Summary
A curious tale that aims for understated romance against a historical backdrop, but its thin plotting and character development keeps the audience at arm’s length.
It’s going to be a fact that for most of 2020, we’re going to be viewing the pattern of releases in relation to where we were at during the global pandemic. As such, TIGERTAIL represents a return to my Asia in Focus section thanks to this high-profile Netflix Original.
There’s a lot of be excited about for this release too. Writer/director Alan Yang, best known for his work on Master of None, makes his feature debut here. It follows Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma), who reflects on his life as a young man (Hong Chi-Lee) from a poor family living in the Taiwanese village of Huwei (“tiger tail”). His later strained relationship with daughter (Christine Ko) stems from his past, including the unrequited love of Yuan Lee (Joan Chen and Yo-Hsing Fang), the woman he cared for in his youth.
You can see what Yang was aiming for here, an almost petit version of Wong Kar-wai’s understated historical romances, briefly brushing against the backdrop of Chinese cultural imperialism on the island. There’s one scene where Chinese soldiers visit the village and enforce Mandarin rather than the Taiwanese dialect as the official spoken language. This, however, is really the only impression we get of the wider cultural changes of the period.
Its focus is much more about the immigrant experience for Asian-Americans. The search for a ‘better life’ is shown through a montage of blue collar work, the inability of Pin-Jui and his new wife Zhenzhen (Fiona Fu/Kunjue Li) to afford the food of their homeland, and connecting with ex-pats any way they can. Yang sets up a kind of parallel between the lie of a ‘better life’ and the one underpinning their fraught marriage, although the line between text and subtext is not thick.
Similarly, conversations between Pin-Jui and his daughter Angela are stilted due to their ongoing estrangement, but are also far too thin to convey any real emotion. Yet a combination of some stilted performances (especially from and oddly distant Ko) winds up making many of the scenes being so understated as to be rendered sterile.
It’s a shame that Yang doesn’t quite pull it off, because this is a very personal story that helped him understand his relationship with his own father (who does bookend voice-over work on the film) and his immigrant story. There was clearly a lot more of the film in the original cut too, including several scenes with actor John Cho that didn’t make the final version. Which is where TIGERTAIL ultimately lands, as a collection of ideas that didn’t quite come together in the edit.
2020 | US | DIRECTOR: Alan Yang | WRITERS: Alan Yang | CAST: Tzi Ma, Christine Ko, Hayden Szeto, Lee Hong-chi, Kunjue Li, Fiona Fu, Yang Kuei-mei, James Saito, Joan Chen | DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix | RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 10 April 2020 (AUS)
