KUO CHENG-CHUI: LAST NIGHT IN TAIPAI (2025) NYAFF
TRAILER Foursome reunite, talk, and drink wandering Taipei Blanche (Yuu Chen), Jake (Jeff Kuo), and Axin (Phil Hou) went their separate ways six years ago after sharing a close friendship and a dream of becoming actors. Since then, they’ve had no contact. On the night covered by this film by Taipei expat Cheng-Chui Kuo, who has long lived in France, chance reunites these three in the heart of Taipei. In an attractive
Before Sunrise style tale, the three, joined by Mao Mao (Chi-Yun Mao), who Axin is breaking up with, to drink, wander, and talk, exploring secrets, memories, future possibilities and past disappointments. To start with it's after arguing with her husband, Ben (Yu Lin) that Blanche meets ex-boyfriend Jake by chance. They join their mutual friend Axin, and also Mao Mao. As the group spends a night out and old feelings and relationships resurface, they run into a few others as well.
The director uses this encounter of four people, which is liberally supplied with voiceovers in the manner of French directors like Éric Rohmer, to explore his sense, strengthened by a first long sojourn in decades (see the interview article in
Source[) of being a Taiwanese outlier because he is a well established expatriate. As each main character has a voiceover, all are able to convey a sense of detachment. This is a Taiwanese film with a French sensibility. Kuo studied filmmaking in France and has lived there for over twenty years and returned to Taipei only briefly to make this film. There is more nudity, more suggestion of sex, than usual for Taiwanese film, even of male-on-male sex. Beyond that, this is a synthesis, and feels like a brave accomplishment and recapturing of roots for Kuo who, with a terrific cast has made a very engaging and absorbing film.
Jake is a kind of stand-in for the filmmaker, because he has been living long in France. Jake describes always choosing in the past not to like or feel at home in Taiwan because he wanted to go to live in another country. But he admits to not feeling at home anywhere, still having trouble with French, a foreigner there, but not really Taiwanese either.
For a fan of Rohmer the film was initially enjoyable, though the director who first came to mind was Wong Kar-wai, and if you look for satisfaction provided by either Rohmer or Wong here you may not find them. However European in sensibility, this is a Taiwanese film, formally itself, but very much about the issue of Taipei and being an outsider there, revisiting it. This film was the first time the director had brought a camera to the city.
Of course this doesn't provide the thrill of Wong Kar-wai, but it is a pleasantly meditative, meandering, European-influenced film, nicely acted, with four attractive actors, sharing subtle emotions. It has the good sense to pause for a breather every now and then, and it takes time toward the end for a nice sequence of suit generis images of the city, making it seem in some corners perhaps to resemble Paris.
Last Night in Taipei is meant also as a portrait of Taipei as well as the sketch of four thirty-somethings gently exploring each other - as well as getting drunk by the method of walking around the city chugging cans of beer. (At least they don't seem to throw the empty cans on the sidewalk.) This could be seen as a more athletic version of the Asian genre of the talk-and-get-drunk dialogue film exemplified by Hong Sang-soo.
The main character and the emotional anchor of the film, Blanche is a local who has always lived in Taipei trying to achieve success. She represents the city's co-existence of old and new, and her story mirrors the pursuit of money and a "better life" within the capital. Jake is colored by having lived in France and always having felt alienated from Taipei, even before he left, because he planned on leaving. His surprise run-in with Blanche reignites old passions and forces them both to confront the choices they’ve made. Axin has shared acting aspirations with Blanche and Jake. Ben is Blanche's current husband, though he is often absent or a source of friction.
The four actors, are attractive, and there's a sexiness about the film. It even has a homosexual flashback and suggestions that attractions between the same sexes are not impossible, though ultimately, perhaps, rejected. A trim and enjoyable little film with indeed a European tilt to it.
Kuo Cheng-chui has done something difficult and necessary in making this film, I feel. He has in a sense made a French film in Mandarin Chinese, both confronting his almost-abandoned roots and applying his long-adopted European culture and filmmaking methods to them. He has made the most of all he knows.
Last Night in Taipei, 明日的過客 87 mins., Premiered at Vancouver Oct. 8, 2025, also shown at Taipei (Kaohsiung Film Festival) Oct. 26, 2026. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
Showtime:
Screening + Q&A with Kuo Cheng-chui
Sun., Jul. 19
2:30 PM
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