Languages of A City of Sadness.

I finally watched a movie I’d been wanting to see for years, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Bēiqíng chéngshì). It’s famous as the first Taiwanese movie to deal openly with the Kuomintang government’s brutal takeover of Taiwan, in particular the February 28 Incident (about which I was told in whispers when I was teaching college in Taiwan in the ’70s), but that’s unimportant compared to the fact that it’s a great film — to my mind, up there with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day at the peak of Taiwanese cinema. What brings it here, however, is something that struck me forcibly while watching it, the linguistic complexity. To quote Bérénice Reynaud’s A City of Sadness (British Film Institute Publishing, 2002; review): From the beginning (Hirohito’s speech) to the end (Tachikawa’s music), A City is permeated through and through by Japanese sounds. Not only is the moody, emotional theme music heard at key moments, creating an aural scansion that contributed to the aesthetic…