CITY OF SADNESS (68)

Directed by: Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1989)

Starring: Tony Leung, Hsin Shu-Fen, Kao Jai

The Pitch: A Taiwanese family is destroyed by the turbulent years (1945-49) between the end of Japanese occupation and the Communist takeover in China.

Theo Sez: It takes a while to make out who's who and to absorb the various bits of Taiwanese history, and Hou's less-is-more style tends to become a little wearying (especially in the later stages, when the film becomes less panoramic and characters start to fall by the wayside). Dramatically it peters out a bit, partly for structural reasons - the climax comes about halfway through, when the building political tension escalates into brief but bloody civil war - yet the rather desultory mood fits with the theme of family decline, and there's hardly a boring shot in the whole two-and-a-half hours (even if some are held a bit too long) : Hou achieves some magical effects - my favourite the conversation suddenly punctuated by a ghostly presence floating across the screen (a reflection in a plate-glass window through which - it turns out - the scene was being viewed) - and his distinctive frame-within-the-frame compositions give the feeling, at once charged and detached, of spying into a house through an open window. Whether or not the larger theme is communication, as has been said (not unreasonably, given the multitude of languages and dialects the characters speak, and the way it evokes a nation in transition), the film is eloquent - if not entirely satisfying - proof of how movies can make another culture's rites and symbols meaningful ; even if, inevitably, we don't fully understand them.