That Day on the Beach is a movie pathfinder, a Chinese cinema first that has concerned itself with both contemporary life and cinematic form, revealing serious intent as well as ambition in a probing film about relationships in modern Chinese society. A complicated structure of flash backs amid a beautiful cinematographic style poses both its observations and its queries.
Central Motion Picture Co. made That Day on the Beach under pressure of a three-month production schedule that reportedly involved the shooting of some 96,000 feet of film. The director, 36-year-old Edward Yang, not known for compromise, from the beginning got the best talent he could find together, then pushed everyone to their limits in efforts to set new standards of production.
The film is about Chia-li, a rebellious young girl who has been brought up in a strict Taiwanese family. Seeing her older brother Chia-sen accept the doubtful felicity of a marriage arranged by their father, she runs away to Taipei and marries college boyfriend Te-wei in a public wedding ceremony.
At this point, where standard fare might have then been "live happily ever after," the film really begins. Complications of modern life overwhelm them, and she and Te-wei become seriously estranged. Te-wei is then reported as having drowned off the beach—but there is also the possibility that he has absconded with company funds and their own money to Japan.
The film is now unraveled in a series of flash backs which begin with the return of her brother's old girlfriend, Ching-ching, now a famous pianist on a concert tour of Asia. During the one afternoon Ching-ching has free in Taipei, the two meet, and the events of those ten-odd years ago are retold and re-lived.
The narrative can be divided into live sections, with the first a sort of "prelude." We find that the sophisticated, cool pianist was once a fresh young woman who simply played the piano while waiting to marry Chia-sen, Chia-li's older brother. When their father insisted Chia-sen marry the daughter of an old friend and he submitted, Ching-ching left the country.
Taking a sip of coffee, Ching-ching changes the subject. She asks Chia-li if she is married, and the second section begins. Now we learn how Chia-li and Te-wei got together at National Taiwan University—both under the sway of more aggressive friends. After graduation, Te-wei goes off to the army, and Chia-li returns home to the country, at a loss for what to do with her life. However, when her father arranges a marriage for her with the younger brother of Chia-sen's wife, Chia-li runs away and she and Te-wei get married.
As they sit in the coffee shop, the two women are touched by the tale. Ching-ching urges Chia-li to bring her husband to the concert that night, but gets a strange reaction from Chia-li: "Let me put it this way," Chia-li says finally, and the third part begins, in which the predictable conflicts of marriage are related along with the not-so-predictable ending.
In this section and the one that follows, the narrative structure of That Day on the Beach becomes more complicated. The film presents flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks: Chia-li muses over memories of her marital problems as she waits on the beach to identify the body of the person who drowned. The film moves from scenes of divers searching for Te-wei's body to the events leading up to the couple's first major argument.
The young couple's problems are familiar. Te-wei gets caught up in his work, leaving early in the mornings, and entertaining customers or celebrating business deals. Chia-li tries to busy herself with shopping, keeping up a stylishly-furnished apartment, and taking a class in flower arranging. She can't stand it anymore and confronts Te-wei with his neglect, and he explodes, frustrated with her demands, and walks out on her.
In the fourth film section, their marriage has derailed, and both parties seem incapable of setting it back on track. During an extended trip abroad by Te-wei, Chia-li flirts with the idea having an affair. Then, a nastyminded woman called Hsiao-hui shows up and reveals an involvement with Te-wei. Chia-li, paralyzed by her problems, collapses and is briefly hospitalized. Yet she does recover, and when Te-wei returns, though things are not perfect, she feels they have made progress in understanding each other.
Meanwhile, her father, the major force in her earlier life, dies. At the funeral, a pathetic, lifeless Chia-sen warns her not to rely on Te-wei, to trust no one but herself with her life. Remembering these words on the beach, Chia-li gets up and walks away just as the divers seem to have discovered the body of the drowned person. It might or might not be Te-wei. Ching-ching does not want to upset Chia-li further by inquiring, and we the audience do not find out either.
In the concluding section, a kind of epilogue, Ching-ching finally asks how Chia-sen is doing, only to find he died of cancer the previous winter. In a poignant sequence, Chia-li tells of how grateful Chia-sen felt in living as long as he did. Near death, he treasured the present more than he ever did in health.
Chia-li then hurries away to chair a meeting at her company, looking the confident career woman. Ching-ching muses that this growth surely dates from that day on the beach.
Superior photography and editing in That Day on the Beach result in a visually-outstanding film. Almost every frame is beautiful to look at. A consistent, paced editing is particularly effective in a number of scenes: In one, Ching-ching ventures out to meet Chia-li. The buildings of Taipei are reflected in the half-rolled down car window, while she looks out through the open half at the construction which has taken place since her departure. This is followed by an extreme close-up of Ching-ching's face, looking thoughtful. The simplicity and beauty of the two shots emphasize both images, selected so deliberately, and Ching-ching's pensive mood.
