The Cabbie

Within the first few minutes of The Cabbie we have heard the confessions of dozens of passengers, from past lives as singing dinosaurs to murder. There's direct integration of text and motion, our eponymous protagonist not only addresses us directly in soliloquy but points out what he's thinking. We've met his father negotiating compensation for a leg, rightly pointing out that there's a difference between an 80-year-old one and that of a player on the women's national team. We've met his mother the coroner, seen his parents courtship including his mother's unsuccessful suitors, chaperoned by the pickled and the crispy dead. His sister, the chemist, raising vehicles from the dead, tripping the alchemical fantastic, and prone to Kafkaesque musings.

There's a long tradition in cinema of taking taxis. The automobile as personal fortress is as intrinsic to the American psyche as apple pie or institutional racism. The adage to 'write what you know' is strengthened by the ease of access to the ephemeral interactions, the yellow-cab confessional, liminality summoned with a whistle. Our shared understanding as an audience of the temporary intimacy of carriage has given us Taxi Driver, Collateral, served as a jumping off point for high concepts like Night Drive and A Taxi of Coldness, and now this.

Establishing tone early, it's relentless in its quirks. Though deeply rooted in Taiwanese culture, traditions, idiosyncracies, I found myself thinking of Moby Dick as a family dinner became a lecture about the protein purine and its connection to gout. There's a line between dead-pan and the flattened effect of isolation, a tickle for Travis Bickle. I think of the literary not only because of a reference to the fate of Gregor Samsa but a subtitle of "damned unfilial". Its playfulness is evident, a chorus of rude mechanicals who would do justice to a full cooked breakfast, special effects that would do Romero proud, a junction guarded by a small god of crashes.

When the gangster says that people like him cruise the streets he's making a boast, but our cabbie is as attuned to the rhythms of tarmacadam as any shaman to the seasons. A chase through a tunnel agains the flow of traffic has notes of Ronin, of The Transporter, but within the context of an episodic black comedy the level of desparation that drives that contraflow chaos is palpable. The road and its recklessness are no strangers to film, but people love and hate their transport in different ways. For every Hell Drivers there's a Herbie. I mention two older films (lets ignore the remake) as there's a distinct old-fashionedness to it all. A speeding taxi removing an attractive lady's dress could have come from Carry On Cabby if the Lord Chamberlain (or their local council equivalent) would have allowed. That and the reference to "a huge pair of knickers".

Our protagonist’s steed has more actual silver (or at least metallic bumper trim) than the Lone Ranger's, and while Ah Di is a VTi trim it's not as tricked out as Besson's Taxi. Not that it isn't thrown around with similar abandon.

There's car(nage) aplenty. Diagrams of ditch disasters. Ford Lasers, Datsun Sunnys, Toyota Coronas, second generation taxi drivers in sixth generation Honda Civic sedans. The policewomen share orange pauldrons with some of Tatooine's stormtroopers but their aim (and Cupid's!) is a lot better. A montage in our looping montage soundtracked by retro surf guitar had shades of Tarantino. Dollars to doughnuts The Cabbie is sweeter (and lighter) than Death Proof, though both are circular or at least cyclic in their narratives. The chapter headings and recursive chronology are similar, but tonally the relationship between Ah Quan/Su Da-Chuan (Chu Chung-Heng) and his car is less of Titane than Bumblebee. The car is central to the love story here, but it's catalyst not Casanova. Karma when it arrives has its light on.

Screening as part of the 2022 Taiwan Film Festival in Edinburgh, The Cabbie is one of several older films given a chance to be seen again. First released in 2000, it now feels like a charming period film, from chunky mobile phones to fax machines to cars that look like the ones I learned to drive in.

For directors Chang Hwa-Kun and Chen Yi-Wen it's one of only a few features, Chang hasn't other credits in that role and Chen has only directed one other film since. I believe at least one (if not both) play roles within an ensemble cast assembled around our protagonist. Writer Su Chao-Bin may be better known for 2014's The Crossing (and it sequel) or Reign Of Assassins, but all three and their cast sketch out something that coheres from a series of often blackly comic vignettes into an entertaining, if perhaps somewhat melodramatic, whole.

Eye For Film saw it on a crisp (and recent) digital transfer, but audiences will get the chance to see it on a bigger screen at the Festival and it will reward them for doing so. Its willingness to play with form, including a sequence fast forwarded by our protagonist as he recounts it is part of a merrily maudlin tone. The Cabbie should be hailed for its quality. Catch it if you can.