Dir. Zero Chou

Splendid Float, Zero Chou’s first film, depicts the life of a group of Taiwanese tranvestites in a travelling cabaret show. Roy (James Chen), dances and sings in drag (as “Rose”) in the show at night, while spending his day as a Taoist priest conducting funeral rites. It’s a clear dichotomy: his vie en Rose is filled with energy, while his life in the day, as a man, holds nothing but death.

At one of the shows, Rose meets Ah Yang (here translated as Sunny), and the two fall in love almost immediately, making love with that certain urgency that in films tends to portend something tragic - even to someone who went into the show without any sense of the plot, as I did. And indeed, Sunny dies in a freak drowning accident, and the rest of the film is about Rose’s coming to terms with the death.

So Splendid Float becomes a film about the monopoly of loss, about the lover who dares not speak her name. Indeed, why the loss matters so much to Rose in the first place is not fully explicated - the Rose and Sunny relationship seems to arise sui generis, and while there are clear signs of affection, we’re left to fill in what exactly the couple see in each other so much so that they talk about moving in together.

In an ironic turn of events, Roy is the priest chosen to summon Sunny’s soul from the sea, which allows him the chance to mourn the death, if only covertly. Yet even the mourning is not untarnished by suspicions: Sunny had left a cryptic note just before he left, and the standard questions that might gnaw at any young person whose lover died mysteriously are magnified by the situation - did he kill himself to leave her? Rose throws the divination lots to check if she can take an icon of Sunny’s with her from the funeral, and the answers seem to keep pointing to a “no”.

Was she spurned? Was she rejected? Ultimately, as in with most attempts to communicate with the dead, Splendid Float remains resolutely ambiguous on these questions. Rose sees the ghost of Sunny in various times - whether it is a real ghost or she is projecting is deliberately not said - but what he means is never quite clear. That Rose is unable to say that a relationship even ever existed only makes it harder - this is a film about marginalisation rather than oppression, and the lack of even having a way of expressing her love and her loss is clearly painful to see. Rose is the nonexistent widow, as much a ghost in the present world as Sunny is in the other, and her wailings to the sea for Sunny to come back are only met with bewilderment by Sunny’s relatives.

The film also plays up the innate sadness that underpins many Chinese cabaret songs. The melancholic tune that repeats throughout the film speaks of dancing hiding one’s essential misery, which holds obvious parallels to the transvestites’ attempts to maintain a dual life and the sadness that that can cause.

Leavening the weight of the theme are sprinkles of bawdy ribaldry, as well as Taiwanese-language humour. (Admittedly, while there were many in the audience at the Singaporean Film Festival who got the jokes - Hokkien being the dialect of a good number of Singaporeans - there were certainly many other viewers bemused by the laughter.)

In the end, the other drag queens provide a solid support network for Rose, with a closeness that shows the true nature of their friendship, but there’s no denying the impact of the loss of a great love at so tender an age. This is a film of contradictions: the darkest moment is where one finds happiness; dressing up in drag allows one to find one’s true self; through frivolity true friendship emerges. And so, right till the end, the same tune repeats, and the drag queens dance to the music; joy and sadness all mixed in together in a bittersweet performance.

Splendid Float among the Golden Horse nominations.