Hazy Days
Taiwan’s White Terror era gets the road trip treatment in this year’s best Golden horse pic.
a Foggy Tale
Director: Chen Yu-hsun • Writer: Chen Yu-hsun
Starring: Caitlin Fang, Will Or, 9m88, Tseng Jing-hua
Taiwan • 2hrs 14mins
Opens Hong Kong April 16 • IIB
Grade: B-
Some time in the 1950s, a young country girl in Chiayi, Yue (Caitlin Fang Yu-ting), is hanging out with her brother Yun (Tseng Jing-hua, Family Matters) in a cane field. She’s brought him lunch, and they’re swapping stories and kind of working on one he appears to be in the middle of writing. It’s also called “A Foggy Tale.” But even though they’re laughing, clearly happy to see each other, there’s a tension in the way he’s set himself that puts Yue on edge too. Sure enough, government soliders are lurking in the bush, which sends Yun bolting. A little while later Yue, also an orphan, is at home with her resentful aunt and uncle and learns that Yun’s been executed and his body is rotting away in Taipei. Aunty and Uncle are too cheap to go collect it – admittedly they’re dirt poor – so Yue starts a pilgrimage of sorts to get Yun herself.
Set during the period of Kuomintang, ahem, governance, the White Terror years have been rich dramatic fodder for Taiwanese filmmakers ever since the KMT (temporarily) faded into the background in 1987. Hou Hsiao-hsien (in A City of Sadness) and Edward Yang (A Brighter Summer Day) launched careers on it, and Tawainese artists have been wrangling with those four decades ever since they were allowed to. Chen Yu-hsun is a fundamentally less, shall we say, serious filmmaker than Hou or Yang, breaking out with the kidnap dramedy Tropical Fish in 1995 and best known for fantasy rom-com My Missing Valentine (remade as One Second Ahead, One Second Behind in Japan in 2024). Because of that A Foggy Tale | 大濛, the Golden Horse winner for best picture in November, is less of a cohesive meditation on a national psyche than period coming-of-age grief romp.
Taiwan’s ‘Quilted Jacket’ movie
When Yue finally gets to Taipei, she’s instantly a target for sex traffickers, thieves and all manner of big city hustlers that make her job even harder than it is. When she asks where the funeral home is she’s baffled a city may be so big not everyone knows every corner of it. Despite Chen’s instincts towards light-hearted narrative there are undeniably strong moments of tension, and he builds an palpable sense of overarching oppression and systemic corruption. Yue’s run-in with the police for vagrancy is a vivid snapshot of that, and Fang and Chen conspire to do a nice job of signalling just how out of whack the world is and how out of her league Yue is; how intensely she doesn’t understand the reality.
Thankfully not everyone is a scumbag, and Yue is rescued by rickshaw driver, former soldier and compulsive gambler Chao Kung-tao (Will Or Wai-lam, Another World), who becomes her tour guide through Taipei, teaches her the ins and outs of dice, how to spot a con and how to survive in a space where everyone is on edge and on their guard. Yue eventually connects with her estranged elder sister Hsia (9m88, Double Happiness), whose presence as a revue girl is part of a larger backstory that could easily have been trimmed to streamline the script. But it’s with Hsia that Yue finally finds her brother and adds the grace notes to what becomes the metaphoric story Yun started in the cane field.
Considering the gravity of the subject matter – which at nearly 65, Chen is old enough to have experienced first hand – A Foggy Tale frequently plays out like a charming travelogue through mid-century Taipei more than a meditation on state-sponsored violence. Yue and Kung-tao bounce around in a series of misadventures and have some emotional epiphanies, all of which is sprinkled with occasional dire moments that re-assert the grim environment, often with help from DOP Chen Chi-wen’s (Trouble Girl) mid-century hued images. No surprise, it’s the little details and small moments that really give the film what heft it has and resonate in too many parts of the world now, like when a high ranking official (The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon’s Chen Yi-wen at his iciest) enters a room and scares the shit out of everyone with just his presence, or when a morgue worker (Liu Kuan-ting) silently fishes executed bodies out of a tank.
But A Foggy Tale wears out its welcome with its multiple endings – everytime you think, “Oh this must be it,” it keeps going, to no one’s benefit – and an epilogue that drags the whole thing down and comes close to dismantling the effective work Fang and Or did for two hours. No doubt anyone with a deeper connection to that time in Taiwan may feel the gut punch, but soft-pedalling the hideousness of it all isn’t necessary, and doing so neuters what should be infuriating and heartbreaking. The better future Yun hoped for, the legacy of survivlism, the lack of closure… dude. No amount of nails is going to make the point if we don’t already get it.