ON THE WSWS
Donate to
the WSWS!

News Feed
Contact the
WSWS
Editorial Board
New Today
News & Analysis
Workers Struggles
Arts Review
History
Science
Polemics
Philosophy
Correspondence
Archive
About WSWS
About the ICFI
Help
Books Online

OTHER
LANGUAGES
German
French
Italian
Russian
Polish
Czech
Serbo-Croatian
Spanish
Portuguese
Turkish
Sinhala-
Tamil
Indonesian

LEAFLETS
Download in
PDF format

WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

1994 Toronto International Film Festival

How a worker's life is used up

By David Walsh
7 November 1994

A Borrowed Life is another extraordinary film from Taiwan, by veteran screenwriter Wu Nien-jen. Born in 1952, Wu began writing scripts for the Central Motion Picture Corporation in 1978. He has worked with most of the directors responsible for the resurgence of Taiwanese cinema--Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Chang Yi, Wang Tong and Ke Yi-cheng, among others. He has written more than 70 screenplays. A Borrowed Life is his first film as director.

One can learn a great deal from this film, both about life and about how to present its truth in artistic form.

This is an autobiographical work; Wu has made a film about his father. Sega (Tsai Chen-nan) has come to Chioufen in northern Taiwan to marry into a somewhat more prosperous family than his own. Chioufen is comparatively well off because it is a mining village, enjoying a boom in the early 1950s. Sega goes to work in the gold mines.

He and his wife (Tsai Chiou-fong) have three children. Sega likes to leave his oldest son in the movie theater and go off to drink with his friends and the hostesses. There is scant pleasure in the lives of any of the miners or their families.

Sega looks back nostalgically to the period when the Japanese ruled Taiwan--until 1945--and longs to make the trip to the imperial palace in Tokyo and to Mount Fuji. He insists that his family call him "Do-san," an approximation of the Japanese To-san (father).

The film has several decisive moments at which painful truths are revealed in an understated but powerful fashion. In one sequence, Sega, his wife and children travel to his family's home to see off his younger brother, who has joined the army. The celebration goes off smoothly, all obligations are met, no one says a word about why the brother is enlisting or what it might mean. But as he is going out the front gate, followed by Sega, their father shouts, off-camera: All my life I've raised sons who were used by others!

The gold mines are becoming exhausted. Sega is laid off. He goes to the pawnshop to sell off family heirlooms. More and more people are leaving the village. Eventually, after an extended period of unemployment, he goes to work in the coal mines. He and his son, Wen-jian, quarrel about his gambling at mahjong.

In one memorable scene, Wen-jian goes to the coal mine to meet his father. Sega comes out of the mine, pushing a car full of coal along a railroad track. He is black with dust, his ankle is bleeding. The son offers to help push the car up a hill. The pair move away from the camera. The father simply says to Wen-jian: Study hard. What took Claude Berri tens of millions of dollars and several hours to establish in Germinal is more than summed up in a minute or two by Wu.

The film is called A Borrowed Life. A "stolen life" might be more appropriate. Sega's life is first of all stolen by the mines--he becomes stricken with emphysema; by all sorts of civic and family obligations which are essentially meaningless; and by his own fantasies about Japan and the emperor.

He retires from the coal mines at 55; his pension goes to help his younger son set up a business. When he is 59, he is diagnosed as a diabetic. By this time, he is obliged to carry an oxygen tank wherever he goes. He quarrels with his wife and family. His only consolation is his grandson, but he regrets that the boy does not speak Japanese.

In 1990 he is admitted to an intensive care unit, hardly able to breathe. After a final visit with Wen-jian, he pulls the IV from his arm and jumps out of the hospital window. He dies shortly afterward.

Here is a film about a working class life which does not strain to convince, or hammer or pull at one's heartstrings. It movingly sets out the essential facts and relationships and leaves the spectator free to draw his or her own conclusions. It is heartening to know that such a film has been made--and in the 1990s.