Inspired by a true story, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (which translates as Can’t Be without You) begins with a chaotic scene that sees a dishevelled man threaten to jump off a Taipei skywalk with a little girl in his arms. The action then flashes back to two weeks previous, to the docks of Kaosiung, where the two protagonists – an unlicensed worker (Chen Wen-pin, who co-wrote and produced the film) and his unregistered seven-year-old daughter (played by Chao Yo-hsuan with wide-eyed innocence) – illegally yet merrily live on. But when the loving father tries to finally send her to school, his path is blocked at every turn; a combination of unsympathetic officials and legal complications soon threatens to deprive him of his daughter altogether.

In his second directorial effort (after 2002’s Twenty Something Taipei, almost a complete opposite in style and subject matter), prolific Taiwanese actor Leon Dai offers a realistic character portrait that is less akin in spirit to the Taiwanese New Wave cinema than, say, Italian Neorealism of the 1940s and early 50s. With his characters – already entrenched in poverty and shut out by bureaucracy – barely even surviving on the fringes of society, Dai realises a series of emotion-stoking incidents with detached coolness, no doubt also facilitated by the film’s sober, black-and-white template.

Deep sentiments, meanwhile, are evoked by simple yet potent images, as when the face of his daughter – obscured by sea waves and enveloped by the dazzling sun behind her – appears and disappears from the father’s point-of-view, as the latter performs his potentially life-threatening job as an underwater ship repair worker. Ultimately, it is Chen’s deeply affecting performance as the desperate father that firmly grounds the story in reality and prevents it from being a mere contrived case of miserablism. To see the way he embraces the role is to see the transcendent power of quality acting.

Edmund Lee