Murmur of Youth

Two girls, coincidentally both named Meili, work side-by-side in a movie theatre box office and have a brief romantic fling - which means more to one of them than the other. Director/co-writer Lin Cheng-Sheng (A Drifting Life) takes his time getting them to this point; he spends more than an hour contrasting their home lives (one is from a middle-class family and gets no emotional support from her parents, the other is from an impoverished working-class family with a senile grandmother who was once a prostitute), turning the film into a meditation on changing values and morals in the ever-more-urbanised 1990s. Cool, calm and very assured.