‘Will You Still Be My Friend’ San Sebastian Review: Lu Po-shun’s Delicate Coming-Of-Age Tale Shows How A Village Land Dispute Strains The Bond Between Two Teenage Boys

Coming-of-age stories are practically the raison d’être of the New Directors section at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and this Taiwan-Singapore co-production walks straight into that territory, following two teenage friends through a complicated stretch of their lives. Beneath their emotional tensions, though, Will You Still Be My Friend is really about a fraught socioeconomic situation involving both boys’ families, one that gradually strains the bond between them.

Jun is 13 and lives in a small village in southern Taiwan, where his grandfather is the local «village chief.» Jasper and his family, originally from Singapore, have recently settled there. Jasper’s father has come to buy land and install solar panels, and he has struck a deal with Jun’s grandfather to help manage the conflicts and resistance those purchases have stirred up among the locals. That arrangement has spilled over, and not entirely innocently on the father’s part, to his son, who at his father’s urging, more or less, has befriended Jun.

Though the friendship began that way, by the time we meet them the two are already inseparable. Jun stands up for Jasper in awkward situations, especially when his old friends, wary of how close the pair have grown, shut Jasper out or lash out at him. At times the closeness between Jun and Jasper seems to go beyond conventional friendship, but these 13- and 14-year-olds appear unwilling, or unable, to look into it too closely.

The film’s central question is how the village’s turmoil bears down on them. Resistance to the land sales is growing, and relations between Jasper’s father and Jun’s grandfather seem to sour, with complaints, disputes and the authorities getting involved. Can Jun and Jasper stay friends while their families drift apart? Or is it inevitable that one thing leads to the other, and the friendship breaks for good?

Will You Still Be My Friend balances these two worlds deftly, keeping its focus on the teenagers while drawing parallels between their situation and their parents’. A political, social and economic conflict threatens to reshape the village, and what initially seems remote from the protagonists’ daily lives ends up seeping into their own, and into the lives of everyone around them.

Lu Po-shun also captures with real sensitivity the muddled feelings of two boys who can’t quite admit what they feel for each other. Walks, conversations, games and even the quarrels gradually bring out the unspoken parts of their relationship. For Jun, the better drawn of the two, it means opening up not only to a boy «from somewhere else» who puts him at odds with his lifelong friends, but to the idea of something more than friendship. It’s in the delicate exploration of these tensions that this very good film lives and breathes.