‘Buddha Mountain’ Actress Meditates on Life and Loss

Hong Kong — Actress Sylvia Chang Ai-chia was eager to tell the audience that the character she played in Buddha Mountain wasn’t really her.

“Don’t believe it too much. My true self is actually beautiful,” she joked as she introduced the cross-strait film screened on March 30 as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

She could have fooled anyone. Chang’s performance had such heart and depth that it was easy to see her as a one-time Peking opera singer in despair rather than as a longtime Taiwanese actress with more than 80 film credits.

Buddha Mountain, which had its world premiere in Tokyo in October 2010, is the collaborative product of filmmakers and actors from Taiwan and mainland China. The film opened in Beijing in early March, grossing RMB25.7 million (HK$30.5 million) in the first four days.

The story is about three frustrated youths (played by Fan Bingbing, Chen Po Lin and Fei Long) who, seeking independence, rent rooms from a lonely woman (Chang) who is coping with the loss of her son. Each a little broken, the four characters learn to live together, let go and find comfort in one another.

As Chang said during a post-film Q&A: “Through the other party, they are able to feel their existence.”

The film’s title is taken from the name of a train station in Sichuan Province that the youths come across during one of their (many) directionless train-hopping jaunts.

Nearby, they discover an old temple destroyed by the earthquake in 2008. The three and their landlady help rebuild the Guan Yin Buddha temple, and in the process, put themselves together again.

To Chang, the train represents something profound, an allusion to life and death. “You can get on together and enjoy life, but who knows if you can get off together,” she said.

When the audience does disembark from the movie, it is left pondering an ambiguous ending.

It was an ending that Chang said she struggled with. “I discussed it with the director for half a year. I had lots of questions for her. [The scripted ending] didn’t seem right,” Chang said.  “But in the end, it was up to the director.”

The role was a departure for Chang, who is also a director and screenwriter. Chang, 57, is known for playing a tough-talking police officer in the Aces Go Places comedies in the 1980s.

“The director was looking for someone with a painful experience to play the role of the landlady. It’s different for me, but I tried to do my best because I like her work,” Chang said, referring to director Li Yu.

“The director used a hand-held technique so it didn’t feel like we were making a movie,” Chang added. “It felt like we were just living life.”

Li, whose controversial film Lost in Beijing was banned by Chinese authorities in 2008, did not appear at the Q&A because she was unable to process her visa application in time, according to HKIFF’s website.

View a clip from the film: