A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong: State of Transaction

As this metafiction suggests, the bewilderment at the heart of A Confucian Confusion involves questions about the compatibility of belief systems, specifically the degree to which Confucianism and capitalism are congruent doctrines. In Yang’s own words, the film seeks to examine “what is wrong with trying to head into the twenty-first century with a fourth-century-BC ideology.” The Confucian virtues of discipline and self-sacrifice may have laid the groundwork for the Taiwanese and various other Asian economic miracles of the late twentieth century, but they offer little guidance on how to behave when self-interest rules all. The opening titles adapt an exchange from The Analects of Confucius:

“The city is too crowded!”
“What can we do about it?”
“Make the people rich.”
“What comes next after they are made rich?”

Confucius ventures an answer in the original text—“Instruct them!”—but Yang, not by nature a didactic artist, leaves it out.

It is doubtful in any case if the yuppies, strivers, and posers in A Confucian Confusion are teachable. We know that, in an age of rampant accumulation, what comes after riches are more riches, to the exclusion of all else, and Yang locates a laughable pathos in the explicit financialization of the interpersonal. Filling the role of symptomatic mouthpiece is the shameless Larry, who likens friendships to a portfolio of savings and blue-chip stocks, and love to “high-risk, high-return investments.” (He also hits on Molly while auditing her balance sheets, which he interprets as expressions of her innermost desires: “While I was reading your financial statements, I was moved.”)

Yang had been concerned since his first feature, That Day, on the Beach (1983), with the countless ways in which modern life fosters romantic disillusionment and indeed exposes the cracks in the ancient institution of marriage. While tragically out-of-sync couples loom large in several of his films, notably Taipei Story and The Terrorizers, A Confucian Confusion is at once lighter and more biting in its handling of such misalignments. Molly and Akeem’s betrothal is, for all intents and purposes, an arranged marriage, a business merger between two powerful clans—Akeem brags about their modern open relationship, likening it to that of Taiwan and China (“one country, two systems”), before melting down over a rumor that Molly is having an affair with her old classmate Birdy. In fact, Molly finds herself in this position only because her TV-personality sister, now trying to keep her own failed marriage a secret from the tabloid press, had broken off an earlier engagement to Akeem. Romantic entanglements are no less complicated or laden with ulterior motives lower on the class ladder, as borne out in the constant bickering, shadowed by fears of economic precarity, between Qiqi and Ming, who still lives at home with his mother. Meanwhile, the newly unemployed Feng proves herself the most resourceful of free agents, ensnaring and discarding one hapless man after another in her quest for upward mobility and career advancement.

The borderline zany Confucian Confusion marks a pronounced shift in tone for Yang, who as a progenitor of the New Taiwan Cinema (along with his onetime collaborator Hou Hsiao-hsien) cultivated a contemplative realism that would become something like the baseline lingua franca of global art cinema. It is a cinematic language that implies distance, although with Yang, that distance bespeaks a fundamental generosity. Stately and precise, his best-known films grant breathing room to the audience, and time and space to the characters, who are always shown to exist within a generational cycle, a social system, and a physical world, which in Yang’s cinema tends to be the sleekly anonymous built environment of modern Taipei. The movies he made in the midnineties, which follow a stint directing for the theater, are talkier and faster-paced than his earlier work, veering into social satire and teetering at times on the edge of mania. With its pinballing characters, quick-fire dialogue, and heightened performances, Confusion bears more than a passing resemblance to screwball farce—even if Yang largely sticks to the patient, controlled long shots familiar from his other films and regards the antic goings-on with his customarily even gaze and philosophical intelligence.

The search for a new form—for a form that fits the present—is reflexively woven into A Confucian Confusion via the travails of the lightly caricatured artist figures. Birdy is said to be leaving behind “postmodern abstraction” to make his first comedy (one thinks of Fredric Jameson’s characterization of the jagged, multiperspectival Terrorizers as “the postmodern film”). The self-pitying novelist experiences an epiphany late in the movie, declaring himself ready to abandon his “romantic period” and his “tragic period,” both equally misguided, although he drifts out of earshot before he can tell us more about his next phase. These artists are more than a little ridiculous, which is another way of saying they are emblematic of their moment. Throughout the film, repeated mention is made of “the culture business” and “the culture industry”—and one does not need to have read much Frankfurt School theory to apprehend the picture that Yang is painting here of culture as a poisoned sphere, swamped by the profit motive, and ever more a repository for base and inane impulses.

These matters were personal for Yang, a practitioner of a kind of auteur cinema that was then already under siege, whose films were minimally distributed in his lifetime, both in Taiwan and in the West. One question that ripples through A Confucian Confusion revolves around the use and possibility of sincerity at a time “when fakes are more real than the real,” to quote one of the intertitles that wryly punctuate the action. Sincerity is here embodied by Qiqi, the most earnest and upstanding character, who is nonetheless told to her face that all emotions can be faked. One might read the film’s conclusion as Yang putting this assertion to the test—along, perhaps, with Birdy’s contention that comedy, his new métier, is a form for optimism. In the liminal space of a hospital, Qiqi and Ming agree to go their separate ways, assuring each other that neither is to blame. A moment later—in a wondrous bit of movie magic, accomplished with the help of an elevator’s sliding door—they both appear, simultaneously, to change their minds. Does this abrupt reconciliation represent a breakthrough in their relationship or an inability to move on? Either way, this comedy of remarriage in miniature effects a miraculous change in temperature. The film’s icy cynicism suddenly melts, washed away in a flood of feeling.

If A Confucian Confusion considers the effects of neoliberal competition on the creative class, its follow-up and companion piece, Mahjong, is set among the grifters and gangsters who are arguably the true avatars of late capitalism—the cutthroat behavior here tips into actual, physical violence. The Taipei of Mahjong is an amoral land of opportunity for assorted swindlers and climbers, whose numbers include a significant contingent of expatriates—“rejects from their own stinking countries,” as someone puts it—who have converged on a Far East equivalent of a Wild West outpost, looking to strike it rich.

While a TGI Fridays serves as a key location in A Confucian Confusion, a Hard Rock Cafe—quintessence of Americana and ultimate nonplace—is the principal site of Mahjong’s questionably legal wheeling and dealing. Among the regulars are a quartet of two-bit thugs, barely out of their teens and led by the loutish Red Fish (Tang Tsung-sheng), the son of a wealthy entrepreneur who has gone into hiding to evade the underworld enforcers who are out to collect on his considerable debt. Two of the crew have patented hustles: Little Buddha (Wang Chi-tsan), with his shaved head, acts the prophet and doles out sham feng-shui fortunes; pretty boy Hong Kong (Chang Chen) is an all-purpose lothario, irresistible to women of all ages. Rounding out the foursome, and watching warily from the sidelines, is Luen-Luen (Lawrence Ko), the latest recruit and a tentative voice of conscience. One night at the Hard Rock, the boys encounter Marthe (Virginie Ledoyen), a self-possessed young Frenchwoman who has come to Taiwan to find her ex, Markus (Nick Erickson), a British interior designer who has long moved on to other conquests. Sensing the potential use value of this attractive outsider, Red Fish and company take Marthe under their wing and nickname her Matra, after the French conglomerate that is years behind schedule in building a Taipei elevated rail line. (The construction delays would result in a legal battle with the city government that dragged on into the new century.)

Many other characters circulate in this colorful ecosystem: Jay (Zhao De), a flamboyant hairdresser with a pink Mercedes; an American named Ginger (Diana Dupuis), who has graduated from turning tricks to running her own prostitution ring; a local girlfriend of Markus’s, Alison (Chen Shin-hui); an Angela from Hong Kong (Carrie Ng) who, in one of several fateful cases of mistaken identity, turns out to be the wrong Angela from Hong Kong. The result is cacophonous by design: a whirlwind of loud, largely one-dimensional characters and a jumble of accents and acting styles. The most common criticism leveled at Mahjong when it premiered involved the stiff performances of the nonprofessional Western cast members, although the uneven, all-over-the-place quality is well-suited to the milieu that Yang is portraying. Some awkward acting is to be expected when everything is a put-on, and besides, everyone speaks the universal language of exploitation.

Yang’s prickliest, angriest, most unnerving film, Mahjong is an unusually unsparing critique of globalization, a phenomenon that movies have tended to treat like window dressing. We are very far here from the platitudinous universality of the flat-world, network-narrative movie, exemplified by Babel (2006). Markers of American influence abound in Mahjong, not just in the prominence of the Hard Rock, but in the paraphernalia adorning Luen-Luen’s family home (the Stars and Stripes, sports-team pennants, a James Dean portrait), which is carved up into rented rooms for foreigners. Entirely missing, however, are the usual trappings of the East-meets-West drama; there is no cutesy culture clash here, no chasms waiting to be sentimentally bridged. No one is trying to understand anyone else; everyone is just trying to get ahead, and this willful mutual incomprehension is presented as a brute fact of globalized life.

A mantra circulates through Mahjong like a virus: “No one knows what they really want. Everyone’s waiting to be told what to do.” This is a motto to live by for Red Fish, learned from his father and dutifully parroted; versions of it are voiced by others, internalized as a credo for an age of mindless consumerism. The economic calculus is such that human relationships are not merely transactional, as they are in A Confucian Confusion, but outright predatory; anyone is liable to be employed as a pawn, treated as property. In the most egregious instance, Alison spends the night with Hong Kong, and the morning after, in compliance with the gang’s policy of sharing their spoils, is coerced into sleeping with the others (albeit with no kissing, which the guys consider bad luck). The tables are turned later when Hong Kong targets and seduces Angela, an older woman whom Red Fish thinks responsible for his father’s downfall, only for her to invite her girlfriends over to sample her new plaything.

As in A Confucian Confusion, Yang is engaged in a kind of formal and affective challenge—setting up obstacles to emotion and then working to overcome them—and the degree of difficulty is perhaps higher in Mahjong, given the abundance of contemptible conduct. He finds a way to a grace note of an ending, with Luen-Luen and Marthe—the film’s least compromised characters—kissing on the street (and defying bad luck in the process). But the moments that startle and linger—and that inspire some of Yang’s boldest filmmaking—are the ones that lead us there: Hong Kong’s comeuppance, a double suicide, a murder. After Hong Kong’s humiliation at the hands of Angela and her friends, he breaks down in tears, and his sobs remain audible as Yang cuts to a panoramic view of the Taipei night, sounding a lament for the entire metropolis. It is a grieving Red Fish who commits the murder, in a corner of an empty apartment, strobe lights flashing from an unknown source, the artifice somehow heightening the shock. Again, a scene ends with a young man inconsolable, and this time his wails cede, over a black screen, to gloating laughter. It is Markus, about to launch into a smug voice-over about Taiwan as a modern-day treasure island, ripe for neocolonial plunder: “The nineteenth century was the glorious age of imperialism, right? Just wait till you see the twenty-first century.”

“An artist must reflect reality,” Birdy says in A Confucian Confusion. He tosses this off as a flippant remark, but it’s a mandate that Yang took seriously—and the clarity with which he bore witness to his age helps us even now. Watching A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong from our present vantage, we see a threshold taking shape, new rules of behavior and categories of experience starting to emerge. We see our world coming into being.

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