Take Me to a Distant Place is a rare, excellent film. Taiwanese directors know how to move an audience with limpid emotion. Especially the film’s ending, where A-Gui holds up an umbrella to look at the rainbow in the blue sky – it struck deep into my nearly shattered nerves.

A-Xian is a rather sensitive, artistic gay man. He loves to fantasize, falls for backpackers, falls for sailors. He plans out a life with his lover and recites it all to himself, detail by detail; he wants to go to a distant place and settle there quietly – but where is that distant place?

I wondered, and guessed – maybe what he loves isn’t any particular person, just the idea of somewhere far away.

Just as he says: I confess, I weep, the distant place is somewhere I can never reach. In truth the distance isn’t far at all – a person is already standing in the distance, so how could the distance be distant? But once you arrive at that far place, where then is the next far place?

My mind in a muddle, I can only think of a poem:

I think

I have already walked very far

Don’t look at me

Really, don’t look

I have already walked very far

“The Other Side of the Mountain,” Luo Yufeng