Chan is Missing [1982] Wayne Wang

http://bayimg.com/AadjhaADf Chan Is Missing (1982) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083728/ Chan Is Missing is a 1982 film directed by Wayne Wang, which tells the story of two taxi drivers searching the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown for the man who ran off with their money. It stars Wood Moy, Marc Hayashi and Laureen Chew. The movie was written by Isaac Cronin and Wayne Wang, and directed by Wang. It is known to be one of the first major American film productions in which Chinese Americans are portrayed in a realistic fashion, using many non-actors, in contrast with other films in which Chinese and Chinese Americans are portrayed in predictable and limited roles based on stereotypes. The movie is considered a seminal work of Asian American Cinema. The song playing at the beginning of the movie is by Sam Hui. Its Mandarin Chinese name is Jia Jia Re Chao. Wood Moy ... Jo Marc Hayashi ... Steve Laureen Chew ... Amy Peter Wang ... Henry the Cook Presco Tabios ... Presco Frankie Alarcon ... Frankie Judi Nihei ... Lawer Ellen Yeung ... Mrs. Chan Hung George Woo ... George Emily Woo Yamasaki ... Chan's Daughter Jenny (as Emily Yamasaki) Virginia Cerenio ... Jenny's Friend Roy Chan ... Mr. Lee Leong Pui Chee ... Mr. Fong By the time he made Chan is Missing, Hong Kong native Wayne Wang had graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts, gotten his unofficial education in cinephilia attending screenings at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, returned to Hong Kong for an unfulfilling stint directing a popular TV soap opera, and finally landed back in the Bay Area, working in San Francisco’s Chinatown teaching English to immigrants and dreaming up the story that would evolve into his debut feature. With grants from the NEA and AFI totaling a little over $20,000, plus time and services donated by his cast and crew and various Chinatown locals, Wang made the film and then released it on the festival circuit in 1982. It was picked up by New Yorker Films and became a minor art-house success. Chan is Missing launched Wang on a long, varied, and still-evolving career, and attained landmark status as the first theatrically distributed feature film directed by and starring Asian Americans. That it’s still arguably the best Asian American film testifies not only to Wang’s talent, but also his timing. In retrospect, Chan is Missing can be seen as part of a broad wave of American independent cinema that emerged after the social movements of the late ’60s and ‘70s, when culturally marginalized groups decided to make their own movies outside the Hollywood system, but before the institutionalization of “indie film” began in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Like Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and other key works of its time, Chan remains interesting and relevant today due to its fusion of cultural and aesthetic radicalism. Artists as well as witnesses or spokespeople, these directors were as influenced by the great liberating movements in post-war global film culture—Italian Neorealism, cinema verité, the various New Waves—as they were by ‘60s social activism, and their movies explored the boundaries of cinematic form even as they expanded the subject matter of American film. Today, when almost every major city in the U.S. boasts entire film festivals devoted to each racial, cultural, and sexual slice of the demographic pie, the topics of these earlier movies have lost their novelty, but the freshness of their discoveries still comes through. And in a time when yuppified, corporatized “indie” filmmakers, critics, programmers, and audiences alike treat recognition by the mainstream as the Holy Grail, their intransigent unwillingness to play by the rules remains invigorating, even inspiring. Chan is structured as a detective story. Two Chinese American cabdrivers, middle-aged Jo (Wood Moy) and his sidekick, young Steve (Marc Hayashi), go looking for Jo’s friend Chan Hung, who disappeared with $4,000 the pair had given him to buy them independent taxi operator’s licenses. Jo and Steve trek through Chinatown, talking to people who knew the missing man—a sociologist, a restaurateur, a language-school director, Chan’s estranged wife and daughter, and many others—and the more they learn about Chan, the less they know who he is. Everyone who ever met Chan has a very different idea of him. Is he a helpless immigrant unable to assimilate? A shrewd operator? An honest man? A scientific genius? A political activist? A paranoiac? All of the above? Over the course of his investigation, Jo begins to realize, like the reporter in Citizen Kane, that nobody’s life can be summed up with a single word or phrase. Does Jo ever find Chan? I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen the movie yet. Let’s just say that Chan interests Wang less as a character than as what the semioticians would call a “floating signifier”: a sign without a fixed meaning, a blank slate allowing almost any interpretation to be inscribed upon it. The mystery of the missing man is a red herring, a MacGuffin, a pretext. Like the disappearance of Anna in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, it’s an excuse to get to the real story underneath the surface story. The heart of the film has to do with Jo—and through him, the audience—coming to terms with the full complexity of the Chinese American experience. And just as the missing Chan can’t be classified by any simple label, the absurdity of pigeonholing any subculture (even by the use of such phrases as “the Chinese American experience”) becomes, by the end, the point of the movie, and the questions the story raises—who is Chan? and what does it mean to be Chinese (or Asian) American?