Gaga

“Characters in Gaga organically mingle Christian and Atayal beliefs.”

Title: Gaga (2023) / Chinese: 哈勇家
Director: Laha Mebow 👩🏻🇹🇼 (Atayal)
Writers: Laha Mebow 👩🏻🇹🇼 (Atayal) and Hsieh Hui Ching 👩🏻🇹🇼

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 4.5/5

When it comes to family dramas, count me in. The pathos and comedy that can be mined from gaps in understanding between family members are limitless, and in Laha Mebow’s Gaga, heartily used. The film, which won Best Director at last year’s Golden Horse Awards and screened at Seattle International Film Festival this past weekend, follows an Atayal community—one of Taiwan’s 16 officially recognized Indigenous peoples—in the aftermath of Grandpa Hayung’s (Chen De-qing) passing. Between the high drama of politicking and mayoral elections, an unplanned pregnancy, and run-ins with the law, viewers manage to get a slice-of-life peek at an agrarian lifestyle in the verdant mountains of central Taiwan.

As with many vérité-style films that prefer realism over gloss, we’re invited to sit in quieter moments. We grasp the underlying meaning of everyday motions like planting a seedling, or playing a traditional mouth harp to ease a somber moment. Even election rallies, complete with megaphones and onstage dancers, take on a level of mundanity, thanks to a steady camera and unobtrusive lens.

Gaga deftly balances the intimacy that comes from this style of filmmaking while briskly moving its plot along, covering an entire, turbulent year in its under-2-hour runtime. This doesn’t mean the pacing is perfect—some ambient scenes could be cut without losing any immersion, especially towards the latter half of the film as it grows unclear where the narrative is headed. Luckily, the gorgeous setting captured by Mebow makes it as beautiful of a watch as it is touching, even when viewers are sometimes asked to sit still for just a tad too long.

Gender: 4.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Women play traditional roles in Gaga as mothers, wives, and daughters who exist without complaint in a male-driven society. In this village, men are family heads and politicians—the movers and shakers, if you will, while women are forced to exert their power in softer ways, bending the ears of men if they want anything done their way.

But women get plenty of screen time, their strength recognized in full. Whether it’s Grandma’s (Kagaw Piling) crucial role as the family’s social glue, to 20-year-old Ali’s (Ali Batu) unplanned pregnancy and birth of a child that brings great joy from the ashes of financial ruin, women are treasured and valued.

All of this is brought to life by a female filmmaker, and Mebow recognizes how society’s changing gender norms affect this small Atayal village. After their family’s wealth has been decimated by the election campaign of the earnest Pasang (Wilang Lalin), who’s not nearly wily enough for politics, it’s his niece who becomes the breadwinner, joining the Taiwanese military while joking that her brother Enoch (Yukan Losing) is too unreliable to do so. Instead, Enoch is the heart of the film—a happy-go-lucky teenager who, of all the characters in the film, understands Grandpa Hayung the most and carries on traditional customs into the next generation. It’s a welcome gender role reversal—the niece striking out to make money, the nephew staying home to preserve their culture—that signals Gaga’s understanding of how to honor the immense history of Native peoples while remaining flexible enough to bend with the times.

Race: 5/5

While Taiwan has an impressive film canon, almost all of it has followed the stories of ethnic Han Chinese, or those descended from two main waves of immigration from China dating back to the 1760s. Gaga, on the other hand, was written and directed by Mebow, an Indigenous Taiwanese filmmaker and Atayal, much like the family she depicts on screen. Characters are authentically cast, with a mix of professional and non-professional Atayal actors. Meanwhile, cultural markers, such as Grandma’s weaving, the casual consumption of millet wine and preserved pork, and the hunting/trapping and sacrificing of animals, all feel grounded in the present day, avoiding overly precious film techniques like magic hour lighting or slow motion effects that can feel like the go-to aesthetic for traditions that are, to be fair, thousands of years old.

The only detail that misses the mark on ethnicity comes through the character of Ali’s boyfriend, Andy (Andy Huang), whom she met prior the film’s events at school in New Zealand. Huang is a Taiwanese actor who plays an English-speaking foreigner, presumably an East Asian man born and raised in New Zealand. However, to the ears of someone whose mother tongue is English, the accent is noticeably off, making it difficult to place his character’s background. Is he meant to be a New Zealander? What is this character’s backstory? Whatever the answer might be, the ambiguity took me out of the film’s otherwise all-encompassing world. Still, this is just a small quibble. Gaga lends a fascinating look at Taiwanese society from a unique perspective; that far outpaces one inauthentic casting choice.

Bonus for Religion: +1.00

A Western audience might assume that Indigenous populations in Taiwan follow traditional religions, as many do in North America. And in her director’s statement shared with press, Mebow does say, “I firmly believe in Utux, and I believe that he blessed us with the snow when we shot the film.” But unlike the government-sponsored cultural genocide forced onto North American Indigenous peoples, Taiwan experienced an incredibly different relationship with Christianity—one where it was the minority faith, banned at various intervals in the past few centuries by Chinese and Japanese ruling governments. As a result, Indigenous Taiwanese tribes today mostly follow Christianity.

This carries into Gaga in digestible ways, such as the way Grandpa Hayung’s family prays to God before dinner, or attends church and sings hymns in Chinese. But this doesn’t mean traditional beliefs have gone away; rather, characters demonstrate religious inclusivism, organically mingling Christian and Atayal beliefs.

Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.00/5

Down-to-earth, visually stunning, painful, and humorous, Gaga is a multi-generational family drama that sits pretty with other Taiwanese classics—as sprawling as Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), with an engagement party to rival the antics of The Wedding Banquet (1993). Best of all, Mebow expands the rather homogenous pool of Taiwanese filmmakers, opening the door for more female and Indigenous perspectives to influence the island’s stories being exported to international audiences.

Like Gaga? Try these other dramas starring Indigenous actors.

Grade: ALiMay 22, 2023Great for: Race, Great for: Religion, Female/Nonbinary Creator