Taipei Story

Taipei Story
Taipei Story.jpg
Theatrical poster
Traditional青梅竹馬
Simplified青梅竹马
Mandarinqīngméizhúmǎ
Hokkienchheng-mûi-tiok-má
Literallygreen plums and a bamboo horse[1]
Directed byEdward Yang
Produced byHuang Yung
Lin Jung-feng
Liu Sheng-chung
Written byChu T’ien-wen
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Edward Yang
StarringHou Hsiao-hsien
Tsai Chin
Music byEdward Yang
CinematographyYang Wei-han
Edited byWang Chi-yang
Sung Fan-chen
Release date
  • 1985 (1985)
Running time
110 minutes
CountryTaiwan
LanguageMandarin
Hokkien

Taipei Story is a 1985 Taiwanese film directed, scored, and co-written by filmmaker Edward Yang — his second full-length feature film and third overall. The film stars Yang's fellow filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and singer Tsai Chin, whom Yang subsequently married. It is one of the earliest films of the New Taiwanese Cinema.

In the United States, Janus Films gave a limited release of the film's 4K restoration, done by the World Cinema Project, on March 17, 2017.[2][3]

Title

The original title, 青梅竹马 "green plums and a bamboo horse", refers to Chinese plums and the childhood practice of riding a bamboo stick as a pretend horse. This idiom alludes to an 8th century poem by Li Bai, and in China it refers to a childhood sweetheart. The English title alludes to the film Tokyo Story (1953).

Plot

A young woman (Tsai Chin) urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei, and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

Characters

  • Tsai Chin - Chin, an office worker
  • Hou Hsiao-hsien - Lung, a former baseball player
  • Wu Nien-jen - Ch'en, a taxi driver and former baseball player
  • Lin Hsiu-ling - Ling
  • Ke Su-yun - Gwan
  • Ko I-chen - Mr. Ke, an architect
  • Mei Fang - Chin's mother
  • Wu Ping-nan - Chin's father
  • Yang Li-yin - Ch'en's wife
  • Chen Shu-fang - Mrs. Mei
  • Lai Te-nan - a coach

Themes

According to the Doc Film Society, the film "displays Yang's uncompromising critique of the middle-class with its dissection of its heroine's emotional fragility, vainly disguised behind the sunglasses she sports day and night. As she flees the past, her boyfriend idealistically clings to it, a Confucian rigidity toward which Yang bears still less patience."[4]

References

  1. ^ https://plus.google.com/+jenniferZhuECL/posts/ZbsbtUgzNh2
  2. ^ Anderson, Melissa (14 March 2017). "Past and Future Tug at an Unstable Present in a Restored Masterwork by Edward Yang". The Village Voice. Village Voice, LLC. Retrieved 3 April 2017.
  3. ^ "World Cinema Project". The Film Foundation. The Film Foundation. p. 2. Retrieved 3 April 2017. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory...
  4. ^ Choi, Edo S.; Iovene, Paola, "A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese filmmakers in transition", doc films Spring 2009 Volume 3 Issue 3, Doc film society, University of Chicago, archived from the original on 9 June 2009, retrieved April 14, 2009

External links


This page was last updated at 2019-11-12 18:50 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari