What To Stream: A City Of Sadness 悲情城市 (1989)
We picked the best movies and TV shows about HK, made in HK or by HK filmmakers, to stream right now, so you don’t have to be overwhelmed by all streaming services.
A City of Sadness 悲情城市 (1989)
A film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien 候孝賢
Taiwan, Hong Kong | 1989 | 2 hr 37 min | Color | Taiwanese, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin | Subtitled
This intimate epic chronicles the tragedies that befall the three Lin brothers and those around them during a chaotic period in Taiwan’s national history, between the end of Japanese Imperial rule (1945) and the secession from Mainland China and the creation of martial law (1949-1987).
This vastly ambitious drama about political strife in Taiwan distills a crucial historical period—from the island’s liberation from Japan, in 1945, to the Communist takeover of China, in 1949—into crystalline sketches. The director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, builds his film around a single episode—the killing, in 1947, by the ruling Nationalists, of tens of thousands of their political opponents—which he tells through the story of Wen-ching (Tony Leung), a deaf-mute portrait photographer, whose silent lucidity is an ironic critique of the post-liberation linguistic wars, which mirror Taiwan’s civil conflict. (The movie pointedly features dialogue in Japanese as well as in a plethora of Chinese dialects.) Meanwhile, Wen-ching’s two brothers fall afoul of gangsters, newly arrived from the mainland, who unduly influence the government. Hou’s extraordinarily controlled and well-constructed long takes blend revelation and opacity; his favorite trope is to shoot through doorways, as if straining to capture the action over impassable spans of time. The movie conveys the director’s intensely personal struggle at the crossroads of large-scale history and private memory; with understatedly bitter irony, he depicts the birth of a nation at the price of a family’s dissolution. Released in 1989.
— Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
Read here: https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/city-sadness
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