World Premiere | Out of Competition | Tribute to PAI Ching-jui
Taiwan, 1969 / restored 2024, 103’, Mandarin
Directed by: Pai Ching-jui
Screenplay: Chang Yung-hsiang
Cinematography (color): Lin Tzan-ting
Editor: Shen Yeh-kang
Set Decoration: Peng Shih-wei
Music: Tso Hung-yuan
Producer: Hu Cheng-ting
Cast: Chen-chen, Wu Chia-chi, Niu Fang-yu, Lei Ming
A high-school student, a businessman and a father run off from their Taipei apartment block and cross paths during the long night. Before dawn the three conflicted souls will decide whether to return home or not. Pai Ching-jui’s biting social realist comedy of rebelliousness, infidelity and suppressed desire bursts with sophisticated mise-en-scène and stylish techniques, turning viewers into voyeurs and delivering a picture of inner upheavals and urban satire.
The film begins with an elderly woman talking incessantly, instructing and complaining to her husband because she fears he might lose his way home. In the midst of the morning fog, a bright yet resonant singing voice emerges: “Wandering person / Wavering heart / You, lost at the crossroads / Not going home today /Why don’t you go home?”
This refrain sets the stage for the film’s complex network of relationships and underscores the Confucian ideal that places “home” at its core. The film’s title song, famously performed by Yao Su-yung with her soaring vocals, became a household tune. Ironically, it was banned by the authorities for its perceived contradiction to socially accepted morals, given the Mandarin title literally translates to “Not Going Home Today”. This ban neatly stands in ironic contrast to the film’s core message.
The story weaves together three sets of family members living in the same apartment building, each facing conflicts common to a modern urban setting: infidelity, rebellious runaways, and the quiet endurance of those who suppress their own desires. Beneath the tangle of contradictions, a return home ultimately offers resolution. Unlike director Lee Hsing’s rural realism aligned with Confucian traditions, Pai Ching-jui (with the innovative cinematography of Lin Tzan-ting) employs sophisticated mise-en-scène and techniques such as split screens, masking, and accelerated montages. These stylistic choices render the audience into voyeurs, capturing the chic nature of the middle class while preserving a subtle sense of irony and urban satire. At the same time, the cityscape, along with its modern environment, magnifies the characters’ inner upheavals.
These ideas echo the aesthetic experiments introduced in A Morning in Taipei, which was shelved in its day. That film adopted a documentary-like approach, highlighting the city’s architectural silhouettes and empty urban spaces, using buildings themselves – through obstruction or concealment – as a metaphor for the characters’ complex relationships. Although “Not Going Home Today” suggests a temporary departure, the underlying implication is that everyone must eventually return. Pai Ching-jui’s film deftly alludes to the tides of modernity that were testing traditional notions of home, hinting at the changing and sometimes unstable nature of familial bonds, and challenging the very idea of emotional belonging.
In Accidental Trio, director Pai Ching-jui embraced multiple narratives. By combining the documentary realism found in A Morning in Taipei with the comedic flair seen in The Bride and I, he created a distinct social realist comedy. Differing significantly from the popular Taiwanese-language slapstick comedies of the 1950s, Pai introduced original concepts – most notably using the theme song to convey the film’s essence – to craft a new middle-class urban comedy.
Pai Ching-jui
Pai Ching-jui was one of the renowned Taiwanese directors. A film critic, he went to study film in Italy and was deeply influenced by Italian Neorealism. After returning, he joined Central Motion Picture Corporation and served as story editor, manager, film editor, associate producer and director, then he went on to set the record of winning Golden Horse Awards for Best Director two years in a row. Pai is best known for Lonely Seventeen, The Bride and I, Accidental Trio, Home, Sweet Home, Good Bye! Darling and The Last Night of Madam Chin. Pai died of a heart attack in 1997.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1968 – Lonely Seventeen
1969 – The Bride and I
1969 – Accidental Trio
1970 – Home, Sweet Home
1970 – Good Bye! Darling
1984 – The Last Night of Madam Chin
1990 – Forbidden Imperial Tales