Classmates Minus

Movie review by Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media
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Common Sense says

age 15+

Unhappy middle-aged men mope in self pity; language, sex

NR 2021 122 minutes
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A Lot or a Little?

The parents' guide to what's in this movie.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Classmates Minus is a quirky Taiwanese film (in Mandarin with English subtitles) about four high school friends reaching middle age without much to show for their efforts. One is a struggling filmmaker, and the character's profession opens the discussion to many arcane references to cinema and uses of cinematic idioms -- that take the action in and out of reality. A man and woman have clothed sex in a cubicle. A man mimics the motions of masturbating another man's fingers. A man cheats on his wife offscreen. Language includes "f--k," "s--t," "hooker," "damn," "hell," "ass" "piss," and "d--k." Adults drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. A man is brutally beaten to death for no reason. A man who attempts suicide by downing weight-loss pills is found unconscious at a massage parlor. His friends, called to the scene, don't seem upset and he recovers.

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What's the Story?

CLASSMATES MINUS tells the disjointed story of four high school classmates now living out their disappointing 40s in Taiwan. Blockage (Kuan-ting Liu) was nicknamed for his stutter, which only goes away when he talks to spirits, a fairly frequent occurrence. He cares for his now-bedridden grandmother who raised him. They live over his paper sculpture shop, barely eking out a living. Dian-Fan Chen, nicknamed Fan Man (Jen-shuo Cheng), is the savviest, a misanthropic loner who works as an insurance adjuster with little patience for the insurance fraud his company tolerates. Tin Can (Na-dou Lin) works temp jobs, occasionally appearing in his director wannabe friend Tom's TV commercials. Depressed, he downs weight-loss pills in a suicide attempt at a massage parlor, but recovers. When Tin Can takes a job with the housing authority to investigate residential transfer requests, he runs into the "school beauty" (Ada Pan) of his youth, on whom he's long had a crush. Now, 20 years on, she's making her living as a prostitute. Director Tom (Ming-shuai Shih) is offered the chance by a corrupt politician facing an impending scandal to run in his place as the puppet of powerful financiers. He has sex with an attractive campaign manager (Evelyn Yu-tong Cheng), then lies to his unbelieving wife (Jacqueline Zhu Zhi-Ying) about it. Insomniac Fan Man has sex with the giggly and equally sleep-deprived A-zen (Jennifer Hong) at an all-night comic book store. He agrees to marry her, but goes into an existential funk about how life is nothing more than a series of dull moves that lead each of us from cradle to grave. Will any of these men appreciate what they have?

Is It Any Good?

This film shows off some technical skill, but is otherwise disappointing, pretentious, and unlikely to engage teens. Director Hsin-yao Huang's focus on disappointed, self pitying 40-year-old Taiwanese males underscores a willful blindness to the plight of other tragedies suffered by many -- starvation, homelessness, displacement, war, racism. Perhaps this will resonate with Taiwanese men of a certain age, as director Hsin-yao Huang has tackled this subject before in an award-winning film called The Great Buddha+, but, for the wider audience, a series of non-sequitur references about everything from the way men put women on pedestals to The Big Bang fails to connect.

In addition, this fails as social commentary, satire, and comedy. The women here are little more than mother figures or sex objects loaded with unpleasant qualities. One is a rapacious and cynical professional, another an angry, ignored wife, another a giggling fool, and another the high school "class beauty" turned hooker. The director offers no guidance when he trains his camera on a man shedding tears. Why is he crying? There are many possible answers, but apart from generic disillusionment, we are offered no clues. This is two hours of self pitying blather expressed by dull, blank-faced men, accompanied by a sideshow of tired observations about public corruption that might seem praiseworthy if expressed by a bright 12-year-old, but amounts to little more than yawn-inducing platitudes when preached from the mouth of a grownup writer-director.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about what a midlife crisis is. How is this writer-director using his characters to describe disappointment in life?

  • Why do you think these friends feel sorry for themselves? Do you think they've ignored the good they have in their lives? Why or why not?

  • How do men treat women in this movie? How are women portrayed? What are some indications that some of these men may not be honestly communicating with the women in their lives?

Movie Details

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