While Hou Hsiao-hsien is widely considered the director who best interprets regional color, Yang's reputation rests on having the most acute insights into city life. As Hou superbly handles the difficulties of expressing simple emotions, Yang takes on larger analyses of reality itself. This interpretation of the larger milieu brings additional insight to his assessment of middle-class ethics and aesthetics in "Taipei Story."
The story has several layers of meaning. On the surface it is a critique of Taiwan's current economic and cultural transformation. Of even greater importance, however, are the people caught up in a tempestuous personal world of paradox because of the sea of changes around them. Yang uses Taipei as a representative model of the searing difficulties faced by all Asian cities as their traditions are challenged, altered, and often rejected by the onslaught of modernization.
The large themes are captured in highly crafted scenes set in Taipei, extending from a cloth shop along Tihua Street in the western side of the city to the delicately designed shopping windows of a department store in the eastern part; from antique Chinese furniture to American Yuppie interior designs; from the cheap tastes found in local Karaoke piano bars to the artful yet vulgar pornographic jokes in a Western pub.
There are memorable visuals, not really complete scenes, that illustrate Yang's critically perceptive eye: contrasting shots of Chinese "old-man" tea and American Coca Cola; conversations mixed with Mandarin and Taiwanese dialect; a locally-produced Yue Loong automobile in a head-on collision with an imported Mercedes; soaring glass-covered commercial buildings next to older, occupation-period dwellings; and the silent road up to scenic Yangmingshan park against the background of distant Taipei city lights.
"Taipei Story" traces the impact of society's new materialism on a young Chinese couple. They are trapped in a time warp, urban youth who grew up according to traditional cultural ethics and now living an adulthood where those standards do not fit contemporary challenges. It is not as simple as a loss of ethics, for the traditional views were honed in an agriculturally based society; now they must live in the environment of the city, the modern metropolis. Their problem is not so simple as trying to save ethical standards lost or rejected; it is to adjust a system that does not fully work in the modern setting.
But the film touches the audience's heart-strings probably not so much because of the basic humanistic concerns that arise, but due to Yang's handling of the deeply personal problems that the young couple faces in the larger context of Taipei today. Their solutions, and those of other characters in the film, are often not much more effective than what happens in real life, giving the film a relevance that is not altogether comfortable for the audience.
Despondency and frustration figure prominently in the story line: A rude yet righteous Ah Lung; Ah Chen, who longs to emigrate to the United States but in vain; the alcoholic Ko I-cheng, who thinks marriage meaningless; an over-the-hill All-Chinese baseball player, who miserably holds a child while talking with friends who have come to express their concerns about his current status; Ah Chen's immoral father, who has been rejected by friends and society; and Ah Lung's sister and brother-in-law, who never appear during the film but are constantly referred to by others as being completely Americanized and therefore are criticized for rejecting the accepted ways and traditional relationships among people. These are all stories of economic change altering human nature, at least on the surface, as much as human values.
Yang is a master of visual imagery, a skill already clear in early works such as "That Day, on the Beach." His "framing" techniques and use of narration by off-screen voices are especially effective. For example, the opening scene of "Taipei Story" has the leading actor and actress separated by the frames of a French window, but their "separation" from each other is visually intensified by the associated angles and sounds in the same scene that gradually complement the window: the back door, a mirror, a pillar, the security fence around a nearby sports field, and the hollow noise of a TV and a remote echo in the building. All these visual and audio effects are systematically arranged to split human relations as far as possible. In fact, the abundant subtle metaphors included in Yang's scene arrangement remind viewers of Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Eclisse" in which buildings and consumer products have eroded the original innocence of human nature.
In narration and descriptive power, "Taipei Story" is more mature and humorous than "That Day, on the Beach," for it more frankly conveys subtle emotions as well as more directly intense feelings such as lust and depression. "Taipei Story" ultimately disturbs. After rejecting the dream of emigrating to the United States, the new generation becomes a generation of nihilists, a spirit poignantly captured by the scene in which the male lead sits in a Karaoke bar-restaurant listening to a song entitled "The Last Train Leaving From Taipei." Although Yang's work may not have reached the realistic power of Antonioni's "L'Eclisse," he successfully raises key questions about just how confident people should actually be in the strength of human nature—questions that still await satisfactory answers.—(Edwin Huang is a well-known lecturer and film critic in Taiwan).
Edward Yang (Yang Teh-chang) was born in Shanghai in 1947, not long after his family had moved there from their original home in Mei Hsien, Kwangtung Province. They emigrated to Taiwan in 1949, where he attended public schools and received his B.S. in engineering. Yang pursued further studies in the U.S., earning an M.A. in computer science in 1972. Later, he took a one-year film course at UCLA, which prompted his decision to return to Taiwan in 1981 and begin directing for television.
Yang's first work for the silver screen came the following year, "Desire," one of four episodes by as many directors in the feature-length film "In Our Time" (see FCR, October 1982). The popular "That Day, on the Beach" (see FCR, November 1983) came in 1983.
Critics claim that Yang is Taiwan's most Westernized director, and he has himself acknowledged stylistic debts to such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni and Reinhard Hauff among others. Nevertheless, his characters and situations are clearly rooted in the reality of Taiwan experience.
His 1986 film "Terrorists" (see FCR, July 1987) was shown at film festivals in Edinburgh, Cannes, and Chicago, and has won him praises from home and abroad, including an award at Switzerland's Locarno Film Festival last September and the British Film Institute's special award for "most original film of the year" at London Film Festival in November 1987.
Filmography:
1982: In Our Time
1983: That Day, on the Beach
1985: Taipei Story
1986: Terrorists