Edward Yang

 A Brighter Summer Day

Taipei Story

The complete Edward Yang retrospective at the Walter Reade Theatre, coupled with the week-long premiere run of A Brighter Summer Day at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, gives me something to truly be thankful for this long Thanksgiving weekend. Last night Yang's widow, Kaili Peng, kicked off the series with a brief, moving introduction before a screening of Yang's third film, The Terrorizers (1986). It's a complex, tragic and masterfully composed meditation on narrative structure in the context of various troubled relationships. Volumes could be written on how Yang frames characters and events in relation to apartment walls and windows, mirrors, city streets and other elements of Taipei's (or in the case of Yi Yi, also Japan's) modern architecture. In the midst of this striking visual design, emotional and physical violence is constantly threatening to erupt.

Yang's Antonioniesque urban modernism is transposed to the 60s in his 4-hour masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day, which focuses on a group of alienated young people. As Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the film, "It has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other ‘90s film...What Yang does with objects—a flashlight, a radio, a tape recorder, a Japanese sword—resonates more deeply than what most directors do with characters, because along with an uncommon understanding of and sympathy for teenagers Yang has an exquisite eye for the troubled universe they inhabit. This is a film about alienated identities in a country undergoing a profound existential crisis—a Rebel Without a Cause with much of the same nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair."

A Confucian Confusion

Mahjong

Happy Together

One of the greatest films of the 90s and rivaled in Wong Kar-Wai's oeuvre only by In the Mood for Love, Wong's 1997 film Happy Together screened Friday at MoMA to kick off a series of films from distributor Fortissimo Films. This is one of the saddest, most achingly beautiful films ever made, with brilliant performances by Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung (both at their most gorgeous) as a tormented, constantly bickering gay couple, with cinematography by Christopher Doyle that switches between black and white and color to suggest the shifting moods, and a soundtrack brimming with music that complements the haunting images. After the screening Chris Doyle did one of his typically irreverent Q&As that managed to illuminate some of the creative process behind his collaboration with Wong Kar-Wai on this masterpiece.

A Hong Kong film with only one shot (upside down) actually shot in Hong Kong, it strands its characters in Buenos Aires, with side trips to Iguazu Falls and a poignant finale in Taipei. This dislocation creates an overwhelming mood of lonely exile from Hong Kong in the crucial transition year of 1997. The pain would be almost unbearable if not for the brilliance of the filmmaking on display here.

In the Family

In the Family, written and directed by and co-starring Patrick Wang, is the most remarkable gay-themed American independent film I've seen in many years. Wang has created a labor of love here, telling a powerful story about a gay family in Tennessee torn apart following the death of one of the partners and the custody battle that follows. It is told at a leisurely pace, almost three hours, which allows the story to take hold in a series of gripping dramatic scenes that play out in natural time, with a modern long-take style that lets the writing and the acting achieve their full impact. Brian Murray's climactic deposition cross-examination, followed by Patrick Wang's beautifully modulated scene defending his right to custody of his son, cap an emotional drama that avoids all the pitfalls of melodrama.

I'm in awe of Mr. Wang for committing so fully to telling this very personal story without compromise. Unable to find film festivals willing to screen the film, he has rented the Quad Cinema in New York for a week to self-distribute the film, a strategy which seems to have paid off with mostly glowing reviews (including Paul Brunick in The New York Times) and very positive audience reaction, judging from a well-attended Saturday afternoon screening at which the film received a round of applause, a rare event in my experience for an ordinary screening of this type with no announced special guests. In fact Mr. Wang and some of his family and friends happened to be at that screening, and I briefly told him I thought it was a great film on my way out of the theater. Perhaps I will have more to add to my analysis as I think more about the film.