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Bei qing cheng shi (1989)

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23 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the most powerful cinematic statements of our time, 17 April 2004
Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.

On the evening of February 27th, 1947 in Taipei, police ruthlessly beat a woman selling illegal cigarettes and the next day opened fire on a protest demonstration outside the Presidential Palace. Years of resentment against a government increasingly defined by nepotism, corruption, and suppression of human rights exploded in open conflict. As soon as the troops arrived, they began the systematic round up and execution of scholars, lawyers, doctors, students and local leaders of the protest movement. In total between 18,000 and 28,000 people were murdered by Chinese troops sent from the mainland by Chiang Kai-shek. Thousands of others were arrested and imprisoned and martial law was established in what became known as the "White Terror" campaign.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's magnificent 1989 film, City of Sadness, brings to light the truth about the 1947 massacre known as the 2/28 incident. Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, City of Sadness treats one of the key issues of Taiwanese history, yet is far from being a political film. Its focus is not on the bloodshed but on the consequences for a particular family and how individual experience is impacted by the flow of time and history. In the film, Wen-heung (Chen Sown-yung), the oldest of four Lin brothers, tries to hold the family together with the support of Ah-lu (Li Ten-lu), the family patriarch. A brutish, feverishly emotional man, he has turned his Japanese bar into a family restaurant known as "Little Shanghai" but finds his business undermined by ruthless Shanghai gangsters. The second brother, Wen-sun disappeared in the Philippines and is talked about but never seen in the film.

Brother number three, Wen-leung (Jack Gao) suffered mental problems as a direct result of the war and is bedridden at a local hospital. Amazingly, he recovers enough to deal with Shanghai drug smugglers but is framed as a Japanese collaborator and, after being beaten in prison, loses his mental balance again. The fourth Lin brother, Wen-ching is deaf and runs a photography studio. Wen-ching is involved with young anti-government socialists such as his friend Hinoe (Wu Yi-fang) who is forced to flee to the mountains to join the guerillas. Wen-ching also wants to join the movement but is persuaded to stay home and care for Hinoe's sister, Hinome (Hsin Shu-fen), a nurse, who loves him.

As in all of Hou's films, there are no peak moments of dramatic interest to which everything else is simply a build up. The camera simply records the events from a distance without judgment or evaluation, allowing the complexities of the characters and situations to gradually unfold. Everything is relevant -- taking care of the baby, eating, cleaning the floor, and washing the dishes. This attention to the ordinary makes us realize that history happens to everyone, not only in the battlefield, but also in the quiet of everyday life. Far from being bogged down in banality, however, the film achieves transcendence in moments such as Hinome and Wen-ching listening to a German folk song, Wen-ching imitating the voice of an opera singer when he was only eight, the solitary flight of a bird after a sudden death, and the gentle caressing voiceover of Hinome.

City of Sadness is a remarkable portrait of one of the most traumatic events in Taiwanese history and its popularity in Taiwan reflected its willingness to deal with a previously taboo subject. Hou said, "I didn't make A City of Sadness because I purposely wanted to open up old wounds'.but because I know that we have to face ourselves and our history if we are ever to understand who we are and where we're going." Though the film was criticized by some for being "politically ambiguous" and "historically inaccurate, the film's depiction of political events and its impact on Taiwan is clear and unmistakable. City of Sadness will not satisfy those seeking a political expose, but Hou's refusal to trivialize events for the sake of emotional appeal gives the film a universality of spirit that ensures its place among the most powerful cinematic statements of our time.

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15 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Beautiful; a Taiwanese "Godfather," but better., 7 January 2001

Author: Zach Campbell (rashomon82@hotmail.com) from Burke, Virginia, USA

This is the only one of Hou Hsiao-hsien's films I caught at a retrospective of his work, and it's a tragedy because this film is so incredibly good. Hou's rigorous formal approach (highly geometrical framing, repetitive shots along axes, distinctive use of lived-in colors) provides a framework for the film to operate within its own world. Whereas Coppola's "Godfather" goes this way and that, without a significant coherence, visually or rhythmically, "City of Sadness" feels like an elegy to Taiwan and the family (in much the same way that "Underground" is an ode to what was once Yugoslavia). At times funny, sorrowful, and invigorating, I suppose that what makes this film so special is that it refuses to operate in "big moments" and focuses, like Ozu (who Hou is often compared to) on the little events that make life what it really is.

