Tigertail | Little White Lies

Tiger­tail

10 Apr 2020 / Released: 10 Apr 2020

Words by Grace Z Li

Directed by Alan Yang

Starring Christine Ko, Fiona Fu, and Joan Chen

Two adults, a man and a woman, sitting at a table with various dishes and drinks.
Two adults, a man and a woman, sitting at a table with various dishes and drinks.
4

Anticipation.

A diaspora drama with a punchy, moving trailer.

3

Enjoyment.

Will 2x speed make this better?

3

In Retrospect.

An ambitious film that needed more workshopping.

A Tai­wanese Amer­i­can reflects on his strained famil­ial rela­tion­ships in Alan Yang’s immi­grant drama.

Tiger­tail real­ly wants you to know that it’s a sad movie. Melan­cholic vio­lin music plays as char­ac­ters wash dish­es with a gri­mace on their faces, peer through semi-shut­tered win­dow blinds for­lorn­ly, and eat din­ner alone. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, these mun­dane move­ments should be swollen with feel­ing. But Alan Yang’s debut fea­ture punch­es below its weight, nev­er quite reach­ing its emo­tion­al heart.

It’s unfor­tu­nate, because the film car­ried a lot of promise for audi­ences hun­gry for dias­po­ra nar­ra­tives that are few and far between. It is clear­ly a deeply per­son­al one for Yang. In an inter­view with Vul­ture, the direc­tor revealed that the film’s premise was inspired by his father’s life as a fac­to­ry work­er in Tai­wan. His father worked on the script with him, trans­lat­ing the Eng­lish into Tai­wanese and Mandarin.

Tiger­tail has plen­ty of promise and ambi­tion. It flits between loca­tions and time­lines, track­ing the course of Pin-Jui’s (Hong Chi-Lee in the past, Tzi Ma in the present) life, from the grassy fields where his grand­moth­er raised him in Tai­wan, to the sug­ar fac­to­ry where his moth­er labours over dan­ger­ous machin­ery, to a tiny apart­ment in New York where he moves in with his stranger of a wife Zhen­zhen (Li Kun­jue), and to the present day. The themes that Tiger­tail deals with are fraught: love, migra­tion, class mobil­i­ty, fam­i­ly, and lan­guage as home.

The con­flicts are there, but they sit on the sur­face expect­ing some­one — any­one but the film itself — to draw out their ten­sions. Scenes that require dra­ma are starved of it, and scenes that don’t are over­filled. Why do we spend a dia­logue-less 30 sec­onds on Angela’s (Chris­tine Ko) break-up with her fiancé, but we spend over a minute watch­ing Pin-Jui lock up the same con­ve­nience store, over and over again?

Maybe it’s the flat dia­logue. Yang’s script faces the same prob­lem the direc­tor had in Mas­ter of None; lines feel like they were born out of a sim­u­la­tion, instead of real­i­ty. Sure, they get us from point A to point B, but they’re awk­ward and stilt­ed and lack iden­ti­ty. They could be slapped onto any per­son. As a result, the char­ac­ters are shad­ows of what they could be. They don’t exist out­side of their sad­ness, or arche­types, or their con­flicts. And their con­flicts were already unex­plored to begin with.

That’s not to say that Tiger­tail is an irre­deemable movie. There are plen­ty of ten­der moments which breathe life into the film: a lan­guid dance between Pin-Jui and an ex-lover set to 1950s Chi­nese pop; a cam­era pan over Pin-Jui’s grandmother’s home, now crum­bling and over­run with wild flora.

The most inter­est­ing part is when we get a sense of Zhenzhen’s inte­ri­or­i­ty, which unfolds nat­u­ral­ly on the screen. I actu­al­ly come to the laun­dro­mat with small loads just to see oth­er peo­ple,” Zhen­zhen says to the first Tai­wanese per­son she meets after mov­ing to Amer­i­ca. There’s a brief pause, until the woman breaks the silence. Wow, how trag­ic!” her friend says loud­ly and sar­don­ical­ly. It’s a gen­uine­ly fun­ny gut-punch – one that hits a lit­tle too close to home for this movie.

Tiger­tail is released on Net­flix on April 10.

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