“Confusion in Confucius” and “Mahjong”: Rediscovering Edward Yang, Anatomist of Taiwanese Modernity

THE WORLD'S OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED

Before coming to cinema, Edward Yang (1947-2007) was first a computer engineer, which perhaps explains in his films this taste for connectivity, network structures, combinations of characters, who cross and recross like so many electrons launched into the circuit of the big city. Of the Taiwanese "new wave" which emerged at the beginning of the 1980s, he was one of the pillars with Hou Hsiao-hsien , although his premature death, at 59, leaves behind a short body of work, seven feature films in barely twenty years of activity.

Among them, the most famous remains the very last, Yi Yi (2000), winner of the Cannes Best Director Award, a moving family epic that will be re-released in theaters on August 6 in a restored version. But before that, two rarer pieces from the Yang laboratory, also restored to their former glory, preceded it on screens: Confusion chez Confucius (1994) and Mahjong (1996) , the latter remaining inexplicably unreleased despite the presence on the bill of a French star, Virginie Ledoyen.

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