Taiwanese opera is a storied performing art that has defined Taiwanese identity despite the island’s turbulent history. It’s bold colours, decadent costumes, and delectable melodrama make for inspired, engaging performances. The same can be said for another domestic cultural sensation – the Taiwanese TV drama; with an international viewership in the tens of millions, and spoken in cosmopolitan Mandarin, there is perhaps no greater cultural symbol of contemporary, capitalist Taiwan other than the 101.
These two worlds collide in Yang Ya-che’s frenzied and hedonistic, The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (though I prefer the Chinese title, Bloodied Guanyin, referencing the Buddhist goddess of mercy). A woman-driven, dynastic crime drama, BCB is a bizarre, often incomprehensible, but consistently entertaining film, showing at this year’s Taiwanese Film Festival in Australia.
Set indeterminably during what is presumably the 1980s in Kaohsiung, BCB is the story of the cooly calculating Madame Tang, who deftly plays the political and corporate elite of Taiwan to spin a complicated brocade of double-crosses, backdoor deals, and a shocking murder. Tang, played with subtle mastery by veteran Hong Kong actress Kara Hui, hides behind a veneer of sophistication and motherly love to justify her actions, and similarly, emerge unscathed while her inner circle begins to crumble. Tang’s home life is even more complex than her profession, her eldest daughter Ning is a waifish painter and drug addict, and the teenaged Chen-Chen, who, despite the love of her mother and friends, appears lonely and emotionally confused. Wu Ke-Xi and Vicky Chen play their respective characters at the same level as Hui, making for the family dynamic between the three women the most dynamic and engaging aspect of the film’s plot, one that is sadly relatively underexplored in comparison to the convoluted gangster plot.
The film is visually sumptuous – perhaps due to my personal taste for this period in Asia, almost every frame is a gorgeous composition of colours and lighting, not to mention the equally sublime costuming and set design. Despite the film’s excellent visual storytelling, Yang makes some questionable cinematographic choices, with some sections of slow-motion, shaky-cam, and high-speed montage creating moments of briefly unintended humour, and further careening the film’s plot into the cartoonishly absurd. This is most apparent in Chen-Chen’s narrative sections: deliberately made to unreliable, they are told through flashbacks and surrealist directorial techniques that in establishing an environment of uncertainty, cloud the film’s storyline into self-implosion.
Unfortunately, like the obvious inspiration from Taiwanese dramas, BCB often sacrifices many of the subtleties and critical eye of cinema for the melodramatic, often selling its actors short of presenting a fully realised vision. However, the melodrama is laid on thick – this is some hammy, campy, delicious melodrama; Yang’s dynamic visual language to symbolically represent the enormous emotions of his characters is reminiscent of Douglas Sirk, and Hui is not afraid to reach Crawfordian levels of mania to counteract her ever-steely demeanour. The film also sets itself apart in its obvious tributes to traditional Taiwanese culture, with the presence of two “Dadaist” storytellers that evoke Hokkien opera and crosstalk performances, as well as visual references to calligraphy, silk painting, and narrative influence from Chinese classics. This is an interesting dynamic that is unevenly weighted towards the insipid and the obvious, these references appear as brief sides to the main event, rather than a consistently reoccurring and explored theme.
It is hard to not feel sold a little short by the end of BCB, but the film’s inventiveness allows itself to carve out a new niche in its genre, while pertaining true to its (often frustrating) conventions and catechisms. Much like the motivations behind Madam Tang, many of the choices made by Yang are left unresolved and unexplained; this builds to what is an unfortunately disappointing conclusion, and a few scenes tending toward the tasteless to generate shock (or rather, schlock). Keeping this in mind, BCB is still worth a watch, both as a guilty pleasure and for an engaging cinematic experience: come for the visual glory and operatic camp; stay for the maverick performances, and endless string of surprises.
Taiwan Film Festival
Sydney