Cape No. 7

The Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will screen Wei Desheng's film that evolves around two romances, the first set in the war era, and the other set in the present.

Directed by Wei Desheng, Cape No. 7 is in Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, with a good portion of the dialogues in Japanese. The film was world premiered on June 20, 2008 at the Taipei Film Festival as its opening film and went on to launch a major commercial success. In a matter of a few months, the film had become the second top grossing film in Taiwan’s film history, just behind Titanic. Its success has baffled many film critics and they wonder whether the film indicates the beginning of another golden age of Taiwanese cinema. The film evolves around two romances, the first set in the war era, and the other set in the present. The wartime romance is set against the violent context of the mid-1940s, near the end of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and centers around a Japanese teacher who is dispatched to Hengchun, the southernmost town of Taiwan, and falls in love with a Taiwanese girl with the Japanese name Tomoko. The romance ends with the surrender of Japan when the teacher is forced to return home alone. The man then pens seven love letters to express his regret for leaving the girl, the love of his life. Some 60 years separates the second romance from the first. Once again we are in Hengchun, witnessing a struggling rock band singer named Aga (Van Fan), young and restless. Not able to launch a musical career, he has taken a position as the town’s postman. One day Aga come across an undeliverable package, addressed to Cape No. 7, K?shun District, a place no longer in existence. The package should be sent back to the sender, but Aga decides to keep it and later on opens it to discover that it contains a collection of old letters penned by a Japanese man to a Taiwanese girl named Tomoko. It turns out that the daughter of the now deceased Japanese teacher has decided to mail the unsent love letters to Taiwan in the hope of locating Tomoko. The true reader of these undeliverable love letters turns out to be a Japanese woman, also named Tomoko, played by Tanaka Chie, the Japanese model and actress who is immensely popular in Taiwan. This contemporary Tomoko is sent to Hengchun to manage a hastily assembled rock band where Aga is to be the lead singer. Aga and Tomoko begins a relationship. The bumpy course of their romance intersects with the bits and pieces of an unfolding narrative pieced together from the reading of the seven love letters. In the end the letters are successfully delivered to the Taiwanese Tomoko, Aga puts on the performance of his life on the beach, and the contemporary Tomoko has made a decision to stay on in the island of Taiwan. Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at UW-Madison