Mahjong

Official Selection, 1996 Berlin International Film Festival

New 4K restoration was undertaken by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute with the support of Kaili Peng and Kaleidoscope Pictures.

In July of last year, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Taiwan Audiovisual Institute co-presented a three month long exhibition dedicated to the late, great Edward Yang. The retrospective featured manuscripts and personal notes, donated three years prior by Yang’s widow, including a 4K restoration of the previously underseen MAHJONG. Yang’s penultimate film sees the director departing from the more serious dramas he was most well known for (Taipei Story, A Brighter Summer Day) in favor of tragicomic farce. Marthe, a young French girl, arrives in Taipei, desperate to rekindle her romance with Markus, the older British expat who left her. Without any plan or means of survival, she gets involved with Red Fish (whose father is being hunted by debt collectors after his kindergarten empire goes bust) and his street gang that runs petty scams.

Yang has always maintained an interest in urban life, national history, and its attendant social transformations, but no other of his films displays this interest with more cynicism and disdain than in MAHJONG. Spackled with ornaments of Western influence – from the Hard Rock Cafe where the characters frequent to a large American flag draped across the walls of a hostel – the film is Yang’s reckoning with the rapid economic growth that Taiwan experienced in the ’90s and its emergent position in the crosshairs of globalization.

– Justin Nguyen

As part of the Taiwan Showcase, this screening is FREE for UCSD students, faculty, and staff with ID.