Strawman (film)

Directed by Wang Toon (王童; aka Wang Tong), Strawman is a Taiwanese film released in 1987. It is the first feature of Wang's “Taiwan Trilogy,  which also includes Banana Paradise (香蕉天堂; 1989) and Hill of No Return'' (無言的山丘; 1992). The film adopts a comic tone to depict the hardships of life as colonizers in rural Taiwan at the height of WWII. Though not an adaptation from nativist novel like Wang's acclaimed A Flower in The Raining Night (看海的日子; 1983), which is based on the namesake novel by Huang Chun Ming (黃春明), Strawman’s poor farmer family at Yilan’s Shuanglian Pi and the ridiculous journey to deliver an unexploded bomb are depicted very much in the style of Huang's nativist literature. The film won the Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in The 24th Golden Horse Awards.

Plot
The story is told from the viewpoint of a scarecrow on the field. The two brothers A Fa and Big Mouth were second-generation tenant farmers living in rural Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule during WWII. Life was hard and they had quite a number of children to feed and a sister who lost her mind after her newlywed husband was drafted by the Japanese and died on the battlefield. They did not have a good harvest this year. Despite the presence of scarecrows, the huge amount of sparrows were determined to take a share of what they grew. To avoid her two sons being drafted, their mother smeared cow dung on their eyes to cause infection.

Their landlord was the husband of A Fa's sister-in-law, Yueh Niang. He came to live with the family due to the airstrikes of the US. The family prepared a big dinner to welcome the landlord and his family, including a fish, which was a luxury in the mountain. The children were told that they could have a taste of the fish for the guest would only eat half of it. The fish was consumed completely by the guests and the children were heartbroken. A Fa and Big Mouth that he had decided to sell the land to the sugar factory, which saddened the whole family. What made it worse was the confiscation of their cattle by the Japanese military, without which they could not farm the field. Later that day, the village suffered an air raid by the US. One unexploded bomb fell on their farm.

Believing that they could be handsomely rewarded, the brothers and the local policeman decided to carry the heavy bomb all the way to the police office in the town. To their disappointment, the Japanese police officer was totally terrified by the sight of the bomb and ordered them to immediately leave and throw the bomb to the sea. They had no choice but to follow the order. They were shocked when the bomb unexpectedly exploded in the sea and happily collected many of those fish blown to the rocky shore. In the end, they returned home with a lot of fish for everyone in the family to eat to their satisfaction. And luckily the landlord was not able to sell the field as he wished due to the war. For the time being life can still go on for the brothers and their family.

Production
For Wang Toon the silent scarecrows in the movie represent the ordinary Taiwanese, inferior to the Japanese, under Japanese rule.

The disabled Taiwanese officer who served in the Japanese military is not played by an actor but a local villager at Su'ao, Yilan. During the shooting, Wang Toon insisted that the character of the wounded soldier be played by a disabled person. While the production team was having difficulty to find such an actor, they accidentally met the man in a Hotel near Su'ao. He became one of the significant characters in the movie.

Because of the language policy of Taiwan at the time when the film was made, the actors have to speak Mandarin in the whole film, despite the setting of the story being in a Taiwanese village. To be truthful to his own film, Wang Toon secretly produced a version of the film dubbed in Taiwanese, which is also the version that is digitally restored version of the film released in 2023 by the Taiwan Film and Audio-visual Institute.