Orz Boyz

Jiong rz nan hai

(Taiwan, 2008, 110 mins)

35mm

North American Premiere

PRODS: Lee Lieh, Ma Tien-tsung
SCR: Yang Ya-che
CAM: Chow Yi-wen
ED: Lei Chen-ching
MUS: Huang Yun-ling, Chung Hsin-min
Cast: Lee Kuan-Yi, Pang Chin-Yu, Mei Fang

Orz denotes an East Asian emoticon suggesting amazement. And it's quite likely that the two young boy protagonists of Orz Boys will amaze and delight. They are dubbed Liar No.1 and Liar No.2 by their teachers after they're caught scamming their classmates with a story of a ghostly Martian lurking under the school building. No.1 seems to have a mute, mentally disturbed, homeless father who lives at the end of a pier, while No.2 is brought up by his alternately threatening and indulgent though always wildly superstitious Grandmother.

The film divides into three parts: the first depicts the boys' flights of fancy at school (there's a bronze statue in the courtyard which may or may not come to life), and a schoolboy crush on classmate Lin, who responds with unexpected grace to their immature taunting. Part two is a tale involving an audience of animated characters, loosely based on the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The third section unfolds the boys' myth of a hyperspace portal located at a water park, whose high price of admission forces them to struggle to earn extra money on the streets.

Hyperspace may in fact be adulthood, and it is director Yang Ya-che's considerable achievement in this, his first film, to evoke the emotionally freighted pathways between childhood and growing up in ways that are both Rabelaisianly playful and hauntingly real.

-- Shelly Kraicer

Rated: PG; no advisory

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