Taipei Story
(Qingmei zhuma)

In Edward Yang’s second feature film, should we be surprised to find Hou Hsiao-hsien – who also worked on the scenario – playing a character so close to those he stages in his own films? From beginning to end, Taipei Story is run through by a deep unspoken discord that impacts the characters at every level of their existence, be it private, professional or social. Their separated lives then take indecisive, vacillating and contradictory paths, and Taiwanese cinema doubtless finds in this film by Edward Yang its most Antonionian leaning. A former baseball player now at a loose end drifts away from his girlfriend, who is devoted to her work but soon finds herself unemployed. JB