Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang’s status as a legendary director is primarily built on the back of a handful of primarily dramatic films: The Terrorizers (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi: A One and a Two (2000). A Confucian Confusion breaks this pattern simply by virtue of being a comedy. Yet much of Yang’s primary artistic concerns - the rapidly changing shape of Taiwanese life in the 20th century, generational conflicts, friction between the modern and the traditional - are present here.

The film follows a group of twenty-ish Taipei City-dwellers in their chaotic inner-city lives: Molly is the head of a PR company and her fiancé thinks she’s having an affair; her sister is a chat-show host; her sister’s husband is the author of a novel which places a reborn Confucius in modern-day Taiwan and awakens in horror to a contemporary society supposedly built in part on his philosophy.

Ambitious, searching, and yearning, A Confucian Confusion is as light and lyrical as any of Yang’s masterworks.

A new digital restoration by The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute through a grant from Edward Yang’s widow Kaili Peng.

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