Mahjong

Director: Edward Yang

1996 / 121min / DCP

A group of Western expats in Taipei (including Virginie Ledoyen) and a pack of local gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight hoods are united by a search for the missing teenage son of a millionaire businessman whose return comes with a substantial cash reward in Yang’s screwball noir, which mines comedy out of preoccupations—miscommunication between social classes and different generations, the growing pains of modernity—more often played for tragedy in his filmography… though tragedy is not exactly missing here either. “Yang’s angriest and most provocative film… Alternating between the abrasive and the poignant, the sad and the terrifying, Mahjong offers a demonic tour of modern life.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader