Hei An Zhi Guang

Chang Tso-chi

 

Even by Taiwanese New Wave standards, Chang Tso-chi paints a pretty uncompromising picture of his homeland. His second feature, Ah Chung (1995), was an in-your-face piece of social comment punctuated with downbeat scenes of raw, abrasive violence, expressing a frustration that was gruelling in its immediacy: "There's money here... but how can you get it?" laments its unfortunate and eponymous anti-hero.

Darkness And Light, Tso-chi's third film, continues to look at the plight of those who have to make their way on society's lower economic strata, but with a fresh angle. "My wife complained that all my projects seemed to be dealing with a very male world of violence and gangsters," says the director, who married last year. "So she asked me to try to do something about a male-female relationship. A love story."

The story focuses on Kang-Yi, a girl from the fishing town of Keelung, who comes home for the summer holidays after studying at college in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Her father, blinded in a car crash that killed his wife, is working as a masseur - not an uncommon profession for the blind in the East - and one of Kang-Yi's tasks is to escort her father on trips to clients' houses. During one of these trips she meets Ah Ping, a young triad gangster, and falls in love with him. This infuriates a jealous friend of Kang-Yi, another triad, who sparks an inter-gang war that can only end in tragedy.

The last few years have seen Taiwanese cinema enter several new phases. The first saw an interest in history and identity - what it is to be Taiwanese. Then came a focus on the citizen's relationship with modern society and the changes that it has brought, perhaps best illustrated by Tsai Ming-liang's first two movies. Thirdly, there has been a gravitation deeper into the psyche of protagonists, as with Lin Cheng-sheng's Sweet Degeneration.

With its mystic finale, Darkness And Light looks set to broach phases two and three - matching the almost primal emotions of Ah Chung. Graham Roberts