The movie tells the story of a pair of childhood sweethearts in Taipei.
Director Hou Hsiao-hsien and singer Tsai Chin act as the male and female protagonists in this movie, A-long and A-jung. One is A-long, a cloth store owner who is a national player of the junior baseball team, and the other is A-jung, a senior assistant employee of a construction company. The two of them, A-long and A-jung, are gradually estranged by their conflicting life status and values, and fall in love, with the male protagonist inexplicably being stabbed in the end.
Directed by Edward Yang and financed by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s mortgaged house, the film is one of Taiwan’s New Wave films, written and directed in a cool and detached manner, a work of realism, and is not highly entertaining. After its release in 1985, the film was met with unprecedented coldness in Taiwan’s market, and even created an embarrassing record of a three-day drop-off, with a box-office gross of only a few hundred thousand Taiwan dollars.
1985 / Taiwan / Drama / Edward Yang / Hou Hsiao-hsien Tsai Chin
A long time childhood friend of Ah Ching, the owner of a fabric store (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), who was a national player on the youth baseball team, is a young man who has been in love with Ah Ching.
Azhen (Tsai Chin) is a senior assistant employee of a company, and she always expects to get married and immigrate to the U.S. as soon as possible, so as to change her current living situation and aspire to a better future.
Ah Lung is always willing to help others, such as his cab driving Little League friend Ah Chin (Wu Nien Zhen).
He has a strong sense of nostalgia and often goes to the baseball field to watch.
In the face of the rapidly changing society around them, Ah Lung and Ah Ching interact with different groups of people, and inevitably grow apart from each other, and cracks appear in their relationship.
Later, Lung is stabbed by a young man who is in love with Ah-jung, and sits alone on the side of the road, waiting.
As he fades into unconsciousness, he seems to be reliving the memory of his participation in a Little League game.
