Celebrated Taiwanese director Edward Yang‘s penultimate feature is a deceptively simple and straightforward affair. “Mahjong” poses as an over-the-top, soap opera-esque tale full of petty criminals, blackmail, sentimental manipulation and unrequited love. But it also offers a bittersweet chronicle of life, love, greed and economic opportunism in the booming, bustling Taipei of the late 1990s.
Mahjong is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival
The film follows a group of rowdy young men who share the same apartment while ripping off other people for a living – and almost, it seems, for a hobby. Their leader is Red Fish (Tsung Sheng Tang), an enterprising young hustler who sees the world as one huge scamming opportunity with only the capitalist sky for a limit. His father is a fugitive businessman and con man who has made a fortune out of Taiwan’s roaring economy, and Red Fish has assimilated to his core his dad’s social Darwinian mantra: the world is only composed of crooks and fools – you either take advantage of other people, or you are taken advantage of.
To a large extent, “Mahjong” consists of testing out of that philosophy, showing how characters of all ages and genders ferociously manipulate and exploit each other without a second thought. Among these is Hong Kong (Chang Cheh), a dashing gigolo and womanizer who brings girls back to the apartment to share them with his pals – until he meets his equal in sexual cynicism in gold digger Angela (Carrie Ng). There is also Little Buddha (Chi-Tsan Wang), a fake, absurd Feng Shui master who takes advantage of people’s superstitious beliefs in some of the most successful comedic bits in the film.
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The three men’s various scams are indeed often played for laughs. But when the camera films Hong Kong’s latest girlfriend being sweet talked by Red Fish into having sex with everyone to please her boyfriend, while also showing the boys smirking in the background of the same shot, the abjectness of the situation is visualized. As the plot moves forward, the full implications of such lying and cheating become increasingly clear, revealing the extent of the moral depravity hidden behind the polished smiles.
Red Fish’s own emotional journey forms the backbone of the film, but there are many different storylines weaved together in “Mahjong”. Most notably that of Marthe (played by rising star Virginie Ledoyen), a young French ingénue freshly arrived in Taipei to reconnect with Markus, her British lover. But the British expat – there are many such conniving foreigners in the film, eager to tap into Taipei’s economic miracle – cares more for money and professional success than for her, while the naive girl soon runs the risk to be sold into prostitution by Red Fish. As they can’t pronounce her name, Red Fish and his gang rename her Matra, after the French company busy building Taipei’s metro at the time – an apt symbol for the Westernization and commercial development of the city, and for the way people can quickly be dehumanized in the name of profit.
Through the portrayal of these many characters and their various fates, “Mahjong” sits firmly on the satirical end of the New Taiwanese Cinema, a new style of films which set out to examine the rapid transformations of Taiwan’s society in the 1980s and 1990s. Taipei is depicted as a hyper-materialist consumerist environment, the latest Wild West-like economic Frontier where people objectify and consume each other while ruthlessly competing for money, sex and success. “In ten years”, a greedy Markus tells Marthe as they drive through the buzzing, neon-lit streets of Taipei, “this place will be the center of the world. The 20th century was the century of imperialism, right? Wait until you see the 21st!”
“Mahjong” might still not be the most successful film of Edward Yang’s, owing perhaps to comedic and screwball elements – including the gangsters tracking down Red Fish’s father – that are not so compelling. His previous film, 1994’s “A Confucian Confusion”, was Yang’s first comedy and set much of the tone adopted in “Mahjong”, but is still superior in wit and thoughtfulness to the latter. Still, “Mahjong” is a potent and affecting film, and both movies, which tend to be forgotten among the many masterpieces in Edward Yang’s filmography, should be rediscovered and reconsidered together.
Thankfully, both are now available in 4K restorations, and “Mahjong” has recently been shown at various retrospectives and festivals, including the San Diego Asian Film Festival this month. The perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the satirical sensibility of one of Taiwan’s great filmmakers.
