A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985)

Hou Hsiao-hsien in Taipei Story

Cast: Tsai Chin, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen, Lin Hsiu-ling, Ko I-chen, Ke Su-yun, Wu Ping-nan, Mei Fang, Chen Shu-fang, Yang Li-yin, Lai Te-nan. Screenplay: Chu T'ien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang. Cinematography: Yang Wei-han. Film editing: Sung Fan-chen, Wang Qi-yang. Music: Edward Yang. 

Edward Yang's Taipei Story thrusts us into the midst of the lives of two people in the city of Taipei in the mid-1980s, and then lets us sort out the personal, social, and economic tensions between them. Chin (Tsai Chin) and Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) grew up together in the city and at some point decided to live together, despite pressure from their parents to get married. Lung has a small fabric shop and Chin is the executive assistant to a manager of a large construction company. As the film opens, Chin is about to lose her job because the company is about to be taken over by a larger corporation, and the woman she works for has resigned. Lung has just returned from the States, where his sister is married to a man who runs an import business. The possibility of immigrating intrigues both of them, especially since Chin's future is uncertain. But their lives are complicated by their families, old and new lovers, and the city that's changing around them. It's a film with the flavor of a good novel, whose subtlety and the intricacy of its relationships suggest that it probably improves with more than one viewing. 

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