Ron Howard | Frost/Nixon / 2008

cheesburgers and new shoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Morgan (screenplay, based on his stage play) Ron Howard (director) Frost/Nixon / 2008

 

Our current national “leader,” Trump, occasionally likes to compare himself with Richard M.  Nixon, especially when it comes to issues of “law and order.” But as Peter Morgan’s script and Ron Howard’s direction quietly reveal, Nixon, although often a narcissist, was much more uncertain about everything about which Trump is certain. And, although Nixon also felt that even illegal action when it was done by the President, became automatically legal, he had far more doubts about his behavior than Trump could even imagine his own acts might represent. No one ever denied, moreover, that Nixon was an intelligent man. And most importantly, unlike Trump, Nixon actually had a glimmer of a conscience, which is the theme of this basically chronological telling.

     Although escalating the Vietnam war, and with the help of Kissinger, moving it into the then-peaceful country of Cambodia and, obviously, ordering up the botched robbery of the Democratic Washington, D.C. headquarters, which eventually grew into the rubric described as the Watergate affair, Nixon actually accomplished some important things, including ending the draft and establishing an all-volunteer military force (for the negative effects of this, see my comments on Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods); he founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, which, in turn oversaw the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (all of which Trump has worked hard to abolish); his administration dedicated $100-million to begin the war on cancer, including the creation of cancer centers throughout the country; with Title IX he opened up the possibility of women playing collegiate sports; he oversaw the peaceful desegregation of southern schools, and, with the 26th Amendment, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18; he authorized the FBI and Special Task Forces to eliminate organized crime; he was the first president to give Native Americans the right for self-determination and returned their sacred land; and in appointing Nancy Hanks as the first active leader of the National Endowment for the Arts, he strengthened that institution significantly.

     On the international level, he participated with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and, of course, he was the first American president to visit the People’s Republic of China (see elsewhere in this series of My Year titles my essay on John Adams’ Nixon in China), where he worked to develop open and normalized relations with that country.

      These achievements, however, do not at all to whitewash his continued involvement with the Vietnam war nor his and his associates’ labyrinthine attempts to bend the democracy he was supposedly representing for his own personal attempts to get reelected, and which ended in his resignation, which is where Howard’s film begins.

       I mention his successes only because, after tentatively agreeing to four interviews, the last dedicated to Watergate, Nixon himself laments to his aide, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) that with the discussion of the Vietnam war and Watergate, he will have little time to discuss any of his achievements.

       Cambridge-educated David Frost, if once thought of as a budding journalist, was in 1974, the year of Nixon’s resignation, was then working in a kind of reality show in Australia, touting the miracles of a manacle man who could magically escape even when placed, upside down, under water. Although perhaps still loved by the masses, Frost was scoffed at as a “talk show host” by most serious journalists.

       How Frost ever even had the temerity to call Nixon’s agent, Swifty Lazar (Toby Jones) to set up an interview, is almost unimaginable. But having just negotiated a good advance for Nixon’s own biography, Lazar perceived how desperately his client wanted a more immediate way of correcting the record and bringing him somewhat closer to normalcy.

       He knew he dared not take on an interview with the hard questions Mike Wallace or any of the other serious network interviewers might have posed, while Frost was seen as a lightweight, who would probably lob a few friendly questions that would allow the former President to create a forum for his rehabilitation. Calling Frost (Michael Sheen) back, Lazar got an outstanding advance for a TV interview of $600,000, made even more astounding by the fact that Frost had not yet found any network supporters, and the first payment of $200,000 probably came out of his own pocket.

      Already on the airplane to Washington, D.C., Frost reveals his frivolous nature by picking up a young woman, Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), who stays with him throughout the rest of the film.

      Meanwhile the team of Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell), and John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) attempt to comprehend Frosts’ strategy, without much success. Since Frost is seldom there, running after possible funders, as insignificant as the manufacturer of “Weed Eater,” only to be turned down again and again. The three strategists, accordingly, imagine questions that Frost might ask, while one of them plays Nixon, attempting to answer them as the former POTUS might. At one point, when they attempt to engage Frost for the evening, he instead runs off to a movie preview—a fantasy-film which he himself has produced.

