Over the years, the Udine Far East Film Festival presented films by the master of Taiwanese cinema, Lee Hsing. This year, the festival will showcase three films by another key figure of Taiwan’s official cinema under dictatorship – Pai Ching-jui – that have been recently restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute: Lonely Seventeen, Accidental Trio, and Good Bye! Darling. Though the two directors, having met at university, were close friends, they could not have been more different in style and themes. Pai Ching-jui was a paradoxical director, deeply fascinated by Taiwan’s popular culture yet acutely aware of his position as a Chinese filmmaker. Torn between commercial success, personal taste (which often diverged from the official line), and censorship, his films embody the constraints of the Martial Law era.
Born in China in 1931, Pai arrived alone in Taiwan in 1948 as a displaced student following the defeat of KMT (Kuomintang, Chinese Nationalist Party) by the Communists. As a waishengren (someone from outside Taiwan), he encountered the hybrid culture of the benshengren (local Taiwanese), who had just emerged from 50 years of Japanese colonial rule. Alone and without family support, Pai worked first as a cartoonist, actor, scriptwriter, and journalist before saving enough money to fulfill his dream of studying film in Italy. In 1961, as a devoted fan of Italian Neorealism, he enrolled at the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema. Upon his return to Taiwan in 1963, he was invited to join the most important state-owned film studio, the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC). His first film, the documentary A Morning in Taipei – a simple and affectionate city symphony capturing everyday life – failed to meet executives’ expectations and was shelved for decades.
After this initial setback, Pai worked as a scriptwriter and co-directed in 1966 an historical propaganda film which success finally allowed him to make his directorial debut with Lonely Seventeen in 1967. In 1964, the CMPC had launched the “Healthy Realism” movement, championed by Lee Hsing, which promoted an idealized and enthusiastic vision of Taiwan’s modernization under KMT rule. To say the least, Pai’s film did not quite fit this agenda. On one hand, it boldly depicted a teenage girl, Tan-mei, her desire and childish fantasy for her sister’s fiancé, played by Taiwanese cinema’s quintessential bad boy, Ko Chun-hsiung. On the other, it served as a scathing critique of Taiwan’s 1960s bourgeoisie.
Tan-mei’s parents and sister are physically absent and emotionally distant, preoccupied with an endless waltz of social activities. Their home is filled with objects that symbolize their affluence – a refrigerator, a television, a large fish tank, and various ornaments – yet these material comforts offer the lonely teenager a cold substitute for human warmth. Pai masterfully uses frame-within-frame compositions to visually entrap his heroine in a gilded cage. When Tan-mei, wracked with guilt over the accidental death of her love interest, spirals into depression, her family and teachers blame her for neglecting her studies and never interrogate the reasons of her sadness. The film follows a descent into darkness, only to abruptly conclude with a forced happy ending. Lonely Seventeen marked Pai’s first major clash with censorship, and he responded by making the constraints conspicuously visible. The film’s sudden tonal shift shocks audiences, a strategy he would later refine in his most personal film, Good Bye! Darling (1970).
For Good Bye! Darling, Pai cast his favorite actor, Ko Chun-hsiung, as A-lang, a quintessential Taiwanese hoodlum. Loosely inspired by Chen Yingzhen’s Generals, Pai sought to create a Neorealist film in Taiwan. While the narrative follows Kuai Chi, an innocent young girl sold by her mother to a parade band who falls for A-lang, it is A-lang himself whom the camera adores. With his crude charm, Japanese bad-boy attitude, and lustful gaze, he exudes a raw magnetism rarely seen in Taiwanese cinema. His sweaty, rugged masculinity starkly contrasts with the clean-cut, obedient, and industrious male archetypes championed by the KMT. As expected, censorship struck again – this time in the form of an awkward, out-of-place voice-over at the film’s beginning and end, attempting to neutralize its subversive message by framing the story as a relic of the past and affirming Taiwan’s modernization Darwinism. Despite these imposed modifications, Pai’s perspective remains affectionate yet ambiguous. He retained some Taiwanese-language in the film backgroung – a bold move given the government’s suppression of local dialects at the time.
Pai’s sharp, amused, yet sympathetic view of contemporary Taiwanese society is also evident in Accidental Trio (originally titled Nobody Goes Home Today) made in 1969 which title song was later renamed Everybody Goes Home to protect traditional family values. Like Lonely Seventeen, though adopting a comedic and slapstick style influenced by Italian and Western comedies, the film portrays middle-class families on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A teenage girl embarks on a drunken night out with a seducer, a weary father seeks entertainment with a bar girl, and a young husband deceives his wife to meet his former fiancée. Beneath the humor, Pai offers a sharp social critique: the loss of ideals, rampant prostitution and predatory behavior. Most of the story happens at night, at bars, dance-hall and hotels – a hidden life – as a strict curfew was imposed under martial law.
In these three films – and others, such as Love in Cabin – Pai consistently aligns himself with youth yearning for freedom and with societal misfits, such as Old Monkey in Good Bye! Darling and the harried family man seeking refuge from chaos in Accidental Trio. His stylistic choices – fast pacing, rapid zoom-ins and zoom-outs, energetic music, and a playful mise-en-scène rich in accumulated details – challenged the rigid, traditional aesthetics that dominated official Taiwanese cinema at the time.
Beloved by audiences yet constrained by official restrictions, Pai Ching-jui remains one of the most stricking example of a filmmaker whose creative freedom was a constant negotiation under martial law. After this golden age, he shifted toward more commercially secure sentimental cinema, though he retained his distinct aesthetic brand. However, by the early 1980s, the bold stylistic and thematic innovations of the Taiwan New Cinema movement marked a sharp break from the previous generation, represented by King Hu, Lee Hsing and Pai Ching-jui. Once a spokesperson for youth, Pai had become a relic of the past. He passed away in 1993.
Wafa Ghermani