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At Cafe 6: Taiwan's latest nostalgia hit movie

Who says only Hollywood loves making formulaic movies? Taiwan does, too — and we can’t get enough of them.

At Café 6 is better than You Are The Apple Of My Eye and Our Times, said Taiwan’s Neal Wu (left), who wrote the novel the film is based on and serves as its director. Photo: Chua Hong Yin

At Café 6 is better than You Are The Apple Of My Eye and Our Times, said Taiwan’s Neal Wu (left), who wrote the novel the film is based on and serves as its director. Photo: Chua Hong Yin

SINGAPORE — Who says only Hollywood loves making formulaic movies? Taiwan does, too — and we can’t get enough of them.

After Giddens Ko’s 2011 runaway hit You Are The Apple Of My Eye, the Taiwanese film industry realised they had hit upon a winning recipe for conquering palates across Asia: Quirky coming-of-age, puppy-love stories tinged with nostalgia and featuring awkward but lovable high school students as the protagonists. The movie hits that followed in the same vein include 2014’s Café. Waiting. Love and last year’s Our Times, a mega success that became Singapore’s highest-grossing Taiwanese movie ever.

This year, there’s At Café 6, which opens this week. It’s about what happens when the owner of a café relives bittersweet memories of his school days in the 1990s. If it sounds like a mash-up of all the above movies, well, it pretty much is. And for that reason, it’s probably set to become yet another hit.

 

YOUNG LOVE

At Café 6 is based on a popular novel by Taiwan’s Neal Wu, who also serves as director. The movie stars Hong Kong’s Cherry Ngan, Golden Horse Best Actor nominee Dong Zijian and Taiwanese social media personality Ouyang Nini.

In town for a press conference today, Wu addressed the inevitability of comparisons between At Café 6 and Our Times.

“Audiences will and must make comparisons, so I will leave that to them. As someone who puts their work out there, I just hope it will do well. Of course I’m hoping it will do better than Our Times, but that’s up to fate,” he said. “I often tell people that You Are The Apple Of My Eye and Our Times were good films. If people liked those, I believe people will like my At Café 6 because personally, I’m confident that my movie is better than those.”

The popularity of this particular genre, he said, can be attributed to the universality of love’s complex emotions.

“Ever since the start of the human race, there have been feelings and emotions. You might think love is something you just do, but really, there is a lot to analyse about it — things we find impossible to understand,” he said. “That’s why these themes persist. That’s why love songs are always the most popular songs. Their topics can never be exhausted. For example, there are two billion songs about breakups, but people continue to be interested in them.”

Ngan felt that films like At Café 6 offer audiences something that’s lacking in the usual line-up of films. “I think there are too many international blockbusters and Hollywood films filled with special effects. Even Hollywood blockbusters are now repeating themselves. So, maybe teenage romances like ours, at the opposite end of the spectrum, offer something different,” she said. “Taiwanese teen romances are very small and local, but they are about things that everyone can relate to.”

SCHOOL OF LIFE

In a nutshell, these movies hit us deep down because they are eminently relatable. One of the characters in At Café 6 puts it best when he says we all go through a “similar adolescence” but go on to lead “different lives”.

In modern Asian societies, primary and secondary school is the great leveller. Like it or not, we’ve all been through those gangly, uniformed days of cramming fanatically for exams; shy, conservative crushes on the opposite sex; and ill-fated rebellion against joyless discipline masters. As a result, nostalgic teen movies can rake in the money of present-day students as well as 30-something-year-olds with rose-coloured glasses — in short, cinema-goers of pretty much every age.

Apart from the setting, there is also the genre: The Bildungsroman’s perennial relevance will never change. The stories of our formative years are so crucial because they determine the course of our lives. In all of the above movies, the common theme is that life never works out the way you planned. Those who thrive are those who manage to grasp the lessons taught in the school of life.

So, like report cards, dental checkups and end-of-year examinations, it looks like a new nostalgia-laced Taiwanese teen movie is something we should henceforth expect once a year — at least for a couple more years.

 

At Café 6 opens in cinemas July 14.

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