Taipei Story

Taiwan is a noisy world where modernity is settling very (too) quickly under Japanese and American influences. Taipei Story depicts the life of those in the Taiwanese middle class, the so-called Asian Tigers, and the grimness and competitive struggle for survival ushered in by the economic changes in Taiwan. Its a movie about personal tragedies to the changes themselves (modernization, Westernization, globalization, technology), to the weaknesses of individuals.

Taipei Story contains a lot of "casual scenes" which holds low value to the overall story but an enormous amount to the general atmospherical feel to the film. Together with these scenes, the tranquillizing still and slow photo and let alone the slow pacing of the movie, let's us better get a grip of understanding about the life the people involved in the story.

I just want to start by saying that I think this is way way more than a film about a couple, it's in reality a film about 3 generations and how they interact with each other in this especific time and in this especific place - Taiwan in a especific situation. The main character represents the past and chin the future, when it's all combined it's just a beautiful and complex story apout Taipei and itss people. Every frame is beautiful just amazing to look at, I don't know how but he just finds new ways of showing scenes that to me revolutionized the way I see and think of scenes. The relationships displayed here are once again a fundamental focus of Yang but the background and the context is what diferenciates him from every other director. He had a vision and a unique way of showing that same vision through film. I feel extremely overwhelmed watching his pictures, they are full of life and awareness and makes me fascinated and intrigued how on earth is it possible to make movies like he does.

Edward Yang's second feature film deals with the systematic breakdown of a relationship in urban Taiwan society, and to say the least I'm always emotionally apprehensive with something like this because it's terribly bleak without any positive reprise, as it chips away slowly but surely toward an inevitable finale. Still, while not as sprawling as his first feature, Taipei Story is just as masterful in its treatment of topics of being alienated in your own society, and being unable to escape from past glories that frankly nobody gives a hoot about.

Two big names in Taiwan put on their acting chops as leading performers of this film, the first being Tsai Chin the songstress who would go on to become Yang's first wife, and starring opposite her is Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the acclaimed film director whom you would have seen earlier in a more comical (or at least going by the laughs his small role received) part of being part of a management posse. And frankly, he has that tremendous charisma in front of the screen, just that his talents also extend going behind the camera more often than he is in front of one. They play the couple Chin and Lon respectively, where the film opens with the couple looking at an apartment they can call their own. All seems well at first, until the story by Yang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chu Tien-Wen begin to unfold and reveal the cracks that exist beneath.

You're not going to be successful each time you sweep things under the carpet, and here the issues are many which includes a sudden turn of events in the career of Chin, being quite confident about her promotion in the beginning before a forced acquisition of the company she works for meant her position is made redundant. Seeking solace and a listening ear from her boyfriend Lon looked like a tall order, with Lon being preoccupied with trying to assimilate back to society having spent some time in Los Angeles, and struggling to find his identity since he's still stuck in the glorious years of the past with his Lttlle League baseball success. From this point on your suspicion of the lack of intimacy rears its ugly head, as one poignant scene involves Lon just staring blankly at his lover who had mentioned the demise of her career, but you can tell just how badly he wants to go back to the television baseball game, and a recorded one at that.

Chin constantly hiding beind large, and I mean large, sunglasses also makes it difficult for the viewer, and others around her, to gaze into her soul since the eyes hold the key to that, and probably added to her frustration of being misunderstood without knowing she's also partly responsible for that. Hou Hsiao-Hsien on the other hand plays that swaggering protagonist with aplomb, intense and constantly on the edge to give others a piece of his mind or two when they cross him through snide remarks, which ultimately this hot headedness and growing impetuousness will prove to be his downfall, not being able to fulfill the dream he once had with the woman he once loved.

In many ways this urban saga highlighting the troubles, issues and concerns of a working middle class are easily identifiable with even for us folks in Singapore, where many of us are juggling careers with other passions (normally tussling for the limited time we have to spend on them), and the various roles that we play in life, from being a family member, to a friend or a colleague. It's painful to watch as these get put on screen, and those looking for escapism in film will be confronted squarely with what's essentially those issues that one desires to escape from.

Here are people stuck with the roles that they cannot run from, and sometimes societal pressures also mean that one has to help the elders to bail out from their situation in what's essentially a wait-and-see, or to tackle things as they come by, one at a time approach. We can tell how beholden Lon is to Chin's father, and the latter's troubles also mean an additional financial pressure placed on Lon. Then on the relationship front come complications from an ex seeking a divorce, and a fellow co-worker looking for companionship with his own impending divorce - seems like any relationship here in the film is constantly on the rocks, such as Lon's taxi friend whom he runs (literally) into - and these present challenges to what's already a fragile couple waiting for an eruption of emotional and trust issues.

Yang's film seems to suggest these are urban traits inevitable at the pace society's moving, trading rapid economic growth for relationship woes as the people's focus changes direction with different priorities being misplaced. From his earlier work, these issues were explored, and they continue here in more depth since the number of characters are more than halved to allow focus and depth of exploration. I'm already curious and optimistic that more of such themes will pop out in the subsequent films in this retrospect (having read their synopsis) and it does seem bleaker in the road up ahead. Recommended, although personally I'd prefer Yang's first film to this one, probably because this cuts too close to home and reality.