       Without any advertisers or other methods of support, Frost convinces the networks such as BBC and his Australian station to fund the interviews themselves, thus holding control over all future rights, which he assures them will be substantial.

        Frost begins the first interview with a rather intriguing question: “Why didn’t you, Mr. Nixon, just burn the tapes?” But the tricky Dick Nixon (played by the marvelous actor, Frank Langella, whom the make-up artists did not even attempt to transform into someone that looked like the real man), turns the question on its head, in a long rambling answer arguing that, actually, Johnson had set up the taping system in the White House, which did actually allow its occupants to speak without having to call in a secretary, and were, perhaps, just too difficult to uninstall.

        Another question, “What gives you pleasure, Mr. Nixon?” allows the criminal to ramble on endlessly, for the rest of the allotted time, about issues such as his daughter Julie’s marriage, etc, etc. Frost has simply lobbed empty questions that take him nowhere.

        Still, somewhat self-assured, and refusing the intense advice his strategists provide him, Frost nonetheless begins the second session a bit more successfully, by insisting that Nixon explain why he extended the Vietnam War into Cambodia, killing thousands, and turning a previously peaceful people against the US. A short but powerful video follows.

 

        Nixon, however, simply justifies the attacks arguing that the Cambodians had guns that eventually would make their way in Vietnam to kill young American boys. Answering a straw man’s response that he wishes that the Americans had previously taken the gun away that killed his son, Nixon insists that his only regret is that the US had not gone into Cambodia earlier. Checkmate no. 2.

       The third interview, not even as memorable, does not go much better, and Frost is now being generally presented in the press as a patsy. The Australians pull out of the deal to broadcast the tapes, and there is a possibility that England may follow.

        Totally despondent, Frost cannot even suggest what he might want for dinner when his girlfriend rushes out to the local Tiki bar to bring back food.

        When the telephone rings, soon after, Frost picks it up to answer “a cheeseburger.” That sounds good answers the voice, who is Nixon calling him at moment of deep despair and somewhat dunk. For the next several moments Nixon bemoans his own inability to ever be appreciated for his political talents, arguing that men “like them” never are truly recognized for their abilities no matter hard to they attempt to prove themselves. Projecting upon the Cambridge graduate who nightly parties with singers, Playboy girls, and other celebrities, and is still beloved by a large swath of his audience, Nixon continues to group his sense of failure with Frost.

     When Nixon finally hangs up, it is as if Frost has suddenly awaken to his responsibility, reading all of the files that his strategists had created for him, and calling up Birt in D.C. to ask him, after previously refusing, to check up the Colson communication that the staff-member believes in in another Washington library.

      Frost stays awake the entire night, without eating, reading, with Birt, having hit the payload, returning to give Frost and him just enough to arrive the house where they are filming the interview, just before Nixon does, a bit late. Nixon refuses to even shake Frost’s hand.

       As the two sit, Frost whispers that he will begin with last night’s phone conversation, perhaps putting the former President off guard. Yet Frost makes no mention about their telephone conversation, but immediately launches into the heart of the Watergate events, demanding to know whether or not Nixon knew of the attempted break-in.

       As expected, Nixon blames it all on H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, who he claims orchestrated the robbery without his knowledge.

       Yet this time, Frost is prepared, and quotes tape after tape, and finally the letter Nixon had personally written to Colson, demonstrating that Nixon not only knew about the events ahead of time but was involved in paying off anyone who might point to the three of them.

       The penultimate intense scene is worth quoting:

 

NIXON I’ve always maintained that what they were doing, what we were all doing was not criminal. Look, when you’re in office you’ve gotta do a long of things that are not, in the strictest sense legal, But you do them because they are in the greater interest of the nation.

FROST: Wait, let me get this correctly, are you really saying that in certain situations the President can decide what is best for the nation and then do something that is illegal?

NIXON: I’m saying when the President does it, it is not illegal. 

 

      From there Frost demands an apology from the former President of the country, insisting that its citizens need such an apology.

      Brennan quickly interrupts the interview, taking Nixon into the next room to warn him about what he might be admitting, but Nixon rejects not facing up to Frost’s request, and returns to admit that he is sorry for what he has done, that he has not only let the people down, but let down democracy.

