Have you ever aimed your camera at a mirror and taken a photo of the endless spiral of cameras inside of cameras that results from it? Like a hall of mirrors? That’s kind of what Gui Zhou 歸舟 (Stories of the Return) feels like within the first few minutes. Taiwanese-American film director Jolinna Li traveled to Taiwan to make this film, which just so happens to be about an American film director returning to her homeland of Taiwan to make a film.
There are some differences, though. In real life, Jolinna Li is a writer and director, while the fictional director Yu Ge (Letitia Ho-Yu Cheng) in the film is a director who is attempting to film an unfinished script written not by her, but by her deceased mother. But wait… Li’s co-writer on this film is Anna Ma, who just happens to be her mother and is very much alive. Further, the script to the fictional film-within-a-film is actually a real-life script written by Li’s mother, Anna, titled Gui Zhou. There’s certainly a fair share of meta-inserts in this semi-biographical story, but there is also enough here to place the film outside of biography and firmly into slice-of-life, family drama, or coming of age.
“…an American film director travels to Taiwan to film her mother’s unfinished script.”
In Gui Zhou 歸舟 (Stories of the Return), American film director Yu Ge travels to Taiwan to stay with her two aunts and her cousin. She brings with her the script to Gui Zhou, the unfinished script written by her mother, who is no longer with us. In order to skip the long explanation, she tells her actors that she is the writer of the script. Problems begin to arise when the actors question how she, an American, wrote a script that knows so much about Taiwanese culture, especially the references to the story Dream of the Red Chamber, an unfinished book written by Chinese author Cao Xueqin. I wonder if the use of this specific novel in Gui Zhou is a coincidence, given that this unfinished book was later finished by different sources, while Yu Ge is also attempting to finish the unfinished script from her mother. The reflections of Jolinna Li’s real life into this film give Chris Nolan’s Inception a run for its money.
We soon figure out that Yu Ge is not only trying to film and finish the story of Gui Zhou, which involves characters searching for a lost family member, but that she may really be trying to find her place within her family, given that she was not on good terms with her mother at the time of her death. And it doesn’t help that her Taiwanese actors make fun of her for dressing like an American.
Gui Zhou 歸舟 (Stories of the Return) is a triumphant directing debut for Li. The filmmaker pulled quadruple duty as writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. Her future’s so bright, she might just have to wear shades.
"…gives Inception a run for its money."
