A City of Sadness

A film set in Taiwan between 1945 and 1949. Japanese rule ends. The surrender is read on the radio and the island passes to a new administration arriving from the mainland. The Lin family has four sons. The eldest runs a restaurant, one went missing in the war, one has lost his mind, and the youngest, Wen-ching, is deaf and mute. Wen-ching is a photographer. He has a studio and communicates by writing on paper. From there the film spreads across four years. Births, weddings, funerals, black market dealings, fights, and arrests that keep increasing. The new administration does not turn out as hoped. Corruption, inflation and second-class treatment of the local population rapidly build resentment. Then it breaks. An action against a street vendor turns into an island-wide uprising, and mass arrests and executions follow. What the narrative is interested in is not politics but a family: the film shows no political event directly; everything is heard from a radio, a letter, a piece of news arriving late. Hinomi is a nurse and a narrator. Her diary is the film's voice and we learn the events in her sentences. Wen-ching being deaf and mute is a choice. The actor was from Hong Kong and could not speak Taiwanese; because the film was among the first Taiwanese productions to use direct sound, the character was written silent, and that silence settled into the centre of the narrative. The form keeps its distance. The camera is mostly still, the scenes are shot in single takes, and nobody's face is approached. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice and was the first Taiwanese film to do so. It was also the first production to touch on the events of 1947, which had been forbidden to discuss for years. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Hsin Shu-fen and Chen Sung-young are in the cast. Hou Hsiao-hsien directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow, distanced historical cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting to follow it easily; there are many characters, the events are told indirectly, and it is hard to watch without knowing the context.