Taipei Story

This film was made my Edward Yang in 1985. Yang is widely thought of as a gifted film-maker, but very few of his films are accessible because they are rarely shown and they are not available on DVD. The Exception is Yi-Yi (aka A One And A Two), which won too many awards to be listed here and was named by the magazine Sight and Sound in 2002 as one of the greatest films of the previous twenty-five years.

Pretty well all of Yang's films are of high quality and that includes the film here under consideration, Taipei Story.

It has often been remarked that one of Yang's talents is to maintain two planes of focus in his films: The socio-political-cultural plane, and the personal plane, and that is evident in this film that, in telling the story of a couple who have been together since childhood but who are growing apart, presents a panorama of life in Taipei in 1984. Chin, played by Chin Tsai (who subsequently became Yang's wife) has an executive desk-bound job, wears sharp suits to work, and is becoming yuppified; while Lung, played by Hou Hsiao Hsien, stays closer to his traditional roots. Edward Yang, who died of cancer (he was a heavy smoker) in 2007, aged 60, was an exponent of the Taiwanese New Wave, that sought to reject the previous light-weight Taiwanese cinema. Yang's reputation was slightly eclipsed by that of Hou Hsiao Hsien, who took the lead role in this film as a favour to a friend. Hou became much more prolific and acquired a wider reputation as an exceptional film-maker (not in the UK, unfortunately!). Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang have currently the two biggest reputations in Taiwanese cinema.

Yang assembles his narrative from several threads in a way that is not so dissimilar to Altman's. Chin loses her job and and Lung, between his work with Chin's father and his interest in baseball, considers emigrating to the USA. Yang does not often use close-up shots and is not afraid to hold a stationary wide-angle shot for the duration of a scene. He paints a picture of a society coping with change and modernity.