      Obviously that admittance of guilt is what everyone had sought and presumed they would never hear out of the mouth of Richard Nixon.

       Frost, finally, has won the debates, and temporarily rises, briefly, as a new kind of hero. Although as the film rider suggests, he never did anything in his journalistic career that could match this moment.

       Yet the screenplay adds a kind of gentle ending, as Frost and his girlfriend travel down to Nixon’s sea-side home at San Clemente just to say goodbye, giving him a present of the pair of Italian shoes, worn by Frost, which Nixon told his associates was too effeminate.

        After a few more words, their guests turn to go, with Nixon shouting after, “Did I really call you the night before the final interview?” “Yes,” Frost responds. “What did we talk about,” asks the nervous Nixon. “Cheeseburgers,” answers Frost.

      If Howard’s cinematic structure is rather simplistic, and Morgan’s script—as many critics have argued—too fictional in its content, director and author still have created a suspenseful tale based simply on one man asking questions and the other answering. We might even imagine that in those first three first interviews, the friendliness of Frost’s questions let, in that final interview, to Nixon letting down his guard, resulting in no way out of a deeply-held guilt which needed to be released not only for the health of the nation, but for the survival of the man himself.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).      

Bob Mizer | Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t / 1969

going native

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (writer and director) Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t / 1969

 

By the late 1960s Bob Mizer was doing films that definitely might be described as porno, although many of them still maintained a lacquer of innocence simply because they involved simulated sex and the production values were so low, the acting so awful, and the humor so silly that they seemed more like home productions than the increasingly more sophisticated porn films by Peter de Rome and Wakefield Poole among others.

     His 1969 film Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t might almost be described as a statement against the increasing move to full sexual representation in cinema, with his proud Indian character opting out in a grand expression of coitus interruptus from the completion of an on-screen depiction the sexual act.          The night janitor (Philip Morrison) at a museum displaying a statue of a wooden Indian (Eddie Scott) is busy at work doing some light dusting. Phil grows curious about the beautiful rendition of an American Indian, commenting aloud to his beauty and carefully checking out whether what lay under the Indian’s loincloth is as beautiful has the rest of him. He is surprised to learn that everything is anatomically correct.

      Suddenly the Indian comes to life, shocking the young janitor, who seems to think at first that the miracle is related in some sense to his being a kind of Aladdin, since the Indian also offers him his immediate wish, providing him with a great deal of money and quickly moves on to dance a rain dance.

      But what Philip really wants is sex with the beautiful representation of American natural beauty, and when the Indian pulls a muscle from doing a dance he has not practiced for a very long time, the boy offers up a massage, soon with the Indian lying on the floor face down with Philip straddled on top of him, he is ready as we all recognize for full sexual penetration.

      The Indian, clearly ready to go through with the act, however, suddenly attempts to stand and return to his pedestal, fearful that if he remains in that position any longer he will return to wood. Presumably, the pun here is on the graphic metaphor of a man getting a “woody” or an erection.

      In fact, the Indian has begun to return to wood the moment the boy begins to insert his penis, and Phil is hurt in the process of attempting to enter the Indian’s ass, later pulling out a nail as proof of the source of his pain.

      Meanwhile the Indian has fully turned back to wood. All Phil can do is to continue with his chores and hope that some other night he will find the Indian “in the flesh” once more.

      The joke, obviously, is that the beautiful rendition of body as a representation of manhood is far better than taking him off his pedestal and engaging him in real sexual acts.

      Yet, the film clearly recognized that things had changed and its showing at the Los Angeles Park Theater in 1969 represented one of the first films to display full male nudity in a public forum, implying that Philip actually penetrated Eddie during the massage, despite the fact that we recognize no male-to-male action really took place.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

 

 

Robert Lee King | The Disco Years / 1991

dancing the blues away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Lee King (screenwriter and director) The Disco Years / 1991

 

Although Robert Lee King’s half-hour long film The Disco Years disguises itself through its title, the film’s introductory voice-over about the dance craze of the late 1970s and its final clumsy disco dancing, this gay “coming out” film is really about homophobia, a far more important sub-genre in LGBTQ film-making than is dance—despite that fact that there are several far more important gay, lesbian, and transgender films that focus on the latter.

