I gotta say, this movie pleasantly surprised me. I mean, I just noticed this movie sitting in the foreign film section of my college library and thought it would be a fun, corny watch.
I expected Spider Lilies to be corny and hypersexualized, but it was actually handled with a lot a care. I could tell the director wanted this to be a good movie, not just a lesbian film. Which makes sense after looking up who the director is, but I’ll get into that later.
I doubt most of you know what the movie is so I’ll give a brief synopsis before telling you why I liked it. Jade is a cam girl who wants to get a tattoo. More specifically she wants to get the tattoo she remembered her first childhood love having (if a question mark just shaped in your head, don’t worry. I understand. Jade’s first love looked at least six years older than her and even then they were probably too young to be having a tattoo. The feelings were not reciprocal). So she goes to a tattoo artist to get this tattoo and surprise surprise the tattoo artist happens to be Jade’s first love. This isn’t really revealed to the characters, but it shows that Jade just kind of knew. So yeah, Jade becomes obsessed with getting this tattoo done by the tattoo artist. However, that tattoo holds significant meaning to the tattoo artist so she isn’t all that willing to give Jade the tattoo. But Jade is determined! That’s kind of the premise of the movie.
Despite one of the girls being a cam girl and the cover of the dvd, the movie isn’t that sexual. It contains one make-out scene from one of the girls in a previous relationship when they were younger. The other was a sex scene between the two love interests which didn’t happen until the last 10 minute of the film.
Anyways, the movie is heartfelt. I cared about the girl’s past (yes, they both unsurprisingly have tragic pasts) and I wanted everything to work out for them. They were likable characters. The side characters were likable as well. Especially the guy (I forgot his name) that kept wanting to get more tattoos- he was hilarious. A lesbian film…with male characters that aren’t trashbags…imagine that.
I wouldn’t go as far to say that the soundtrack is good because there’s pretty much only one track that’s ever played in the film. But boy is it a damn good track. Okay maybe it’s not the same track, but each track is played in the same tune. Either way, it was effective and I want to buy the soundtrack now.
I did have a few problems with the movie, however, one of them being the last 30 to 20 minutes being really…weird and generally confusing. I had no idea what was going on for the last 20 minutes of this movie. Another thing is that although the two love interests are likable and have interesting backgrounds, there isn’t a lot of chemistry between them. They kind of like each other at the end of the movie and there’s a sex scene between them, but that’s kind of it.
I don’t know…there’s something about the way the movie is executed that made it really enjoyable to watch and make me care about what was happening.
Because I found this movie from my college’s library, I was able to watch the behind the scenes stuff on the dvd I watched it on and I was able to learn more about the director, along with searching some stuff up about her here on the interweb- and I think this is something you guys should get in on. So ready closely.
The director of Spider Lilies is a woman named Zero Chou who is most well known for directing documentaries- being dubbed the most talented documentary director. She’s also one of the few openly lesbian filmmakers in the world; she’s the only one in Taiwan. She is currently on something called the Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project, which she’s trying to get done quickly since many of these places don’t allow films that present LGBT+ content.
I’m intending to watch more things by Zero Chou, as while Spider Lilies was a weird film that sometimes didn’t make sense, it had a lot of heart in it and it’s clear that Zero Chou handled the love story with care. I think supporting her is of a lot of importance. So guys please go look into her films.
originally posted here
Romance Junkie (Title in Progess) 