Artemisia (2008)

A family centered story

Overall: this centers on Artemisia, a woman with a queer son, a daughter studying/living abroad who then returns with a surprise and a bigoted, penny-pinching mother

Content Warnings: the grandma is very bigoted but it is not shown in a positive way

What I Liked
- the m/m had an actual realistic conversation about thoughts on planning a trip together and whether or not to come out
- the kiddo is super cute
- showing challenges and working through them (Artemisia)
- the mom hanging up that underwear to dry was hilarious

Room For Improvement
- the boyfriend coming over unannounced felt like an ambush and was forcing the son to do something he wasn't yet ready for
- the ending feels a bit abrupt or too open ended, though you can infer what is happening with the son and his boyfriend and I liked the tai chi (I think that's what it is)

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Morning Mo (Tzu-Yi Mo), who we know as the main star of the beautiful movie Dear Tenant from 2020, played the character of Sung Hai's gay son x years ago. His partner was the likeable Gary Tang.
But the film is not only about a gay son, as written in the Details about the film. It is a psychological probe into a multi-generational and incomplete Taiwanese family headed by mother Ai-Tsao. She must gradually cope not only with the growing suspicion that her son is gay and with a greedy mother (grandmother, very well played) who pays attention to the social "conventions" of Taiwanese society in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but also with her daughter, who returns from studies abroad and, as a single mother, brings home a black girl (whom she conceived while studying with a dark-skinned man, with whom she then did not agree on living together). In fact, even the mother herself (Ai-Tsao) did not live a conventional life. Maybe someone will find the story slow and long-winded, but it didn't seem like that to me, and on the contrary, it nicely conveyed the not-so-simple fates of several characters through film.

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