| Welcome to the Super Champion Film Zone. We hope your visit is dope. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, creating a personal blog, feeding contents, filling the database, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Kuei-mei, a Woman (Yi Chang, 1985) | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 6 2015, 12:00 AM (159 Views) | |
| DT. | Aug 6 2015, 12:00 AM Post #1 |
|
Let them eat Prozac
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
At this point, I might as well rename my genre “Deconstructing Ozu”, because while I didn’t originally plan it, the rest of my picks will likely be Asian movies. But what they’re lacking in geographic variety, I hope they’re making up for in thematic variety - think of my first film in the Group Stage as the theme and my following choices as the variations. Kuei-mei, a Woman brings it all back home with a traditional family unit (this time focusing on the title matriarch), but with its cohesion threatened by issues of politics, economics and social identity. Directed by Yi Chang, who’s known for his work on the anthology In Our Time alongside Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the film is a historical saga tracing the life of its characters against Taiwan’s history - a narrative characteristic of the country’s New Wave. However, as a Letterboxd reviewer aptly remarked: if Hou represents the Taiwanese New Wave by way of Ozu, Yi Chang rears the movement by way of Mizoguchi. This is due not just to DP Wei-Han Yang’s mobile camerawork, but to the story being more emotionally involving. Bywords such as ‘touching’ and ‘poignant’ have been used to describe it, which personally had me feeling dubious going in. But I eventually found myself very affected, and absorbed in another fine piece of filmmaking from the Taiwanese New Wave. I hope y'all will be too. ![]() From the Chicago Reader: For a brief spell in the early 80s, the "social realism" movement in Taiwanese cinema outdid even Hong Kong martial-arts epics at the box office throughout most of southeast Asia. Most of its output, to be sure, aimed to titillate: exposes of country girls' lives gone astray. But a good number of films offered cogent looks at the effects of the island's rapid industrialization and social transformation. One of these was Kuei-mei, a Woman by Chang Yi, a talented director who has yet to achieve the international prominence of his younger contemporaries Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. This 1985 film (whose Chinese title would translate literally as "Such Is My Life") tracks the life of the eponymous heroine through the three decades after her escape from the mainland. Her case, typical of legions of mainlanders who came to Taiwan to start anew, is the stuff of melodrama, but Chang wisely eschews sensationalism, adopting instead an understated tone that reinforces the heroine's quiet strength and dignity. And he fills the background with plenty of richly informative details about a changing Taipei and its colorful denizens. Yang Huey-sian, Taiwan's Meryl Streep, gained and then lost 30 pounds for the title role; her portrayal is both honest and poignant. P.S. While IMDb states the length of the film as 2½ hours, the version on KG and the blog (which is what I've seen) only runs for 120 minutes. However, I can already recommend this shorter cut wholeheartedly. Edited by DT., Aug 6 2015, 12:01 AM.
|
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Round 4 · Next Topic » |




![]](http://z5.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)




7:24 PM Jul 11