The Accidental Trio [Jin tian bu hui jia, 今天不回家]. Dir. Pai Ching-jui [Bai Jingrui, 白景瑞]. Perf. Chen Chen [Zhen Zhen, 甄珍], Wu Chia-chi [Wu Jiaqi, 武家麒], Lei Ming [雷鳴], Niu Fang-yu [鈕方雨], Ko Chun-hsiung [Ko Junxiong, 柯俊雄], Ou Wei [歐威]. Tachung [大眾]: 1969.
One day, three residents of a Taipei apartment complex leave their homes. Zhenzhen, a teenager who has recently failed her college entrance exams, is driven to rebellion by her overbearing father. Huacheng tells his wife he's heading to Kaohsiung for an overnight business trip, but instead meets up with an old flame who has just returned from abroad. Jinde is frustrated by his nagging wife, visiting in-laws, and four bratty sons, so he tells them all he's working overtime to afford himself some temporary reprieve. For various reasons, none of them will return home when they're supposed to, though these wanderers' paths will cross before the night is over.
Zhenzhen runs off to her friend's house, where she is introduced to her friend's uncle, Mr. Zhang. Zhang is a notorious playboy and an unrepentant flirt, whose dancehall antics have earned him the nickname "The Devil." Even though Zhenzhen is bordering on jailbait, he moves right in on her. Zhang lures her out to a secret rendezvous with him at a night club, buys her clothes, plies her with drinks and cigarettes, and eventually brings her back to his bachelor pad. This skeezy situation actually ends up being the most interesting of the three stories, with the most "pleasant," though somewhat predictable ending of the three (given the cultural conservativism of martial law-era Taiwan, when this was produced).
Basically, Zhang realizes that Zhenzhen's only there to piss off her father, and besides, he doesn't quite have it in him to deflower the virginal young thing -- a real American Beauty moment there. So the self-proclaimed "devil" ends up being the most sympathetic character in the whole story.
The story of Huacheng and his old flame is the most convoluted, with neither character's motives clearly or consistently mapped out. Meanwhile, there's Huacheng's fretful wife hovering over their whole affair. She called his office earlier in the day and discovered his real agenda right from the beginning, which somehow makes his transgressions seem even more callous. But disturbingly, she is explicitly told to excuse his philandering by the neighbor, Jinde's obnoxiously-traditionalist wife. "As long as it doesn't affect the big picture, we women should just pretend we don't see it," is the advice she is given.
So even though Huacheng's wife never finds out the full extent of her husband's philandering, the audience is at least reassured that "nothing really happened" by portraying the other woman as an manipulative, slightly crazy bitch (her emotional breakdown is physical melodrama at its rawest, her quivering hands and exaggerated posturing reminiscent of some weird hybrid between avant-garde theater and pili puppets). But I think Pai deliberately leaves some odd... ellipses... that suggest that much more happened between the two. (I mean, we know he's not afraid to go there, he just can't depict it as explicitly as he my want to.) There's this weird scene where they both return to their shared hotel room after an afternoon on the golf course. He's all disheveled, putting on a shirt and tie, and she's just stepping out of the shower. "It's all your fault that we wasted an afternoon playing golf, getting all hot and sweaty," she says, almost deadpan, dressed in a full-length pink mumu, but the statement is so erotically charged, it's hard to imagine they were only golfing all afternoon. Suuure... Yet, all we see for the rest of the film is Huacheng constantly rebuffing her. He doesn't seem particularly torn about the situation -- he's THERE, after all, and lied to his wife to be there -- but he has to make some big show out of not succumbing for the sake of fidelity to his wife, which is exactly the pretense that brings out the other woman's bitchiness. I don't know... it's probably just sloppy scriptwriting. Either way, neither Huacheng, his spineless wife, nor his old flame are characters particuarly worth caring much about, so good riddance to the lot of them.
In the third segment, Jinde, the steadfast husband, falls victim to a barslut scheme's due to his own naivete. Again, it's a classic setup, though Pai takes his sweet time getting to the punchline. What's screwed up about this story is how Jinde's philandering is, like Huacheng's, totally downplayed. When his wife puzzles over why her husband, who never had to work overtime before, is suddenly nowhere to be found, she is told by her own father that it's "okay" as long as he's only "working overtime" once in a while. When he returns, she is instructed not to ask any questions, and all will be fine. Not a word of protest, but total acquiescence... this is how a dutiful wife is expected to behave for the sake of maintaining his face and a harmonious marriage, which is ultimately more important. Right. No wonder the wife has to deal with a freaking four-year-old peeing in the middle of the living room (yes, this is actually depicted in the movie). She may get her kicks out of smacking a few kids around, but that's just an illusion of power and she really has no say whatsoever in this story. Surely, this is something Sylvia Chang was responding to in her 1996 remake of this film...
So I gave this a rather negative review the first time I saw it. Now, a few years later, I'm able to forgive many of its stylistic faults (the terrible overdubbing, for example, surely an outcome of Pai's Italian film school training) though I'm still unable to stomach the narrative problems. Indeed, my favorite actors in this movie have nothing to do with the plot at all, and instead appear in cameos of, well, themselves -- or themselves as stars. Ko Chun-hsiung, Ou Wei, and Yao Su-rong are named in the opening credits. Audiences were surely watching out for them, and when they do show up, they're flipping hilarious because they end up being caricatures of their star personas (like how Neil Patrick Harris is not credited as playing "himself," but as "Neil Patrick Harris" in Harold and Kumar because it's a total construction). However, it's not as clear in this film if Ko and Ou appear as completely fictitious characters, or if they're playing characters based on their cumulative reputations. Ko plays the part of another swinging bachelor who shares an apartment with Zhang, very much in line with how he his image has been constructed in films and tabloids. The part here he plays is supposed to be funny or something because Zhang shunts one of his unwanted girls onto Ko, and Ko complains about always having to help him "wipe his ass," though Ko is the more good-looking and popular actor of the two of them.
Ou Wei appears as another hotel patron who intercepts the barslut on her way out, recognizing her as a former victim. "Who the hell are you?" she asks, feigning ignorance at first. The line resonates rather cruelly with his situation then, as in now. Much like the actor who has died hundreds of times on screen, but whose name nobody can remember in Sylvia Chang's remake, Ou Wei has so often been relegated to mere supporting roles, mainly because he doesn't look clean or handsome enough to be the star -- especially not in the Taiwanese film industry at the time! He wouldn't really get a chance to star until later (and even then, he's very much an anti-hero), and by then, it was pretty much too late. Ou Wei would be dead a few years later, his reputation in the annals of Chinese-language film history never fully established, despite talent that was greater than the sum of his bit parts.
Also, a note on the print -- this seems to be the only reissue of a Bai Jingrui film that preserved the original widescreen format. It's a real shame (downright embarrassment, I'd sa) that Hoker (豪客), the production company, wasn't able to attend to this most minimal of considerations when reissuing the rest of Pai's back catalog.
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