viewers might ignore Sister Lele’s pure feelings due to her morally ambiguous job or even go further and blame her for manipulating a naive young boy. On the other hand, some might accuse Xiao Hong’s single mom of being overwhelmingly protective based on the stereotypical portrayal of an Asian mom without giving her enough space to justify her reasoning.
Our knowledge about these two women’s pasts is relatively shallow, and this insufficient comprehension casts a shadow over our judgment.
Arvin Chen’s interest in socially taboo relationships and his technical expertise have the potential to attract a broader international audience. However, his locally-oriented approach to the subject matter is most appreciated by audiences well-educated in Taiwanese romance film conventions. His writing lacks the required infrastructure for international audiences to comprehend some social problems in Taiwan. Unlike the decorated South Korean filmmaker, Bong Joon Ho whose films thoroughly deliver all the essential information that an international viewer needs to know about South Korea’s social issues, Chen fails to provide us with such information about social concerns in Taiwan. For instance, the sub-story of Sister Lele’s rebellious son, Wei Jie, feels raw and hardly appeals to international viewers. While Chen intends to shed light on the existence of debt and debt collectors as a social issue in Taiwan through this sub-plot, it doesn’t add any value to the narrative or information to the viewer and could have been cut out entirely. Although the juxtaposition of the disobedient son and righteous Xiao Hong in their fight scene at the police station, is rooted in commonly explored motifs of good vs. evil in Chen’s cinema, this exploration is redundant in MAMA BOY. Our grasp of Xiao Hong’s personality and his love for Sister Lele remains intact even without the sub-story of Wei Jie.
Chen’s skills in craft are indeed the pillar of his filmmaking. Unlike the turbulence in his writing, the technical aspects of the production saturate the set with his unique artistic signature. Employing vivid warm colours in costume and setting against the light blue-tone backdrop and using vibrant lighting has become his trademark in his films and evolved from one to another. The orange colour of Hong’s uniform or the lighting in the love hotel scenes or bar scenes in MAMA BOY is not only eye-catching, but they are in line with a romance theme and the filmmaker’s demands to create a sumptuous, pastel-coated otherworldly melodrama.
Whether an intentional choice, the limitations of a small budget, or the result of COVID restrictions, Arvin Chen benefits from the uncrowded locations in MAMA BOY. Unlike the busy streets of AU REVOIR TAIPEI or the packed wedding set in WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?, MAMA BOY revolves around the main characters in extra-free scenes, and a few background actors only appear when necessary. The nature of MAMA BOY’s story demands a minimal setting to build up a dreamy, timeless, and universal romantic environment, and the filmmaker nattily achieves that.
Coming to the performances, all three main leads are stunning in their given roles. Kai Ko stars as Xiao Hong and brilliantly portrays a shy inexperienced young adult who has never been in a close relationship with any females but his overprotective mom. Perhaps his solo dance scene between the aquariums in the fish store is the climax of his performance, where his intense feelings for Sister Lele ultimately erupt in this memorable charming scene. Kai Ko is remarkably supported by Vivian Hsu, who plays Sister Lele. Hsu analyzes her role thoroughly and adds layers of nuance to Sister Lele’s character and depicts a broad spectrum of her feelings with a wide range of shades of gray in between absolute black and white, giving the viewer a contrasting perspective of what is usually depicted as a sex worker in mainstream media. Nevertheless, in the final quarter, the filmmaker unintentionally takes us to a conclusion to find Sister Lele guilty, a conventional image of sex workers who don’t deserve to be loved until they repent from their “immoral” jobs. Sara Yu’s astonishing performance as Xiao Hong’s single mom shapes the other side of this powerful trio in MAMA BOY. Her extreme love to save Xiao Hong from harm at any cost resembles Hye-ja Kim’s brilliant performance in 2009 Bong Joon Ho’s MOTHER.
Chen’s films start off pretty well but lose their charm in the quarter-finals and turn into a sermon in the last act. He uses the same recipe in all his three features; picking up an over-told story; making efforts to give it a fresh look by breaking the conventions in writing and through lavish production design; and finally adding excessive ethical seasoning to the plot and going back to the same conventions that he was determined to overturn minutes earlier. His over-investment in the technical execution to create a luxurious dreamy environment, and his overly insistent delivery of a moral message in the simplest possible manner prevents him from paying enough attention to story details and proper characterization.
Except for his second feature, his other two films’ characters feel loose, and his writing lacks the elegance, intricacy, adornment, and subtlety that otherwise defines his technical craft. While his films’ endearing characters instantly attract both critics and the general public, they are not polished enough to keep critics satisfied till the end, and Chen’s intentions to modify traditional storytelling methods might not be to the general audiences’ tastes, keeping his works halfway between a typical, entertaining film and a potentially critically-acclaimed arthouse piece. His endeavour to please both the general public and industry professionals is impressive but not enough. He needs reform in his work to take his career to the next stage. While his first two features screened at Berlinale, giving Chen enough space to hone his skills and flourish, MAMA BOY hasn’t yet gotten into any Top-10 festival, sounding the alarm for Chen to unveil whatever he has up his sleeve in the next movie!
Reza Sameni is an Iranian-Canadian film programmer based in Canada, Iran, and France. Over the past few years, he has supported festival programming for seven film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Reelworld Film Festival, and JAYU’s Human Rights Film Festival.
Previously, he worked as a cinematographer on documentaries and short films that focus on human rights, injustice, and domestic violence, several of which have been screened at international film festivals, including IDFA, Rio de Janeiro, Denver, and Kassel Documentary Film Festival.
