Movie of the Weekend: A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (Edward Yang, 1994)
#YangGang
Edward Yang’s fifth feature suggests a myriad of influences. Throughout this Taipei-set screwball — seen via a glittering 4K restoration last night at the Aero in Santa Monica, with a totally packed house — I thought variously of Chaplin, Renoir, Lubitsch, Hawks, Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and Whit Stillman. I doubt, of course, that Yang had all those filmmakers in mind when making his only straight comedy. But he was such a master of style that any genre he adopted couldn’t help but recall the very best of its kind. A Confucian Confusion is capital-F funny, with a sprawling cast of characters who grow more entertaining and compelling the harder they fall. Molly (Joyce Ni Shu-Chun) and Akeem (Wang Bosen) are wealthy, engaged twenty-somethings, and Akeem is funneling money into Molly’s flailing PR firm. But they’re not serious people, and their impending marriage appears strictly transactional. Aspiring actress Qiqi (Chen Shin-Chyi), salaryman Ming (Weiming Wang), philanderer Larry (Danny Deng), seductress Feng (Richie Li), and bombastic playwright Birdy (Ye-Ming Wang) are just a few of the colorful men and women who round out the central couple’s orbit; by film’s end, I’m pretty sure everyone fucks each other at least once. As fun as it all is, though, it wouldn’t be a Yang joint without a bitter pill or two to swallow. Confusion is suffused with a ruefulness about the modern world’s lack of true romance, and an anger about the way that art is ceaselessly neutered by commerce. But it also wouldn’t be a Yang joint without revelation. After lambasting the emptiness bred by Late Capitalism for two hours, he ends with the most hopeful and romantic image you’ve ever seen. As Neil Bahadur writes on Letterboxd: those final ten seconds are “like watching the restart of civilization.”
Currently playing as part of the Edward Yang retrospective at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. The 4K restoration will be streaming later this year.