tlavideo.com

Amos Lassen wrote on 12/17/2011:

“Drifting Flowers” (Wolfe) looks at the lives of three Taiwanese lesbians at different stages in their lives. They each have one thing in common and that is that they each experience “earth-shattering” love. Zero Chou, who gave us the beautiful “Spider Lilies”, brings us the stories of these women as they attempt to find a place for themselves in the world.

The film is presented in three parts—each in a different time period and each with a woman who searches for both her identity and balance in her life. This is an unconventional look at gender, sexual preference and orientation in Taiwan.

The first vignette is about 8 year old Meigo who is the eyes of her blind sister Jing and she revels in that responsibility. Nightly Meigo takes Jing to sing at a local bar and when Diego, a butch woman joins the back-up band, both sisters fall for her and problems follow. The two sisters have been struggling to stay together in a society that has prejudices against blindness and same-sex love.

The second vignette is the story of love loss and friendship found. Lily is alone and dealing with being a victim of Alzheimer’s disease and she seems to sit and wait for the day when her girlfriend. Ocean will return to her. However, her husband who is a cross-dresser appears at her door and their friendship which had been torn apart becomes a bond to hold them together.

Finally we return to Diego when she was a teen and had to fight with her traditional family and finding love for the first time.

The film is an allegorical journey and Chou uses the symbolic train to represent this. Her heroines seem tough but they are going through a great ordeal which includes self-acceptance, self-discovery, familial responsibility and loyalty as they move toward their final destinations of finding true love. Some may find the film to be little more that a series of lesbian cliché but it is so much more than that. After all, are we all not on a journey of discovery?