Yang's debut feature and in the first ten minutes he's cutting between different times without warning, entering memories, deploying voiceover to render memory active in the present time, shifting between memories within memories, and establishing dreams within memories within memories. It's all so shockingly and marvellously fully formed. The cuts across time and reminiscence are never declared or signalled but achieve their purpose as an almost natural element of the celluloid (e.g. words seen spoken in the past becomes those heard in the mind of the one given to remembrance in the present). Nor is this mere flashback structure, which is to say the witnessing of events relevant yet distinct in cinematic composition. Yang is placing the viewer inside the mind and the words of the speaker–the host of the memories seen–and as he does so he renders time fully cinematic, as pasts and presents become utterly contiguous in the one who remembers. Only cinema could achieve this. Indeed, that this stacking and layering of memories upon memories is the structural conceit Yang hinges the film on basically declares a master from the offing. He's testing formal limits in more daring ways than most filmmakers manage in entire careers.
The story itself is a touch sedate in comparison to the use of the cut and the temporal logics therein, but it is none the less tragic and challenging in how the director views capitalism as corroding the implicit breaks in values between generations and the end traditions find in the emergence of youth in adulthood. The narrative renders the end of tradition and its requisite cultural values a hellish trap in the new neoliberal mileiu. Cross-generational support and communication finds itself divested of meaning and communicative possibility when the world achieves a new speed. Relationships become abstracted in the abstraction of finance, in making and losing millions in minutes; happiness esotericism when the world and one's place in it can no longer be understood. A film which sees both person and culture cease to be—itself.
