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
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) attendance at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPP) “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” parade in Beijing is infuriating, embarrassing and insulting to nearly everyone in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s friends and allies. She is also ripping off bandages and pouring salt into old wounds. In the process she managed to tie both the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) into uncomfortable knots. The KMT continues to honor their heroic fighters, who defended China against the invading Japanese Empire, which inflicted unimaginable horrors on the
RSS