Your Name Engraved Herein; Movie Review #3

Oshun Cortez (He/Him)

Editorial Team Member

As I started college in September, I was advised to go to orientation to get ourselves comfortable with our environment and the people that we are going to be with in terms of potential classmates or friends. We did an introduction on what our name is, our pronouns, and what our favorite movie is currently. I stated my name, my pronouns, and my favorite movie which is a Taiwanese film called “刻在你心底的名字” or the english translation, “Your Name Engraved Herein.” The movie takes place in 1987 when martial law ends in Taiwan and our two main protagonists, Jia-han and Birdy begin to fall in love and encounter the challenges of homophobia, family expectations, and social stigmatism.

While watching this movie, I found the cinematography to be a crucial part in telling their stories compared to other movies. There is a scene where Jia-hen and Birdy sneak into a theater and begin making animal shadows with their hands. I found this scene to be very important even later on because of their relationship that they have to hide even though they are both comfortable with their love and understand each other. There is a scene later on that also explains their strained relationship. They are at a  beach where they scream out of  frustration that they have to go through this situation  that isn’t only their relationship but the pressure that both have to go through in order to be accepted into society that they no longer want to be a part of. 

Another crucial part to this story is the wordplay that goes into the film, especially if the audience is able to understand Mandarin. The two characters grow up and Jia-hen and Birdy are connected once again. They spend a night together and tell each other goodnight over and over again. This is crucial to understand as we, the english-speaking audience, are not aware of the deeper significance to the word “goodnight” in Mandarin. The romanization of the word is “Wanan” which means “I love you, love you.” The reason as to why this is said is because “Wo” means “I”, “Ai” means “love”, “Ni” means “you.” When put together, we get the meaning of “I love you, love you” which is said repeatedly by both Jia-hen and Birdy. With this understanding, we are able to understand the relationship of Birdy and Jia-hen and the status of their relationship from a romantical standpoint. 

The movie contributes a lot to the late 1980’s and early 2020's of homosexual relationships from men and the growing acceptance of it. As we live in a time where being part of the LGBTQ+ community is being accepted worldwide in comparison to earlier days, having to watch this movie made me feel an extreme amount of bitterness, sadness, love, and overall acceptance. We can always find hatred in people for being different from us. We can always find people’s lives to be sad and try to help. We can always find love in people for being just like us. At the end of the day, whether you are hated for, pitied for or loved for, you are your own person and can accept it even if it isn’t to the person’s best intentions.