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10 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Quiet transcendence, 26 January 2006

Author: utp0130 from California

A previous poster described this film as a Taiwanese Godfather, but better. Indeed, this film has a lot similarities to godfather, in which the most notable is the condensation of an entire nation into the life of one single family. Even though I never really come to love other Hou's films, City of Sadness is a flawless epic that truthfully depict an era that is forgotten by most of my generation. I have heard those stories from my paternal grandparents, who are like people portrait in the film, grass root Taiwanese. I have also heard stories from my maternal grandparents, who are the late comers from mainland China. The entire different perspectives surprised me that in such a small nation, mistrust is still profoundly rooted and transmitted via generations. City of Sadness portraits this image so hauntingly and yet with beautiful and quiet transcendence seeing the turmoil through the eyes of the deaf and mute son of the Lin family. Taiwan, the city of sadness, is eternally sorrowful because of its rootlessness, which until today, still runs in my blood.

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11 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
You have to know Taiwanese history to enjoy this movie thoroughly, 24 September 2001

Author: cd1793 from Beijing

Needless to comment on Hou's excellent artistic directing, the story itself tightly revolves around an average Taiwanese family's life during the years 1945-1949 when Japanese occupation ended and KuoMinTang from mainland took over. There are conflict on personal/family level between native Taiwanese (BenShengRen) and mainland newcomers(WaiShengRen), and massive political prosecution and massacre of native intellectuals by KuoMinTang. Hou painted an inspiring (rather than sad) picture of the native intellectuals giving their lives to earn their fellow Taiwanese dignity which was ironically more lacking during the KuoMinTang ruling than Japanese ruling.

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the world's most important films, 19 March 2003
Author: M-Harrison03 from London

Artistically, its greatness is not in dispute, but it is hard to overstate the importance of this film in political and social terms for Taiwan. The subject of the film, the February 28 Incident (the massacre of 20000 or more Taiwanese by Chinese Nationalist troops in 1947) had been completely been banned from public discussion by the now-defunct military government of Taiwan up until 1988 - only a year and a half before the film was released. To intervene so powerfully in a period of political and social change as Taiwan's democratic revolution in the late 1980s, makes the film as dramatic a re-configuring of a country's cultural landscape as any film has ever achieved.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
The greatest film of "The Greater China" cinema, 27 July 2007

Author: darii73 from Singapore

Simply one of the best films ever made and certainly the best to have come out of China, Taiwan or Hong Kong. Forget about traumatic Taiwanese history, forget about other "epic" films from mainland China, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong. This one is one of the most profound statements about human condition and the relentless power of history. You can physically feel the winds of history blowing through a small hospital in the mountains, or a house of the person who will succumb to the inevitable, or a railway car caught in the middle of a massacre. Hou Hsiao-Hsien doesn't reconstruct history, he shows you human beings caught unawares and unable to cope with a totally unexpected avalanche of events destined to change their lives. Acting is superb, the mute character played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai (who, quite prosaically, couldn't speak Hokkien and had to be made mute) will haunt you for a very long time. One of the most underrated films from one of the most underrated directors. Spend two and a half hours of your life watching this, it's worth it. 10 out of 10.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
A very moving time travel to post-war Taiwan, 8 January 2008

Author: kaoru-mw from Graz, Austria

This film is definitely one of the best historical film i have ever seen!

... putting aside all those clichés most filmmakers are tend to use: there is no such thing as heroic portrayal of martyrs or the use of extremely artificial dramatic art. That makes this film believable and, compared to others, very unique.

Normally you would have a narrator who is telling you the story from his point of view. Now, i don't want to say that i dismiss this way of narration but "A city of sadness" does not need such a narrator; in fact it would shatter the special specific atmosphere of this movie if that would be the case. Without definitive narrative elements, the staging normally involves (narration/music/DP etc), the viewer gets the feeling that he is able to see for himself what the lives of those people were like when WWII ended. It is fascinating to witness how this very sober staging is still able to evoke strong emotions within the viewer. This is due to the directors vision but also to the cast which did an amazing job.

