Cape No.7 Trailer

A trailer for Cape No.7, with a rough English translation.
…………………………………………….

Three Times

I finally got to see Hou Hsiao-hsien’s newest film. Here’s a commentary.

Three Times tells three unconnected love stories in Taiwan in 1966, 1911, and 2005, with the lovers played each time by Chang Chen and the gorgeous Shu Qi.

1966 is a charming, exquisitely-realized romance. On brief days of leave from military service, Chang insouciantly woos Shu over a game of pool, and then pursues her in small-town pool halls across Taiwan. 1911 is silent, with inter-titles for formalized dialogue. Chang is a wealthy young reformer meeting Shu as a courtesan in her room in a large Japanese house, between excursions with the great scholar and politician Liang Qichao. In 2005, Shu has a jilted girlfriend as well as photographer Chang, and sings in dark underground clubs in Taipei. Shu is damaged physically and emotionally, and self-consciously alienated from meaning in her life.

Three Times is unmistakably Hou, with long static takes and minimal dialogue. It is beautifully shot with framed compositions which return like motifs through each section, and he makes the most of his photogenic actors.

In 1911, Chang writes to Shu to tell her he is leaving for Shanghai and he may never return, his reforming ideals falling before the courtesan who he is unwilling to save. In that moment, Three Times becomes national allegory, and Shu Qi is Taiwan herself, abandoned by China and its hypocrisies. Hou is writing her history as a continuous narrative across the Japanese colonial period, the KMT era and the present. As an allegory, Three Times becomes Hou’s personal and critical view of Taiwan. After being left to her fate, she returns steeped in nostalgia in the 1960s with freshness, charm, and captivating beauty. But by 2005, she is fractured, cynical, materialistic, and tragically lost in her modernity.

Three Times’ elegiac presentation of the 1960s, when Taiwan was an authoritarian state under martial law, makes it very particular critique and sure to irk those who would write that period differently. But as Taiwan struggles through its current crisis of confidence, Hou’s film is a timely and harsh commentary, and its wholly ambiguous and uneasy ending suits the moment.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Tsai Ming-liang can be an acquired taste, but this is my favourite of his films

Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang (dir.) (2004)

A film about watching films, and nostalgia. Dragon Inn, King Hu’s 1966 wuxia classic is the last film showing at a run-down old cinema on a wet night in Taipei before it closes down. A handful of odd figures come to watch and as they move around the cinema against the screen’s flickering light, there are evoked passings moment in an array of wry, funny, sad personal stories. In slow, wordless comedy, the personal space of a young Japanese tourist is invaded by noisy eating and bare legs over the seats, before he goes silently cruising. An old man watches with a boy. It is the actor Shih Chun, and is watching himself on screen as a young man in the original film. The ticket-seller steams an absurdly large bun in her rice cooker in her booth and then takes half to leave for the projectionist. She is crippled, with calipers, and limps with excruciating awkwardness through the concrete passages and stairs of the cinema. Up and back and back again to secretly, and painfully, see that he hasn’t touched it. And then she stands behind the screen to look up and watch Kuang Shan, the heroine of Dragon Inn, singlehandedly defeat a brigade of bandits with her martial arts. There is not a word spoken in Goodbye, Dragon Inn until forty-five minutes in, and no more than a dozen lines of dialogue in the entire film. But it is filled with warmth and humour and sadness, and space for reflection.

Saving Face

A short film review.

First-time writer director Alice Wu’s take on life, love and family in Chinese-America.

Saving Face juggles a lot of balls and just about keeps them in the air. Michelle Kruciec is a lesbian daughter in the closet, an up-an-coming surgeon, whose widowed middle-aged mother, Joan Chen, lands on her doorstep pregnant by an unknown lover. There follows a weave of intersecting life stories against the background of a censorious Chinese-American community, in a familiar romantic, bitter-sweet tone, and it all comes down on the safe side of love and acceptance.

Baggy shirts and cargo pants aren’t enough to make Kruciec entirely convincing as the butch to Lynn Chen’s femme love interest, but she sketches a real character and conveys a sense of discomfort in her own body, not a trivial achievement given the particular body it is.

Her unease expresses her family and community’s unacceptance of her sexuality. Social transgressions show the operation of social power, and in Alice Wu’s Chinese America, like many before, social power is made visible most sharply in women, in women’s bodies, and their sexuality — in Chinese-American women’s freedom, or lack of it, to control and enjoy their own bodies.

Through the lens of sexuality, Saving Face constructs the meaning of being Chinese-American as the denial of individuality, as an ethnic identity with sanctioned, “traditional” life paths, which don't happen to include being a lesbian or a woman taking a young lover in middle-age. The “Chinese” in “Chinese-American” is resolutely unmodern, while the modern is, of course, the “American”. In Saving Face, America enters in the form of Michelle Kruciec’s non-Chinese neighbour, who dispenses advice as the modern voice of commonsense, reason and rationality.

