By Love Obsessed

Director: Chin Han
Year: 1979
Rating: 3.5
If ever you decide to explore the Taiwanese work of Brigitte Lin, this very odd and enigmatic film would not be a very good place to start. It’s quite confusing (though subs falling below my TV screen didn’t help certainly), badly edited, but worst of all only has Brigitte on an intermittent basis. She disappears for long stretches of this film. What the film does have though is perhaps one of Brigitte’s longest kisses, also an underwater kiss, a song from her and a bit of dancing!

A photographer (Chin Han - who also directed this mess) goes to the beach to take some pictures and into his viewfinder comes a woman dressed all in white doing a whirling dervish of a dance on the hillside. Like a fairy she appears enchanted as she nearly floats across the landscape. Chin chases her into the forest, but loses her trail. When he gets back to Taipei, he develops the photos and becomes obsessed with finding her once again. He breaks off with his girlfriend and goes back to the beach where she appears magically in the firelight. She kisses him deeply, madly – but then disappears again into the darkness. Dogs howl in the distance. Much of this and the rest of the film is annoyingly played out with a piano clanging out various Carly Simon tunes.


These mysterious going ons continue until finally Chin learns that people are trying to keep him and Brigitte apart – and the two of them run off into the wilderness and set up home in a cave. All seems quite lovely for a while as they catch fish and frolic in the water – but Brigitte’s past is catching up with them.
 

This is probably the weakest of the Taiwanese Brigitte films that I have seen – all absurd melodrama with little heart or sense.  Still there was that kiss!