It was also very clever to have the deaf Wen-Ch'ing as the main character so the viewer can sympathize with him very easily: like Wen-Ch'ing the viewer is kind of caught up within the political turbulence and is not to able react like he would want because he is mute ... and is therefore not able to speak up in a loud voice to stop the violence. He is forced to watch.

Even today the topic Taiwan/China isn't solved at all. After watching this film people will surely get a better understanding why the struggle between China and Taiwan is so filled with anger, sadness, fury ...

so ... that's definitely a must-see!! ;)

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
A distance history, 12 February 2005

Author: jeyurita from Taiwan

As my age, several section in this film makes me feel funny, such as the way they behavior, the words they said. It is too unbelievable for me to drive me away to feel the sadness. Just like listen to a story.

However, it did happen. Several events I have heard from my grandmother; the setting is also like my mother's house in south country; the location, Chiu-Fen, I visited several months ago is still similar with the scene in the film.

All I know about this period are from history books. Time would wipe people's memory. In case people would forget the sadness in our history, movie provides us to retract some part of that moment in our past time to allow us to learn what had happened around us.

I have to say this movie is worth every people with any age in Taiwan or from Taiwan to see once in your life.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
7 or 8?, 1 October 2001

Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I'm having difficulties rating this film. I gave Hou's last film (that I saw), Dust in the Wind, a 7/10 because I felt it was slight and sloppy, but good nonetheless. CoS is even sloppier, but it is not in any way slight. However, when I'm desperately struggling to understand the film, trying to identify characters and interpret events, a lot of the power seeps away. I feel that the characterizations of DitW were more clear (if, again, slight), but CoS, despite its apparent cast of hundreds, I only identified with (and could identify, for the most part) the two main characters. However, I really did end up loving them and was very affected by everything that happened to them. Luckily, as the film progresses, it becomes less about everyone and everything else and focuses on those two characters, entering the genre of such films as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Doctor Zhivago, i.e., movies where war is examined from the point of view of those who want desperately to live and love without hinderance, but keep getting pulled into the conflict. Still, the first three quarters of the film are very loose. I found myself saying often: "I can't recognize a single individual in this scene." I also kept coming back to the idea that this story would make a much better novel than a film. In a novel, it's much easier to follow the action.

While Hou's narrative is still poorly devised (he wasn't the screenwriter, anyways), his cinematic technique is improving by leaps and bounds as I go from one film to the next. His shot composition utilizes depth to a great extent. We often see the action from a distance, and he uses the technique of blocking, putting characters and objects in front of the main action, to astonishing effectiveness. It makes us feel helpless in many of the more painful scenes.

SLIGHT SPOILER: There's at least one amazing edit to which I have to call attention: the characters are all at a funeral and then there is a cut to an extreme long shot which encompasses a whole, small peninsula of Taiwan with the vast ocean behind it. In the distance, we see (and hear) a procession. I assumed it was a funeral procession, but the next scene reveals that it was a marriage procession, a marriage that I was beginning to doubt was ever going to happen. The funeral scene and wedding scene are masterfully connected with the intricate Buddhist ceremonies, and the emotional effects of this juxtaposition is marvelous. One more master scene that I have to point out is one where the deaf character (forgive me, but I tend to mix Asian names up and I don't even want to try) is in prison and soldiers take away two of his cellmates. We see a medium close-up of the deaf man and we hear two shots. I cringed, but of course, the character doesn't react because he can't hear them. The implications of that left me shivering.

END SPOILER: So what am I going to give it, a 7 or an 8? I choose 7, but with the stipulation that I want to come back to it someday in the future to see if I can comprehend the narrative better. It's certainly a fine film, but I do feel justified in my complaints. There's also the fact that, as this is a foreign film, and it has a lot of dialogue, I'm so busy reading the subtitles that it is easy to miss who is who. One thing I don't want to hear from people is how important the events depicted are for Taiwan. That doesn't matter. I'm criticizing a film here, not history.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
A Flower on a Rainy Night, 6 July 2008
Author: xx_DrStrangeposter_xx

City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao-hsien is enveloped by times of turmoil, unrest, tragedy and upheaval in Taiwan's recent history. The film's epicenter in this respect is the 228 incident which refers to an anti-government uprising that began February, 28, 1947 after the death of a cigarette vendor following an argument with an officer of the Office of Monopoly. This flash point was a culmination of a festering dissent directed towards the Chinese government who controlled Taiwan following WWII and continued to following the uprising, imposing martial law until 1987. During this time of "white terror" as it was dubbed, thousands of Taiwanese were either imprisoned or executed for their alleged dissent against the mainland government. Many more simply disappeared in the night, never seen or heard from again, their whereabouts a mystery.

