For most movie-goers in Beijing, last year's Taiwan box office success, Cape No. 7, was somewhat exotic.

Its twin plot lines involved a small cape town in southern Taiwan, where the locals struggled to form a rock-and-roll band to perform at a rare concert by a popular Japanese singer in the town.

The story reaches back six decades to when Japan surrendered at the end of World War II and ended its five decades of colonization on the island. A time when a Japanese teacher wrote, and failed to post, seven letters to a Taiwan girl he had loved while in Taiwan. They were sent by the man's daughter after his death.

But after so many years the girl's address is unknown. The letters fall into the hands of a local postman, who is the band's leader and songwriter.

The film is the second Taiwan film officially released on the Chinese mainland in the past 60 years. It won six awards at the Golden Horse Film Festival, one of the most important film festivals in Asia. It has attracted enough attention here.

At first, many viewers wondered whether Taiwan director Wei Te-sheng had deliberately created a sense of Babel, with the dialogue in the first minutes needing subtitles, mixing a long Japanese monologue with the Min Nan dialect and Mandarin interjections.

The film, which began to be played in mainland cinemas on Saturday, portrays a parochial, inward-looking small town and local people who are often smiling but irreverent.

It is a side of Taiwan that mainlanders rarely see.

Many mainlanders have stereotypical ideas about Taiwan, as do people on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. These ideas have inevitably been hardened by decades without face-to-face exchanges.

After years of actively building a single national identity, many people in the mainland may have lost sight of the vastness and diversity of their country and its people.

No wonder many mainland viewers were confused about the real message delivered in Cape No. 7.

The nostalgic perception of Japan's occupation of Taiwan proved to be the biggest surprise. With the plot centered on a Japanese man's love letters to a girl in Taiwan, the film fails to strike the nationalistic note typically found in mainland movies about the war.

The film exposes subtleties in Taiwan attitudes toward this period of history, which people on both sides of the strait commonly regard as a time of patriotic fervor.

Audiences may have to accept a reality that people on the two sides have different experiences and therefore, different perceptions.

Cape No. 7, a light comedy, offers an unexpected insight into the attitudes and experiences that shape today's Taiwan through the vivid portraits of some common people: an unsuccessful young singer in the metropolis of Taipei; a Japanese girl who stays in Taiwan to pursue her dream of being a model, but never starts a real career; a traditional musician with no audience; a community-loving politician who despairs at seeing young people leaving the small cape town.

Its box office success on the island shows it has struck a chord with the enthusiasm of islanders to realize a common identity and a profound concern that they may be losing their heritage as their culture is challenged by outside fashions and influences.

The mainland release of the movie offers mainland audiences an opportunity to learn what Taiwan people think. Cape No. 7 may also triumph that it diverts mainland attention from the modern Taipei and its celebrity culture to a grassroots Taiwan.

(Xinhua News Agency February 18, 2009)