The Personals

Set in Taipei, Taiwan (apparently a singleton's nightmare city), The Personals is exactly what lonely heart Du Jiazhen (Asian pop star-cum-actress Rene Liu) turns to in order to mend her broken heart. Before long the very attractive (and oddly unattached) ophthalmologist, using the alias Ms. Wu, is besieged with offers of matrimony, albeit from a string of losers. As Wu (Du?) patiently gives each of them their fifteen minutes ("it's like going to work," she confesses to a friend), she gradually reveals the true reason behind her loneliness via a series of phone messages she leaves on her ex-lover's answering machine. Despite a threadbare plot, which consists of a long series of witty, though eventually numbing, blind introductions, the film is surprisingly winning, mainly due to the warm lead turn of Ms. Liu, whose enormously subtle performance serves as the perfect foil to the madness playing itself out around her. (Her paramours include a thrifty middle-aged school teacher, who brings his own drink to the restaurant; a pimp, who ends up offering her a job on the side; and a fawning foot fetishist, who lugs a suitcase full of pumps to their first meeting.) Granted, the emotionally wrenching ending is sprung on the audience a bit unfairly, and her luck in love is just too bad to be believable, but time spent making the acquaintance of this gentle sleeper is time well spent. Recommended. (S. C. Sickles)