As an elementary school student in rural Taiwan, the rowdy, underachieving Shane is punished for snipping a girl’s hair. His more sensitive and well behaved classmate Jonathan is asked to make friends with Shane to pull him into shape by example. Now about to graduate from high school, Shane is a magnetic, roguish basketball star who makes the girls squeal, while Jonathan sits watching on the sidelines. Despite their vastly different personalities, they’re inseparable. Jonathan’s brooding reticence masks his passion for the appealingly unaware Shane, who insists he needs Jonathan by his side at all times but can’t say why. When a teacher singles out transfer student Carrie for a hair-cutting, she becomes entangled in the boys’ already complicated relationship.

Twenty-five-year-old director Leste Chen’s second feature after the gothic horror film The Heirloom is a lovely melodrama that captures the moment when teens are poised between the eternal summer of their youth and the frightening prospect of claiming their identities and going their separate ways.

Two strangers attempt to defy the fleeting nature of desire in the short Dissolution of Bodies. — FRAKO LODEN