We know commenter Lilly is dying to know what we thought of , the Taiwanese movie we were watching this afternoon in the Frameline GLBT film festival! Thanks for asking, Lilly -- though we should clarify that, like all other press outlets, SFist does not guarantee reviews in exchange for passes, nor are we expecting reviews from the readers who win free passes for individual screenings.

So this is the first movie we've seen at the Victoria Theater. 1) They have excellent popcorn -- just the right amount of salt, butter, and crunch, and 2) we really like the slide-y seats they have in the auditorium!

Eternal Summer (Sheng xia guang nian) is a moodily-shot, melodramatic movie about an equilateral love triangle between three young adults in the summer before college in the oceanside city of Hualien, Taiwan, as Jonathan struggles to come to terms with his feelings for his best friend, Shane, through the intermediary of new girl Carrie.

This being the Frameline movie festival, we suppose we weren't too surprised to see the direction the movie goes (in a tasteful and mildly-graphic scene), but we found it interesting that the Chinese words for "gay" and "love" are never used in the movie, the script going with the more ambiguous terms "good friends" and "like" instead. And there's a little more heterosex than you'd expect for a gay-themed movie too. Maybe that's the only way they could get the movie made?

The tension this creates in the plot results in a movie that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in places, but the emotion in the scenes is palpable -- we heard some sniffling in the audience during the final climactic scenes, and through the quite ambiguous ending as the credits rolled.

Eternal Summer screens again on Wednesday at the Parkway Theater in Oakland.

Eternal Summer