Throughout their three-decade collaboration, writer-director duo Mabel Cheung (張婉婷) and Alex Law (羅啟銳) have earned a reputation for making intimate dramas — An Autumn’s Tale (秋天的童話, 1987) and Echoes of the Rainbow (歲月神偷, 2010) — about people who are geographically or psychologically dislocated.
A Tale of Three Cities (三城記), starring arthouse favorites Sean Lau (劉青雲) and Tang Wei (湯唯), is the kind of movie one has high expectations of. It tells a romanticized real-life story of the parents of martial-arts hero Jackie Chan (成龍). Unfortunately, the film lacks the ambition and execution it needs to carry this off. As the period drama unfolds, genuine human emotion and empathy are left out, making the story more affected than affecting.
Set in the war-torn China of the 1930s and 1940s, the film looks to a time when death and survival were the order of the day. It opens in 1950s Hong Kong, where Daolong (Chan’s future father), played by Lau, works as a cook in the American embassy. Flashbacks return viewers to the Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War, a time when the younger Daolong is a customs officer with two sons. Yuerong (Chan’s future mother), played by Tang, is a strong-willed mother of two daughters, forced into illegal activity to support her family.
Photo courtesy of Hualien Media
Fate brings Daolong and Yuerong together and they become lovers, their spouses already having passed away. But their romance is ill-fated. The couple, uprooted by war, travel to Shanghai and eventually Hong Kong. They are separated and reunited again and again, and that is what mostly happens throughout the story. While exceeding two hours in length, the film at times feels like a repetitive and protracted courtship, revolving around the two lovers kissing and embracing after separations across different historical events.
The story moves rather hastily from location to location, trying to cover a lot of ground, but leaving little time for motive and character development. While the film’s top-notch cast hand in good performances, even China’s fine thespian Qin Hailu (秦海璐) and Hong Kong’s Kam Yin-Ling (金燕玲) cannot rescue their characters from being flat and insipid. It is certainly not one of Lau and Wei’s best work.
In A Tale of Three Cities, Cheung and Law tumble under the weight of history, delivering a lackluster and vacant historical piece, rather than a touching human story.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Toward the outside edge of Taichung City, in Wufeng District (霧峰去), sits a sprawling collection of single-story buildings with tiled roofs belonging to the Wufeng Lin (霧峰林家) family, who rose to prominence through success in military, commercial, and artistic endeavors in the 19th century. Most of these buildings have brick walls and tiled roofs in the traditional reddish-brown color, but in the middle is one incongruous property with bright white walls and a black tiled roof: Yipu Garden (頤圃). Purists may scoff at the Japanese-style exterior and its radical departure from the Fujianese architectural style of the surrounding buildings. However, the property
RSS