A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness is an intimate, poignant and masterful work from Hou Hsiao Hsien, a deep dive retrospective into Taiwan's post-war history, featuring strong ensemble performances from Chan Sung Young and Tony Leung. Winner of the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the 46th Venice Film Festival in 1989, the film has been remastered in 4K digital and re-released after 33 years. The story chronicles the lives of three brothers during the White Terror, a period of political repression and martial law in Taiwan under Kuomintang rule post-WWII. The eldest brother, Lin Wen-hsiung, runs a bar in a coastal town near Taipei. The second brother disappeared in the Philippines during the war. The third brother, Lin Wen-liang, who's come home after working as an interpreter for the Japanese in Shanghai, struggles with mental illness and engages in illegal activities. The fourth brother, Lin Wen-ching, is mute after suffering an illness and runs a photography studio. Hou Hsiao Hsien invests the screen time in the daily mundanities of Taiwanese rural life, covering full scenes in long take master shots that transports the audience into its historical setting. A City of Sadness forced me to mature into an adult through its 157 minute runtime. My mind fought against the slow-moving slice-of-life aesthetic at first and narrowly nodded off in the first act but I eventually tuned to it and learned the virtue of patience. At its peak, I felt I was lingering around in a historical period. Hou builds the tension through his own unique film language. Initially, my patience was tested watching Tony Leung's mute character hand write notes in real time but eventually I was on the edge of my seat, eagerly waiting what he was about to write, and thus, how the story was about to unfold. Whenever the story pulls the rug from under the audiences' feet, the drama hits hard and it is heartbreaking to witness good working folk slowly losing their own nation and their way of life. An overwhelming melancholy slowly builds and builds up to the very end. Chen Sung Young, who famously played Jet Li's father-in-law from Fong Sai Yuk, delivers a great naturalistic performance as the elder brother. I couldn't feel the acting. It was pure behavior. Tony Leung gives a fascinating performance as the mute Lin Wen-ching. It is the most stripped down Leung has ever been from his movie star leading man persona. There's no smirking or cinematic coolness like in his Wong Kar Wai roles, just raw emotions bathing in silence. A City of Sadness is a great piece of art. It's an important film for Taiwan that can be prescribed as a group cathartic release of an unpleasant part of their history that went undiscussed for too long. Hou Hsiao Hsien just presents the history through civilian eyes. He does not judge, critique or take a stance. I walked out wishing more historical dramas were made with this level of craft and mastery.

Hou Hsiou-Hsien's "A City of Sadness" is one of Oriental Cinema's most rewarding challenges. I have returned to it several times, always with a sense of awe, understanding it a little more on each occasion but still not always sure what is actually happening on the screen. Although this makes the experience sometimes frustrating, the miracle is that it never detracts from the gut feeling I have had from the very first viewing that I am watching a masterpiece. An ambitious attempt to capture the immediate post second world war period of Taiwanese history by following the members of one family through fragments of their daily lives rather than a carefully constructed continuous narrative, Hou's work resonates with tremendous feeling. As is usual with this director, the audience has to work hard to supply connections in a film without joins, in order to understand who is who and what is actually going on. I have to admit that some of the scenes of gang violence still elude me, but, these apart, the light is beginning to shine through. It is clear that the old man with the beret who sits often staring vacantly is the owner of that densely furnished restaurant; that he has four sons. The eldest, the sturdy looking one, seems perennially mixed up with figures of a gangster underworld, the second has returned from the war mentally damaged, the third did not return from active service in the Phillipines and is presumed dead. And then there is the youngest who has a photographer's studio and seems completely apart from the rest of the family by virtue of a sensitive, gentle nature and the disability of complete deafness brought on by a childhood accident. It is his fortunes and those of the young nurse he eventually marries that provide the sense of audience empathy that even the most obscure cinema need in order to work its magic. Their scenes provide moments of great tenderness in a relationship that relies entirely for communication on the written note such as the occasion when she needs to tell him about the beauty of a German folksong that is being played. When the country is placed under repressive martial law with massed executions for dissenters we have snippets of the deaf mute's experiences. There is a particularly telling moment when he is in captivity, unable to hear the sound of the firing squad from which he somehow mercifully escapes. In "A City of Sadness" it is short scenes such as this that one remembers so vividly. That it provides the experience of a sweeping epic without recourse to any great scenes of action is both its mystery and fascination.

