Early Train from Taipei 台北发的早车
Chinese title (trad.):
台北發的早車
Chinese title (simpl.):
台北发的早车
Russian title:
Ранний поезд из Тайпея
Release year:
1964
Country:
Taiwan
Genre:
drama
Language:
mandarin
Description:
Xiu-Lan and Huo-Tu are childhood sweethearts in a farming village in Changhua, deeply in love. Xiu-Lan's mother has been bedridden for years, and to pay off the debts left after her father's death, Xiu-Lan goes to bustling Taipei to find work and earn money. Missing Xiu-Lan, Huo-Tu takes the train north. When the two meet, he discovers that Xiu-Lan has been tricked and lured into working as a dance hostess at a nightclub. In grief and despair, he boards the early train from Taipei and returns home. Show more Xiu-Lan cannot hold him back in time, and her heart is torn apart, yet the boss gets her drunk and takes her innocence; thinking of the debts still unpaid, she ultimately gives up the thought of ending her life. Huo-Tu goes north again, but searches everywhere without finding Xiu-Lan; the boss sends men to beat him, and he accidentally loses his sight, becoming a vagrant in the slums. Xiu-Lan, held under house arrest, accidentally stabs the boss to death with a knife, and in the struggle her face is disfigured with sulfuric acid. She is sentenced by the court to life imprisonment, and on the way out of the courtroom after the trial, the disfigured Xiu-Lan encounters the blind Huo-Tu…
This film is a standard "bitter melodrama in Taiwanese dialect": the protagonists are toyed with by fate, endure partings and reunions, and the plot is highly dramatic and sentimental, full of coincidences and unexpected twists that wring tears from the audience. Just as many nineteenth-century European and American realist novels took a woman as protagonist and title and used her tragic experience to reflect the cruelty and upheaval of modern society (such as Nana, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie, and others), this film likewise adopts the narrative structure of "a portrait of a lady," using two portraits of Xiu-Lan to tell her story and depicting the phenomenon of "urbanization" in Taiwan—from "farming to feed industry" in the 1950s to the beginning of rural migration into cities in the 1960s—and the impact of this phenomenon on Taiwanese society. The film presents a sharp, vivid opposition between city and countryside: the countryside is often simple and good, while the city is a den of every evil. This contrast appears in the film as pastoral idyll versus the nightclub's bright lights and wine, the shepherd's flute versus the trumpet, Taiwanese songs in the style of Japanese enka versus American nightclub jazz… Under patriarchal ideology, women find it harder than men to resist environmental change and the temptations of the city; Xiu-Lan's loss of innocence and her disfigurement symbolize the loss of purity and a fall into degradation, with the female body becoming a vessel that carries social change. In fact, the countryside also has evil and oppression: it is precisely the pressure of rural usurers that forces Xiu-Lan to leave her hometown and rush to the city to earn money; the city also has its pleasures and liberation, as Xiu-Lan enjoys the urban life of dressing up and dancing. Beyond the city-country contrast, trains and stations appear in the frame many times: on one hand, this suggests that the distance between city and countryside has been shortened by transportation; on the other, the train and tracks also serve as a metaphor for the "wheel of the times": the cold, merciless, never-turning-back process of modernization crushes those who are out of step with the age. In the ending, the plot makes Huo-Tu blind so that he can ignore Xiu-Lan's disfigurement and his love for her can continue. At first glance this celebrates the pure feelings of a rural man, but in fact it ironically exposes how, in male desire for women, patriarchal ideology constructs a visual fascination: only by losing his eyes can he continue to love Xiu-Lan, who is no longer beautiful.
This film is a standard "bitter melodrama in Taiwanese dialect": the protagonists are toyed with by fate, endure partings and reunions, and the plot is highly dramatic and sentimental, full of coincidences and unexpected twists that wring tears from the audience. Just as many nineteenth-century European and American realist novels took a woman as protagonist and title and used her tragic experience to reflect the cruelty and upheaval of modern society (such as Nana, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie, and others), this film likewise adopts the narrative structure of "a portrait of a lady," using two portraits of Xiu-Lan to tell her story and depicting the phenomenon of "urbanization" in Taiwan—from "farming to feed industry" in the 1950s to the beginning of rural migration into cities in the 1960s—and the impact of this phenomenon on Taiwanese society. The film presents a sharp, vivid opposition between city and countryside: the countryside is often simple and good, while the city is a den of every evil. This contrast appears in the film as pastoral idyll versus the nightclub's bright lights and wine, the shepherd's flute versus the trumpet, Taiwanese songs in the style of Japanese enka versus American nightclub jazz… Under patriarchal ideology, women find it harder than men to resist environmental change and the temptations of the city; Xiu-Lan's loss of innocence and her disfigurement symbolize the loss of purity and a fall into degradation, with the female body becoming a vessel that carries social change. In fact, the countryside also has evil and oppression: it is precisely the pressure of rural usurers that forces Xiu-Lan to leave her hometown and rush to the city to earn money; the city also has its pleasures and liberation, as Xiu-Lan enjoys the urban life of dressing up and dancing. Beyond the city-country contrast, trains and stations appear in the frame many times: on one hand, this suggests that the distance between city and countryside has been shortened by transportation; on the other, the train and tracks also serve as a metaphor for the "wheel of the times": the cold, merciless, never-turning-back process of modernization crushes those who are out of step with the age. In the ending, the plot makes Huo-Tu blind so that he can ignore Xiu-Lan's disfigurement and his love for her can continue. At first glance this celebrates the pure feelings of a rural man, but in fact it ironically exposes how, in male desire for women, patriarchal ideology constructs a visual fascination: only by losing his eyes can he continue to love Xiu-Lan, who is no longer beautiful.
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