I only managed to catch one film in the Cinemateca Yang season. The Terrorist, which I dimly remembered having seen on MUBI once upon a time, is a beautifully layered work. A novelist leaves her husband (in order to write?) for a former lover. The husband starts to construct links between the novel she publishes and real life. It leads him to a seedy underground world, where a photographer, an extortionist pimp and his female accomplice operate. She is the bait which allows them to steal from rich men. Where do the lines between the fictional and the real cross, all of which is occurring within the context of the fictional, which the film is? And who are the terrorist, to whom the accomplice is connected, as the photographer discovers. The levels of story within story are almost Borgesian. It’s the kind of astute, literate, playful film that Anglo-Saxon culture tends to shy away from, unless there’s some kind of sentimental kernel, something which Yang decidedly resists.
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