Taipei Exchanges

A sickly sweet capitalist allegory that severely lacks substance, ‘Taipei Exchanges’ follows two go-getting sisters who open a trendy minimalist coffee shop and decide to stock it with trinkets that people can come in and exchange. Speckled with magical realist cine-thought bubbles which take the shape of line-drawn animations and even a dream sequence in which one sister has a discussion with her own alter-ego, the film singularly fails to say anything particularly complex or profound about the nature of object trading, and even at 82-minutes the film feels about an hour too long. It gets extra marks for the production design and ultra-clean shooting style, but you just wish director Hsiao Ya-Chuan put as much effort into his writing as his image making.