Generally seen as the film which kicked off the Taiwan New Cinema, this movie consists of four segments by young Taiwanese directors. The segments, although unrelated in terms of plot and characters, move forward in the sense that the main characters move in age from young children to young adults while the time period is set in successive decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. The segments are:
- Little Dragon Head (director Tao Te-Chen) in which a young boy Xiao Mao [Lan Sheng-Wen] who feels neglected at home and bullied at school develops a fantasy world.
- Expectations (Edward Yang) – a young girl [Shih An-Ni] reaching puberty is interested in the male student boarder only to find that her older sister has the same idea. Probably the best segment.
- Leapfrog (Ko I-Chen) – Fatty [Li Kuo-Hsiu] a college student struggles to find a direction in life (like the character in Yi Yi, he is not in any way fat).
- Say Your Name [Chang Yi] – a young married couple move into a new apartment. When she [Sylvia Chang] leaves for her first day in a new job, he [Lee Li-chun] manages to lock himself out wearing only boxer shorts and a towel. Meanwhile, she realises she has forgotten her ID and security won’t let her into the office.
The short films do highlight some of the features of later New Cinema movies including the focus on the personal and family relationships, elliptical story telling and the use of music – including American music – to set the tone (I guess the Beatles can be classified as American for these purposes).
While at least in hindsight, this film does not stand out as strikingly original (albeit it is a good film), on the basis of the few contemporary Taiwanese films I have seen, one can see that it marks a strikingly different direction to the largely commercial material then on release. Perhaps it was the also fact that the movie was financially successful, thereby allowing directors like Yang to get deals for full features, which marks one of its main contribution to the New Cinema.
The Chinese title is something like the Story of Time.
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