In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Filmmaking is a complex process and you’d think it would take a long time to learn how to do it well. Yet sometimes a director’s first film is his or her best, or at least among their best. Think about it: did Orson Welles ever direct a better film than Citizen Kane? Or Jean-Luc Godard than Breathless? Some other first films that I would rate as at least among the director’s best: Night of the Living Dead (George Romero), Ex Machina (Alex Garland), and Ratcatcher (Lynn Ramsay.
Also Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang). OK, maybe it’s tied with Smoke (1995), but for a guy who has known both arthouse and commercial success Chan Is Missing rates as a very strong and distinctive first film. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always interesting, and what good is a first film that doesn’t take some risks? It was also groundbreaking in being about Chinese-Americans told through their own perspectives that offered a realistic (and non-touristic) view of life in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The story is pretty simple. Two cab drivers, Jo (Wood Moy, a stage actor with only five movie credits for his career) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi, another stage actor with similar number of movie credits), who attempt to rent a hack license through an intermediary, Chan Hung. But Chan disappears with their money, and they try to track him down and get it back.
In the process, Jo worries that Chan may have gotten mixed up in disputes between the Chinese loyal to mainland China and those loyal to Taiwan. He and Steve also meet a number of local characters, each of whom has a different impression of Chan. This aspect makes him a stand-in for what Wang wanted to convey about Chinese Americans more generally: they are a rich and diverse populations of individuals and can’t be reduced to just one characteristic or type.
Style, not story, is the real reason for watching Chan Is Missing. It’s shot with many references to film noir while also ironically salting in some Charlie Chan-like aphorisms. It’s often very funny (wait until you hear the college student try to explain the complexities of cross-cultural communication) and seldom does what you would expect—which is one reason why it’s so great.
Chan Is Missing won Best Experimental/Independent Film at the 1982 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards and was added to the National Film Registry in 1995. It is also generally acknowledged as the first Asian American narrative feature to get theatrical distribution in the United States. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1124
Technical details: 75 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin (warning: non-English dialogue is not always subtitled).
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray
Extras: “Making-of” documentary by Debbie Lum (director of Try Harder! a documentary about students at the predominantly Asian Lowell High in San Francisco); conversations between Wayne Wang and critic Hua Hsu, Wayne and Ang Lee, and Wan and programmer Dennis Lim, the film’s trailer, and a booklet with an essay by Oliver Wang.
