Thoughts about 《大濛》(A Foggy Tale)

My wife and I watched A Foggy Tale on Netflix last night, and I became my usual blubbery self, of course. I don't want to give away anything because I hope a lot of people watch it while it's available. But a few thoughts:

There were ways in which it reminded me of Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters, with the main character traveling from rural Chiayi to the sort-of big city of Taipei to retrieve something for her family. Unlike Li Liu in Sneider's book, who is going to retrieve his family's god, Ah-yueh (黃秋月) in the movie is on a mission to retrieve the body of her brother, Yuh-yun (黃育雲), who was executed--evidently for having the "wrong thoughts." 

The movie begins in 1953, which coincidentally is the year Sneider's novel was published--it was also the year that Ts'ai T'ieh-cheng (蔡鐵城) was executed. (Ts'ai also had a little sister he evidently loved a lot.) I saw that A Foggy Tale was filmed in various locations around Chiayi, which I guess were able to stand in for parts of Taipei in the 1950s. Coincidentally, Ts'ai had connections to Chiayi, as well. 

Without giving too much away, A Foggy Tale, like A Pail of Oysters, portrays its main characters as navigating the thin line between agency and helplessness. The characters do their best to act within the limitations and unpredictability around them. Ah-yueh is scammed almost immediately after arriving in Taipei and almost sold into prostitution, but she's rescued by Chao Kung-tao (趙公道), a rickshaw driver who's a former soldier from Kuang-tung. After being conned once, she's suspicious of Chao at first, but slowly comes to trust him. He's got troubles of his own, being suspected of having Communist connections, but he tries to help her raise money to collect her brother's body. This gets him into further trouble, unfortunately. It reminds me of how in A Pail of Oysters, Precious Jade's attempt to help her friends (who were, like her, trafficked into prostitution) escape eventually backfires on her--and her brother. In that kind of environment, it's difficult to predict the effects of your actions. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

I think I'll watch the movie again while it's still available, if for no other reason than to absorb its representation of 1950s Taipei before I visit 2020s Taipei this summer.