Farewell to Edward Yang

The Taiwanese director Edward Yang sadly passed away on Sunday, of cancer, at the age of 59. Yang had directed only seven films, most of which were not well known in the West, with the exception of his brilliant period youth movie A Brighter Summer's Day (the title comes from 'Love me Tender') and his last film Yi-Yi, for which he won the Best Director award at Cannes seven years ago.

I managed to see four of his films around the time Yi-Yi got released and the screening of A Brighter Summer's Day was one of my most bizarre cinema experiences ever. A packed house settled down to watch the three-hour film for the first of two weekend screenings on a Saturday afternoon in the IFC; we were a little confused to see the film start abruptly with a street fight, and the film continued with little or no reference points offered to distinguish one character from another. After about twenty minutes, when the opening credits rolled, it dawned on us: the reels had been mounted in the wrong order. The film stopped for five minutes and everybody was informed that they could get a refund or a ticket to the following day's screening. We all filed out of the cinema, though I was one of the last to be able to get out, when suddenly the film started rolling again. Knowing that films need to be run through the projector once they are loaded, I settled back into my seat to watch the rest of the film, as did a handful of other people. About an hour later, the subtitle track began to slip below the screen so I ran out to the box office to ask them to rectify it; the guy at the box office, who I knew well enough from regular visits, gave me a horrified look, and said, as if out of a disaster movie, 'Are there still people in there?'

Even jumbled up, the film was great, and though I would place Yang behind his compatriots Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, it is a bad thing that he will be making no more films.

Malaysian Malaise

Tsai Ming-Liang is a director whose profile has fallen slightly in world cinema in recent years, as the commercial popularity of one fellow Taiwanese, Edward Yang, and the critical canonisation of another, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, has outstripped his films, which are slow, difficult, often inscrutable and less respectful of the still stringent social mores of Taiwanese society.

Tsai first came to prominence with Rebels of a Neon God and Vive l'Amour, which were big festival hits in the early 90s. Both films were cool, artfully mounted portrayals of urban alienation in modern Taiwan, in the second film the locus being the female real estate broker, played by Kuei-Mei Lang, whose tearful breakdown on a park bench in the final scene is one of the most moving scene I have ever seen in the cinema. Like his Korean contemporary Hong Sang-Soo, Tsai explores the interzone of menial and temporary work that prevails across much of the Tiger economies of the Pacific Rim. Boredom is the dominant atmosphere but Tsai in all his films manages to wheedle out little snatches of drama amidst all the static ennui and his formal compositions - mostly long takes with a perpetually immobile camera- are a joy to watch for those with a lengthy attention span.

In recent years his films have becoming increasingly outré - even if his basic technique remains the same. The Hole, which was about a hole that mysteriously appears in the floor of a Taipei apartment, occasioning a rapprochement between two previously mutually unknown people, was laced with the songs of 50s Mandarin diva Grace Chang. Goodbye Dragon Inn weaves a story around the final screening at an old Taipei movie palace; What Time is it There? exported the ennui - and quite a bit of anxiety - to Paris, and The Wayward Cloud was a thoroughly bizarre, and overlong pornographic musical, centred on the watermelons that Taiwanese people have been advised to consume instead of water during a heatwave.

For his new film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai returns to the country of his birth, Malaysia. The film follows a mute Chinese (played by Tsai's usual leading man, the imperiously deadpan Lee Kang-Sheng) around the streets of a Malaysian city - I'm guessing it's Kuala Lumpur but it is never made clear. After getting beaten up by a number of local hustlers in the opening scene he is taken under the wing of a kindly Bangladeshi who seems to have an affection for him, but which is never consummated. The young man then has brief liaisons with both a mother and daughter - the owners of a small greasy-spoon - who are caring for a comatose son, who is also played by Lee. As ever in a Tsai film there is little dialogue and the character motivations are vague, even malleable. The compositions are pristine and the tone is sad, though it is a sadness that is always undercut with an exquisite sense of visual irony - the non-professional Lee has perfected his shtick so well by now that he is becoming an autodidact master of deadpan to rival Buster Keaton. There is an unusually optimistic final scene, which itself signals a departure of sorts for Tsai. Not surprisingly the Malaysian authorities found much to object to in the film, and banned it before Tsai made cuts to their liking. For a foreigner the film is a fascinating glimpse of this unknown but important Asian country, a place where cutlery takes precedence over chopsticks - except among the Chinese minority - where the Roman alphabet is used everywhere and where devout Muslim women wear headscarves while otherwise being liberated enough to walk down the street wearing a T-shirt and jeans.