Set a decade after the Chinese Nationalists fled the mainland, the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is Edward Yang’s semi-autobiographical reflection on what it was like, and what it means, to come of age in a politically fraught, repressive society.Supplied
When I visited Taipei last summer for a film festival, on the way in from the airport my guide eagerly informed me that the first comprehensive show on the late director Edward Yang was about to open at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, featuring curated displays of a vast array of personal documents and manuscripts. Then, as we entered the historic city centre, he proudly pointed out locations from Yang’s seminal film Taipei Story, buildings unchanged since 1985 despite the city’s hyperdevelopment that Yang himself captured with an unblinking gaze and a sardonic beauty.
This goes to show how much Edward Yang is still held in esteem in his homeland. Yang tragically passed away too early from cancer at 59 in 2007 and only made seven features over 25 years. A rewarding rewatching of all seven films, many of which have been unavailable in decent prints for ages, confirms Yang’s eminence as an auteur with a truly coherent body of work, one both of and ahead of its time. Along with the 1982 omnibus In Our Time, to which Yang contributed one of four chapters, all his features will screen mainly in new vibrant digital restorations throughout the month of July in TIFF Cinematheque’s must-see summer retrospective, Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories.
Unlike fellow Taiwanese New Waver Hou Hsiao-hsien, who starred in Yang’s Taipei Story but in his own directorial career was concentrated on rural stories, Yang was an urban poet. His films are evidence of the drastic societal change that took place as Taipei became one of the richest cities in the world. Yang’s specific thematic focuses are on the increasing influence of American consumerism and cultural imperialism (through rock music, baseball, McDonald’s etc.), the greed and corruption infusing business and art in the time of rapid economic growth and the paradoxes inherent in a changing culture where an historically collective mindset is overwhelmed by rampant individualism.
Nondescript offices, middle-class apartments, both occupied and vacant, gaudy bars (including, in Mahjong, the Taipei Hard Rock Café) – these are where Yang’s urban pseudo-warriors haplessly bear witness to the fracturing of their relationships, impelled by the strain of late capitalism and the sudden reappearance of long-lost loves. Over the course of film-historical time, Yang’s protagonists morph from alienated to aspirational, jaded to grotesque, dreamy to realistic. One thing is certain: They aren’t a happy lot.
The underrated A Confucian Confusion (1994) posits that simulated emotions are indistinguishable – if not more real – than the real ones.Supplied
Early in his career, Yang was compared to Michelangelo Antonioni, and his debut feature That Day, on the Beach (1983), does feature a disappeared protagonist, like L’Avventura. But it’s in his first masterpiece Terrorizers (1986) that one truly feels the influence. It’s a coolly shot film about a city threatening to explode that’s as much a time capsule of Taipei in the 1980s as Blow-Up was for swinging London in the 1960s, down to the keen fashion sense. Intertwining four simultaneous storylines across class lines, Yang creates a spatial postmodern puzzle that remaps Taipei as a location of chance encounters and fractured identity.
In the mid-1990s, Yang went from depicting alienation to creating films that alienated his viewers, or at the very least poking them where it hurt, as he dared criticize the inherent pitfalls of progress. A fake-it-till-you-make-it comedy about the dirty business of culture, the underrated A Confucian Confusion (1994) posits that simulated emotions are indistinguishable – if not more real – than the real ones. In the rarely screened Mahjong (1996), which sees a French naïf (Virginie Ledoyen) arriving in Taipei to surprise her expat British boyfriend, the scamming is all on the surface. It’s a more off-putting piece of noir where blackmail is considered “accounts receivable,” and, as one character gleefully points out, there are two kinds of people: crooks and dopes. As the economic bubble is about to burst, the foreigners have invaded: One just wishes they were better actors.
What many critics consider Yang’s two greatest films alternatively find the director in a novelistic mode, shaping sprawling multi-generational portraits rich in detail that both climax with teenage murder. Set a decade after the Chinese Nationalists fled the mainland, the 1991 237-minute teen gang epic A Brighter Summer Day is Yang’s semi-autobiographical reflection on what it was like, and what it means, to come of age in a politically fraught, repressive society. Unforgettably lyrical and moving, it’s a flat-out masterpiece, and a toss-up with Hou’s City of Sadness as the greatest Taiwanese film ever made.
Yi Yi, Yang's last film, is an expertly crafted work about the members of a contemporary generation conscious of the emptiness of their own lives.Supplied
The children of A Brighter Summer Day have grown up and procreated, metaphorically speaking, in 2000′s much-lauded ensemble family drama Yi Yi, screening in a 35mm print. Less adventurous following the sucker punches of A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong, Yi Yi remains a fitting capper to Yang’s prematurely terminated career. An expertly crafted work about the members of a contemporary generation conscious of the emptiness of their own lives, Yi Yi also provides a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow.
TIFF’s Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories retrospective runs July 4 through 30 in Toronto (tiff.net).
Special to The Globe and Mail