Tigertail: Surprisingly Heavy Drama about Midlife Minefields from Comedy Creator
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
The two breakthrough Chinese-American movies of the last couple of years, Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell — though predicated on painful generational and cultural conflicts — were comedies. The new Netflix drama Tigertail is a character study of an emotionally blocked Taiwan-American immigrant, Pin-Jui, who finds himself, in late middle-age, alone, divorced, and almost estranged from his adult-daughter. It is not funny at all.
That’s a little surprising, given that the film was written and directed by Alan Yang, best known as the co-creator of the smash Aziz Ansari comedy series, Master of None. But Yang, who must have some clout with Netflix, is the master of his own film here, in a personal film purportedly inspired by his own father’s story.
The director has touched on this subject of parents before, namely in an episode of the show called Parents, for which he and Ansari won an Emmy in 2016. In the episode, Indian-American Dev (Ansari) and his Chinese-American friend Brian (Kevin Yu) discover the sacrifices of their immigrant parents.
Read our interview with Alan Yang
Bookended by scenes in Taiwan — Tigertail is the English translation of the township of Huwei, with a voice-over of Pin-Jui, recorded by Yang’s father — in which the older man recalls his childhood, when he was sent to live with his grandmother in the aftermath of the Chinese civil war while his young widowed mother looked for work.
Separated from his mother and forced to hide when Kuomanting soldiers combed the area looking for undocumented people, Pin-Jui needed to be tough. “Crying never solves anything,” his grandmother scolds him, a motto he takes to heart.
In the next scene, the now late-middle aged Pin-Jui (gruffly played by Tzi Ma, who was also the dad in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell) is riding in the passenger seat of a car driven by his daughter, Angela (Christine Ko), who has picked him up from the airport after a trip home for his mother’s funeral. She tries to ask her father questions about his trip, but he remains terse and distant.
We flashback to the 1960s, when Pin-Jui he was a handsome fun-loving young man (Hong-Chi Lee), who works alongside his mother in a sugar factory. At night, Pin-Jui goes to a local bar and reunites with a childhood soul-mate, vivacious Yuan (Yo-Hsing Fang), and they enjoy a whirlwind romance. But Pin-Jui, who is convinced that Yuan’s parents would never accept him, decides on a marriage of convenience, getting his fare to New York by marrying his boss’s timid daughter, Zhenzhen (Kunjue Li).
He gets a job cleaning floors in a grocery story. Zhenzhen hangs around laundromats to get out of their cramped apartment and hoping to meet someone else who speaks her language. Decades pass, in a montage of mopped floors and storefront roll-down doors. The marriage grows more distant as the couple somehow prospers and moves to better digs.
Tigertail is shot in a very different way from Master of None though, again, there’s a connection. In its second season, Master of None offered an homage to the arthouse classic, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Here, Wang seems to be offering a pastiche of a Chinese art house movies – the exquisite reveries of Wong Kar-wai or the exquisite melancholy of Taiwan’s Hou-Hsiou Hsien (City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai), whose films feature similar themes of country and city life, dislocation, the past and the present and lost loves.
As an ersatz arthouse pastiche, Tigertail is crafted with care. Nigel Buck’s cinematography effectively registers the different time periods and locations, and Michael Brooks’ plaintive score balances Pin-Jui’s taciturnity.
On the negative side, the film’s hopscotching flashbacks can be confusing and there’s a lot of stylistic spin for what amounts to a prosaic family drama. The on-the-nose dialogue between Pin-Jui and his ever-aggrieved daughter Angela has the resonance of family counselling transcripts: “You’re my father. I don’t even know how to talk to you. I never have.”
There could be more space for the women who suffer from Pin-Jui’s emotional unavailability, although his old flame, Yuan, pops up in an unnecessary cameo by Joan Chen, and seems to have bounced back well.
More time might have been spent on a side-plot about Zhenzhen’s friendship with a good-natured middle-aged Taiwanese woman (Cindera Che), scenes which add a dimension to the wife’s character. The rest of the time, as Tigertail tiptoes toward its teardrop of an emotional payoff, the film is so carefully serious it’s almost funny.
Tigertail. Directed and written by Alan Yang. Starring: Tzi Ma, Christine Ko, Hong-Chi Lee, Yo-Hsing Fang, Kunjue Li, Fiona Fu and Joan Chen. Tigertail is now streaming on Netflix.ca.