      The young soon-to-be-out gay boy in this film, Tom (Matt Nolan) does indeed suffer the stings of the homophobic reactions of his fellow students and even his doting mother, but the real victim in this work is the English schoolteacher Mr. Reese—the adult actor Dennis Christopher, not nearly as cute and charming as he was in an earlier 1979 coming of age film, although not gay oriented—Breaking Away. Yet the film does not focus on him and gives us little evidence for his later actions since it presents his character almost as the stereotype of an immediately recognizable gay man who even as he introduces himself to his class leads one female student Denise (Robin Stapler) to quip “Looks like we’ll be reading a lot of Walt Whitman.” This in an English composition class.

      The real focus is on the character of Tom, obviously a version of director’s younger self. Tom’s major problem seems to be that he looks and acts straight in a world that basically protects him for his impersonation, while utter frustrating him in his attempts at self-identification and, of course, in finding someone with whom he might—let’s put it bluntly since most “coming of age” films describe it as “love”—have sex. Honestly, although many a high school romance has ended in marriage, most 16 and 17 years old are really seeking someone with whom to relieve their hormonal tensions. For Tom the only available gay peer is the highly effeminate and outrageously “out” Teddie (Robb Willoughby), the kind of nelly gay boy that many young homosexual boys fear, as Tom does, that they will become—as if some fairy godmother held a magic wand over their heads in readiness—the minute they declare their sexuality. My husband Howard has long asserted that he shared that very fear as a 17-year-old. Fortunately, in King’s version of this phenomena, the hero sort of envies this future “queen” for his openness and by the end of the film invites him to dance.

      Yet there is always in any high school a beautiful jock lurking in the locker room just waiting to find the right boy to rub up against. In fact, the high school gay athletic hero having sex with shyer intellectually-inclined gay boys might almost be yet another sub-genre to the “coming of age/coming out” movies. My weather bell model, Get Real (1999) features just such a figure, as does John Butler’s 2016 film Handsome Devil. As I’ve written elsewhere, when I was a 15- or 16-year-old I might have had sex with the gorgeous captain of my hometown football team if only I’d been more a bit more mature and ready for the experience. Certainly, I wanted it and kick myself to this day for having jumped out of the car when he took out a cigarette.

      In Tom’s case it’s the beautiful fellow tennis player, Matt (Russell Scott Lewis). The two began playing matches which turn quickly into a camaraderie that ends up with them playing the kind of “touching games”—arms around the shoulder, mock wrestling bouts, and head-butting drinks from the water fountain—that ends up one night in a neighbor’s swimming pool where they play a kind of strip-tease game with one another before jumping in naked to swim their way into each other’s arms and lips.

      But King’s film, as I have already suggested, is no simple rom-com. The day “after” often ends in convenient amnesia for the jock and a well of loneliness for his nighttime friend. Matt, like so many others, has a girlfriend by the next morning and quickly develops into a homophobe to hide his true sexual proclivities from himself and his friends. Tom is too nice of a kid to “out” his one-night stand to the others, and besides they might not believe him and, as they ultimately do, turn their homophobic rage upon the truth-teller. Moreover, to do so Tom would be outing himself, something which he apparently is not quite ready to do, even if he has been trying out in the local bowling alley bathroom and has momentarily stood at the front door of the local gay dancing club. Certainly Teddie sees through Matt’s bluff, responding to his taunts, “You know what they say about people who live in glass houses.”

      Tom remains silent as they sport their homophobia by decorating Reese’s classroom with the usual chalkboard slurs of “fag” and pasted-up pictures of naked gay porno models. Which of them, one wonders, purchased the magazine from which the photos were lifted? Or did he already have them hidden under his mattress? It’s common knowledge that the most homophobic of beings are those who are most trying to deflect attention, but in this case it appears the girls are far less tolerant about gays than the boys. Are they afraid of losing their power over their boyfriends, terrified of their own loss of sexual prowess?

