Critic’s Notebook: Casting Light on Taiwanese Cinema

 

That country was even represented at the multiplex, where “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” from the Taiwan-born Ang Lee, was becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. (Unless you count “The Passion of the Christ.”)

But the moment didn’t linger. Mr. Yang, who died in 2007, never made another movie. Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai remained famous all over the festival circuit, while Mr. Lee made most of his movies in the United States. A domestic box-office slowdown in Taiwan that began in the mid-1990s lasted well into the new century.

Taiwan Stories, through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, is an attempt to shine some light on this vital national cinema, which has operated in the shadow of Hong Kong, China, Japan and, more recently, South Korea and Thailand. Of the 20 movies in this series nearly half are from the 1960s and ’70s (including the martial-arts blockbuster “A Touch of Zen,” made in Taiwan by the Hong Kong-based director King Hu), while a handful represent the commercial resurgence of the domestic film industry during the last three to four years.

The biggest attraction, though, is the selection from the New Wave filmmakers, which avoids the familiar, benchmark works of Mr. Yang, Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai in favor of earlier movies that are less known and rarely screened in America. Here you can see them working out a hybrid of kitchen-sink naturalism and moody, romantic melodrama that each would take in his own direction in years to come.

The film with the most historical interest, especially for cinephiles, will be “In Our Time” (Thursday, 1 and 6:15 p.m.), a four-director omnibus considered one of the earliest examples of the New Taiwan Cinema; it was released in 1982, around the time of the first stirrings of political reform in what had been a repressive, totalitarian state.

The second segment of that film, about a teenage girl and her interest in the college student who rents her family’s spare room, was Mr. Yang’s debut as a writer and director. It’s a period piece, like many other 1980s Taiwan films, made when commenting directly on contemporary life or politics was a dangerous business. The girl’s older sister listens to the Beatles (“Hello Goodbye”) on her transistor radio, and the presence of twangy British and American pop on the soundtrack is another New Wave trope.

“In Our Time” has some style, but it’s a long way from the Altman-like complexity and assurance of “Yi Yi.” By 1985 Mr. Hou’s fifth feature, “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (Sunday, 4:15 p.m.), was a complete realization of the early New Wave style: the slow pace, the distant camera, the way the most dramatic or pertinent parts of the story are often conveyed indirectly, as anecdotes or passing remarks.

Mr. Hou’s story, an autobiographical tale that begins shortly after the main character’s family is cut off from the mainland in 1949 by the Chinese civil war, is suffused with the feelings of dislocation and grief, of bewildering exile, that run through Taiwanese film. Its style is sufficiently pronounced that perfectly reasonable viewers can find it profoundly moving or profoundly slow and boring, but anyone should be able to appreciate Mr. Hou’s craftsmanship: a kind of meticulous fluidity that gives a sudden close-up tracking shot of the young protagonist at the end of the movie a joyful, kinetic charge.

Mr. Tsai is represented by his first feature, the 1992 “Rebels of the Neon God” (May 17, 6:15 p.m.), a contemporary story of disaffected Taipei youth that’s rougher and more vital than his later work. (It is an obvious precursor to “Unknown Pleasures,” the breakthrough film of the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke.)

Lacking a famous director but packing in a lot of pleasure, guilty and otherwise, is Chang Yi’s 1985 “Kuei-Mei, a Woman” (Thursday, 3:45 p.m.; Saturday, 5:45 p.m.). Stylistically it’s of a piece with the other new wave films, and it shares their mood of intense nostalgia, but it’s resolutely traditional — or Hollywood-like — in its unabashed four-handkerchief, women’s-picture plot. Among the challenges surmounted by Kuei-Mei, a spinster from the mainland pressured into a bad marriage, are a gambling and philandering husband, an ungrateful stepdaughter, an evil boss and a typhoon.

“Kuei-Mei, a Woman” is a classicist’s melodrama, a dry-eyed tear-jerker, because of its restrained direction and the impressively controlled, realistic star performance of Yang Huey-sian. When Kuei-Mei goes into labor in a gambling den while holding a kitchen knife to her husband’s throat, Ms. Yang shows an aplomb that would have done Joan Crawford proud.

Among the recent films in the series are two big box-office successes, the love story “Cape No. 7” and the gangster story “Monga,” as well as artsier fare like “The Fourth Portrait” and the Shakespeare-inspired (but not Shakespeare-worthy) trilogy “Juliets.” The Government Information Office of Taiwan, a sponsor of the series, would probably be very happy if you went to see these newer films, but the greater rewards of the series still lie in the feel-bad films of the 1980s, which feel just as bad as real life.

Taiwan Stories runs through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater; filmlinc.com.