Not for no reason is "No puedo vivir sin ti" photographed in black and white. A life spent in abject poverty certainly can become a life without color, without beauty. Chang Yu-Tang is an unskilled laborer who dives into the ocean with faulty equipment because he has no choice. There's a young daughter to take care of, so he makes boat repairs with an old generator that could potentially, and almost does, kill him. While his uncle sleeps, the air compressor falters, but Mei, whom the father can see as a silhouette from beneath the surface, senses the imminent danger, therefore she rouses their benefactor from his nap and averts a tragedy in the making. She protects him. Tang doesn't deserve her. Mei should have decent shelter, should be in school, and in the absence of having fit parents, should at least have a fit father. Tang tries. Throughout the course of "No puedo vivir sin ti", Tang shuttles back and forth between his native Kaohsiung province and the big city in his futile attempts to enroll Mei in school. But the bureaucrats won't let him; they insist that the girl belongs to her birth mother, even though this supposed guardian hadn't seen Mei or Tang in years. The seven-year-old girl lives with her father in an abandoned warehouse by the sea. The moviegoer sympathizes with the father's frustration, as these pencil pushes can plainly see how they overmatch this borderline homeless man, disguising their contempt with the bald-faced assertion that rules and regulations need to be followed. The black and white photography gives Tang's plight a nightmare quality. Nobody listens to him, because nobody listens to a poor man. Finally, at wit's end, tired of such people pushing him around, Tang ascends to a bridge with Mei and threatens to jump. Back in the harbor, back under the water, it was only Mei who cared if her father lived or died; now he has a city and a television audience wondering about his fate. By dragging Mei into his fatalistic sphere, however, he loses the audience's sympathy.
"No puedo vivir sin ti" seems derived from the neorealist tradition with its assemblage of real locations, non-professional actors, and especially, its humanist viewpoint. The filmmaker isn't a sadist who subjects his characters with relentlessly downbeat situations. He points his camera skyward, albeit a sky without its blue rendering is like a sky without optimism, the sky remains there for looking, for hoping. He points his camera at windmills; he points his camera at pear trees. Like Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz"(the Victor Fleming film is featured briefly), Mei dreams of a better place, but not without her father. "No puedo vivir sin ti", as was the neorealist Italian films from the forties and fifties, lacks the ironic glamour you sometimes find in a studio film, where being poor sometimes seem like an adventure, and worse, fun. Being poverty-stricken may be a bleak proposition, but the filmmaker has room for some grace under the inherent desolation of indigence, as in the scene where the father and daughter eat some fruit they picked off the roadside trees. The fruit is sweet, too sweet, probably. In Vittorio DeSica's "Umberto D.", the maker of "Bicycle Thieves" reunited the old man and his dog, and yet, despite their joyful antics in the park, it was a bittersweet reunion, at best. Nothing had really changed. The old man still would be hard-pressed to look after his beloved pet. "No puedo vivir sin ti" ends similarly, but with a difference.
Although a foster home is no Oz, Mei is in school, and no doubt, enjoys better food and a real roof over her head. The action picks up two years after the incident at the bridge, and during this interim, nothing has changed for Tang, except his hair. When he locates Mei, the school authorities tell him that she's gone mute, which sets the film up for a reunion scene more befitting of a major studio movie than a low-budget one. The sentimental music betrays its previously gritty presentation with bathos. Nobody seems to remember that the father almost killed his daughter. This fact gets lost in the pretty piano balladry. The filmmaker seems more concerned with the father's needs than the daughter's needs. He manipulates the audience by rigging everything in his favor. Mei never gets to be happy. Here is a more appropriate coda: Chang sees his daughter from afar, well-adjusted and well-fed, talking with her schoolmates outside the school, then walks away, with peace of mind that his daughter is alright. That is the bittersweet ending which would ably compliment the film's formal strictures of neorealism.
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