Although
it helped usher in the New Taiwanese Cinema movement, Edward Yang’s 1985
masterwork had even greater personal significance for its principals. Budding
auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien mortgaged his home to finance the film he co-wrote. He
also played the co-lead opposite pop star Tsai Chin, who would later marry
Yang after meeting him on the production. Yet, despite its reputation, the
resulting film has largely survived on nearly unwatchable prints. Fortunately,
it has been restored to a pristine
clarity that will allow cineastes to finally appreciate Yang’s Taipei Story as it was meant to be seen
when it screens during the 54th New York Film Festival.
It
seems like Ah-chin is on the brink of realizing her Taiwanese Dream in the
opening scene. Assured of a promotion by her boss, she decides to buy a flat in
a fashionable neighborhood with her long-term lover Lung, who has recently
returned from America to take over his family’s textile concern. However, his
restless heart is not in the business or their supposedly on-again romance. He
still pines for baseball glory and increasingly resents the mundane realities
he is stuck with.
Their
relationship is further strained when both are betrayed by their mentor
figures. For the westernized, career-minded Ah-chin, suddenly being out of work
is particularly humiliating. She tries to console herself with her sister’s
hard-partying friends, but she is not accustomed to their lifestyle or the
unwanted attention that comes with it.
Yang
deliberately chose the English title Taipei
Story to echo Ozu’s masterpiece, but the temperaments of the two films
could not be more dissimilar. Whereas Ozu pulls the viewer in, inviting us to
empathize with his characters, Yang keeps the audience emotionally at arm’s
length. Hou and Tsai play Lung and Ah-chin with such extreme reserve in such
austere settings, it feels like Yang is literally choking off all the oxygen to
the film.
Still,
Hou conveys a sense of the barely contained ferocity roiling within Lung. Just
seeing him nervously taking practice swings in the opening scene tells us he is
trouble. Likewise, Tsai’s Ah-chin utterly unsettles and unbalances viewer
expectations and judgments, suggesting not so contradictory elements of naivety
and sociopathic manipulation, sometimes even within the same scene.
