In Taiwan, There’s Little Respect for Filmmaking

When the lanky Edward Yang, a black-on-black tuxedo accentuating the salt in his peppery hair, was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s best director award recently, the echoes were multiple and multilingual.

A year earlier, a short Spaniard in a black shirt and tux named Pedro Almodovar had been given the same award, for the picture every festival tout had picked as Most Likely to Win the Palme d’Or (“All About My Mother”). He, too, had to settle for the director’s prize (no small potatoes, but . . .).

This year’s result was far less surprising: The top winner, Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” had rarely gone unmentioned during the ritual handicapping. But it also seemed to have as many venom-sputtering opponents as supporters.

Yang’s film--”A One and a Two . . ,” a many-layered family drama that ran three hours and was one of the few films that deserved to--had reaped almost unanimous critical praise and thus was probably destined to be overlooked.

Cannes Award Means More Abroad?

But unlike his picture--which features irresistible performances by two first-time actors, the young Kelly Lee and the very young Jonathan Chang--Yang was a winner. His triumph, however, may be better appreciated abroad than at home.

“We had a party the other day after a screening of the film,” Yang said before his award. “The little boy [Chang] was there, and there was also this Hong Kong actress [Hu Qi], who’s in another film and arrived with her entourage and the journalists and photographers. And all the photographers kept trying to get her to bend over toward the little boy. You know, so her breasts would hang out.

“The next day, my wife called from home and said, ‘It’s really bad: The picture’s in all papers in Taiwan.’ I mean, that’s terrible, you know, tabloid stuff. But the message was that she did it on purpose. The message is that an actor is not much better than that whore down the street.”

It’s an attitude Yang says pervades Taiwan society, where he says children are steered toward science and math, where study of the humanities is discouraged and where the message is, if you follow the rules, the money will follow--a subject he himself has pursued in “A Confucian Confusion” and “Mahjong.”

The Shanghai-born Yang admits he “gave in”--by becoming an engineer, immigrating to the United States to study computer design and working in the microcomputer industry in Seattle for seven years.

But when he returned to Taiwan in 1981 (with a year at USC film school under his belt), it was to help inaugurate the Taiwanese new wave, a movement that nurtured another of Taiwan’s world-class directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Corruption in Party-Run Studio

Fortunately for Yang and his gang (which eventually became the name of his production company), the head of the party-run studio was being cheated blind. “One guy had spent $100,000 on coffee,” Yang said. So the studio head decided to let some of the younger filmmakers have a shot at a film, a four-episode, four-director project called “Expectations.” Response from the Taiwanese public was so strong that the $150,000-budget film netted another $150,000--or, as Yang said, “that’s a lot of coffee.”

Yang went on to make what had previously been his most acclaimed film, “A Brighter Summer Day,” but the fortunes of Taiwan’s cinema have risen and fallen according to political winds. And whims.

“They’ve tried to say ‘A One and a Two . . .’ is not a Taiwanese film, because they have no authority over it,” Yang said. “The financing is all venture capital from Japan, but the whole world says it’s a Taiwanese film. Except the government of Taiwan.”

Yang has hopes for a change in attitude now that a new government is taking over his island nation. He also has realistic expectations about his lengthy but glorious film.

“The length is no problem in Tokyo,” he said. “It’s not a big problem in Taiwan, either. In Hong Kong it’s a problem. But for me right now, this length for this story is the best it can be. If I have to shorten it. . . . Well, I’m an engineer, and the job of an engineer is to find a solution. But if you’ve already taken all the fat out and have nothing but muscle and bone, then the only way to shorten is to amputate.”