" with all that education , you should know what happiness is .
" starring sylvia chang , teresa hu , hsu ming , li lieh ,
mao hsueh - wei ; directed by edward yang ; written by yang and wu nien - chen ;
cinematography by christopher doyle and chang hui - kung every country has , eventually , its new wave .
france had its nouvelle vague , brazil its cinema novo , china its fifth generation , and on and on .
some waves just take longer than others , before they wash over us , cleansing us with the balm of discovery .
taiwan 's new wave came in the 1980s , in the work of directors like hou hsiao - hsien , wan jen , and edward yang ; that day , on the beach -- yang 's first feature -- is central .
it created a new language for young taiwanese directors , even if the first attempts to speak that language were hesitant and faltering .
later works refined the techniques that yang first explored here , giving taiwan a distinctive international presence .
that day itself is long and frustrating , the document of a nation 's attempt to find a voice .
it does not lack ambition .
it anatomizes urban life in modern taiwan , in the manner of antonioni , elaborating the alienation that the westernized white - collar middle - class feel as their lives are shaped by old - fashioned roles -- dedicated career men , loyal housewives -- that they find unfulfilling .
jia - li ( sylvia chang ) is the focus , but the film brings others into its compass -- her husband , her brother , friends from her college days -- as it charts her discontents .
no one is happy .
jia - li married her husband , we - lei , at a young age .
at the time , her brother had been urged into an arranged marriage , despite his affection for another woman , and so jia - li 's marriage seemed , in comparison , a good one : she chose we - lei of her own free will , they loved each other .
but it goes wrong .
that day dutifully presents all the clich ?
s :
we - lei becomes absorbed in his career , indulges in an affair with a co - worker ; jia - li feels restless and trapped , bound by a choice she made while young , but which no longer seems wise .
the film never redeems these clich ?
s
by conveying the feel of authentic experience , the intensity of lived pain , and much of it seems trite and belaboured .
it unfolds , awkwardly , as a series of flashbacks , told during a luncheon in vienna , where jia - li meets her brother 's old flame ( teresa hu ) , now a concert pianist , whom she has not seen since college .
both women seem rather sad , and resigned to their sadness .
their circumstances ( and those of jia - li 's brother and a college friend ) suggest not so much that they have made the wrong choices -- married the wrong man , chosen the wrong career path , etc .
--but rather that the choices available to them were inadequate .
it is not that jia - li married the wrong man ; she did n't .
the problem is that she needed to marry at all -- and that if she did not marry , she would still be just as unhappy .
for a woman in modern taiwan , that day tells us , the cards are stacked , the dice are loaded : she can play the game , but the house always wins .
the film 's sympathetic feminist implications are presumably the reason it caused such controversy upon its release in taiwan .
seen now , it does not seem provocative .
indeed , it 's hard to imagine anyone having felt passionate enough about the film to generate any controversy : it may be ambitious , it may be innovative , but it is also terribly , terribly dull .
and what was new for taiwan was not necessarily new for the rest of us : yang adopts methods established years before by antonioni and others , and his use of those methods is fumbling , uncertain , undisciplined . nor does he bring anything new -- other than the locale -- to the material .
there are moments when that day takes on some of the emotional richness it strives for -- in a young couple 's first kiss , in the awkward meeting of a woman and her husband 's mistress -- but they are brief .
too often , yang devotes needless time to mundane scenes -- grocery shopping , flower - arranging -- in which nothing happens , little is said , no emotion imparted .
perhaps , if the film were content to focus on such reflective , inward moments , leaving us to guess at thoughts and feelings , it might have been ambiguous , suggestive , insinuating .
but jia - li and her disaffected companions do not only brood in silence
: they talk about their problems , at length , in detail , redundantly , and eliminate all subtleties .
at two hours and forty - five minutes , it all seems exorbitantly long , indulgently long - winded . consider the defining moment for jia - li , the titular day on the beach .
the thrust of the whole film explains , easily enough , what we are to think of that moment , what it means when she walks away from a particular situation .
even so , the film has not one but two characters explain it for us verbally , in case we may have missed the point .
needless time is devoted to expressing what should have remained unexpressed , and that is the problem throughout .
the look of the film is as tedious as the drawn - out narrative .
it was the first feature shot by christopher doyle -- at least , it 's his name in the credits -- who is now rightly regarded as one of the world 's leading cinematographers .
in the freewheeling expressionism of his work with directors like chen kaige and wong kar - wai , he seems incapable of fashioning a boring image .
you would never know it from watching that day , which , due either to doyle 's inexperience or yang 's humdrum direction , is almost perverse in its insistence on making the physical environment seem as drab and banal as possible .
in scrutinizing the long decay of a marriage , that day manages to capture the ennui of the experience , but none of the damage , none of the heartbreak .
needless time is devoted to expressing what should have remained unexpressed , and that is the problem throughout tedious it all seems exorbitantly long , indulgently long - winded awkwardly the film never redeems these clich ? s it is also terribly , terribly dull his use of those methods is fumbling , uncertain , undisciplined