A Borrowed Life
3rd - 9th of August
A Borrowed Life (Wu Nien-jen, 1994)
Golden light floods through the open door behind a half-remembered silhouette, the brightness of the memory rendering it lost and indistinct. The doorway reoccurs throughout Wu Nien-jen’s intensely autobiographical debut, A Borrowed Life; a film that like many of the greatest works of the Taiwanese New Wave, is an intensely felt document of lived history. This distinctive cinema, created by a group of young directors and writers in the mid-eighties, when suddenly freed from decades of cultural censorship, was suffused with a desire to examine and understand the movement of history; capturing intimate lives caught up in economic, political and linguistic structures. Wu is likely best known to audiences for playing NJ, the disillusioned father given an opportunity to relive a delicate first love, in Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi (2000) - an indelible performance imbued with an endless well of tired pathos and earnest feeling - but is also a prolific screenwriter having written, most notably, Yang’s That Day, On the Beach (1983) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989); two films that, alone, would make most writing careers pale in comparison and both of which demonstrate a preoccupation with the intertwining of personal and national histories; a theme that torrents through Wu’s debut, that charts the relationship, from the late fifties to early nineties, between Wen Jian (Chung Yo-hong, Cheng Kwei-chung and Fu Jun at various ages), and his miner father Sega (Tsai Chen-nan), while the village in which they live slowly decays and empties until eventually disappearing from the administrative maps.
The film opens on Wen Jian’s mother asking the young boy to follow Sega and his friends into town. They visit a cinema and watch a Japanese film, the dialogue repeated in Minnanese by a theatre employee, but Wen is quickly abandoned when the men leave to visit a Japanese style bar. This instinctive deferral to Japan, on an authoritative and cultural level is key to the divide between Sega, his children and the modern Taiwan under Kuomintang rule. Constantly rooting himself in a personal and historical past, the opening voiceover establishes that when asked his age Sega would always say he was born four years into the Showa era. An answer only decipherable to his son by remembering that the Showa era began 14 years after the foundation of the Chinese republic. In the first real conversation we see between the two he simply feels it is important to communicate his own family’s genealogy. Sega is proud and stubborn, quick to anger and shows little care for his children, a feeling weaponised when a failure to find stable employment renders his wife the primary breadwinner. When they finally move from the mining village in the eighties, the complete absence of economic power within the household renders the decision is out of Sega’s hands.
Voiceovers establish the firmly autobiographical nature of the work, at times placing us within three points in time: the present, a past, that is seen, and a future past, that is unseen. In one moment, Wu presents his twist on Bresson’s narrative repetition, the voiceover telling us a story directly before we see it play out. Lingering shots of Sega, communicate a deep searching gaze, looking backwards to try and find something unknowable and out of reach. Indeed, for much of the first hour his face is somewhat hidden, either by shadow or distance, replicating an attempt to grasp foggy memories of imprecise detail. Frequently the film will hold on sequences of poetry, carrying the magic, affecting permanence of youth. Waiting for his father and the other miners to appear from the shaft, the young Wen looks into the abyss. All of a sudden several golden suns begin to appear, bobbing between each other, some vanishing and reappearing. The many eyed monster casting a burning red on the wet ground below, approaching closer and closer.
The film makes complex use of language, shifting between Minnanese (a dialect historically spoken in Taiwan), Mandarin and Japanese; while the most subtle blurring between these idioms was lost on this non-fluent viewer, they, nonetheless, overtly communicate the alienating ravines between generations and communities. The family and village mainly speak in Minnnanese, although Sega and the other working class men are keen to speak Japanese amongst themselves. The voiceovers of the grown Wen are spoken in Mandarin; a language Sega is unable to understand, a factor likely contributing to his inability to find stable employment outside the village. Sega’s fascination with Japan presents a divide between himself, raised and educated under the Japanese occupation, and his children born under Kumonintang rule, who have been brought up to see mainland China as the historic centre of Taiwan’s orbit. In one fascinatingly complex sequence, an argument breaks out after Sega colours the white sun, on his daughters drawing of the national flag, red. Not as a vindictive act but because the image of the Japanese flag feels naturally correct for him: “the sun should be red, shouldn’t it”. While Wen attempts to calm the two down in Minnanese, she responds by calling him a traitor, but doing so in Mandarin; partly because he won’t understand but also instinctively since it is in this language that the new nationalist thinking is taught. That his daughter has insulted him does not need to be translated for Sega.
For Sega, raised in an era where languages other than Japanese were outlawed, he and his generation are effectively mute in the new Taiwan where Mandarin is the exclusive language of power. resulting in a situation where he finds himself impotent politically and domestically. By the final act he is unable to fully understand the Mandarin spoken by, either, the employees at the hospital he is constantly visiting or his own grandson; “two Taiwanese gave birth to a mainlander” he says of the boy. As Wen ages into adolescence and his rather becomes an increasing drain on the family, and so the relationship between father and son becomes more combative, until, seemingly noticing how forces far outside of their small village have marginalised his life, he begins to kindly, pity the man, who is seemingly unable to help himself. Well into Wen’s adulthood, Sega rejects all of of these offers of financial assistance.
On a brief visit back to Sega’s father house, a caught conversation hints at Sega’s experience of the February 28th incident; a massacre of anti-government protesters by Kumonintang troops that, for decades, was rarely spoken of in public due to cultural taboo and government censorship. This story seems to place Sega’s life in the village as some sort of exile, imposed either on the self, or, indirectly, by the realities of urban life closer to Kumonintang control. In the city, sick, near to the end, Sega is a figure of the past and cultural confusion itself. Fervent to visit Japan before he dies, there is no peaceful close; hunched over, gasping for air in his hospital bed before stubbornly insisting to go out on his own terms. As he finally dies, the bold shadow-play occurring on a medical curtain takes us back to the cinema that opens the film, a temporal link confirmed by the voiceover, establishing the genesis of the film itself, functioning as a map, tracing forward through a newly opened door from one point to the other.
Of a visit to Japan to scatter Sega’s ashes, Wen simply recounts
“father was silent, like the falling snow.”
Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) - Delightfully ridiculous, communicates a liberating joy of creation while watching. Moments here touch on more sensitive aspects of Japanese history and I’m expecting to get more out of the Obayashi films that dive into these punctures resolutely.
sorry, mainly been caring for a loved one so haven’t been able to find much time to watch films in the past couple of weeks. i hope you and yours are all keeping well.
all the best,
james
xx
Great stuff