The Great Buddha+

Pickle is a night watchman at a sculpture workshop. Belly Button collects scrap. At night the two sit in the hut, read the paper and watch television. When the television breaks they find something else: the recorder in their employer's car. They start watching the footage. It shows the man's daily life; meetings, women, politicians. Then something else happens on one recording. The two men do not know what to do. They hold a piece of information and it gives them no power at all. Huang Hsin-yao writes and directs. Cres Chuang, Bamboo Chen, Leon Dai and Chen Yi-wen are in the cast. It is a Taiwanese production. The film won in several categories at the Golden Horse awards. Its form is black and white; only the footage from the car recorder is in colour, and that division is at the centre. There is a narrator; the director's own voice cuts in, introduces the characters and speaks straight to the audience. The matter it treats is class; the lives of the two men and the life of the man they are watching are set side by side and never meet. The giant Buddha being made in the workshop finds a function at the end. The director had made the same story earlier as a short and this feature is its expansion. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow and there is little event. Who it is for: viewers who like Taiwanese cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: it is slow, bleak, and the ending offers no hope.