Il maestro burattinaio

This movie is truely a puppet show: If I remember correctly the camery doesn't move even once - just a dozen or so cuts, each depicting one scene with a different set-up, each scene remaining for several minutes. Persons move through the scenerey: sometimes you see someone doing something, sometimes you even recognize what he is doing. After a while you realize the same persons appear in different scenes. Even later you start picking up the story. Yes, there is a story, even though noone explains anything, hardly any word is said (was there a word at all? Maybe even not). all your concentration is needed to find out what is going on. The audience finds itself in the situation of an ethnographer meeting for the first time some unknown group of people, trying to find out something about them. The scenes, which initially seemed to keep on forever suddenly appear to change much too fast - you might be able to understand more, if they kept on longer.

Once you get into this movie, it is pure gold. If you want action, even one minute of The Puppetmaster will bore you to death.

Perhaps Asian movies there are considered slow. But inside this slow-motion film you can feel the intensity of the human emotions in every look.

The intensity of every shoot makes this movie an extraordinary experience for everybody.

The plot of the film is something more than a tribute of a losing tradition, the puppets art, is about the relationships between an old man an his adopted niece. How the affection between they could break absurd but ingrain traditions from hundreds of years ago.

The incredible sequences of puppets are only an addition in the incredible beauty of the Taiwanese landscape.The entire movie in general has a flavour that makes it tasty from start to finish.

Life in Taiwan during and shortly after the Japanese occupation (1895-1945) as seen by re-enacting episodes from the life of a hand puppeteer. The film includes selections from several puppet plays and some Chinese Opera scenes as well.

Episodic and can be hard to follow for those without a knowledge of Taiwan history and customs. Beautifully shot with very nice sets, costumes and exteriors.

As a film detailing a period of history through the experiences of a family, THE PUPPETMASTER is very similar to HEIMAT. By using an acting troupe as the narrative and thematic focus of this history, it resembles THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS and FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE. Stylistically though, it couldn't be further apart. Unlike the character drama of the first, the elegant, complicated camerawork of the second or the intense emotionalism of the last, THE PUPPETMASTER is a rigidly formal work, breathtaking to look at, baffling to understand, eventually oppressive to watch.

The main narrative concerns the life story of the title character, up until the end of World War II - his story parallels the occupation of his country, Taiwan, by Japan. Interspersed between highly stylised and composed dramatisations of his life are interviews with the man himself as an old man.

Although Hao's other films share a similar aesthetic (including the marvellous A CITY OF SADNESS), it is the puppetmaster's profession that shape the look of the film. He puts on elaborate puppet shows; and in the same way his little theatre looks like a cinema screen, Hao's film is less a fluid narrative than a series of tableaux vivants. I think there are only two camera movements in the entire film. Each scene is elaborately composed - decor overwhelms the characters, with masses of pillars, frames and characters dwarfing any individuality. There are hardly any close-ups, and such is the visual clutter, and the sombre lighting it is often shot through, that it's often hard to make out which character is which. The direction is highly distanced and artificial, letting these characters, like rats in a trap, blindly blunder, unable to find an exit.

Any perceived objectivity in this style is deliberately illusory, and it is clear that the protagonist is not the only puppetmaster. Hao's strings are rarely unfelt, and behind the domestic traumas and bildungsroman narrative is a bitter denunciation of the effects of colonialism, and rigid hierarchical societies. Much of the entrapment of environment is linked to the traditional repressions of Taiwanese family life, with its absurd rituals of family nomenclature, masculine honour, and arranged marriages, which allow free rein to domestic brutality and the corruption of decency.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the Taiwanese become such willing quislings, deference and anonymity being a familiar part of everyday life. The puupetmaster is deeply implicated in this, being a prominent, and officially valued member of cultural propagandist groups. Much of the local and symbolic detail was shamefully alien to me, so I obviously lost much, and maybe Li's plays - generous, enthralling excerpts of which appear at crucial points of the film - have a hidden subversion lost to the ignorant viewer.

What isn't lost is a remarkable visual sensibility which often speaks for characters who can't. The historical saga is compelling, and the puppetmaster's life is often moving. The recourse to storytelling and an almost scientific faith in superstition and magic gives the film a feel of magic realism. It's just that by the second half of the film, you're throwing things at your TV, just to get the blasted screen to move.

I wonder if the people who write rave reviews of this movie have actually ever sat down and watched it? I wonder if the director of this film has ever watched any movies himself--except his own. Everything about it is wrong--except maybe the actors are ok--but not very interesting or involving to watch.