After his feature debut Night Market Hero (雞排英雄), which grossed NT$140 million in 2011, blockbuster maker Yeh Tien-lun (葉天倫) returns with Twa Tiu Tiann (大稻埕), a film that aims to be grander and much larger in scope. The movie mixes fantasy and history to tell the story of a young man travelling back in time to 1920s Taiwan which was then under Japanese colonial rule. It is a melodramatic comedy punctuated with big emotions, and through its well-rendered time-travel conceit, the film delivers a rare portrait of Taipei as a city with a long history, affording its residents time travel into the past when one could bump into Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), an important figure in Taiwan’s resistance to Japanese colonial rule, while walking down a Dadaocheng (大稻埕) street.
The film opens in present-day Taipei, where college student Jack, played by television show host-turned-actor Chris Wang (宥勝), whiles away his days chasing girls and hanging out with friends. To the gang of young lads, the history lessons taught by Professor P (Chu Ko Liang, 豬哥亮) couldn’t be more different from their easygoing lifestyle.
One day, during a field trip to a museum in western Taipei’s Dadaocheng area, Jack notices a painting on display. It is Festival on South Street (南街殷賑), a painting of iconic Dihua Street (迪化街)) by Kuo Hsueh-hu (郭雪湖), a pioneer of modern art in Taiwan. Encouraged by Professor P, Jack takes a photograph of the work. Suddenly, everything in the painting comes to life, and Jack finds himself transported back to 1920s Dadaocheng, which at the time was a major trading hub for tea, textiles, herbal medicines and many other goods.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Bewildered, Jack is taken in by Ginger (Sonia Sui, 隋棠), a sassy Manchu woman who fled to Taiwan after the Qing Dynasty crumbled and has since run a textile shop in the area. To his surprise, Jack finds among Ginger’s helpers his history professor, who discovered the painting’s portal back in time and has been returning to the past constantly to court Ginger.
Jack’s eagerness to return to the 21st century dissipates when he meets young Taiwanese geisha Rose (Jian Man-shu, 簡嫚書). While love blossoms between Jack and Rose, they befriend Chiang Wei-shui (Lee Li-jen, 李李仁) and are drawn into the campaign for democracy led by Chiang and other Taiwanese civil rights activists. Soon Jack, Professor P and their friends become involved in Chiang’s effort to petition the colonial government for the creation of an elected representative body in front of the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito, who visited Taiwan in 1923.
Over the two-hour screening time, Yeh delicately weaves Taiwanese history into a work of holiday entertainment packed with romance and humor. The plot involving the lead character coming to terms with the present through his reconciliation with the past serves as an eloquent metaphor and is passably carried out by rising actor Wang. The star of the show, however, is Taiwanese comedian Chu Ko Liang, who appears genuinely funny with his offbeat humor and makes a surprisingly lively pair with model-turned-actress Sui.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Unfortunately, the movie is largely let down by sloppy and lazy scriptwriting. Sufficient details, motivation and narrative coherence are often absent. Embarrassingly cliched characters abound; a speech by Chiang is lifeless in its excessive sentimentality. The absence of a film studio in Taiwan, along with the needed infrastructure and talent to produce period films, is also apparent in this movie as portraits of historical grandeur are sometimes reduced to the scale of a television drama.
An aspect of Twa Tiu Tiann worth mentioning is the playful rendition Moving Forward (向前行). Though the uplifting mood of the song, recorded in 1990, is hardly in tune with the sentiments of present-day Taiwan, it makes a fitting accompaniment to the movie’s sanguine, if not overly saccharine, vision.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
RSS