Mahjong

A screwball farce about the manipulation and lies baked into modern prosperity, Mahjong centers on a trendy nightspot in Taipei, where Yang orchestrates the elaborate comings and goings of a raft of disparate characters, including a couple of mob enforcers (one played by Yi Yi’s Wu Nien-Jen, co-writer of That Day, on the Beach and Taipei Story), an American escort service madam, and a young Frenchwoman (Virginie Ledoyen) looking for the British entrepreneur who wooed her in London. Yang’s penultimate feature is as much a wry critique of the many dark crime-comedies of its decade as it is a jaundiced love letter to late ’90s Taipei—a city where languages, classes, and ideologies collide at a dizzying rate, and the pursuit of happiness is a brutal zero-sum game. An NYFF34 Main Slate selection. A Janus Films release.

The new 4K restoration was undertaken by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute with the support of Kaili Peng and Kailidoscope Pictures.