Drifting Flowers

Women in love with women is a subject not often touched on in the west, but Asian cinema has been far more successful. The award winning Taiwanese director Zero Chou’s second lesbian feature is a loosely connected collection of three story threads about women in love with women; covering puppy love, life after love and coming-of-age. Chou’s gift for creating dreamlike and often beautiful images is clear, but here she tries too hard to make the individual stories exotic and unique, in the process losing something important. While there are moments of humanity, it’s incredibly frustrating in a film that looks this good that the characters don’t feel like ordinary people, and the situations are so contrived as to be completely unbelievable. Wasting a chance to challenge stereotypes and gender roles, it’s sadly more a dreary series of arthouse wank-bank vignettes. As a piece of art this is passable, but at providing genuine and meaningful depictions of human love it fails completely.