The Terrorizers

Rating: out of
Released: 1986
Directed by: Edward Yang
Cast: Cora Miao

This was part of the 2007 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Edward Yang retrospective.


"The Terrorizers" is Edward Yang's most abstract and angry film. It's often compared to Antonioni's "Blow-up" because of its abstraction and its use of a photographer at the film's center.

A doctor sells out his friend to get a promotion. The doctor's wife (Cora Miao) is not happy. She has an affair with an old boyfriend, and later she leaves her husband because she thinks her husband is having an affair. This marital strife ruins the doctor's promotion.

The wife is a writer. She's about to become a salarywoman when her book unexpectedly wins a prize. A photographer, whom we've seen throughout the film, reads the book and is angry. The photographer is a rich man's son who likes slumming: he shacks up with desperate women and photographs gangsters. Because of the photographer's attitude toward the world, his moral disgust at the wife's novel is surprising. He doesn't care that the book is fiction; he knows that an enigmatic gangster's moll, "White Chick" (a Eurasian), made crank phone calls out of boredom, and one crank phone call made the wife suspect the doctor of an affair he wasn't having and got her imagination rolling for the composition of her award winning novel.

The photographer's information does not help the doctor reunite with his wife. After the final rebuke from the wife, it is hard to determine what is real and what is imagined, but it contains the most shocking violence of any Edward Yang film. (Yang's films typically feature shocking acts of violence in the third act.)

For some, this will be Yang's most rewarding film. It has some academic cache because it was championed by the esteemed postmodern critic Frederic Jameson. Others will prefer Yang's warmer films, the depths of which are contained within more traditional narratives and more humanistic sensibilities. Yang's films are preoccupied with (among many other things) the struggles of middle-class and middle-aged men, and the anger and the hopelessness of the doctor in "The Terrorizers" might serve as a key to understanding the depth of Yang's concerns with such men. (Interestingly, the doctor is probably the least sympathetic of Yang's quietly desperate middle-aged men.) There are also curious forms of attention given to the criminal world, the world of law enforcement, and the world of the idle rich (whose sons nevertheless are still drafted into the military).

Again there are fine evocations of the beauty of the city. In one arresting scene, pedestrians on a footbridge are tracked as potential photograph subjects by the photographer. In another, the photographer, trying to seduce "White Chick" as he helps her recover from an injury, asks her to guess whether it is day or night. (The photographers apartment at this point is a wholly dark room, literally and practically.) When they go outside, it is dusk.

The cruelty of the ending will make or break the film for the viewer.

At this point, your best bet is to buy the readily available Taiwan DVD of this fine film. You'll need to learn Mandarin and probably Taiwanese as well, as there are no English subs. (Fortunately the festival copy had said subs, and we can all hope that Yang's films will get the full release they deserve now that he is dead.)

Reviewed by: Sean Allan

Dec 23,2007