Singing Chen’s second film (her first, Bundled, was at VIFF 00) is a major accomplishment, and it’s quite splendid. This ambitious multi-character drama, set in contemporary Taiwan, announces that an important new Taiwanese filmmaker has arrived.

Ching (pop singer Tarcy Su) is a hand model suffering from severe postpartum depression. Her careerist husband A Xiong (Chang Han) is drawn to well-outfitted spiritualism. Niu Jiao (Hou Hsiao-hsien regular Jack Gao) fixes “gods” and feeds a pack of wandering dogs. He has a large truck full of animated, illuminated statues of Buddhist deities whom he drives to various local celebrations. On the side, he collects and repairs small statues of gods discarded by their owners: they (the gods) somehow inform him where they’ve been abandoned. Xian (Jonathan Chang, the young boy in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, now grown up) is a runaway petty thief who earns money winning eating competitions. Biung is an aboriginal carver struggling to recover from alcoholism; his tough daughter Savi is sent away to study kick-boxing in Taipei.

God Man Dog achieves a small miracle: it keeps all these balls soaring in the air, criss-crossing in delightfully unexpected ways. Chen’s compassionate eye for characters makes each come to vivid life. Her and cinematographer Shen Ko-shang’s camera creates image after image of astonishing beauty, which build to a series of climaxes whose magic seems both gracefully easy, completely earned and uncannily rhapsodic.

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