This is definitely one of my all-time favorite movies. Before watching A City of Sadness, I subconsciously had this notion that somehow there were certain ways (or methods) feature narrative films should be made. Oh…how wrong I was. Experiencing this movie was like… the first time I saw Asian art, no more like the first time I tasted Chinese food as a kid. It was more than different. It was delightful! This film totally enlightened me! This poetic masterpiece changed the way I view cinema. This film which deals with modernity of Taiwan, feels more like a Confucian ritual, an ancestral rite of some sort. And at the same time like many of Hou Hsiao-hsien's other films, this movie deals with the theme of 'growth'. Hou seems to tell us over and over again that growth is learning to say goodbye to the things we love. One beautiful movie. I strongly recommend it to the cinephiles who haven't yet tasted this great cinematic treat.

Artistically, its greatness is not in dispute, but it is hard to overstate the importance of this film in political and social terms for Taiwan. The subject of the film, the February 28 Incident (the massacre of 20000 or more Taiwanese by Chinese Nationalist troops in 1947) had been completely been banned from public discussion by the now-defunct military government of Taiwan up until 1988 - only a year and a half before the film was released. To intervene so powerfully in a period of political and social change as Taiwan's democratic revolution in the late 1980s, makes the film as dramatic a re-configuring of a country's cultural landscape as any film has ever achieved.

This film is definitely one of the best historical film i have ever seen! ... putting aside all those clichés most filmmakers are tend to use: there is no such thing as heroic portrayal of martyrs or the use of extremely artificial dramatic art. That makes this film believable and, compared to others, very unique. Normally you would have a narrator who is telling you the story from his point of view. Now, i don't want to say that i dismiss this way of narration but "A city of sadness" does not need such a narrator; in fact it would shatter the special specific atmosphere of this movie if that would be the case. Without definitive narrative elements, the staging normally involves (narration/music/DP etc), the viewer gets the feeling that he is able to see for himself what the lives of those people were like when WWII ended. It is fascinating to witness how this very sober staging is still able to evoke strong emotions within the viewer. This is due to the directors vision but also to the cast which did an amazing job. It was also very clever to have the deaf Wen-Ch'ing as the main character so the viewer can sympathize with him very easily: like Wen-Ch'ing the viewer is kind of caught up within the political turbulence and is not to able react like he would want because he is mute ... and is therefore not able to speak up in a loud voice to stop the violence. He is forced to watch. Even today the topic Taiwan/China isn't solved at all. After watching this film people will surely get a better understanding why the struggle between China and Taiwan is so filled with anger, sadness, fury ... so ... that's definitely a must-see!! ;)

Simply one of the best films ever made and certainly the best to have come out of China, Taiwan or Hong Kong. Forget about traumatic Taiwanese history, forget about other "epic" films from mainland China, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong. This one is one of the most profound statements about human condition and the relentless power of history. You can physically feel the winds of history blowing through a small hospital in the mountains, or a house of the person who will succumb to the inevitable, or a railway car caught in the middle of a massacre. Hou Hsiao-Hsien doesn't reconstruct history, he shows you human beings caught unawares and unable to cope with a totally unexpected avalanche of events destined to change their lives. Acting is superb, the mute character played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai (who, quite prosaically, couldn't speak Hokkien and had to be made mute) will haunt you for a very long time. One of the most underrated films from one of the most underrated directors. Spend two and a half hours of your life watching this, it's worth it. 10 out of 10.

This is the only one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's films I caught at a retrospective of his work, and it's a tragedy because this film is so incredibly good. Hou's rigorous formal approach (highly geometrical framing, repetitive shots along axes, distinctive use of lived-in colors) provides a framework for the film to operate within its own world. Whereas Coppola's "Godfather" goes this way and that, without a significant coherence, visually or rhythmically, "City of Sadness" feels like an elegy to Taiwan and the family (in much the same way that "Underground" is an ode to what was once Yugoslavia). At times funny, sorrowful, and invigorating, I suppose that what makes this film so special is that it refuses to operate in "big moments" and focuses, like Ozu (who Hou is often compared to) on the little events that make life what it really is.