What A View | Dear Ex on Netflix – award-winning Mandarin-language film explores family values in Taiwan

An odd-couple Netflix double bill this week, featuring a film that feels like it could have been a 10-part series and a 10-part series that looks like a film (albeit an extended one).

Said film is Dear Ex, a Taiwanese tragicomedy starring, well, a couple of odd couples: gay male lovers on one hand, the ex-wife and son of one of the men on the other. The older man of the two is a professor apparently settled in his marriage, who suddenly disappears with a local-theatre actor and stage manager broadly considered a too-enthusiastic drinker, smoker and slob. The permanently stressed and histrionic ex-wife, meanwhile, seems to be in a never-ending fight with the teenaged son, unable to “talk” to him unless she’s screaming, while he flounders, trying to understand what’s happened to his father.

At the start of the film the older man has already succumbed to cancer, so his story is told in flashbacks, while the present-day chaos, confrontation and triangle of hatred blow up, the flames fanned by an insurance payout left to the young lover instead of the dead man’s family. Already mortified and in meltdown mode, the abandoned wife is staggered to find her son leaving home … to move in with his father’s former partner.

If all that sounds like a recipe for unmanageable bile then the film has done its job of preparing to surprise. Dear Ex proves to be a work of redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness, with star turns from Hsieh Ying-hsuan as Liu San-lian, the forever-furious spurned wife and mother, and Roy Chiu as Jay, the deadbeat young actor – or “family-wrecking fag” as the quietly seething son, Chengxi (Joseph Huang), memorably tars him.

Co-directed by Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen (the latter known for his visually distinctive music videos), Dear Ex is already bristling with awards and nominations. And at its heart, it’s a love story: nothing odd about that.