更新时间:2019-06-26
他他 • 青梅竹马:[Film Review] Taipei Story (1985) 7.3/10
“I’m selling cloth, not textiles” - retorts Lung (Hou), during a bar gathering with his girlfriend Chin (Tsai, well-known Taiwanese pop singer and Yang’s first wife) and other friends - underlines Edward Yang’s attitude towards the deep-dish severance between cottage industry and the prevailing capitalism that swamps Taiwan at that time. In his second feature, TAIPEI STORY (which evokes Ozu’s TOKYO STORY, 1953, however, its original name is a Chinese idiom referring to “childhood sweetheart”), such friends Lung and Chin are buffeted by alienation, malaise, miserabilism and we are led into a forensic dissertation of their dashed dreams.
The film opens with Chin and Lung surveying a new apartment which Chin will move in, finally separated from her feckless father (Wu Ping-Nan), which should usher in a new chapter of their lives, but Lung seems nonchalant. Working as a special assistant of Ms. Mei (Chen) in a construction firm, soon Chin is given the kiss-off when the firm is taken over by a government buyout.
Meantime, Lung, recently back from a sojourn in L.A., where lives his sister’s family, plans to do import business together with his brother-in-law, so he and Chin begin to envisage a possibility to immigrate to USA. Being a talented baseball player in school, Lung still harbors a passion for the sport, but apparently is enfolded by an inarticulate inertia, especially after he bumps into an erstwhile teammate Ch’en (Wu Nien-jen), who now works as a taxi driver to make ends meet, past glory and present cul-de-sac make a jarring bedfellow in Yang’s prosaically slow-burn narrative (a collection fruit from Yang, Hou and named writer Chu Tien-Wen), with masterful pillow shots paying tribute to Ozu.
Emotional undertow simmers while the pair’s relationship deteriorates after concealed lies surfacing and losing their seed money when Lung unwisely lends money to pay for the debt of Chin’s father, but there is no betrayal, Chin judiciously eschews a married architect and former colleague Mr. Ke (Ko I-Chen) with whom she shares some beer after hours, and Lung doesn’t rekindle his affair with his ex Gwan (Ko Su-Yun), another “childhood sweetheart”, who is freshly divorced from her Japanese husband and returns to Taipei with her child. Their disintegration is internal, ineluctable, pulling away from each other minute by minute as we dread the end is nigh.
Yang’s pessimistic outlook can dismay some audience, but TAIPEI STORY, for what it is worth, stands tall with its acute diagnosis of a whole generation’s disillusion and confusion. Granted Tsai Chin and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (whose DAUGHTER OF THE NILE 1987, treading on a similar ground) are not professional actors, their tacit interactions and taciturn impressions rack up strength through Edward Yang and DP Yang Wei-Han’s devout camera magnifying the minutiae of their carefully posed rendition, the devil is all in the details. The image of a man smoking a cigarette while philosophically bleeding to death nows seems passé, but at that time, it is mostly consonant with the mass’ ideal of a lone man and a half, unfit to the world he lives in, shuffling off this mortal coil with one last puff, whereas his unwitting girlfriend, looks pensively through the window glasses when a new, nativistic hope arises, like Ms. Mei comments, paraphrasing here “Why should one go to America if the same business is right here underfoot?”, Yang’s nostalgia is all over the place.
referential entries: Yang’s THAT DAY ON THE BEACH (1983, 7.4/10), A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991, 8.9/10); Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s DAUGHTER OF THE NILE (1987, 7.0/10).
