Lin Cheng-sheng

When a daydreaming Taipei teenager tries to save a kidnapped boy, he ends up being kidnapped himself and transported to the Taiwanese countryside. There, among an eccentric family of criminals, he embarks on an unexpected journey that is by turns hilarious, surreal, and deeply humane.

This is a four-part anthology comedy. The themes of four parts are: car, house, body and friendship. The central characters are a plastic surgeon Chen, a nurse, an experienced maid, three energetic teenagers and a young couple. The stingy surgeon Chen treats a car and a man so differently that he could be a perfect example to show how treasonously modern people treat their cars and how indifferently they treat other people. The maid Ying is like a knight on her "iron horse" (a bicycle), fighting in the city. Every day she rushes home after work to wait up for a husband never returns. The new nurse has problem with her colleague because they support different idle. What she also doesn't know is the reason why her brother's girlfriend sends her free lunchbox so often. The truth is that her brother's girlfriend wants to get plastic surgery in the clinic. Almost everyone here is not satisfied with his/her body. Moreover, they try to change their body with quite violent ways.

A cute coed leaves her mother's home and gets involved with a pastry chef who has links to the local criminal element.

A rather dejected Mei-li Chen lives with her extended family in the suburbs. She drops out of college when the boy she has a crush on finds a girlfriend. Mei-li eventually ends up selling tickets in a movie theatre. A great camaraderie then builds up between the two cashiers in the small ticket booth.

When a military contingent of "mythic" Americans arrive for war games in a little farming village in South Taiwan in the late 1960s, a veritable flood of hilarious cultural and linguistic misunderstandings is loosed on both sides.

With a singular voice that distinguishes him from his New Taiwan Cinema contemporaries, Lin Cheng-sheng adds to his brief, but already remarkable, filmography with Sweet Degeneration, his third film in two years. As with A Drifting Life and Murmur of Youth, Lin’s new film delicately unfolds, gradually building to a climax of stunning emotional reverberations. Drawn from a particularly painful episode in the director’s past, Sweet Degeneration delves into the uneasy bonds a brother and sister have with each other and the people around them.

After his wife dies during childbirth, Ku-cheng leaves his children behind in their rural village while he finds work on a construction site in the city. He develops a relationship with a widow but despite their intimacy, he refuses to remarry.