BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Edward Yang, 1991)

Prior to his celebrated Yi yi (2000), Taiwan’s Edward Yang made Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, which suggests a cross between Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema and West Side Story. Rival gangs of youth, fighting over turf in the early sixties, represent those who already lived in Taiwan and those who fled there from the mainland as a result of the 1949 civil war in China. This is the time of Chiang Kai-shek’s “White Terror.” Xiao Si’r’s father actually moved to Taiwan a few years prior to the Civil War; but this career move proved only to undermine his familial and civic authority, and his son, reflecting his rudderlessness and disquiet, joins other children in a confrontational, unruly existence. The culmination, based on fact, is Nationalist China’s first juvenile homicide. Si’r is 14; Ming, his impoverished sweetheart whom he had promised to protect and whom he ends up killing when she asserts her independence, is 13.
     The film opens with a bare hanging light bulb being flicked on and barely illuminating the darkness: an indication of routine blackouts, but also a metaphor for the unmoored sense of identity that flight from Mainland China incurred. Indeed, most of the film unfolds in scarcely lit scenes of nighttime, in medium shots and long-shots that suggest the distance of not only political memory but also national prospects and clarity. Si’r’s father is interrogated with minute invasiveness by the secret police; his arrest costs him his job. His “crime” is tantamount to guilt by association.
     The children, unsure of who they are as a consequence of history as well as adolescence, gravitate towards American popular culture: basketball, John Wayne, rock ’n’ roll.
     Richly detailed even though character-driven, its color subdued, at times near-monochromatic, Yang’s film is long and absorbing.

SWING TIME (George Stevens, 1936)

Swing Time is the finest of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Like numerous other ’30s Hollywood films, it provides commentary on the Depression. Money, for instance, is a motif. Lucky, a dancer, makes a bet that causes him to miss the appointed time of his wedding. Lucky’s motivation isn’t money; he can’t resist the sport. But money is what motivates others to detain him by luring him into the bet whose outcome they know in advance. If Lucky marries, after all, he may leave the show he headlines for more respectable prospects, putting his fellow performers out of work. Arriving late to his intended’s home, where the wedding would have taken place, Lucky finds her father furious; but the successful businessman softens a bit when Lucky pledges to earn the man’s daughter by going to the big city and amassing money of his own. Money, his future father-in-law asserts, proves “character,” unawares, it seems, that he is commoditizing his own daughter. The names of both lead characters—the gambling Lucky (Fred Astaire), with his lucky quarter, and Penny (Ginger Rogers), the dance instructor he meets in New York—also refer to money.

At nearly every comical turn of their rocky relationship some misunderstanding between Lucky and Penny might disappear if Lucky only honestly confessed one thing or another: “I don’t have the right clothes to dance in,” “I gambled, against my word, but only because I was forced to,” and so forth. Partly because he feels honor-bound to the hometown girl he is engaged to, though, Lucky falls short of coming clean; and this imperils his “fine romance” with Penny, whom he feels honor-bound to keep ignorant of the engagement even as he takes exacting care not to make too much money lest the target sum he proposed to his intended and her father, finally met, trigger his return home to the altar. Thus the complicated script, by Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott, risks appearing farfetched in order to interrelate financial and romantic disaster, here posited with considerable irony since the romance with Penny must go south once Lucky is rich. It is a comic reversal that Depression audiences, beset with their own financial uncertainty, could delight in. (Or not: Swing Time did well, but not brilliantly, at the box office.)

Farfetched indeed, you say, that Lucky is constrained from making as much money as he can? That’s the point, though. The times are so out of whack, hence unpredictable, that reason needn’t apply. We mortals at best barely control our lives; often, life seems out of our control. Having been tricked into what seems, to his advantage, a sure bet, Lucky misses his wedding; and he and Penny lose their first chance to dance together professionally—as it were, Lucky loses his new lucky Penny—through the fault of neither, although Penny, in denial over how unlucky Lucky (and, by extension, she herself) is, chooses to blame him nevertheless. In a (very) lighthearted form, the world of Swing Time may even resemble that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; everything seems topsy-turvy. Even when things happen to go right, the element of uncertainty holds. Impossible things happen. Once frowning, a wall portrait now smiles; outside a picture window, the spectacle of snow falling becomes in a heartbeat vast sunlight. These tricks of editing and back projection suggest that nothing, good or bad, can be counted on. Countless people during the Depression felt the same way.

The film, of course, ends happily. Penny and Lucky, their other entanglements finally (and smoothly) undone, are about to marry—“I guess so,” is how Penny, laughing, puts it, upholding some piece of uncertainty to the last. (Like Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the film ends before there is a wedding.) The two then, in front of the vast, sky-high window, duet harmoniously as the snow turns to sunlight. This sublime moment of complicity between girl and boy, and between them and Nature, is given a challenging preface: a number of characters, Penny included, breaking into hysterical laughter—delightful, yes; also, out-of-control. But, as a couple, surely Penny and Lucky can weather the changeable weather. They and their audiences, whom they represent, certainly hope so.

In Swing Time, the Astaire-Rogers cycle reached a luminous and—courtesy of Jerome Kern’s music—melodious peak. The songs by Kern and lyricist Dorothy Fields, including “A Fine Romance” and the incomparably beautiful (and Oscar-winning) “The Way You Look Tonight,” are magical—as are the dances, by Astaire and Hermes Pan. These include, intricate and deft, the “Waltz in Swingtime,” and the glittering, dramatic dance to “Never Gonna Dance”—for me, also the best song. (When this dance lamenting hopeless romance quickly breaks into and out of a reprise of the hopeful “Waltz,” it’s a point through the heart.) Grounded, precipitous, delicate, robust, and shimmeringly mysterious, the “Never Gonna Dance” dance haunts with its grand passion and its soulful defenses against time. Astaire and Rogers are wondrous in both these dances—and, earlier, irresistibly nonchalant dancing to “Pick Yourself Up.” On the other hand, before (in blackface) Astaire, accompanied by triplicate shadows, starts in on his solo, an electric tribute to Bill Robinson (“Bojangles of Harlem”), the ensemble set-up is gaudy and grandiose—more Busby Berkeley/Bobby Connelly-Warner Brothers than intimate, elegant RKO. (At one point in the solo, special effects—there are a lot of them in this film—render Astaire-as-Robinson diaphanous in contrast to the three looming, substantial “shadows”—Why? Whatever; the effect is esoteric and unattractive.)

The acting is a pleasure, especially that of Rogers, Astaire, Helen Broderick and, as Lucky’s loyal sidekick (“. . . I know I’m not a pretty girl, but I’ll stick”), Victor Moore, who takes highest honors. Doubtless some credit for the warmth of the performances goes to director George Stevens, the cut-above-hack responsible for Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Greatest Story Every Told (1965); but, overall, his contribution seems minor. Indeed, only one of his other efforts qualifies as a modestly substantial piece of work: The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). However little he may have contributed to it, Swing Time will always remain Stevens’s one great film.