Che Zhan 车站

Description:

In this ninety-minute television drama, the first half is told from the daughter's point of view as she looks at her long-widowed father and at herself, still unmarried. Returning home to visit her father, she unwittingly carries back to Taipei a loneliness that often blends her own circumstances with her pity for him. Although the depression and bewilderment that repeatedly intertwine with her moods are never revealed in front of the family, the daughter's weariness and helplessness cannot escape — again and again they are written on the window reflections of the trains between Taipei and Jiaoxi, and in her hurried, solitary footsteps through Taipei... Facing her aging father, the daughter once rushed to find a partner — partly because she did not want her father to leave this world with regret and worry; yet in making all these efforts for him, was she not also, moved by the aging of life and its uncontrollability, afraid that one day she too, growing older, would face the same helplessness and solitude as her father. Twenty minutes of the film are shown from the paralyzed father's point of view: through his voice-over and inner consciousness, he narrates how he went missing, how his daughter found him and brought him home, and the five days until his death — the various family members and the urgent feelings of the father paralyzed in bed. The father's voice-over and his paralyzed body are like the two ends of a seesaw, opposing each other while moving in parallel. The father was a railway worker all his life, and his professionalism often leaves people wavering between respect and the urge to stifle a laugh, but at the moment of his death, viewers may, like his daughter, find it hard to laugh at his seriousness anymore.