Splendid Float (2004) - Yan guang si she ge wu tuan

Splendid Float (2004) Country: Taiwan Release Year: 2004 Aka: Yan guang si she ge wu tuan Director: Zero Chou Writer: Zero Chou Language: Mandarin Genre: Drama Runtime: 71 min Cast: James Chen, I-chin Zhuon I-hang Ma, Yu-chi Lai Ming-zhang Wang, Wawa Wang Studio: Zero+Hoho Illusion Imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436789/

Splendid Float is Zero Chou’s first film. It 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.
At one of the shows, Rose meets Ah Yang (here translated as Sunny), and the two fall in love almost immediately. However, the Rose and Sunny relationship seems to arise spontaneously, and while there are clear signs of affection, we’re left to fill in what exactly the couple sees in each other so much so that they talk about living together.
They make love with that certain urgency that in films tends to portend something tragic. 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. When Rose’s ex-boyfriend Sunny drowns, he is asked by the family to perform the Taoist funeral rites to call the soul home.
In an ironic turn of events, 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? Was she spurned? Was she rejected?