A Confucian Confusion 1994

For his fifth feature, Edward Yang returned to the present day, bringing the lessons he’d learnt on A Brighter Summer Day to bear on a pungent comedy.  The cast is expansive, the plotlines dense and deviously arranged, but the situations (the multiple intrigues of, among many others, a brisk businesswoman, her put-upon PA, a populist playwright and a reclusive writer) are pitched at a level of near-hysteria, with the headlong pace of screwball comedy.  Although there’s plenty of wry humour – and some slapstick – on display, Yang’s primary mode in this film is satirical, and his target is Taipei’s culture of business and business of culture. In A Confucian Confusion, even the personal relationships are modelled on corporate mergers, or hostile takeovers.

The film’s criss-crossing storylines are so outrageously, even parodically, complicated that it might all be one big technical exercise: how much coherent plot can you cram into a two-hour film without recourse to conventional exposition? Although it’s initially odd, though fascinating, to see Yang applying such heavyweight craft to apparently lightweight material, he calms down long enough at the end of the film to deliver scenes of surprising emotional power.   These serve to anchor the film and reveal its serious subtext, alluded to in the film’s title, which Yang elaborates as Asia’s “serious cultural problem. . .  trying to head into the 21st century with a 4th century BC ideology." — AL

“‘It's a dangerous time for emotion,’ says one character early on in the film, but the twenty-something denizens of A Confucian Confusion are completely incapable of suppressing their emotions or their greed. Sleek, chic and hysterical, the film owes more to Preston Sturges than Michelangelo Antonioni, though all of the characteristic Yang themes are present; only this time there is a more luxurious feel to the proceedings. Taipei has a vibrant, cut-throat glamour here that it lacks in other Taiwanese films. The film's thesis – stated by an overly earnest, struggling writer – is that if Confucius returned to contemporary Taiwan, everyone would adore him, primarily because they consider him an influential and powerful fraud. And fraudulence is the norm: so-called artists have more in common with businessmen and even the sweetest, most straightforward characters cannot trust themselves.” — Cinemathèque Ontario