Hong-Chi Lee stars as Pin-Jui a free-spirited yet impoverished young Taiwanese factory worker, in Tigertail.Chen Hsiang Liu/Netflix/Netflix
- Tigertail
- Written and directed by Alan Yang
- Starring Tzi Ma, Kunjue Li and Christine Ko
- Classification PG; 91 minutes
So much of Tigertail begs unfair comparisons. Alan Yang’s new family drama is, like last year’s indie hit The Farewell, that rare kind of film: a largely foreign-language movie produced by a major Hollywood production company (A24 for The Farewell, Netflix for Tigertail). Similar to 2018′s box-office bonanza Crazy Rich Asians, Tigertail features a predominantly Asian cast, another rarity for a mainstream production, and a story line untangling the roots of familial discord. And taking a page from Disney’s (eventually?) forthcoming remake of Mulan, Tigertail stars Tzi Ma as a stoic patriarch. Heck, the steely-eyed Ma also pops up in The Farewell, and in nearly the same kind of role.
But no matter how many hmmm-wait-a-minute similarities we can attempt to tally across these truly disparate productions, Tigertail cannot, and should not, simply be lumped in to some crassly defined mega-genre as “Asian-American family drama.” Yang’s deeply personal, imaginative work is very much its own creation, just as much as The Farewell. Or any other movie whose producers knew that audiences are hungry for diverse stories. That representation matters as much as story and style and performance. All of which, by the way, Tigertail has in spades.
Loosely – “very loosely,” according to Yang – based on the life of the director’s own father, Tigertail is a tight and deeply felt meditation on memory and responsibility. Flitting between the rural fields and dangerous factories of Taiwan in the 1950s, the grimy and garbage-strewn streets of New York in the 70s and the blandly-manicured suburban lawns of the city’s suburbs today, the film subtly pieces together the early hopes and broken dreams of family man Grover (Ma in later years, Hong-Chi Lee as a younger man).
Now divorced and struggling to identify with his two adult children, especially daughter Angela (Christine Ko), Grover finds himself recalling his youth, and the decisions and mistakes that led him to leave his home, marry a woman he never really knew, let alone loved (Fiona Fu, and Kunjue Li in flashbacks), and turn into an emotional shell of a father, barely able to muster the energy to engage his daughter in the politest of conversation.
Generational-divide drama and coming-to-America tensions are not especially novel concepts, and Tigertail initially feels like Yang might just be replaying, and then extending, the best notes of his small-screen work, including Netflix’s Master of None and Apple TV+'s recent Little America. But once the director establishes a rhythm to his feature, it’s clear that Yang’s vision is both familiar and singular. We might know what to expect from the beats of Grover’s story, but Tigertail is always twisting them in just a subtle enough fashion – eyes trained on how to make the personal universal, and vice versa.
For the flashback scenes, for instance, Yang and his cinematographer Nigel Bluck (True Detective) treat Grover’s remembrances as half-remembered dreams – the scenes are all shot on 16 millimetre, the camera hand-held and the colours deeply saturated and intense. Once Grover is pulled back into the reality of his drab day-to-day existence – he lives alone, his mother just died and it seems it takes his entire core strength to shuffle from one end of the room to the other – we’re viewing everything through the lens of a digital camera: modern and clean, sure, but sucked of energy. Just as Grover is asking himself to imagine what could have been if he had only done things differently, Yang is asking us to wonder whether Grover’s recollections are exactly as imagined.
The performances are strong across the film, although this is firmly Ma’s show. A veteran character actor, Ma has been quietly supporting his brighter, flashier colleagues for decades now – but it’s something of a wonder to see what he can do when given the burden of carrying a scene. He can tightly coil his lips to suggest unbearable contempt as easily as he can let loose the subtlest of smiles, betraying a happiness that Grover feels should be bottled up as deeply as possible.
The film trips on one familiar family-drama trope toward the end – a father-daughter journey to heal festering wounds. But as the moment is taken from Yang’s own life – again, “loosely” – it’s hard to fault the instinct too much. Tigertail pays as much attention to the authenticity of personal history as it does the fictional. We shouldn’t have trouble confusing it with anything else.
Tigertail is available to stream on Netflix starting April 10.
Plan your screen time with the weekly What to Watch newsletter, with film, TV and streaming reviews and more. Sign up today.