THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983)
"With all that education, you should know what happiness is."
1.5 out of ****
Starring Sylvia Chang, Teresa Hu, Hsu Ming, Li Lieh, Mao Hsueh-wei; Directed by Edward Yang; Written by Yang and Wu Nien-chen; Cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Chang Hui-kung
Every country has, eventually, its New Wave. France had its Nouvelle Vague, Brazil its Cinema Novo, China its Fifth Generation, and on and on. Some waves just take longer than others, before they wash over us, cleansing us with the balm of discovery. Taiwan's New Wave came in the 1980s, in the work of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Jen, and Edward Yang; THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH--Yang's first feature--is central. It created a new language for young Taiwanese directors, even if the first attempts to speak that language were hesitant and faltering. Later works refined the techniques that Yang first explored here, giving Taiwan a distinctive international presence. THAT DAY itself is long and frustrating, the document of a nation's attempt to find a voice.
It does not lack ambition. It anatomizes urban life in modern Taiwan, in the manner of Antonioni, elaborating the alienation that the Westernized white-collar middle-class feel as their lives are shaped by old-fashioned roles--dedicated career men, loyal housewives--that they find unfulfilling. Jia-li (Sylvia Chang) is the focus, but the film brings others into its compass--her husband, her brother, friends from her college days--as it charts her discontents. No one is happy. Jia-li married her husband, We-lei, at a young age. At the time, her brother had been urged into an arranged marriage, despite his affection for another woman, and so Jia-li's marriage seemed, in comparison, a good one: she chose We-lei of her own free will, they loved each other. But it goes wrong.
THAT DAY dutifully presents all the clichés: We-lei becomes absorbed in his career, indulges in an affair with a co-worker; Jia-li feels restless and trapped, bound by a choice she made while young, but which no longer seems wise. The film never redeems these clichés by conveying the feel of authentic experience, the intensity of lived pain, and much of it seems trite and belaboured.
It unfolds, awkwardly, as a series of flashbacks, told during a luncheon in Vienna, where Jia-li meets her brother's old flame (Teresa Hu), now a concert pianist, whom she has not seen since college. Both women seem rather sad, and resigned to their sadness. Their circumstances (and those of Jia-li's brother and a college friend) suggest not so much that they have made the wrong choices--married the wrong man, chosen the wrong career path, etc.--but rather that the choices available to them were inadequate. It is not that Jia-li married the wrong man; she didn't. The problem is that she needed to marry at all--and that if she did not marry, she would still be just as unhappy. For a woman in modern Taiwan, THAT DAY tells us, the cards are stacked, the dice are loaded: she can play the game, but the house always wins.
The film's sympathetic feminist implications are presumably the reason it caused such controversy upon its release in Taiwan. Seen now, it does not seem provocative. Indeed, it's hard to imagine anyone having felt passionate enough about the film to generate any controversy: it may be ambitious, it may be innovative, but it is also terribly, terribly dull. And what was new for Taiwan was not necessarily new for the rest of us: Yang adopts methods established years before by Antonioni and others, and his use of those methods is fumbling, uncertain, undisciplined. Nor does he bring anything new--other than the locale--to the material.
There are moments when THAT DAY takes on some of the emotional richness it strives for--in a young couple's first kiss, in the awkward meeting of a woman and her husband's mistress--but they are brief. Too often, Yang devotes needless time to mundane scenes--grocery shopping, flower-arranging--in which nothing happens, little is said, no emotion imparted. Perhaps, if the film were content to focus on such reflective, inward moments, leaving us to guess at thoughts and feelings, it might have been ambiguous, suggestive, insinuating. But Jia-li and her disaffected companions do not only brood in silence: they talk about their problems, at length, in detail, redundantly, and eliminate all subtleties. At two hours and forty-five minutes, it all seems exorbitantly long, indulgently long-winded.
Consider the defining moment for Jia-li, the titular day on the beach. The thrust of the whole film explains, easily enough, what we are to think of that moment, what it means when she walks away from a particular situation. Even so, the film has not one but two characters explain it for us verbally, in case we may have missed the point. Needless time is devoted to expressing what should have remained unexpressed, and that is the problem throughout.
The look of the film is as tedious as the drawn-out narrative. It was the first feature shot by Christopher Doyle--at least, it's his name in the credits--who is now rightly regarded as one of the world's leading cinematographers. In the freewheeling expressionism of his work with directors like Chen Kaige and Wong Kar-wai, he seems incapable of fashioning a boring image. You would never know it from watching THAT DAY, which, due either to Doyle's inexperience or Yang's humdrum direction, is almost perverse in its insistence on making the physical environment seem as drab and banal as possible. In scrutinizing the long decay of a marriage, THAT DAY manages to capture the ennui of the experience, but none of the damage, none of the heartbreak.
A Review by David Dalgleish (February 21st, 1999)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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