These events are what encompass City of Sadness yet this is not an overtly political film but it is about human emotional dissemination within families directly affected by these events. That is to say that City of Sadness is a deeply human picture that concerns how these events shaped and influenced Taiwanese everyday life, their relationships, their loves and losses, their grief and sorrow as well as their unwavering dignity and perseverance through a period in history that tested their will, their bonds and their ties to each other. Although it was a caustic, violent and damaging time in Taiwan, City of Sadness displays that although this time was a formulation of a following destiny, the family it portrays refused to let it define their humanity. Although at times in the film the characters express great sorrow, lament, loss of hope, anguish, questioning, anger and rage-- and understandably so-- they still maintain a sense of who they are, their identity, when surrounded by forces of oppression that attempt to intervene and alter feelings of national property, loyalty and duty.

The family of the film, the Lin family contain the central characters of the film, four brothers. Wen-heung is the oldest, a business owner who has to deal with devious and sinister interventions by gangsters from Shanghai. The second brother Wen-sun has disappeared, he is spoken of in the film but never depicted in any manner, only that he went to the China seas and has not returned and his Mother still has hopes that he is alive and will one day return. The third brother Wen-leung has suffered a mental breakdown and is hospitalized, during the course of the film he makes a recovery but never regains a total sense of coherence, subsequently after a stint in prison at the hands of the Chinese government and a severe beating he never returns to a complete state of functioning mental stability. The fourth brother Wen-ching is deaf. He runs a photo studio. He becomes involved with his best friend's {Hinoe} sister, Hinome, a nurse. Hinoe is an anti government dissenter who eventually is forced to take refuge in the mountains as a result of the government's pursuit of those they deemed collaborators of the Taiwanese rebel factions.

It is Wen-ching's relationships with his brothers, his Father and with Hinoe and Hinome that give City of Sadness an encompassing aura of quiet, dignified humanity and deep seated emotional resonance that emanates from its beautiful moments and scenes of somber tranquility, reflection, and sorrowful longing and yearning. There's a powerful metaphorical sentiment expressed in Wen-ching being deaf that proffers an idea of the individual being muted during the caustic sonic rumblings of the political machine-- a sentiment that suggests in his loss of hearing, a severing of communication with those who govern, a political body one can't reach-- and thus a stronger connection with the immediacy and availability of those one can, in this instance his loved ones. There's this oscillation between the external factors one cannot see or reach in the political strife and the internal interpersonal events as the only ones that can be truly affected and influenced and perhaps the ones that matter the most as history marches on.

Through Wen-ching the viewer is given a sense of the helplessness and mental trauma this period of history the Taiwanese people endured. What's striking in a visual sense is Hou's camera, how it remains unobtrusive, how its framing and positioning never chooses a point of view in terms of political ideology or character judgment. There's a sense of the naturalistic in the length of takes and the distance during the action sequences that gives the impression of an objective observer and perhaps more importantly of an intense and focused concentration on family and the human response to the events, rather than the events themselves. As the film draws to a close, Hou really emphasizes this point with a finely constructed sequence that evokes the cycle of life and displays cause and effect, tradition, simplicity and beauty in a world gone mad.

The Taiwanese song A Flower on a Rainy Night, written by Chow Tien-wan and banned in Taiwan for being "too sad", evokes a similar haunted trope with its lines "A flower on a rainy night/Fell on the ground/in wind and rain/Out of everyone's sight/It sighs day and night/It has fallen not to return again. These lines, like City of Sadness, suggest this notion of the fallen, of that lost which cannot be regained. However, although this time in Taiwan's history resulted in the loss of many and a damage done to a nation, City of Sadness displays that the spirit remains and the flower will bloom again.

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