       What also truly surprises one in this otherwise typical portrayal of high school bullying is that the teacher is almost immediately ready to pack up everything and transfer to a less volatile school. Throughout, this film hints at the spirit of the times, with TV footage of California State politician John Briggs speaking for State Proposition 6 which would have prevented gays or those who supported gay rights from working in the public schools.

       Shortly after the classroom desecration, Tom visits his teacher, who is packing up to leave, asking him why he has become so easily intimidated. Reese explains that he knows all too easily to where this will lead, the kids reporting his homosexuality to their parents, the parents putting pressure of school authorities, and from there on having school administrators watching over his shoulders. Tom attempts to change his decision, suggesting he find out who committed the act. But Reese argues that’s not really important since the inevitable series of events has already begun to unfold. When Tom argues that it’s “unfair,” his beloved teacher snaps back, “Life is unfair...you better get used to it.”

 

     Suddenly Tom’s concern has been converted into his own personal involvement, and he is startled by the implications, quickly responding “I’m not like you,” presumably a denial of his being gay. Reese gently puts the matter to rest by denying his statement had suggested anything about shared values.

      When Tom returns to the klatch of perpetrators he tells them that he has seen what they did to the room, asking them “Why didn’t you invite me?” as if, for a moment, he too has become determined to hide behind homophobia. Yet you can see he is troubled by the event, and the camera follows him as he wanders about the campus in a moral quandary.

      By the time he returns home we realize, through the phone calls his mother has been receiving calling her son a “faggot,” that he has reported them to the authorities as Reese should have done. He has acted, and in so doing has “come out” not because of a crush on another guy but because of his moral convictions, because of the “unfairness” of it all.

      His mother’s reaction is even more disconcerting than his schoolmates’ cruel derisions. Throughout the film Tom’s divorced mother (Gwen Welles) has seemed like a kind of caring, open-minded, and even free-wheeling woman—she insists that Tom take disco lessons with her at the studio where she used to teach hula dancing. But having received those calls, she meets her returning son with near desperation for an answer to the epithets hurled at her over the phone. Tom admits that he is indeed a faggot, that he is gay, explaining to her how he first met his swimmer friend and had sex with him (“It was so wonderful.”) and reporting what happened after.

     Like many such a terrified mother, she refuses to believe that son is a homosexual, and even suggests that if Matt was gay and now has a girlfriend then perhaps Tom can also become straight—hinting even of the possibility of conversion therapy.

      Tom pleads with her, “Mom, I can handle being gay. I’m just tired of having to hide it all this time.” But she still cannot accept the fact. When the phone again rings she answers it, shouting out “My son is not gay.”

      It is her reaction finally that drives Tom out of his own home. For the first time he bravely enters the gay bar, named Oddity, not only being delighted with a room of people who might accept him for who he is, but upon encountering the school outsider Teddie, asking him to join him, finally having the opportunity to put his new-found dance skills to use.

      Too bad King and his crew couldn’t afford a better foley man to fill in the sounds of the disco dancers, which in this rather charming little film sound more like clomping feet rather than fevered hoofers. No matter, as the narrator explains in the final voice over “In time the world of gay dance clubs proved to be a trap of its own,” but in 1978 and for a few years after it was like heaven, where you could meet up with other guys and have sex without the fear of dying. I should imagine that eventually even his mother, Melissa, will get over her worries for her son—after all she had found their obviously gay disco teacher to be “fabulous”—and join her son from time to time at the local club.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).    

 

Edward Yang | 青梅竹馬 (Qīngméizhúmǎ) (Taipei Story) / 1985

a world without now

by Douglas Messerli

 

 Chu T’ien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Edward Yang (screenplay), Edward Yang (director) 青梅竹馬 (Qīngméizhúmǎ) (Taipei Story) / 1985

 Edward Yang’s 1985 cinematic work, Taipei Story, is a fragmented narrative about a city’s past and future played out in its landscape and, particularly, in the lives of its two central characters, Chin (the off-the-screen Taiwanese pop star, Tsai Chin, and Yang’s wife at the time of the filming) and Lung (played by the director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who also, with Yang and Chu T’ien-wen, wrote the script to this movie).

