New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

BAI RUN MIN, AKIO CHEN IN OLD FOX

HSIAO YA-CHUAN: OLD FOX (2023)

Boy learns about inequality from sly local boss in a Dickensian coming of age focused on real estate

With Old Fox director Hsiao Ya-Chuan has made an old-fashioned but highly accomplished and thought-provoking movie about the basic moral conflict between justice and power. The ruthless and cruel local factory and property owner Boss Xie (Akio Chen), who is like a well-dressed lizard tooling around in beautiful cars, befriends the 11-year-old Liao Jie (Bai Run-yin) because he feels the boy is a kindred spirit, the mirror image of himself at that age. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) ,Xie thinks, is like Xie's own late mother, a "loser," softhearted, not tough. "Inequality," Boss Xie repeats to the boy, "inequality." There is a power structure, he teaches the boy, and you must learn to be ruthless to get to the top of it. He remembers that he began himself very poor, his mother a street cleaner who died of blood poisoning

The boy is tempted by Boss Xie's lessons and some of his power wears off on him simply by visibility, by his riding back and forth in Xie's big black chauffeured Mercedes and expensive new red sports car, which intimidates bully boys who lingered around and menaced the boy earlier. He gets dirt against the bully boy's mother that he wields to threaten the boys and make them run away. Jie has been called a "snitch" and doesn't even know why. His new skill at menacing the bullies is as satisfying to him as it is infuriating to him when his father in a gesture of kindness gives up the possibility of a cheap store space he had gained from Boss Xie. Jie really has come to identify with Boss Xie. . . but then he begins to feel the man's cruelty and brutality and rejects him.

The movie is complicated, despite its schematic ideas, and I am not sure I follow it after one viewing. It also gives us glimpses of other possibilities. There is, for example, a brief stream of black and white images of penniless boys begging for help, like many generations of Liao Jie, shot like clips from Italian Neorealist films. There are several women who come and go, without explanation. And, at the end, there is a present-day scene of an adult Jie, now a sophisticated and accomplished architect. In his work and Zoom consultation on the design for a glamorous but understated house it doesn't seem the contrasts between justice and power really apply.

The time of the main action, 11-year-old Jie, is 1989, a moment of rapid economic growth and insecurity in Taiwan, when some made a killing and others lost everything. Jie's father, Liao Tai-lai, is a waiter dreaming of owning a small space where he can open a beauty shop in memory of his late wife, the boy's mother. But his savings aren't enough when property prices suddenly double. The boy repeatedly tries to persuade Xie to sell his father a property at a price he can afford, but what Xie wants to do is teach the boy to be tough and self-interested, indifferent to morality and to human feelings, like him. Drink cold water, he says in a memorable moment, close your eyes, and say "None of my damn business!"

There are other characters, notably Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), the young woman people refer to as "Miss Pretty," who is Xie's rent-collector. (It's all collected in person in cash every month.) She is an agent of the cruel boss but herself a kindly person with the renters, and she knows Liao père, who serves lonely and sumptuous meals to her at the restaurant. She seems a somewhat mysterious character. In fact we don't go deep into any character. We often see Liao père and his son meeting at their little home and we see the boy in school uniform, but school we don't see. We see the father play the saxophone and take in tailoring, but this hardly makes us know him. We are instead restricted to a stylized world of power and weakness, haves and have-nots, the soft-hearted and the hard-hearted. We know the boy has talent because he solves a Rubik's cube. This is an old-fashioned world as well as an old-fashioned movie. The characters are conceived in rather Dickensian terms, but the stark contrasts still work. As the boy, Run-yin Bai is the best in the cast, his performance a marvel of restraint. He presents a whole panorama of stoney expressions. When he smiles, it's a breathtaking moment. Director Hsiao's suave control can be seen at work.

Old Fox 老狐狸, 111 min., debuted Oct. 27, 2023 at Tokyo and Nov. 11 at Taipei (best feature, best director), Golden Horse (best director award, other awards), and this year (Apr.-May 2024 at Udine Far East Film Festival. It was screened for the present review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 6:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57