Taipei Story

Rating: out of
Released: 1985
Directed by: Edward Yang
Cast: Hou Hsiao-Hsien as Lun; Chin Tsai as Chin; Nien-Jen Wu as the Taxi Driver

"Taipei Story" was an early triumph of the New Taiwan Cinema and Edward Yang's first masterpiece. Lun (Hou-Hsiao Hsien, the best known director from the New Taiwan Cinema movement) is a former youth basball standout. He has returned from a trip to American to visit his sister; he also visited an ex-girlfriend in Japan.

Chin (Chin Tsai) is Lun's long suffering girlfriend. Chin is something of a protege to an older businesswoman, but the relationship does not give her stability or peace of mind. She has to put up with lazy seduction attempts by a married colleague, and she has to watch out for her younger sister, who likes to hang with biker-types.

Lun is a protector. He looks out for Chin's father, an abusive and vain man who loses his fortunes because of shady business practices and bad gambling habits. Lun also looks out for a former teammate (Nien-Jen Wu), now a cab driver with a gambling-addict wife and three children. Lun is not integrated into the new Taiwan economy like his girlfriend, though. He works at a more traditional fabric operation, and he does not suffer salaryman fools at all. (Lun explodes at one of Chin's coworkers in a bar during a dart game.)Lun wants to sell his father's house and take Chin with him to America, where he would work with his brother-in-law.

Chin spends a night with her sister's friends in an effort to blow off steam. In the new economy, the older generation, like Chin's father, is left to tread water, while the younger generation, like Chin's sister, has nothing to do. Yang is sympathetic to everyone, though, so when we see Chin's sister and biker friends dancing to "Footloose" in a night club, we see not just directionless youth but real vibrance.

By the end, Chin's mentor has prepared a new job for Chin. We see Taipei's traffic through a jagged set of mirrors while Chin prepares in her mind an answer to her mentor's question about what and how Lun is doing.

The film is full of life despite its dark themes and its characters' emotional turmoil. Yang has a loving eye for the cityscape, and he is able to complement it with brief scenes of rural beauty. He is sympathetic to his characters, and his humor is warm even when his situations are dark. The attention to everydayness and the lives of quiet desparation among the people of Taipei and Overseas Taiwanese is subtle and affecting, yet Yang is also able to use more symbolic scenes to good effect. Lun tells Chin his brother-in-law's story about shooting an unarmed black man and getting away with it; as Lun tells the story, he stands next to Chin's Marilyn Monroe calendar. The scene, despite its obvious use of icons, is not at all maudlin, a real indicator of Yang's strength as a director and thinker.

It's a film to appreciate, and one can only hope that Yang's untimely death will make this and his other work more readily available.

Reviewed by: Sean Allan

Dec 23,2007