The Personals

Issues of modern romance and personal identity are played for intelligent laughter in this tart comedy from Taiwan. Wu (played by Rene Liu) is a businesswoman in her early 30’s whose professional life is going just fine. It’s her personal life that’s giving her problems. Since she’s not meeting the right sort of man in her daily life, she decides to take the bull by the horns and place a personal ad in the newspaper; she gets over 100 responses to her ad, and much of the film is taken up by her meetings with a variety of men who want to know more about her. Her potential suitors range from a restaurant manager with a shoe fetish and a writer who his brings his mother along to a would-be rock star and a lesbian in male drag. Director Chen Kuo-Fu was a leading Taiwanese film critic in the 1980’s before moving to filmmaking in the early 1990’s.