Another example is found in section two, when Te-wei kisses Chia-li for the first time. The late afternoon sunlight silhouettes their figures by the room window. The camera does not zoom in on their faces or cut away dramatically; no violin music swells. It is one single, silent long shot in which Te-wei slowly leans over to kiss Chia-li, who stands in a stiff and embarrassed posture. The scene combines tenderness and awkwardness.
A final example is a scene where Chia-li and Hsin-hsin have talked all night. Chia-li has expressed renewed faith in her marriage with Te-wei. Hsin-hsin walks over to the window, opens it, and the pale, bright light of the morning comes streaming in, like the hope now filling Chia-li. Hsin-hsin fetches her baby, and we see the two women react to the baby in the gentle morning light. It is a scene full of that tender optimism which arises so rarely in the course of everyday lives. Later, Chia-li walks home contentedly, to be greeted abruptly by the news of Te-wei's drowning.
The quality of the acting is almost uniformly good. Sylvia Chang plays Chia-li, and Terry Hu the pianist, Ching-ching. The delicate interplay between the expressive faces of these two beautiful women places their parts among the most engaging of any movie.
That Day on the Beach has a message: that education and material prosperity, all the benefits of an industrializing society, are no guarantee for satisfactory personal relationships or happiness.
What will be the audience reaction to That Day on the Beach, which is to be released this month? "It's almost too realistic. I'm afraid the audience won't think it's enough like a movie," said Tso, the actor playing Chia-sen. He feels that local audiences usually expect melodrama. In contrast, one long-time local critic complained, "It's not realistic at all—no one is like that in Taiwan."
Whether or not the problems of communication and understanding presented in the film are depicted "realistically" or not, there is no doubt that the aim of the film is to address real problems, with the hope that audiences will try to think out the "answers" for themselves.
According to common observation, the movie industry in the Republic of China is seeing the rise of new, younger directors and a new style of movie-making: realism. That Day on the Beach, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay in this year's Golden Horse Awards, the Republic of China's equivalent of Hollywood's Oscars, can certainly be considered "realist" in intent. What is more, among the other major films of the year, The Sandwich Man, Growing Up, A Flower in the Rainy Night, On Stage and Off Stage, The Child with the Sword, and Papa—Can You Hear Me Sing? all focus in varying degrees on elements of realism.
But what really is "realism?" In the 19th Century, artists involved in realism movements began by rejecting stale artistic conventions and seeking truth in the "real lives" of peasants or "simple folk." Then their concerns turned toward presentation, or the problem of form. Realism became a synonym for attention to accurate or observed detail, for attempts to portray subject matter "naturally." Artists began to use the materials of their own everyday lives—almost always, now, middle class.
However, the realism movement eventually came to a realization that realism could only be pushed so far, that subjective choice still dictated the final work of art, and that this must be acknowledged. At this point, most 19th Century artists turned inwards and gave themselves up to an open manipulation of form, resulting in abstract painting and literature of the psyche—surrealist and symbolist works. Whether or not Taiwan's film realism is on this same path in a different age is not clear. But emerging problems for such films are not difficult to identify.
For instance, That Day on the Beach both intentionally alters the straightforward narrative form and yet, paradoxically, is too bound to it. The flashbacks are really too realistic—that is, logically structured and detailed, rather than containing intuitive leaps of plot. Whole sequences of action are presented, with care taken that the "return" to the beach or coffee shop in some way "fits": the lighting of a cigarette cuts to another cigarette back in the coffee shop; Chia-li's tearful face is matched with her tears at the re-telling, and so forth. As a result, there is too much material in an effort to thoroughly delineate all possible themes, even though that shouldn't be necessary in a film where the traditional narrative and its climactic ending have been consciously put aside.
This overabundance of thematic material is particularly noticeable in the third and fourth sections, in which the complications between Chia-li and Te-wei are developed. In the previous sections, we have already been faced with questions posed by the relationships of Chia-li and Te-wei (wife and husband), Chia-li and Chia-sen (sister and brother), Chia-li and Ching-ching (one who married, and one who did not), and Chia-li and Chia-sen and their father. These and other relationships are certainly rich material for examining the basic conflicts and intertwining of human lives.
Nevertheless, in the following sections we see a further development of numerous additional relationships. The range of pitfalls and alienations afflicting the modern Chinese middle class is illustrated—but not enough direction is given to the resulting tangle.
All this is not to say the movie should be shorter, but that a narrower range of themes would have led to greater control. In addition, such important elements as the expressive and original music by Hongkong's Lin Min-yi, could then have been better integrated into the film.
Still, how much more it takes to make a movie of the dimensions of That Day on the Beach than it does to dissect it! The idea for the film is the director's—Yang co-authored the script, and in providing direction, was both hardworking and demanding. "What he wants is different from what other directors want," said Tso. That Day on the Beach is what Yang wanted—his first really major film. His previous works include short pieces in a ground-breaking television series called Eleven Women and the acclaimed A Story in Our Time (1982).
Nevertheless, it is actually the high standards of this film that demand a similar level of strictness in evaluation. It is not enough to note that the very fact that such a movie was made is an affirmative.
As Yang says, "Life is always able to hold out hope for the future; in the end, what this film is suggesting is a conviction in marching forward."