I watched Flower Buds and Youth on the second day of my Taipei Film Festival schedule. Both films depict poverty-stricken families undergoing some downward spiral.
In Flower Buds, every member in the working class family wants to live a better life, but the convergence of every one’s problems–namely slot machine, increasing debts, the father’s unemployment, teenager pregnancy, and the obsession with the stripper–all of the above lead to the inevitable misery of the death of the Vietnamese guy Long. Flower Buds sets in a small town in Czech Republic, and the opening shots has portrayed how miserable and barren the town is: Heavy snow covers the train tracks, adding the miserable tone to the film. The cinematography of the film is fantastic, showing the cruel nature of the weather and the humanity in eastern Europe, and the narration is very smooth.
While Flower Buds is a story about working class family, Youth is about middle class family in Israel which is about to face upcoming financial difficulty. First the film tracks how the twins think of the plan to kidnap a high school girl, and as the story unfolds, the audience will be more and more aware of the worsening situation of the family.
The actress who played the mother in the film, Shirili Deshe, has joined the interview after the screening. She said that although noticing something going wrong, the family members in Youth do not discuss the important matters, which reflects the reality of Israeli society. It’s very common for parents not to talk about how bad the situation is when their children are around. So everyone seeks their own way to deal with the situation, but not as a family. the second thing she said is that it’s very normal for young men who attends military service to carry rifles on the streets, which is very different from the living experience in Taiwan. When she goes to work by train, sometimes her legs will be touched by the rifle of young soldier who sits beside her. And Israel has also been stricken by economic crisis like any other capitalist countries, and the middle class has been suffering the most. Israeli people have gone on a strike against the government in 2011, and in 2013 they elected a new president, whom they hope will take the country out from the ditch.
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