Movie
gangsters have been taking a shine to neighborhood kids since Angels with Dirty Faces, but few have
been domesticated as quickly as this Taiwanese hitman. His latest assignment
takes him to Tokyo, but it will not turn out well. While laying low, he falls
in with the son of a heroin-addicted former prostitute. It is unclear how
serious his intentions are, but it will hardly matter much if his enemies find
him in Sabu’s Mr. Long, which screens
during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Mr.
Long only wields a short stiletto, but it is sufficiently lethal in his hands.
We get a sample of his handiwork in the opening scene, but unfortunately, his
yakuza prey gets the drop on him in a nightclub. Barely escaping with his life,
Mr. Long crashes in a squat in the distressed outer boroughs, where he quickly
befriends Jun, a young boy forced to care for his drug-addled mother Lily. As
we learn in flashbacks, she was once relatively happy working as a high-class
yakuza prostitute, but when she fell for her driver Kenji, Jun’s father, it
launched them both on a steep downward spiral.
Bereft
of passport and money, Mr. Long must while away a week or so before he can
catch a mobbed-up freighter back to Kaohsiung. In that time, he will start
assuming a surrogate father role with respects to Jun and help Lily quit cold
turkey. With the encouragement of the nosy, but well-intentioned neighbors
(they can be a bit too cute), he starts selling Taiwanese beef noodles from a
street cart. Of course, it is inevitable the villains from his past or Lily’s
will interrupt this peaceful interlude.
Viewers
should be warned, they could very well feel like they were stabbed in the heart
with a stiletto after watching Mr. Long.
Much like Sabu’s shockingly moving Miss Zombie, Mr. Long takes familiar
genre elements and recombines them into an emotionally devastating tragedy. As
a case in point, viewers will hope a key figure will appear at an opportune
time to save the day, but Sabu is too honest for that.
As
Mr. Long, quietly brooding Chang Chen burns up the screen. It is one of his
darkest, most powerful turns since his teen debut in Edward Yang’s classic A Brighter Summer Day. However, Yao Yiti
is arguably an even great revelation as the heartbreaking Lily. She just rips
the audience’s guts out and stomps on them. Likewise, Bai Runyin’s performance
as Jun is mature beyond his years.