Taiwan Black Movies Part 2

 

The Lady Avenger (1981)

Director: Chia-Yun Yang

Screenplay: Yun Chu and Kang-Nien Li

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Lun Hua, Nien-Kuo Kao, Hsiao-Ling Hsu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Hsuan Lung

 

Can't forget that strange image, won't let me...

Barely surviving oblivion, viewing The Lady Avenger was a reminder why film preservation is important, and in this case, you sadly see the handicaps of films having to be "perfect" when one like this had to be preserved from a very battered and scratched print, which will be a hindrance in giving The Lady Avenger a wider availability. This is sadder as this is a Taiwanese entry in the contentious "rape and revenge" genre however directed by a woman, Chia-Yun Yang, adding a different context alongside turning into one of the strongest films I saw from a collection of Taiwanese genre films.

Chia-Yun Yang, who is interviewed in the documentary Taiwan Black Movies (2005), was a script supervisor amongst many roles before she became a director of films like this, which was a production where the script was being worked on whilst being shot as she described in the documentary. It is however compelling from the get-go as a lurid pulp film still pointedly relevant in its subject, the soundtrack already strange and intense, befitting a bizarre opening where a sexist commercial is being shot where, even when shot in the back with a gun, a woman would still crawl and reach out for a cosmetics product.

Said actress named Chu storms off the set, only to be raped by the male driver she hitchhikes with, all within a sequence where you find, even in its lurid tone, the sympathy is on the female cast as, running from him in the muddy countryside, all the violence is ugly when happening to the female cast. Attempting to get a trial set up against him, the bias against this woman, including the actress likely to lose her reputation even if she was to win, is uncomfortably potent still decades later, especially as with the point made that the perpetrator also happens to be from a rich family, this film not feeling alien to a post-MeToo movement that transpired in the late 2010s at all. Even after that movement lead to woman speaking up of previous real molestation and sexual violence against them from powerful figures, this Taiwanese b-movie still possesses salient comments or moments which sadly are still relevant today.

Step in the real lead, a female reporter named Hsu, tackling the case only for Chu to not be held up as a highly moral and loose woman, even by Hsu's male fiancée, and the trial to go against her. Even when Chu tried to get revenge by knife, her body is found days later washed up and the shore and, as Hsu digs and openly taunts the male perpetrator, she is becoming more of a target. Even in this pulpy narrative that comes after though, this is taking the material seriously even in its heightened tone, uncomfortable and eventually nightmarish when Hsu unfortunately encounters four drunken men. It is a long sequence what transpires as, the film requiring a trigger warning for anyone interested in the film, she attempts to escape them through a grungy urban environment and fights back, long but to the point that, when it is not possible, the film tastefully cuts away and you get the impact of what has happened. That this was a set up by the rich man of before sets up the genre plot but does not demean how the film tells the story.

Even the song that plays afterwards is used fully to represent the lingering agony, the same words repeating in the shower for Hsu. It is an exaggerated film but the content is still strong, when she gets drunk and, despite the over-the-top drunken acting from lead Lu Hsiao-Fen, you get in the space of a few minutes someone being unable to tell her fiancée she has been raped without pain, and becoming traumatised to the point she would rather be drunk. That the fiancée himself is more concerned about saving face, twisting a metaphorical knife in, makes it worse; it is to the point that, destroyed and a woman devoured by revenge by the end, Hsu and he have long split up and a haunting image of them passing each other on an escalator in opposite directions takes place much later in the film, he already with another woman in a separate life again.

You can argue that, getting to the action tropes as she picks off the assailants, and the villain is trying to get rid of her, it undermines the point, but in context, you accept this as a heightened reality appropriate to tackle the subject. Those revenge scenes are fantastical - a poor stunt man is hung upside down by a leg off a crane on top of a building, whilst there is a repeating shot of a giant gory splash of fake gore, deep red, hitting on white which fits the film's mood. Even its music, between a sad solo saxophone, to electronic droning synth and guitar, is a bar higher than many genre films in turning uncomfortable and real subject matter into a primal scream, where every detail keeps you on your toes.

