Look
in your pocket and you might find a smart phone made in Taiwan. They were the
only one of the four Asian Tiger economies that largely dodged the regional financial
crisis of the late 1990s. However, the Republic of China remains very aware of
the extreme poverty it rose out of. The memories of its hardscrabble past were
even fresher in the early 1980s, when Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien
introduced the world to Taiwanese auteurist cinema. One of those watershed films
was an anthology production Hou contributed to. Fittingly, Hou, Zeng
Zhuangxiang, and Wan Jen’s The Sandwich
Man screens this week as part of the traveling Hou retrospective Also Like Life, now playing in
Vancouver.
Jin
Shu is definitely a crying-on-the-inside kind of clown, but he doesn’t look very
cheerful on the outside either. He tramps through his provincial small town
wearing his shabby home-made clown costume and sandwich boards advertising the
local theater. He has not even been paid yet for his humiliations. This gig was
his idea and he is still working on-spec during the trial period. He badly
needs work to support his infant son and increasingly impatient wife, but he
does not have the right sort of personality for anything involving promotions
to the public. Adding further anxiety to his wounded ego, Jin Shu’s little boy
no longer recognizes him when he is out of make-up.
In
some ways, His Son’s Big Doll (as the
story’s title directly translates) also critiqued restrictive Taiwanese laws
against contraception that were abolished a few years after the film’s release.
It is a relentlessly naturalistic tale about economic desperation, but the
surprisingly upbeat conclusion makes it feel like a sort of before-the-fact
allegory of Taiwan’s rapid development—just hang on and everything will get
better.
Since
it is Hou Hisao-hsien and the titular story, The Sandwich Man would seem to be the main event, but the
subsequent constituent films are just as good or better. In Zeng’s Vicky’s Hat, two new recruits try to
sell Japanese pressure cookers throughout their provincial territory, but they
soon start to suspect their product is categorically unsafe. It is a story that
has a bit of Glengarry Glen Ross to
it, but it is even more concerned with the younger salesman’s halting friendship
with Vicky, a mysterious school girl in their neighborhood. There are some fine
lines Zeng and his cast must walk—such as establishing his willingness to
chastely wait for her to grow old enough for a relationship, but they turn the
multiple tragic twists to devastating effect.
Wan’s
concluding Taste of Apples is a bit
O. Henry-ish—in fact, its irony now seems ironic. A migrant worker is hit by
the American military attaché’s car, but this might not be the worst thing that
could happen to his struggling family. He will have the best of medical care at
the American military hospital, his wife and family will be financially taken
care of, and his children will have educational opportunities that never would
have otherwise been available to them. Plus, the American Colonel seems
genuinely sorry about it all.
Reportedly,
the Taiwanese government sought to suppress Sandwich
Man because of its portrayal of American government personnel, but
considering the anti-American propaganda out there, we should settle for Sandwich Man every chance we get. Sure,
we try to fix problems by throwing a bunch of cash around, but that just might
work for the family of Apples.
