Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dear Ex’ On Netflix, Where A Teen Gets To Know His Late Father’s True Love

In the United States, there have been plenty of stories about people who have married and raised families questioning their sexuality, but it’s a topic that’s still touchy in certain countries. Taiwan is one of them. Dear Ex is a film about a family discovering the hows and whys of their late patriarch’s decision to leave his insurance settlement to his male partner, couched in sexual politics that may make Americans cringe. Read on to find out more…

DEAR EX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The movie opens with drawings and a voice over by Sung Cheng-hsi (Joseph Huang), a teenage boy whose dad, Sung Cheng-yuan (Spark Cheng), died 95 days earlier after battling cancer. He knew his father was gay, but he had no idea who he left his mother, Liu San-lien (Hsieh Ying-hsuan), for. That was, until San-lien learned that her husband changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy.

Which is what brought the two of them to the apartment of Ah Jie (Roy Chiu), who is directing a play at a small theater. During the final months of his life, Cheng-yuan moved in with Jie, which has, made his mother into “Liu San-lien 2.0,” as Cheng-hsi tells his therapist. Angry, demanding, overbearing and prone to dramatics, Cheng-hsi can’t stand his mother’s shtick anymore — including throwing out his father’s letters — which leads him to go seek out Jie, even if it is to threaten to jump off his balcony.

When San-lien arrives and berates Cheng-hsi off the balcony, he decides to stay with Jie, even though Jie wants nothing to do with his “male lover”‘s kid or the daily visits from the ranting “mistress”, San-lien to clean and drop off Cheng-hsi’s meals and medicine. The longer Cheng-hsi lives there, the more confused he gets about his father’s true relationship with him. Through flashbacks, we see some of what really happened, especially the period where Jie becomes a caretaker to Cheng-hsi as his illness gets worse.

As Cheng-hsi figures Jie out, the more tense his relationship is with his mother gets; Cheng-hsi just figures she’s in it for the payout. But after some people “pay a visit” to Jie, even San-lien starts to figure out the whole story, and why her ex made the decision to leave the money for Jie.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The arc of Dear Ex almost feels like that of My Own Private Idaho, without the road trip. It’s a journey of discovery for all three of the movie’s principals, in a society were LGBTQ rights aren’t nearly as advanced as they are in North America and Europe.

Performance Worth Watching: Hsieh Ying-hsuan has the unenviable role of being the loud, overbearing mother in Dear Ex, but as we come to learn Liu San-lien has a reason to be loud and overbearing, and the later scenes show how much pain she’s really in. Hsieh does a nice job of conveying that pain.

Memorable Dialogue: San-lien busts into her son’s therapist’s office, and sits down to talk. She reflects on when Cheng-yuan told her that he was gay. “I still can’t figure it out, just this one little question,” she tells the therapist through her tears. “Can you tell me? You’re a doctor. You’re smart. Was it all a lie? Was there no love at all? Not… even… a little bit?”

Single Best Shot: Cheng-hsi calls his mother and screams at her to come to Jie’s apartment. After a winding shot of her running up some stairs, she discovers that someone has made Jie’s leg bend in a way that no leg should bend.

Sex and Skin: Just some kissing between Jie and Cheng-yuan, but that’s it.

Our Take: If it feels like Dear Ex was a film that would have been made in the United States circa 2001, then directors Hsu Chih-yen and Mag Hsu (from a screenplay co-written by Mag Hsu and Shish-yuan Lu) did their job. It’s readily apparent that Taiwan is just coming to grips with LGBTQ rights, and this film reflects that struggle. At first glance, Jie is cast as a “husband-stealer” and San-lien calls him a “fag” on more than one occasion. On the other hand, San-lien is seen as a bitter, overbearing, woman and mother scorned. But by the time we get to the end of the film, both of their roles in Cheng-yuan’s life become more focused, as is Cheng-hsi’s role in this triangle.

Dear Ex feels like a coming-of-age film that’s about all three of its leads coming of age, even though Jie and San-lien are both in their thirties. It’s not like all three main characters are buddy-buddy at the end, but they all come to an understanding of what they contributed to Cheng-yuan’s life and why things happened the way they did. There are a few leaps of faith in the editing of the movie, and a lot that seems to be papered over by Cheng-hsi’s voiceover. But it’s an affecting story from a country that, even in 2019, doesn’t always acknowledge that people of LGBTQ orientation even exist.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dear Ex has good performances and a story that should be relatable to anyone who has gone through family problems as a kid.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Dear Ex on Netflix