     The film begins in a slightly older high-rise apartment that has clearly seen better days. One almost might describe it as a kind of compromise between Chin, an assistant to a real estate operator working in a company obviously devoted to high-end real estate deals, and Lung, a former teenage baseball star, who still hangs out with some of his old buddies and helps to coach members of the newest teen league.

     Lung, however, is even more entwined to family, almost locked up, one might say, with family commitments. He works as a fabric seller, but is about to travel to the US where his brother-in-law is a wealthy businessman who Lung hopes will allow him to buy his way into participating as a business partner. Together the couple declare the property they are surveying as “not bad,” which as critic Glenn Kenny succinctly summarizes, “is about as good as it gets” for this still-unmarried couple. Without saying why, Yang makes it clear from the onset of his film that both Chin and Lung are delaying their wedding plans for reasons which will later become more apparent; if for no other reason, neither of them is quite ready for total commitment to each other. Furthermore, Lung will soon be away for several months while Chin plans to redo the place.

     It is clear that Chin is a more-than-capable worker representing a bright new hope (a term suggested in Yang’s later masterwork A Brighter Summer Day of 1991). But no sooner does she rent their new somewhat dreary dwelling, than her office superior, Mrs. Mei, is let go and Chin herself is told by the new owner of the company for whom she works, that she is in an odd place in their business structure, being neither an executive nor secretary.

     She is encouraged to become a secretary, which also explains why Mrs. Mei was let go. The new owners represent, quite obviously, a thing of past, with patriarchal values that will soon have no room in the future Taiwan. (It might be of interest to remind ourselves that the current president of that country is Tsai Ing-wen, a female who this year was re-elected with an increased percentage of the vote.) Before Chin can be fired, she resigns, and, one might suggest, to lift her spirits, starts up a deeper relationship with an architect friend, Mr. Ke (Ko I-chen), who also works for her former company. Looking out the window of his office he laments that he designed several of the buildings that lie below the tower in which he works, but can no longer remember which ones. In Yang’s film, even the somewhat recent past has given way to a future that has little meaning for those who cannot, for whatever reason, completely embrace it.

     In Ke’s case, it is an unloving wife a home that leads him to despair, which even a drink of beer with Chin is somewhat allayed. Chin, for her part—although trying to reach Mrs. Mei on occasion—keeps telling herself and others that she is simply taking a break between jobs, but we sense her inner despair of losing the upward mobility she has previously sought.     

     Her brief affair with Ke is only one of the many problems she now faces, including a search for her missing daughter—whom she finally locates and offers a room in her new apartment—as well as the return from the states of Lung.

      After visiting his brother-in-law and sister, Lung is even more intent on buying his way into a partnership and moving to the States with Chin. Yet, even in his upbeat dreams of his own future, we sense the dangers that he may face he making such a radical move: his wealthy in-law lives in a mansion in a state where, so he tells it, you can drag a black man onto your property and claim he has trespassed with an intent to do harm and then legally kill him. In short, in retelling this horrific tale, Lung hints at his own reservations of making such a move and, were he to relocate, suggests the racism he might have to face.

     Where she was once a force in helping him make such decisions, Chin now appears rather passive about both her own and Lung’s futures, even though we suspect that she would rather stay in the world she knows.

      Lung, in the meanwhile, with the intent, so it seems, of making an offer to his US relative, determines to sell his deceased father’s house, a well-built building of the old days that will surely go for a high price.

      But no sooner does he collect the payment than he runs into a baseball-playing friend of his youth, Ch’en (Wu Nien-jen) who is now working almost full time in order to feed his children and to pay the bills of his endlessly gambling wife. The kind-hearted Lung gives him money to help the children eat, and later arrives with a large package of groceries, only to find the children alone in the house, while in a nearby café Ch’en’s wife is once more sitting at the gambling table. Pulling her away from the inn, and demanding that she properly attend to her crying children, Lung finds himself as serving the traditional role of a male figure in a family that has forsaken all traditional ties. Soon after, the wife commits suicide, suggesting that familial order and the behaviors that attend it are a thing of the past or, possibly, destroy those would live differently

     Hardly has Lung put in a call to his brother-in-law than he discovers that Chin’s father (Wu Ping-nan), whom Kenny correctly describes as a “crooked and lazy businessman” is about to be taken to collection by loan sharks who have long backed his gambling debts.

