Review: Tigertail

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Alan Yang's "Tigertail" is all at once a captivating immigration tale coupled with a moving story about intergenerational disconnect and a wistful tale of lost loves and lost time. It manages to cram all of this into a brief 91 minutes, and while the picture might feel as if a large part of its story were left on the cutting room floor, its short running time simultaneously drives home the concept that time - especially those times in our lives that count most - are fleeting.

Yang is primarily known for his association with such TV shows as "Parks and Recreation" and "Masters of None," both of which are unseen by me, and "Tigertail" is technically his directorial debut in feature filmmaking. Stylistically, he borrows from several Asian masters, most notably the great Wong Kar Wai, but if you're aiming to emulate, that's a pretty great standard to attempt to live up to.

The film is set during several different time periods. It starts off during the 1950s when Taiwan was under the rule of China's Kuomintang nationalist party. A young boy named Grover (Zhi-Hao Yang) plays in a stunningly gorgeous field close to where his grandmother keeps him hidden in her house. His father died when he was young and his mother is in China because she was unable to find work in Taiwan. Grover meets a young girl named Yuan (Hai-Yin Tsi) and the two become close friends.

Some years later, Grover (Hong-Chi Lee) is a good-looking young man hoping to escape from Taiwan and move to the United States, taking along his mother - who has since returned and works in a factory - with him. The man who operates his mother's factory makes him a proposition - if he marries the factory boss's daughter, Zhenzhen (Kunjue Li), he'll give them the money to go to America.

To complicate matters, Yuan (Yo-Hsing Fan) shows back up and the two begin a romance that involves some antics - a Chinese version of dine and dash - and a lovely moment when the young couple sings Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" under the moonlight by the water. Another effective musical moment involves Grover dancing with Yuan to a Chinese surf rock song that is later coupled with a moment in which he decides to part with the record for various reasons.  However, Grover makes his choice between Yuan and America, leading him to forever consider her the "girl who got away."

Much of the film is set in the present as Grover has become a silent, non-emotive older man (Tzi Ma) who is divorced from Zhenzhen, who couldn't take his lack of affection any longer and has moved on with her life, and somewhat estranged from his grown daughter, Angela (Christine Ko), a hard worker who has relationship problems of her own. Angela doesn't know her father's past, and a reckoning between the two of them leads to a journey in the film's final scenes that is among its finest sequences.

"Tigertail" may flit by like a dream - but its brevity makes it all the more poignant. Occasionally, an epic story can successfully be told in a short span of time - by squeezing an entire life into a brief film, we are reminded of how much of a blip one's life truly is. Some have criticized the picture for the same reason, saying it's almost too brief, but I'd disagree. This is an impressive debut and Netflix's best offering for 2020 so far.