Even with the first images being a montage of all the revenge scenes out of context, gut stabbings to recreating the Most Dangerous Game in the woods, The Lady Avenger despite its sadly battered and mangled presentation befits the hyper-potent tone of a film whose luridness actually makes such uncomfortable subject matter more meaningful. This, even with some strong films I saw, was the one above them all I was blown away with from this batch of movies.

*****

Never Too Late to Repent (1979)

a.k.a. The First Error Step

Director: Yang-Ming Tsai

Screenplay: Yen-Ping Chu

Based on the memoirs of Sha Ma

Cast: Sha Ma, Hui-Shan Yang, Hsiu-Shen Liang, Hsiao-Fei Li, Min-Lang Li, Chi Wang, Mo-Chou Wang, Hsiu Chuan Yang

For a completely different tone, we get to the film argued in Taiwan Black Movies as the catalyst for this movement of Taiwanese genre cinema. Lead Sha Ma, introducing the film in narration, says he is not an actor as the scene presents him in a prison being lead along in chains by guards. In truth, whilst he would eventually become a prolific actor (including in Woman Revenger (1981)) Sha Ma was a reformed criminal turned author who in this fictionalised take on his life tells a cautionary tale of a man, within genre tropes, ending up incarcerated and the hard climb back up to salvation. In this film's case, whilst working at a brothel, when upon being stabbed multiple times by a surly gangster with their gang, even losing a finger to the blade in the process, he went beyond self defence to stabbing the man to death with a giant sharpened pole-like object. The film is fictionalised - Taiwan Black Movies, with one of its interviews, reveals that Sha Ma was charged for "obscenity" - but that does not stop the film as an interpretation of this real man's life from being compelling.  

Tragically as well, this is another film only surviving from very damaged materials, with the version I saw battered and with a lot of the sound track lost, only with the relief that it is not the whole film, just snatches, and that this proves that the visuals of a film can still tell a story even muted, like Sha Ma being bullied the moment he is put in a group cell. Early on, the film plays out as a prison escape film, including tools being hidden in food for the cellmates, including a comedic rotund figure named Chicken who bumbles through the escape plan. It even has a much more creative ways of drawing straws, writing numbers on torn up pieces of paper, to order who goes first to last to get through the window they spend days removing the bars from, with money for everyone to use if they manage to all flee.

However, despite escaping briefly and even meeting his real father, a man abandoned and left to be looked after by his grandmother in his back story, Sha Ma is eventually back in jail and even shipped off to Orchid Island, a literally island compound for re-education. It is a place closer to military training, but the film is not about anti-authority or crime pulp, whilst the later is occasionally seen, but a tale of a man now on the path to redemption, starting with the island being ran by a former classmate who wishes to help him. The film is instead a drama more than a genre film, but that is not a bad thing. Never Too Late to Repent was held in high regard, against quoting Taiwan Black Cinema, because it tackled subjects that were never seen before in Taiwanese films considered taboo, such as the narrative drifting into locations like brothels and especially tackling the Taiwanese prison system, particularly as the real narrative is that Ma Sha's fictionalised life eventually tackles the stigma of being a criminal even when you have reformed.

Be it being picked on by police when a crime is committed by someone else, or being fired when people see Ma Sha's tattoos, the real man's full body ones striking and likely to have stigmatised him in real life, the final quarter which deals with the hardness of ordinary life outside of prison is the most rewarding passage. With happiness marriage but even a simple job of selling magazines on the street needing a license, it offers a distinct change of pace to a drama about a criminal seeing one try his hardest to redeem himself but the society around him completely unfair in its structure. This is all melodramatic, but in melodrama, you still reach a meaningful conclusion which is a triumphant ending here. The genre tropes, as in Western melodrama, allows for intensity, here as he goes alongside his way to reforming and becoming an author, literally bleeding onto his art and actually bleeding his own manuscript as a result of a fight when defending a woman. As a non-actor, Sha Ma is charismatic, and in mind these genre films were meant to be "social realist", Never Too Late to Repent definitely shows the template for what this genre was originally meant to be, showing real Taiwan by way of genre plotting. I can see how, even if sadly underappreciated to the point it only survives in a damaged form, why people in its home land praise it in Taiwan Black Movies, and how it kicked off a movement of similar films.

To Be Continued...