| 70; 3.5 stars; B+ | dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwanese | 157 min | M18 |
Taiwan, after the Japanese Occupation, is now governed by the Kuomintang government, whose repressive rule has devastating and long-lasting effects on its people.
‘A City of Sadness’, widely proclaimed as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s magnum opus, has the ambitious mandate of examining a post-war nation’s reconstruction through a familial microcosm. The Lin family, a group of four brothers, is this microcosm – anger, grief, alienation, and rebellion are its characteristics. Tony Leung plays the youngest brother, Wen-ching, a deaf-mute photographer who marries a Japanese nurse, sister of his friend.
Of the three other brothers, one is missing-in-action, another has returned home insane, and the eldest – Wen-heung (Chen Sung-young) – manages the shady family business. Wen-heung’s illegal dealings see him face to face with gangsters from the Mainland as part of a larger turf war, while Wen-ching surrounds himself with intellectual friends as their brewing discontent with the Kuomintang’s repressive rule precipitates the February 28 incident, a major uprising in the island’s history.
Hou’s film, over a good two-and-a-half hours long, offers no straightforward resolution; its plotlines are interwoven, its storytelling elliptical. What we hear of authoritarian misdeeds is visualised on-screen through the senseless imprisonment of the brothers; their house is stormed, one is badly beaten. There is a Marxist group fomenting revolution in the mountains, yet no substantial confrontation is shown.
This approach has substantive merit: Hou frames the camera through doorways, offering us a glimpse into the minutiae of characters’ lives. His concern is less with a tale of statistics than it is with fictional – yet strikingly authentic – people. While frustrating at times, ‘A City of Sadness’ is best viewed as a snapshot of happenings, a painful and long-drawn struggle for recovery.