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Taipei Story
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Wikipedia article
{{Infobox film
| name = Taipei Story
| image = Taipei Story.jpg
| caption = Theatrical poster
| director = Edward Yang
| native_name =
| producer = Huang Yung
Lin Jung-feng
Liu Sheng-chung
| writer = Chu Tien-wen
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Edward Yang
| narrator =
| starring = Hou Hsiao-hsien
Tsai Chin
| music = Edward Yang
| cinematography = Yang Wei-han
| editing = Wang Chi-yang
Sung Fan-chen
| distributor =
| released =
| runtime = 110 minutes
| country = Taiwan
| language = Mandarin
Hokkien
| budget =
}}
'Taipei Story' is a 1985 Taiwanese film directed, scored, and co-written by 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.
Title
The original title, "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.
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."
References
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