Edward Yang Week 2

It's taken me all week to get around to writing anything up about the second weekend of Edward Yang and Wu Nien-jen films at the HFA. I would like to write more - but I am lazy... and, let's not overlook the fact that these are long, complicated, dense films: it is very hard to do do any kind of justice to them on one viewing. I just hope it is not another 10 years before I get to see Brighter Summer Day or Terroriser again. For now, though - get thoughts down in words, and out to the internet.

Brighter Summer Day is all it is cracked up to be. 4 hour film about high school kids in early 60s Taipei - they are all mixed up in gangs - there is tension between the children of mainland families and the native Taiwanese as well as between various gangs (and amongthe gangs, since they seem to fight with each other as much as their rivals.) We follow Xiao Sir, mostly, played by Chang Chen - his fights, his amours, his family, etc. He is the center of a dazzling array of stories and characters - the gang plots, with missing heroes and intrigues with girls and elaborate schemes involving rock concerts and pool sharks, are a full length movie unto themselves... But Sir's family (his father's troubles with the government and corrupt friends, his brother's gambling problems, his sisters - one a Christian, who hangs in the background until nearly the end then emerges), his friends (Cat, a tiny little kid with an ethereal voice and a tape recorder doing phonetic Elvis covers when he isn't starting fights; and Ma, a rich trouble maker who becomes Sir's best friend, but can't leave the ladies alone... ), plus all the people around them - the drunken neighbor who resents their "iron rice bowl", the teachers, the film studio next to the school, etc. - all get their due. It's an easy 4 hours to take - gorgeous looking, made with consummate skill. The problem is - its density, the number of characters, the fact that most of the characters go by nicknames in some scenes, actual names in others - and that a number of characters seem to have been deliberately set up to resemble each other (a good deal of plot turns on the fact that Ming and Jade (2 girls) look alike) - all this makes it very hard to keep track of who is who and why: by the time you figure it all out, the film is almost over. It's a film you need to see at least twice, just to know what is going on - and to appreciate the skill with which it is all handled. (Since a lot of the things that make it difficult - like the doubling of characters and names and such - are integral to what makes it work.) But good luck with that.

The Terroriser is the other Yang film I've read about - Frederic Jameson and all that. It also lived up to expectations. Its a network narrative of sort - following a doctor and his writer wife, a photographer, and Eurasian girl - they have nothing to do with one another, but, network narrative fashion, cross paths at key points. The photographer shoots the girl escaping from a police raid; the girl, locked in at home by her mother, phones people at random - she tells the writer her husband is having an affair... eventually they all come back together - maybe. It's Yang's most difficult, strange film - the Antonioni references at their strongest (bits of Blow Up, Zabriskie Point, etc.) - or Oshima. All of it placed most emphatically in the city - the streets and roofs and buildings, the flats and offices and roads of Taipei shaping the material throughout.

Confucian Confusion and Mahjong are Yang's least known, or least talked about, films: they are comedies - CC is a madcap near farce among a bunch of people associated with a magazine; Mahjong is a dark comedy about gangsters, businessmen, international hustlers and the like... Mahjong probably should have been better - it goes astray a couple places - notably, some of the non-Chinese casting is a problem. It's especially noticeable given that the role of Markus was originally supposed to be played by David Thewlis - you can see Thewlis in the role - it sounds like Thewlis - the actor doing it has no hope.. But it's still high quality stuff - very funny at times (Wu Nien-jen as a gangster is a total hoot), capable of sudden swerves into horror and violence - and most of the cast carries it off very well. Confucian Confusion, meanwhile, though overlooked among Yang's work, is a first rate film. Starts out, I admit, a bit too busy - lots of shouting and people bustling about in an imitation of a madcap comedy - but once it gets going, it becomes very good. There are a host of characters, again (all of Yang's films, at least since Terroriser, have been fairly large ensemble pieces), all of them sleeping with each other (like in a Coen brothers film). It's intricately plotted - a series of rumors and real infidelities set everyone chasing everyone else around trying to get proof - everyone bounces off everyone else... though it finds time to reflect - there is a writer, morose and possibly crazy, who hates himself for writing popular novels and now can't sell his serious work, who gets to reflect seriously on the condition of things... he's paired, I should note,by his opposite - an extremely silly playwright and director, who starts the whole thing rolling by plagiarizing one of the writer's popular novels... doubles and parallels abound,but that's a given in Edward Yang's work.

Anyway - these two films are interesting for a couple reasons. One is - his 80s work is often compared to Antonioni - comparison it well earns. (And Oshima - though Oshima and Antonioni often parallel each other as well - at least the films I've seen: compare The Man Who Left His Will on Film and Zabriskie Point, say). But these films - Confucian Confusion and Mahjong - seem to me to shift toward something like a Rivette or maybe Chabrol influence. (I don't know too much about Chabrol: but it seems possible.) The big casts, running through fairly elaborate comedic plots, that turn dark or light almost instantly - all of it circling around artists (in CC at least), all of it very theatrical. Even Yang's famous fascination with architecture and spaces fits - Rivette, too, is notable for his fascination with places,and space.... It's an interesting thought anyway - whether there's anything to it or not.

Finally - the series also showed In Our Time - an omnibus film from 1982: Yang contributed a section, about a teenaged girl's first crush. It's a nice piece - the films as a whole is interesting, especially the first 2 pieces, for how similar they are - the long takes, long shots, the restraint. Yang's style emerges from this blend of neo-realism, Japanese classics, a bit of modernism - it's not quite formed here, though his control of the medium is already apparent.

And Wu Nien-Jen's second film was also shown: Buddha Bless America - a comedy about a Taiwanese village taken over by the US military for maneuvers. The story is familiar enough - the mysterious Americans, the greedy, shifty villagers, the idealist caught in the middle - but it's all quite amusing with an undercurrent of sadness. Interesting too for reserving its harshest attitude for the Mandarin speaking translators who do more to separate the Taiwanese speaking villagers from the Americans than to link them. The Americans and villagers may be selfish and callous to one another, but they don't come off as intentionally cruel - the translators are. Anyway - it's a fine movie, though somewhat overshadowed by the Yang films.