El maestro de marionetas

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.

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.

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.

I hate to say it, since I liked The Assassin, Millennium Mambo, and (especially) A City of Sadness, but The Puppetmaster is sort of a misfire by Hsiao-Hsien Hou's standards. He makes a biopic of sorts that also sometimes feels like a documentary, since the central figure gives interviews throughout the film, but the scenes between these interviews are so lifeless. There might be some point being made with the approach here, but it just feels borderline disrespectful to have Li Tian-lu tell a story about his past coherently and compellingly, and then for it to cut to (sometimes cutting the narration off in the process) a dramatized scene that farts around and doesn't do much. I'll stress that I said it feels borderline disrespectful, not that it is disrespectful, because I'd like to hope there's some reason for this approach I just didn't pick up on. But I didn't like how it felt, and that's something I can't help but take away from watching this film just this once.

It's a little more interesting nearer the end, and the interview segments are good. It's the first 45 or so minutes that are the most torturously slow. The film is visually distinctive, even if I didn't really like how most of it looked and was edited. But it's all just a bit baffling, enough for me to suspect it might be a Hsiao-Hsien Hou misfire, even if it's more likely something I didn't get, just based on the strengths of his other works.

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.