Call of the Sea
Kind of an offshoot of the Folk Musical genre. It’s got most of the standard genre elements: Taiwanese fishing villages, songs using the standard Folk Musical melody, unmitigated thuggishness from the villains. And boats. Lots and lots of boats.
But it lacks the improvised singing battles that, to me, are the true core of the genre. So while it may not be a full Folk Musical, it’s definitely very close.
Something this movie desperately lacks is a single likable character. It’s largely about how small village jealousies lead to strife, division and violence. So it makes sense thematically that everyone in the film is short sighted, jealous and mean. But man, it gets to be a lot.
There’s Lu Chin-Hu (Kang Wei) who is hot tempered, frequently drunk, and out for revenge. Elsie Tu Tieh as the ‘town beauty’ who yells at pretty much everyone and hides out behind rocks in the middle of the night just to see if her boyfriend is cheating on her. There’s the always villainous Lo Wei (who I think must have really enjoyed playing massive jerks based on this and his role in Crocodile River).
And bearing it all is Li Li-Hua as the frequently widowed and constantly maligned brunt of the village’s scorn. She’s the one person in town who is not a jerk, but she is also sad for nearly 100% of the movie.
Written by Chang Cheh, it’s not a huge surprise that this film really leans in to the revenge and action towards its melodramatic conclusion. But when that final song kicks in, using the oh-so-familiar Folk Musical melody, there’s a bit of tonal whiplash between the dour movie we just saw and the song’s jaunty beat.
This was put up today on the official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8RHPM8GCNU
I believe it’s the first film they’ve added that did not have a DVD release, which means that it also didn’t come with the English subtitle tracks that they put on those DVD releases.
The English subtitles they have on this one are…not so great. But some nice and mysterious benefactor who couldn’t possibly be me has put up both Chinese and English subs on OpenSubtitles. https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/sublanguageid-all/idmovie-2236046
Were the subtitles made by Google Translate? I couldn’t possibly say as I am not the kind and handsome stranger who made them. But they are much better than the ones on the YouTube video.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2025-02-20