This is a quiet, caring, patiently observed film about that most difficult thing to make into interesting drama: the everyday lives of basically decent and normal people, in this case an on/off again couple as played by Chin Tsai (why wasn't in she more films, I wonder, she makes a good impression here) and Hsiao-Hsien Hou (usually a director, also quite excelleng), who have to navigate the loss of and seeking employment, heavily flawed family (a debt-addled dad for her, wayward and ultimately tragic brother for him), and what atmosphere a city like Taipei, so bustling and at night neon-drenched and polluted and seemingly full of (as Yang and company show) self-interested middle class people. It gives empathy for everyone, and let's scenes breathe.

I think it's understandable if this isn't someone's cup of tea, but on the other hand it isn't perhaps a keen idea to see this before the other Yang heavy-hitters like Yi Yi or Brighter Summer Day: this has somehow even *less* incident than that - if anything, at least for what is about the first 45-50 minutes, Yang as a storyteller reaches the apex of George Costanza's pitch of a "show about nothing... what did you do this morning?" I got up and went to work" "There's a show" on Seinfeld - but I was invested in these people precisely because Yang doesn't gum up things with anything approaching cliche or convention.

It's stripped down so that that actors can bring their own life and lived-in experience (Lung's weariness and discontent, a face Hou brings in almost every other scene and, whether conscious or not, adds immeasurably to this being as great and pained and sad as it is), and he and the DP find dozens of wonderful ways to shoot this city, in interior and exterior, so that we can understand innately what it's like to be there, in those office rooms, the bars, that bedroom, then on those streets and the FUJI-FILM backlit roof) without calling much attention to the style. It's seamless, meditative, yet totally natural at the same time.

And that ending... it made me feel like had I seen this when I was younger (ie my first big bursts of making short films in college) it would have inspired me to want to get a camera and shoot something like this. In a strange way it is inspirational in that it's not necessary to add the same old Screenwriting 101 stuff you get taught so often. This is more about capturing a mood, of being on a street at night with just a couple of those overhead lights and that solitude and aloneness. It didn't happen all at once but I loved this one.

Although all Edward Yang's films deal with similar themes, characters and milieux, it has been common to divide his work into three relatively distinct categories - the multi-character panoramas (e.g. 'Yi yi', 'A brighter summer day'); the satiric comedies (e.g. 'A Confucian confusion'); and the formalist, Antonionian studies in urban alienation (e.g. 'The Terroriser'). These latter are the most difficult to watch, with narrative rigorously fragmented, characterisation distant, the ugly, monumental urban backdrop dominant.

On the surface, 'Taipei Story' seems to belong to this category. Its opening sequence is similar to the tone of 'the Terroriser'. A couple are checking out an empty apartment the woman hopes to move in to. Yang emphasises the inchoate nature of the apartment, its emptiness, its forbidding whiteness and angularity - the first thing you notice about an empty apartment is how many walls it has. The woman talks a lot about what she hopes to do with it, but the characters' expressions are as blank as the rooms that surround them. We wonder if the apartment is a projection of their relationship's hollowness, or a sign of its future, its beginning, something to be filled up with life.

Yang's way of filming his characters in this space, blocking them off from one another by walls, framing them in doorways etc., certainly seems to suggest a distance in their relationship. After all, the man is just about to go to America on a business trip - this very ritual of togetherness is shadowed by an upcoming rupture.

As in 'Terroriser', there is something almost metaphysical about this scene, which seems to be about the material (walls, floors etc.). There are traces of previous occupants. The woman talks about what she intends to do with the room. Yet between the past and the future, these characters exist in a very empty present tense, ghosts in the house of predecessors and future selves. This feeling of being and yet not being quite there is quite familiar in Yang's work - we see it in the dream narrative of 'Terroriser', for example. One of his most recurring devices is to film action in window-reflections or mirrors, visualising the theme of alienation so central to his work (alienation from family, work, city etc.), but domesticating it, showing that the bigger alienations start with an alienation of the self. The vast jungle of the skyscraper-laden city is thus a literally monumental backdrop for the human shadowplays that comprise the drama.

As in the best novels, the best films crystallise their thematic and narrative intentions in the opening scene, which is why this sequence is so important. It also structures the narrative to come, which will chart the fragmentation of the relationship, and the separate, doom-laden destinies of the lovers. But although everything points to 'Taipei story' belonging to the third category, there is a humanism at work that brings it closer to the first. In 'Terroriser', the characters' lack of character was a crucial thematic element, but made it difficult for the viewer to be interested in their fate, forcing him/her to concentrate on their formal properties as part of the overall mise-en-scene.

In 'Taipei story', as in 'Yi Yi', we are closer to 3-D characters, we are given insight into their personalities, their histories, their desires, their frustrations. We see them at work, at play, at home. We see them interacting with the city, even as they are defeated by it, rather than simply ground down by it. this is not to suggest a softening of Yang's formal rigour (there is none of the saccharine miramaxmusic of 'Yi yi' for instance), but in this case it is poignantly counterpointed by the characters, used to express their predicament, rather than a more abstract theme. Yang's greatest strength is the way he can turn a teeming city into an empty dreamscape, or turn the familiar everyday into something uncanny by moonlight. He could almost be a Surrealist.