Yet the daughter’s transgression of her Chinese “traditions” is just one of many in the film. She is disapproved of by her mother, who in turn is disapproved of by her father and friends, as is Lynn Chen by her father, and so on and so forth. And as the scandals pile up, they seem to be working harder and harder at producing the meaning of contemporary Chinese-American identity. One lesbian daughter is not enough to show us its social mechanisms at work. We need two, and a middle-aged pregnancy, and an intergenerational love affair.

Perhaps, then, real Chinese-America is rather more pluralistic. Perhaps contemporary Chinese-Americans are more readily able reconcile their ethnic identity with their sexual, or with any life’s journey which they follow, and Saving Face represents the end of the need to show them to be otherwise. If so, then the meaning of being Chinese-American is open for reimagining, and there are many talented artists such as Alice Wu able to do so.

Tigerwomen Grow Wings

Last week I co-organized a screening of German documentary about three Taiwanese women artists at the Goethe Institute here in London. It was a sell-out, with a great crowd of Taiwanese, Germans and British. The film was well-received, with, interestingly, younger Taiwanese most ambivalent about being represented by a European in film. The director herself came over from Hamburg for the event, and was a charming and forceful personality. Here is a short review of the film.

The German filmmaker Monika Treut has a reputation for challenging and confronting films dealing with women's sexuality. Her narrative films in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Verfuhrung: Die Grausame Frau (Seduction: The Cruel Woman, 1985) and Die Jungfrauenmaschine (The Virgin Machine, 1988) and Female Misbehavior (1992) tackle lesbianism, the extremes of women’s desire and the eroticism of sexual power for women in sado-masochism and other practices.

In 2002 Monika Treut visited Taiwan for the first time for a festival screening of her work, and found herself within the island's intense political and cultural milieu. With hundreds of Chinese missiles targeting the island counter-pointed by billions of dollars of trade, and an island narrative of marginality and suffering, and transformation and modernity, Taiwan presents any curious visitor with a sense of the discovery of a dynamic political and social life largely unknown in the western world.

The result of this encounter was a documentary film about women, art, politics and history in Taiwan.

The film, Tigerwomen Grow Wings, is about three Taiwanese women artists of different generations – the Taiwanese opera singer Hsieh Yueh-hsia, the well-known writer Li Ang and the young film director Chen Ying-jung. The documentary is very straight. There is no voice-over, just the women speaking about themselves. The film uses a little contextualizing historical footage, shows the women in their lives and careers, and locates itself against the backdrop of the bitterly contested presidential election of 2004.

The film's premise is a well-established trajectory of modernization. Hsieh Yueh-hsia represents tradition, Li Ang transformation and Chen Ying-jung modernity. Recalling Farewell My Concubine, Hsieh Yueh-hsia was sold to a Taiwanese opera company as a child in the 1930s, and endured a brutalizing upbringing, while Chen Ying-jung is an archetypal Taiwanese urbanite, and her hugely successful film Formula 17 – a glossy gay fantasy set in Taipei – is as far from the conservative social mores of Hsieh's youth as would be possible. One could also suggest that the use of “three generations” is a standard theme for representations of Chinese modern history, referencing Wild Swans and The Joy Luck Club.

But the film explicitly undermines these standard narratives, creating a rich counter-history of women’s lives as radical, even transgressive, and showing the blurred boundaries of personal identities in Taiwan regardless of the historical period. Hsieh Yueh-hsia spent her illustrious career in Taiwanese opera playing only male characters, and the film intimates at her sexual life with female partners, and sometimes violent relationships with men. The film is also attentive to her Taoist religious beliefs as a worshipper of the god Matsu. The sexual life of the writer Li Ang is well-enough known in her own novels, and in the film she focusses on her politics as a supporter of the democracy movement in the 1970s. Li Ang does not pass up opportunities to play the celebrity, self-consciously "showing" Taiwan to the German director. Chen Ying-jung is the most insouciant, constructing her identity as Taipei urban "cool", but offering glimpses of a focussed and ambitious artist.

Western reportage on Taiwan is almost uniformly abysmal, falling back onto lazy cliches and sensationalisms over the prospect of a cross-straits war. Tigerwomen Grow Wings is a rare intervention in Western media imaginings of Taiwan, attentive to the complexities of personal stories without being intrusive, and locating them against the backdrop of political social movements over many decades.

The film is ultimately constrained by being a Western film about the East, and cannot escape the presumption of a German director to speak about the Taiwanese. As such, one could look forward to a Taiwanese director making a documentary film about three generations of German women artists, and undoubtedly this is something which Monika Treut would welcome.

Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the globalization of propaganda

Another film commentary, I wrote this … today. For the journal Millennium, published here in London. A favourite piece of writing about one of my least favourite films.

