The puppeteer

The Puppeteer presents an interesting solution to the usual problem of the ‘and then and then and then’ dreariness of biographical pictures: this film is a long filmed interview with its hero interspersed with dramatized scenes from his life. The choice of scenes is interesting: it is not the most dramatic moments of his life which are dramatized, but the trivial: what it was like to put on puppet shows in the mountains before the war, how a mistress tested his faithfulness. They are long takes taken with a still camera from middle distance in natural light: they look like retro photographs, dark and somewhat blurry. The reality they describe seems a little blurry, too: people dressed differently (in the first scene they still wear queues), lived in large extended family households, in houses arranged around the central ancestor shrine, exchanged children for marriage and labor, parents’ authority over them was absolute. But the food was the same: in one scene the hero eats pork-knuckle noodles with his mistress; in Taipei transformed beyond anything anyone could ever have imagined back in 1934, I was eating them from a street-side vendor only a couple years ago. They were delicious.