This website uses cookies and other technologies to help us provide you with better content and customized services. If you want to continue to enjoy this website’s content, please agree to our use of cookies. For more information on cookies and their use, please see our latest Privacy Policy.

Accept

cwlogo

切換側邊選單 切換搜尋選單

“Nina Wu” Reveals the Dark Side of the Entertainment Industry for 100 Spellbinding Minutes

“Nina Wu” Reveals the Dark Side of the Entertainment Industry for 100 Spellbinding Minutes

Source:Seashore Image Productions 岸上影像

“Nina Wu” is a Taiwanese psychological thriller directed by Midi Z (趙德胤). It is written by Wu Ke-xi (吳可熙), who also stars in the leading role. When it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, noted Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino was not only in attendance, but praised it as “Thrilling, you have to see it twice!” What is the movie about?

Views

1740
Share

“Nina Wu” Reveals the Dark Side of the Entertainment Industry for 100 Spellbinding Minutes

By Lin, Hsin-Chie
From CommonWealth Magazine (vol. 677 )

A long endless hallway. The shriek of angry dogs. An ocean of red, a malignant “girl number three”...if you watch “Nina Wu”, you will step inside the mind of a traumatized woman and discover she is living in a horror film.

This is a thriller in the era of the #MeToo movement. The titular Nina Wu, portrayed by Wu Ke-xi, is a girl who came alone to Taipei and has been pursuing her dream of stardom for eight years. When her big break finally comes, she will sacrifice anything to become the female lead. She has to strip naked for the film, accept all kinds of unreasonable demands and treatment from the writers, and somehow still survive. At the brink of making it big, her darkest nightmare descends relentlessly on her. With her old home in financial crisis and her best friends deserting her, an unburied secret will drive Nina closer and closer to the edge of madness.

(Read also: From the Island of Women to #MeToo)

She cannot escape that night. The long tunnel in the subway; during filming, the long hallway inside the Chung-Shan Building; the passage inside the spa hotel...day after day, Nina is rewalking the long walk that led her to her financer, that night in the hotel. The whole movie is smoldering. The audience is on fire along with her: “What happened that night?” The minutes melt in search of answers. They will get none. The lines between reality and dream blur together.

                               

Wu Ke-xi, who wrote the movie and also starred in it, became famous after her role as the reckless and decadent Tang Ning in the movie “The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful”  (血觀音). Refusing to be typecast, she wrote a script based on her own experience the first time she was cast in a TV ad. She latched on to the Hollywood #MeToo movement, and produced the story of “Nina Wu.”

Source: Seashore Image Productions 岸上影像

Director Midi Z has known Wu since her amateur days. He is known for realistic portrayals of society in movies such as “Ice Poison” (冰毒) and “The Road to Mandalay” (再見瓦城). To create “Ice Poison”, he filmed secretly in Myanmar without a permit, and finished the film with a seven-person crew in a sort of guerrilla filmmaking style. In the creation of “Nina Wu”, which burned up sixty million dollars, he finally found the chance to showcase his talent. With surrealist shots and lots of symbolism, he created a tragic, beautiful, and terrifying blend of dream and reality. 

Both Midi Z and Wu Ke-xi have sacrificed so much in their pursuit of dreams. In the film “Nina Wu”, they flex their artistic muscles. In the movie, we see survivors of the #MeToo movement must fight against more than the moment of their injury. Like the creative heart of “Nina Wu” tries to tell us, “How much are you willing to sacrifice for a dream?” This is a movie that makes the audience forgets to breathe. As they watch, the audience feels the same as Nina Wu.

Have you read?
♦ What is the Golden Horse Festival Without China?
♦ The First Netflix Series Produced in Taiwan
♦ Taiwan’s New Box Office Hit ‘Detention’

Translated by Jack C.
Edited by Sharon Tseng

Views

1740
Share

Keywords:

好友人數