It’s a gentle and pensive intergenerational story about love and leaving home, about how an immigrant father’s experiences might not be as distant from his first-generation daughter’s as he imagines.
ENTERTAINMENTIn “Tigertail,” he has dispensed with the comic set-up and gone straight for the arthouse, striving for the kind of lyricism of Wong Kar-wai or the elliptical beauty of Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Yang’s film, heartfelt but inert, only briefly touches on anything like the work of those filmmakers. But it’s an earnest stab at a drifting kind of memory piece that crosses generational divides, from Taiwan to New York.
The movie’s most vibrant images come early. It opens on a young boy running through shining rice fields in rural Taiwan. The boy, Pin-Jui , grows up to be a factory worker. He reconnects with a girl he met in those fields, who becomes his first love. Their scenes together, dancing, are handsome. But when Pin-Jui is given the opportunity to go to America, it comes with the bargain of an arranged marriage, to a woman named Zhenzhen .
These scenes are overlaid with contemporary ones of an older Pin-Jui and his grown daughter, Angela . She is navigating her own heartbreak but finds her stoic father indifferent to her pain. His reflections of his past play out as a withheld history that, if he relents, could bond them. “Tigertail” comes off more as an idea of an arthouse movie than one propelled by its own volition. While the 1960s-set scenes have a warm glow, the modern-day ones are flat. We’ve been blessed lately with films that chronicle multi-generational tales, straddling Asia and America, like last year’s “The Farewell” and the upcoming Sundance winner “Minari.” “Tigertail” doesn’t rise to the level of those movies, but it contributes to a heartening trend.
“Tigertail,” a Netflix release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for some thematic elements, language, smoking and brief sensuality. Running time: 91 minutes. Two stars out of four.