China and the West have rich places in each other’s imaginations. In the cultural life of the English-speaking world, in just the last century, we have passed through a range of tropes and stereotypes: China as dangerous and corrupting in the form of the evil “oriental” Fu Manchu, China as woman, to be consumed and to be saved in the character of Suzy Wong, and ambivalent masculine versions of China – macho, camp, comic and cool in Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-fat, and more recently, geo-political understandings of China as a new superpower. For the Chinese-speaking world, the Western models of consumer culture and modernity and simply the presence of the pre-eminent economies of Europe and the US have structured Chinese thinking on how it establishes its post-imperial place in the modern world.

Mirror Image

Another mini review, this time for the program notes of the Sydney Asia-Pacific Film Festival a few years ago. This film was really good, and its director Hsiao Ya-chuan was the Next Big Thing, but he doesn't seem to have done much since.

Mirror Image (2000) Hsiao Ya-chuan (dir.)

Tung-ching is running his father's pawnshop on the outskirts of Taipei with his girlfriend Eiko while his father is in hospital. A scooter accident has left Tung-ching with no lines on his palm, frustrating Eiko's desire to know his fate. A beautiful woman comes into the shop, who Tung-ching calls Xiaode Le (Now I Know), and they begin a relationship in love and illegal hawking.

Mirror Image is the first feature for Hsiao Ya-chuan, a protege of the great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hsiao is an established commercial director and was Hou's assistant on Flowers of Shanghai. Mirror Image was selected for the Directors Fortnight at Cannes this year.

In Mirror Image, Hsiao Ya-chuan gives us a concise millennial update of the Taiwanese experience. His is a dry and pithy intrusion into the territory of Hou Hsiao-hsien's great and tragic Taiwanese historical trilogy, A Time to Live and A Time to Die, City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster.

Hsiao's Y2K Taiwan is disconnected from itself. Like Hou's, his interiors are claustrophobic and filled with the small things of ordinary lives, but his exterior is Taipei's slick new subway system. Hsiao apprehends the empty consumerism and ennui of Taiwan's modernity tempered by the wry quietude of a society not so far from its rural roots. The character of Tung-ling, the young man with no fate, evinces Taiwan's uncertain future, both hopeful and apprehensive on the frontier of East Asia.

Ping Pong

A micro review of a Japanese film we rented on DVD a few months ago from a pretentious video store down the road in Camden, north London. I wrote this for another livejournal blog, of film reviews, but I really just wanted to get back into writing again for pleasure, after finishing my PhD.

From Japan, based on a hugely successful manga, Ping Pong is about … er … ping pong, played by two best friends, their coaches, their own loser team and fanatical rival schools. The narrative is conventional – boys get ping pong, boys lose ping pong, boys get ping pong – but in that are stories of redemption, transcendence, ecstasy and death. Well, not literally death, but in the film the drama of ping pong encodes the obsessions of Japanese culture with the pursuit of the sublime in the spiritual, in suffering, and ultimately in the valorization of death itself. The final contest, between one of our heroes and his cast-iron rival, throws contemporary Japanese slacker culture against riffs on the bushido ideology of Japanese militarism, all undercut by the joke that these samurais are just smacking little plastic balls at each other. Ping Pong is shot with a stylization which invokes its hyper-real manga origins, and although the product placement is intrusive, it’s satisfying, funny and ironic.

Cinema and National Memory – Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness

A more recent piece about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 masterpiece, City of Sadness written for the "bulletin" published by my research centre. To call it my "favourite" film seems inappropriate. It is, almost literally, a monument, a cinematic work of overwhelming weight and power. City of Sadness achieves as much politically and culturally as any film could ever hope to do.

Like many cinema traditions outside of Hollywood and Europe, Taiwan has produced films with a self-conscious project to articulate and create a national experience. Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness is one of the most remarkable such films, for its artistry, its subject matter, and the period in modern Taiwanese history in which it was made.

Star Wars and the Seraglio

I wrote this in 1999, as a preview piece for the first of the Star Wars prequels. It ends hopefully, but as we now know those hopes were dashed when we actually got to see Episode 1 … and 2 and 3.

The new Star Wars movie, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, is due for release in May in the States and the publicity machine is already well into gear: teasers on the internet, a two and a half minute trailer showing in cinemas, glossy 'sneak' photos in Vanity Fair. Not that a publicity machine needs to do very much. A new Star Wars movie after sixteen years is a publicist's dream; a movie that generates its own hype; a movie big enough to make it in the media as a legitimate international news story, like war in Kosovo or a tornado in Nebraska. One can imagine George Lucas convening a meeting of his bean-counters and announcing his intention to make another one. Were they able to hide their glee? Did they nod to each other solemnly and say, "Yes, that is a sound decision that will grow the product returns." Or did they all start dancing and giggling hysterically with arms outstretched as if to catch the billions falling from the sky like rain?