The first shot of Julian Chou’s film Blind Love is both jarring and literal: a closeup of a doctor draining a cyst under a twitching eye. The next scene reveals the eye to be that of Han (Jimmy Liu), a teenager intent on studying social sciences despite his father’s wishes, and Chou focuses on his eyepatch falling off when he dives into a swimming pool. The director follows this visual metaphor through for the film’s duration: Han and his family, who struggle to focus on their own desires and each other’s emotional needs, are beset with eye maladies, while two more perceptive characters are, respectively, an eye doctor who takes photographs as a hobby and a prominent collector of photography. While a bit obvious, it is a clear statement of Chou’s thematic intent: in Blind Love, the single-minded focus on how one is perceived by others progressively degrades the ability to see oneself clearly.
This clearly communicated social critique is of a piece with the film’s melodrama-inflected narrative, as crafted by screenwriter River Wu. Han meets and falls in love with an older woman, the doctor and hobbyist photographer Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi), who is his mother Shu-yi’s ex-girlfriend from college — Han is unaware of Xue-jin’s connection to his mother, and Xue-jin is unaware that Han is Shu-yi’s son. Shu-yi (Ariel Lin), who is in a chilly marriage to a preoccupied doctor, reconnects with Xue-jin at the same time as her son is getting to know her, and slowly rediscovers her long-dormant sexuality through this rekindled relationship.
Chou sets up this triad with the potential for maximum drama and fallout. Early in the film, she stages a profoundly uncomfortable sex scene between Han and Xue-jin, facilitated by Han’s lie that he is a university student and by Xue-jin’s state of drunkenness. Though Xue-jin sets a clear boundary that their relationship is only a friendship once she’s in a sober state, the encounter casts a pall over the film, making Shu-yi’s conflicted but earnest pursuit of Xue-jin tense — whenever she visits her apartment, it is an open question whether Han will show up, thus derailing all three of their lives. It is to Chou’s credit that, when the three of them do eventually encounter each other in the same room — as, narratively, they must — she portrays this encounter with restraint, awkwardness and repressed feelings converging as the three of them realize the dynamic they’ve unwittingly been participating in.
By this point in the film, Chou has trained her focus on Shu-yi, whose burgeoning realization that she is deeply unsatisfied with her life, yet too afraid to walk away from it, becomes the film’s emotional locus, even taking precedence over the triad that forms the narrative spine. The film is set sometime in the 2010s, in the lead-up to the 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan, and uneasiness over LGBTQ rights affects Shu-yi’s own life — her husband is openly homophobic, and she avoids the topic completely, reflecting her own discomfort with her sexuality. Lin’s performance is emotionally resonant and finely modulated: initially cool and reserved, she reaches ever-intensifying emotional peaks as she loses her grip on her carefully composed life. (A particular highlight is her wild overreaction when her younger son, a kindergartener, is accused of stealing a classmate’s cell phone, which he denies; Shu-yi exclaims that “It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself, it’s how others see you that matters most!”, a rare moment when her mask has fully slipped off.) In this regard, Chou, Wu, and Lin take full advantage of melodrama as genre. In direction, screenwriting, and performance, they reveal the untenability of a social structure — in this instance, the steep expectations of heterosexual marriage and family life — through one character’s flailing inability to navigate it.
The film, unfortunately, tends to falter when Chou moves her focus away from Shu-yi. The other characters are comparatively underdeveloped, which makes the subplots involving Han and Xue-jin feel vague in comparison to Shu-yi’s. Han reads as a disaffected, lightly rebellious teenager without a clear identity beyond this archetype, and Xue-jin is a model of sexual and artistic freedom who exists mainly to provoke and inspire her paramours. Narrative logic and tone also pose occasional issues: there are a series of poorly integrated flashbacks, which provide context for the relationship between Shu-yi and Xue-jin but are included so abruptly as to cause confusion, and Chou moves on too quickly from a scene of sudden violence toward the end of the film, leaving the viewer unequipped to fully process the more ambiguous epilogue. If the film is inconsistent, though, it still clears the bar for an effective social melodrama by centering Lin’s compelling performance and taking an earnest and direct approach to its subject matter’s political import.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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