A Taipei Love Triangle

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With the possible exception of "Christian Slater vehicle," few words chill the heart of a movie critic faster than "coming-of-age story." Before the sepia tones have drenched the opening frames, we already know what we're in for: turgid nostalgia, with teenage protagonists not so much living as waiting around for their by-the-numbers life-changing experiences. The Taiwanese film Blue Gate Crossing grasps, however, that adolescence is more than a sweetly remembered holding pattern for adulthood. The story of two Taipei high-school girlfriends and the boy who comes between them, Blue Gate Crossing achieves innocence without naiveté, sweetness without sacrificing realism. Its characters fall in and out of love but never quite manage to come of age. They're too busy living.

What they're living is a teen-pop-love triangle with a k.d. lang twist. Girlish Yueh-chen (Liang Shu-hui) has an obsessive crush on her blithe classmate Zhang Shi-hao (the F4-quality cutie Chen Bo-lin). Too shy to talk to Zhang, Yueh-chen feeds her imagination by collecting or stealing his pens and papers, old water bottles and basketball shoes, like a devotee hoarding a saint's relics. Yueh-chen even resorts to sending her best friend, tomboy Meng Ke-rou (Guey Lun-mei), to feel out Zhang—which she promptly, and literally, does. Zhang falls for Meng, Yueh-chen worships Zhang, and as for Meng, well, she's not sure which one she wants to smooch. So she kisses both, with mixed results.

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The beauty of Blue Gate Crossing is in its summery, sedated atmosphere. Writer-director Yee Chin-yen likes to repeat shots, sequences, even whole lines of dialogue: Zhang piloting his bicycle through Taipei's streets, Hawaiian shirt fluttering behind him; Yueh-chen writing her crush's name over and over in perfect characters; Meng hugging her school desk, staring hard at the girl she doesn't want to love. It all adds up to the diffident burn of an adolescent season, the sense of sameness that circumvents time, until time hits back. "You're 17, the summer's over and you haven't done anything," Meng says near the end of the film. It's a shrug of a line but not a mere dismissal; when you're 17, you want and you hate with the same casual intensity.

Yee also has a sure hand for the way teenagers communicate or, rather, don't. Zhang struggles to understand Meng, and Meng struggles to understand herself; eventually the two just resort to shoving each other, which ends up working best of all. Chen has a smile as winning as his personality and a guileless befuddlement that plays well off Guey's nerves. Guey, a high-school student Yee discovered on the street, is a real teenager, emotionally opaque save for moments of piercing transparency when her pain and confusion overwhelm her. It's then, as feelings flicker across her moony eyes, that we can watch someone coming of age the way it actually happens: second by second, heartbreak by heartbreak.