Terrorizers

Three separate lives in Taipei: a wealthy young man who takes photographs, a woman in a writing crisis, and her husband, who works in a laboratory and waits for a promotion. A girl fleeing a police raid touches all of them, and a prank call she makes ties the three stories together. The film is not interested in crime. It is interested in the force of coincidence in a city: people who do not know each other wreck one another's lives with a single lie. Edward Yang deliberately chose unrelated characters and let the city alone provide the connection. The form is modernist: parallel cutting, long static takes, reflections in glass and mirrors. At the end the film offers a passage open to more than one reading and does not say which is real. It won the Silver Leopard at Locarno and Best Feature Film at the Golden Horse Awards. It is one of Yang's hardest portraits of the city in the eighties. Cora Miao and Lee Li-chun are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Taiwanese New Cinema and urban narratives. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a clear ending. The film leaves its conclusion deliberately unsettled and explains none of its characters.