     Lung feels, simply out of the moral obligation for his relationship with the man’s daughter, that he is obligated to pay the debts, which leaves him with hardly any money left to buy his way into a business. Moreover, his telephone calls to his brother-in-law have not been returned for weeks.

     When Chin hears of obeisance, she is furious for his naivete. It is clear that she feels no commitment to her father or the past that he represents. Only later do we learn that as a child she often suffered beatings from the man so that she might spare her mother the same tortures.

     Meanwhile Lung discovers that his former lover has now arrived from Japan to Taipei, he refusing her insistence that he continue the brief affair he had with her upon his stop-over in Japan from his US trip; he has lied about spending any time in Japan to Chin. Even his ex-lover rejects Lung’s connections with the past: “You’re living in a fairy-tale world where only your pity can save us.”

     Apparently, Lung cannot even entirely leave a woman connected with his past. It is an inferno which he cannot break free just as Chin is now unable to flee from her purgatory, the break she has taken from her search for her ideal job which might bring her both power and money.

       When Chin discovers the truth, the two fight, and Lung is sent packing with no longer anywhere he can go. He has even sold his car in order to raise the payment to help bring him the new future he imagines for himself.

       Mrs. Mei finally contacts Chin, and shows her around the new office space into which she is planning to move into with a new company, in which Chin will obviously serve a major role. But for the first time Chin actually remains quietly passive, as if she has lost all will to move on with her life.

       In searching yet again for her missing daughter in the empty shell of a building in which she tracked her down the first time, Chin discovers only a young man studying for his entrance exams for college.

       The two immediately hit it off, and almost inexplicably she joins him on his scooter on a long trip through a partying night which includes, strangely enough, her formerly missing daughter. Deeply inebriated, she falls into a kind of intense sleep. When Chin attempts to return home, she finds the young man waiting outside the building and quickly rushes away with him.

        Frozen-in-space, so to speak, a bit like Lung, who has equally has nowhere to turn, she calls her ousted lover for help. Together the two take a taxi to their apartment, only to discover that the boy has finally disappeared. But when Lung leaves, he discovers Chin’s obsessed would-be suitor again waiting for her. Lung impulsively grabs him, insisting that the youth recognize his one-night relationship is over.

       Lung hails a taxi and is off to wherever he might go in a world that proffers him little possibilities of future, perhaps yet another night on the floor with his old baseball friend Ch’en and his children. Yet he finds that now Chin’s own past is following him in the form of the boy on his scooter. Ordering the taxi to stop, Lung leaves the vehicle as the cabbie speeds away, wanting no part of a confrontation.

     The older baseball player approaches the younger would-be student and beats him for his impudence. The fallen boy is seemingly left behind, as Lung begins to walk—not for the first time in Yang’s film—down the long road that might return him, at least, to civilization.

      Suddenly, the young man returns and again Lung rebuffs him, continuing on his march towards his destination. As he soon discovers, however, he is bleeding on the side of his lower stomach, at first just a few trickles, but then quite profusely.

      Confused, but also somewhat abashed by the fact that he unknowingly has been knifed by the kid, Lung continues for several more steps as the camera goes temporarily black before opening the lens again in its penultimate scene where we see a couch and other derelict household objects left near a curb for garbage pickup.

      Lung, now coughing and bleeding intensely, painfully pulls out a cigarette and with a rather bemused look, joyfully takes the smoke into his lungs in what he now recognizes will be his last few breaths.

      No garbage truck arrives, but a brightly lit ambulance picks Lung up almost as if he were now a piece of tossed-away debris left by the side of the street.

   

       The director leaves us with no answer concerning what choices, after she hears of Lung’s death, Chin will make for her future, whether with Mrs. Lei she will rise up to a manufactured paradise in the towers of Taipei or if she might, like her boyfriend, fall down in an almost humorous grief recognizing the meaninglessness of her aspirations. Will the possessive nameless young man return to haunt her? These are the rich and somewhat ironic possibilities with which this profound director leaves us. In a city determined to transform its past into the future, what has happened to the all-important present, the now in which people can love and live?

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).