A typical Taiwanese romantic drama that focused on the Romance of a first love and the devastation of unrequited love. However, unlike most films of its genre, director Patrick Liu (柳广辉) seemed restricted by its central LGBTQIA+ story to fully tell a realised love story. Therefore, instead of getting deep and personal with each of its main characters, what we ended up getting was a series of beautiful and lovely - and occasionally touching - vignettes that only managed to outline the story of the two protagonists without allowing a full colouring and characterisation of them as individuals.
That being said, the second half of the Second Act was its strongest and most involving. Lead actors, Edward Chen (陈昊森) and Jing-Hua Tseng (曾敬骅) really submitted to their characters in those scenes which helped to sell their relationship.
The Third Act, on the other hand, was not really necessary and seemed to serve more as a wish-fulfilment for Liu than any real dramatic purposes. Nothing showed in those final few scenes could not have been implied in the preceding hour and a half. Even the beauty of the final scene could have been transposed to that gut-wrenching, heart-tugging closure of the Second Act.
Now, that scene - classic Taiwanese melodrama - was the pièce de résistance of this film and should have been the end of the film. Coupled with the ear worm that was its title song, that scene was powerful, effective and simple, and if it served as the film's ending would have devastated the audience and allowed the film to linger within them.
Liu's choice to use flashback to delineate the story in the first two acts was a double-edged sword. It helped to hook the audience into figuring out why Chen's character was bleeding and confiding in the school's priest but yet his confessions also served to provide the string where Liu strung on the vignettes of the boys' relationship and hence hamstrung (all pun intended) the characterisations of them as individuals and them as best friends/couples/whatever-they-were. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of religion and homosexuality was only given lip service and should have either been fully explored or just laid aside. Liu tried to juggle too much and lost focus.
Chen's portrayal of a boy coming to terms with his sexual identity deserved praise regardless of his own sexual preferences. Chen's melancholic reflections and eventual unabashed affection for the boy of his desires appeared natural and unforced.
Tseng, being the aforesaid object of desire, was more of a cipher. Maybe it was done purposefully, but Liu and Tseng had crafted a character's whose identity that seemed inscrutable, and that made him a difficult character to want to root for.
Your Name Engraved Herein had a beautiful love story in its core that was unnecessary complicated by the ambition of its director. But, thankfully, the charismatic and capable leads still managed to capture the complexity of the central relationship and that served to keep the audience invested and engaged.
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