That Day, on the Beach

A woman reunites with a long lost girlfriend, hoping to find out what happened to the girlfriend's brother, her past love. Instead, the other woman confesses her life's disintegration, and the film veers off into this whole new direction. Edward Yang is one of cinema's greatest storytellers. His debut demonstrates the novelistic richness he imbues into every one of his films. In this melodramatic woman's picture, we have "flashbacks within flashbacks", scenes that "echo", major digressions, and abrupt changes in narrative point-of-view, all held together by Yang's neat transition devices such as visual rhymes and sound overlaps, ensuring the grace and effortlessness of Yang's epic storytelling. The misery of these middle-class characters, revealed by the coldness of their interactions, is linked to the corruption of the workplace, the anxiety attendant with economic mobility, and the hopelessness in getting away from all these troubles. No one is really living in this film, only slowly dying. Or is that a ray of hope at the film's end?