That Day, on the Beach

Two women meet in a café after many years. One is a concert pianist living in Europe; the other is Jia-li, who was once expected to marry the pianist's brother. Across the conversation Jia-li recounts her own marriage: the one she made escaping the life her father chose for her, and how it ended. At the end there is a beach, a disappearance and a question that is never answered. Edward Yang directs, in his first feature, which runs 166 minutes. The cinematographer is Christopher Doyle, in his first feature too, years before the work with Wong Kar-wai that made his name. The structure was unusual for its moment: the story moves through flashbacks inside flashbacks and time is not ordered. Yang does this deliberately, because the subject is remembering. It counts as one of the founding films of the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang sets out here the question he would work on for the rest of his career: how men and women lose each other in the middle of economic growth. Who it is for: viewers who follow Taiwanese cinema, Yang's filmography, and slow narratives centred on women. Who it is not for: it is genuinely long and deliberately circuitous. Impatient viewers will struggle.