Taipei Story


Taipei Story is a 1985 Taiwanese film directed, scored, and co-written by filmmaker Edward Yang — his second full-length feature film and third overall. The film stars Yang's fellow filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and singer Tsai Chin, whom Yang subsequently married. It is one of the earliest films of the New Taiwanese Cinema.
In the United States, Janus Films gave a limited release of the film's 4K restoration, done by the World Cinema Project, on March 17, 2017.

Title

The original title, 青梅竹馬 "green plums and a bamboo horse", refers to Chinese plums and the childhood practice of riding a bamboo stick as a pretend horse. This idiom alludes to an 8th-century poem by Li Bai, and in China it refers to a childhood sweetheart. The English title alludes to the film Tokyo Story.

Plot

A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei, and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

Characters

According to the Doc Film Society, the film "displays Yang's uncompromising critique of the middle-class with its dissection of its heroine's emotional fragility, vainly disguised behind the sunglasses she sports day and night. As she flees the past, her boyfriend idealistically clings to it, a Confucian rigidity toward which Yang bears still less patience."