Taipei Story 青梅竹馬 (1985, dir. Edward Yang)
To appreciate just how bitter a pill Edward Yang was serving up with Taipei Story, it helps to understand the sarcastic fake-out embedded in the film’s Chinese title. Lifted from a poem by Tang dynasty master Li Bai, Qingmei zhuma translates literally as “Green plum, bamboo horse,” a phrase that, like many classical idioms in the language, distills human experience to a tableau of emblematic objects that can be savored by the mind’s eye. Here the experience being described is one of kismet—an eternal love that evolves out of the carefree games of childhood and preserves its innocence even as the companions age. Seeing these words on a marquee in 1985, the year the film was released, the average Taiwanese viewer would have been primed to expect the kind of escapist melodrama that commercial Chinese-language cinema had excelled at for decades, or at least something in tune with the treacly hit ballads of lead actress (and Yang’s first wife) Tsai Chin. But instead of the pastoral, ever-blooming romance evoked in Li Bai’s lines, what we get is the dry chill of urban malaise.
Like the more widely appreciated masterpieces that Yang made later in his career, A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), Taipei Story is charged with the urgency of a director attempting to map out a whole society through the interlocking oppositions of gender, class, generation, and cultural persuasion that threaten to pull it apart. But whereas those later works boast the intricate plotting and ensemble acting that have led to his reputation as a novelistic director (further differentiating him from the more impressionistically inclined Hou), Taipei Story is hollowed out and almost airless, qualities that make its portrait of two lives grinding to a halt feel that much more unforgiving. As in almost all of Yang’s work, the central tensions arise out of what lovers, friends, and family do not know—and do not care to know—about each other. And the more we see of Chin and Lung in their private moments together, the more bewildered and embarrassed they seem that, despite having known each other since their school days, they’ve spent so many years calling something a relationship that now barely merits the name.
Whereas some filmmakers are primarily interested in the textures of life as it reveals itself in the present moment, Yang, even at his most despairing, is always tempted to look elsewhere, as if to ask what more might be needed to live meaningfully. Fifteen years before the tender resignation of Yi Yi, Taipei Story, in all its unrelenting darkness, comes up short on answers. But it’s in Yang’s ability to face up to the big questions with neither self-consciousness nor self-delusion that the seeds of his later hard-won hopefulness can be found.
Andrew Chan, “Taipei Story: Modern Planning”
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