—are left dangling, as Jo learns to live with mysteries rather than trying to solve them. And yet, if the message of Chan is Missing is a sort of intellectualized postmodern trick—the message is that there is no message, the solution to the mystery that there is no solution—the feel of the film is something very different. It’s loose-limbed, light on its feet, sly and jokey, often documentary-like in its spontaneity and openness to experience. Most of the cast members (though not Moy and Hayashi, both Bay Area Asian American theater pros) are nonprofessionals—real Chinatown locals playing Chinatown locals—and their semi-improvised interactions have the unpredictable ebb and flow of real life caught on the fly. This dynamic tension between Wang’s controlling intellect and the freedom of his way of seeing the world makes Chan a richly pleasurable viewing experience more than two decades after it was made. (The same tension informs every stylistic choice in the film; note how seamlessly the cinematography, by doc vets Michael Chin and Curtis Choy, blends exquisitely composed chiaroscuro studies with verité realism.) What gives Chan is Missing its status as a seminal Asian American film, beyond the fact of its historical “firstness,” is how it encodes and encapsulates so many aspects of Asian American life that later filmmakers (and novelists and playwrights) would confront in their work. Many of the story’s points of reference (FOBs versus ABCs, PRC loyalists versus pro-Taiwan-independence factionalists) are specific to Chinese Americans, but many more—the loss of social status that comes with immigration, the pleasures and pitfalls of assimilation, the generation gap, the endless self-questioning about “identity”—are universal to the post-immigrant experience anywhere. Wang covered all these bases in Chan, and he did it with a seeming ease and gracefulness and an utter lack of self-seriousness or heavy-handedness that his successors can learn from (and that, truth be told, Wang has never fully equaled in his subsequent films CHAN IS MISSING is a small, whimsical treasure of a film that gives us a real feeling for the people of San Francisco's Chinatown. And at some point while we're watching this film, we may realize that we have very little idea of Chinatowns, in San Francisco or elsewhere, that haven't been shaped by mass-produced Hollywood clichŽs like the Charlie Chan movies. The title CHAN IS MISSING is almost a pun, because Charlie Chan is missing from this film, and what replaces him is a warm, low-key, affectionate and funny look at some real Chinese-Americans. The movie's plot is simplicity itself. The heroes of the film, two taxi drivers, go looking for Chan because he owes them some money and he has disappeared. They search for him more out of curiosity than vengeance; they don't really think he intended to steal the money, but they can't figure out why he would have disappeared without paying it. Familiar with the ways of Chinatown, they knock on doors and talk to people and, almost without realizing it, we are taken beyond the plot into the everyday lives of these people. The movie has an unforced, affectionate sense of humor about its characters. There's a cheerfully cynical analysis of how the annual Chinese New Year's parade has been turned into a competition between factions loyal to Taiwan and to mainland China. There's a philosophical cook, whose resignation in the face of the inevitable sounds anything but resigned. There's a political activist who dissects the politics of Chinatown with a fine-tooth comb. And there's a fascinating discussion involving linguistics, as a young sociology student tries to explain why Chan recently said "no" to a cop when he meant "yes." We can almost follow her logic: Chan was replying to the truth of his action rather than to the meaning of the question, you see, and so although his taxi did indeed go through the red light, he did not drive it through the red light but was, in a sense, a bystander in the driver's seat as the taxi autonomously violated the law. I'm making it sound complicated; the linguist makes it funny. CHAN IS MISSING has already become something of a legend because of the way it was filmed. The movie's director, producer, editor and co-author is a young filmmaker named Wayne Wang, a 33-year-old San Franciscan who made the movie on a $22,000 budget, with a little help from his friends. He wanted to examine the ways in which Chinatown was both Chinese and AmericanÑand who would be better qualified to do that than a director whose last name is Chinese and whose first name was inspired by John Wayne? Wang's plot owes a little to THE THIRD MAN, I suppose, as his heroes question people about a man who is presumed missing and whose life turns out to be more complicated than anyone would have thought. But CHAN IS MISSING isn't really a thriller or a whodunit and doesn't pretend to be. It's an excursion. It takes us through a part of America we haven't been able to see before in the movies. It takes us into the kitchens of Chinese restaurants, and into the offices of Chinese-American social workers. It takes us into hotels for transients, sleazy bars and politician's offices. By the time we've finished the odyssey, we realize a curious thing: There may not be a Chan, and it doesn't matter if he's missing. What's important is that everyone has a different idea of Chan, filtered through his own consciousness. And we realize (for ourselves, because the film is never obvious about this point) that Chinese-Americans, more than many other ethnic groups in this country, are seen by the rest of us through a whole series of filters and fictions. We "know" them from movies and walk-ons in TV cop shows, from the romanticized images of fiction and from ubiquitous Chinese restaurants, but we don't really know them at all. This movie knows them. In sharing its characters with us, it opens up a part of America. Wang’s debut feature has the same sense of allegory with regard to the Chinese question as his Chinese Box, and in fact works even better than his feature about the handover of Hong King to China, delving into the complex nature of Chinese identity particularly as it applies to US migrants and finding a meaningful way to express it as a noir to which there is no answer, while at the same time sending up the “Charlie Chan” image of migrants. Looking like it was shot on zero budget, filming almost semi-documentary style, what it lacks in polish it makes up for with a strong script, some good natural authentic performances and evocative location shooting, getting a sense of local flavour in the Chinatown streets, restaurant and hotel locations, spicing it up with slice-of-life anecdotes, characters and stories that are reminiscent of his later work on Smoke and Blue in the Face.

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Akijama (2011-06-09)

Seed please!!
Its very rare movie.

liang1 (2013-07-30)

finally got this movie, thanks very much. keep seeding.