Taipei Story
Restored
In a Taipei expanding faster than its inhabitants can comprehend, Ah-chen and Ah-lung are losing their grip on one another. She is an ambitious career woman with her sights set on the West; he is a former baseball star tethered to his family’s fading textile business. While the world around them hurtles forward, their relationship slowly grinds to a halt.
Director Edward Yang maps this alienation within the concrete jungle with the precision of an architect. Much like the characters of Antonioni, Ah-chen and Ah-lung are swallowed by their environment: the grey high-rises and the monotony of modern life leave no room for nostalgia or dreams. Here, Taipei is a labyrinth where every attempt to escape only pushes them deeper into a melancholic isolation.
TAIPEI STORY is a haunting elegy for a city and its people, caught between a forgotten past and a hollow future. Featuring a rare on-screen performance by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang captures the cost of modernization and the fragility of everyday life. A timeless masterpiece that, forty years on, has lost none of its resonance.
TAIPEI STORY was restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
