While heading home from class, three classmates, none of whom are friends, discover the body of a girl in an alleyway shortly after she jumped off a balcony. After giving a statement and being forced to visit the school’s emotionally inept counsellor, the students become convinced there is more to the girl’s suicide than people think. The trio of ragtag boys team up and launch an investigation, searching for clues that may or may not be there but becoming decent friends in the process. Things don’t go according to plan though and soon death strikes again, this time causing a shake-up within the group that leaves everyone in a very unstable emotional state. Directed by Chang Jung-Chi, Partners in Crime is part detective story, part loneliness drama, and part high school adventure, that culminates into a gorgeous looking and interesting, albeit semi-predictable, film from Taiwan.
As mentioned, Partners in Crime centers on three high school boys, Huang, who is the lonely outcast, Lin, the nerdy A+ student, and Yeh, the troublemaker/semi-jock type character. While normally they would never be caught dead with each other, the death of this girl brings them really close together and the idea of investigating further into her suicide brings them to almost immediate best friend level. While unfortunate events generally unite people as a coping mechanism, in this film it doesn’t seem much like a coping mechanism as it is an opportunity to explore something cool. The focus on the “why” rather than each individual’s emotional state is one of the main reasons why I really enjoyed the first half of this film. The counsellor at school, who I mentioned was emotionally inept, really is the initial driving force behind the boy’s curiosity since she says “nothing happens after death, you just die, that’s it.” That’s pretty harsh for high school kids but at least their annoyance of that comment helped separate the emotions of the death from the cause of it. This is the way a real detective story would play out, so props to the filmmakers.
About halfway through the film, the plot takes a sudden shift when another body surfaces but, this time, it hits the boys hard. They each become emotional wrecks, going their separate ways causing them to resent each other. It’s hard to describe without spoiling but what I will say is that the cause of all this stems from a steady stream of lies that relate to the idea of being lonely. The issue of loneliness is something that each character faces at some point and is a really nice shift from the investigative aspect. In fact, I found this to be the main reason why the film was able to really take hold of me as an audience member. While I was able to predict the causes of certain things, I still appreciated the concept and the angle the film was coming from.
Now, while I dug the film from a basic entertainment level, it had some issues that couldn’t be overlooked. Throughout the film, clues were randomly being discovered that helped propel specific theories forward. Many of these were justifiable and valid, but one of the biggest clues that came in the second half was a picture of the three boys meeting in a parking lot, it looked like a surveillance shot from a phone camera. My issue here is who the hell is actually taking a random photo in a parking lot at that specific moment before a drastic event happens? Did someone manage to hack a security camera and that’s where it’s actually from? It’s so improbable and incredibly convenient that it made me almost want to discredit the entire film. When you see the scene you’ll know what I’m talking about but, suffice to say, it really offended my intelligence as a viewer. As a little add on, I did think the acting was mediocre, it was decent but there were plenty of points where it felt a little amateurish.
Overall, I did enjoy Partners in Crime. It was a beautifully shot, moderately compelling crime drama that had some decent twists and turns even if you could figure out a certain important twist by the halfway mark. It didn’t waste time diving into the mystery of the girl’s suicide and it was nice to see a dramatic high school sleuth story where the leads were able to put most of their emotions behind them while investigating. Partners in Crime is the type of film I’d watch on VOD but if you’re looking for a cool Asian movie to watch at the fest, I’d give it a whirl.
Partners in Crime screens on July 11th at 3:45 at the Beatrice Theater.
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