EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD (1990)
"A man is not a man without eight taels of gold."
3 out of ****
Starring Sammo Hung, Sylvia Chang; Directed by Mabel Cheung; Written by Cheung and Alex Law; Cinematography by Bill Wong
EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD begins as a fish out of water story and at some point becomes a love story involving two people whose past choices prevent the fruition of their love. Neither aspect of the movie is entirely successful, but both are good enough. And along the way there is one perfect scene, which is one more than you find in most films.
Slim (played by portly Sammo Hung, better known as a star and director of Hong Kong action movies) is a Chinese immigrant who drives a yellow cab in New York. When the movie opens, we see him shouting obscenities at another taxi driver. He does not seem particularly out of place. In fact, he is about to return to visit his home in rural China for the first time in sixteen years, spending most of his life savings in the process, and it is there that he will become the proverbial fish out of water, as he realizes that you can never go home.
He brings with him some Statue of Liberty cigarette lighters, cheap sunglasses, and lobsters (which have to be large, to prove they're American)--the tokens of his success. He also wears a gold chain and a gold watch, because without eight taels of gold, a man is not a man (my dictionary tells me that taels are a unit of weight used in the Far East, and I assume the phrase is a Chinese proverb). He loses most of this stuff--except the gold--when his van crashes into a river and he has to hitch a ride, so to speak, on a raft along the river which runs past his parents' village. When he arrives unannounced, he almost induces cardiac arrest in his father.
All of this has the makings of a routine comedy, and the movie has its amusing moments, as when the villagers take turns giving Slim gifts during a celebration of his homecoming, and they all give him birds, so by evening's end he is surrounded by turkeys, ducks, geese and other sundry fowl. But EIGHT TAELS is not a comedy--it is a sad, sweet story about the choices people make, and how they are sometimes irreparable.
Director Mabel Cheung (AN AUTUMN'S TALE, THE SOONG SISTERS) sees clearly what it is like to have lived half of your life in one country and half in a country on the other side of the world--what it is like to no longer have a place to call home. Slim does not belong in China, nor does he belong in America, where he can barely speak the language. Seeing water buffalo in the fields and rafts poled down the river and fireworks exploding gloriously in the sky over a small village, we come to know the world Slim left behind, and it seems as if he too is knowing it for the first time, and wishes it felt more like home. The condition of the expatriate is eloquently portrayed; I, being one, was sympathetic.
On his way to his parent's village, Slim hooks up with Jenny (Sylvia Chang), whom he knew when she was a girl nicknamed Odds-and-Ends, which is what he continues to call her, although she is now a mature, professional, attractive woman, to be married in the spring to an American-Chinese man. Slim and Odds-and-Ends fall for each other. That's predictable. The manner in which their (non-)romance is played out is not. The emotions involved are adult and complex, and the film avoids cheap solutions to their dilemma. It's typical, for instance, that the fiancé in this sort of plot be a colossal jerk, because it makes it easier to empathize with the unrequited lover. But here the fiancé is a decent, ordinary guy, and although Slim would like to feel anger, he cannot. The fiancé has done nothing wrong; the situation is the result of bad luck or bad decisions, take your pick.
EIGHT TAELS has its share of flaws (the early sequences in America and on the plane to China are especially weak), but it compensates with insight. When Odds-and-Ends tells Slim that her future husband wants to move to San Francisco, she notes resignedly, "It's all the same. Wherever we go, we'll be in Chinatown," and her straightforward statement expresses much. There is insight, too, in the understanding of the consequences of Slim and Odds-and-Ends' decisions: he to move to America, she to marry a Chinese-American. Both their choices were perhaps born of impatience, perhaps of a sense that the grass is always greener--and it turns out that both choices were wrong. But they cannot undo them; they must live with what they have done. Such is life. The movie is tender toward these people, but it offers no false comforts.
Everything that is right and true about EIGHT TAELS comes together in one great scene, which is the culmination of the love story. Slim and Odds-and-Ends sit in a secluded spot and talk hesitantly, with the muted pop-pop of fireworks exploding in the night behind them, and it seems the conversation will lead to a kiss. The exchange that follows, and what Slim then does, is poignant and perfect: with clarity and understatement, we see two people's lives, their heartbreaks and virtues, summed up in a single moment. Yes, the film is flawed, but moments like that justify most of its inadequacies.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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