Café. Waiting. Love. (等一個人咖啡) – 2014
8/17/2015 08:23:00 PM
This film is the adaptation of the Taiwanese novel by Giddens
Ko of the same title. Giddens both wrote and produced the film. He already had
box office success in Taiwan with You Are
the Apple of My Eye (2011), which was also a novel to film adaption. I
personally have not seen it, but now I plan to as many say it is much better
than Café. Waiting. Love. (2014).
Café.
Waiting. Love is, (for the most part),
the story of Lee Siying (Vivian Sung) who starts to work at a café where her
secret crush Zeyu, who she believes saved her life, visits every day. There she
meets the A Tuo (Bruce Lu-si Bu), a notorious student at her university that is
rumored to have lost his girlfriend to a lesbian and must carry a cabbage and
wear a bikini because he’d lost a few bets. One of his bets also being that he
can only graduate after seven years. The outrageous bets is only one of the
things that were hard to believe in this mixture of romance and fantasy. Siying
spends her time obsessing over her mysterious crush and somehow in the mist of
all that she always manages to run into A Tuo. Soon they become good friends,
and at some point A Tuo begins to really like Siying.
I had pretty wish-washy feelings about the film. It reminded
me of a manga, characters with really odd quirks that you would only find plausible
in manga writing. A tuo has this head of steel and does “head kungfu”. His uncle
he was really close to as a child dies and comes back as an angel and tells him
(as he is crying over his loss) that when he meets the girl he loves he will be
able to pull sausage from their body. And when she loves him back she will
create a bowl of Tofu pudding.
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| Lee Siying played by Vivian Sung |
- Abusi (Megan Lai) is a barista who can create any drink imaginable.
- The unnamed café owner played by Vivian Chow lost the love of her life and now she spends her days staring out the café window longingly
- Brother Bao (Luo Lee) is some gangster film maker who has been separated from his wife for 16 years over a petty argument about her fried noodles.
- And Siying’s sister spends the whole movie smashing a brick against her head in the hopes of becoming the master of head Kung fu.
Every character in the film has this own odd, or comedic
quirk to them. The film still manages to get pretty sappy (especially towards
the end). While the actors who played Siying and Tuo had pretty believable
chemistry, the actual story itself could get so unbelievable that it turned cheesy.
I mean but really, A Tuo was pulling sausage from Siying’s
head because he liked her. And can I take a moment to mention the horror I felt
every time Siying’s sister smashed that brick against her forehead? I
understand she wanted to be the head kungfu master or whatever, but my goodness
it was hard to watch.
The film is just roughly two hours long, and it seems like
there is just too many side stories detracting from the main one between A tuo
and Siying. All the relationships reinforced the message of the ways we miss
love in an attempt to wait for our picture perfect image of it, but as the film
comes into its third act so many plots twist are thrown at the audience. It’s
overwhelming, and it at some point as I was staring at the screen I couldn’t
help by say;
“What that hell just happened?”
These plot twist weren’t small either. At the beginning the
film is a manga styled romantic-comedy, but by the end it’s also a fantasy.
Literally, the unexplainable is the only way the plot twists could be explained.
It was still a very cute viewing. Even though the dialogue was
sometimes laughable, the commitment from the actors at some moments did
actually make me shed a tear. The little bit of reality and humanity that
characters portrayed the actors really hit home on. I picture myself coming back
to this movie again once valentine’s season swings around.
Side note the café it was filmed in was built specifically
for the film. It’s still open too, so if you happened to be in that area of
Taiwan you can check it out.
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| http://www.flyhoneystars.com/2014/09/13/cafe-waiting-love-filming-location-cafe-in-taipei/ |
Have you seen Café.
Love. Waiting?
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