Letterboxd Review by Voc_17 ★★★½
Chu Yen-Ping was Taiwan’s factory comedy filmmaker, he shat out films quickly with an extreme tonal whiplash between scenes of broad comedy, action and pathos, he is a junk food artist and it’s hard to make a case for him as being an effective filmmaker dramatically. However, I’m going to try and make a case for this film and by extension him because I kind of liked this movie a decent amount. Hsu Pu-Liao was a popular stage comic who Chu wanted to place within a Chaplin type narrative, although whole Chaplin’s tramp was very poor he was never as downright miserable as Hsu is in this. The film will go especially early on from a broad but amusing comic setpiece to the stronger dose of pathos possible within a single cut, it’s bizarre but after awhile I felt it kind of working. The tone may drastically shift from scene to scene but the face of the lead stays the same and not to get too sentimental but that’s what happens in life, something light can be suddenly taken away by the darkest happenings. Chu kind of taps into something emotionally for once in his career, I like that there’s just a desperate sense of struggle to be happy as nothing goes right for lead and up entil almost the ending his smile feels forced. Hsu Pu-Liao is a very charming performer and while I would’ve liked to see him envoled in more comic set-pieces that really use film to their advantage, his stage bound set pieces in this are quite cool and he’s a great pantomime artist. His romance with a blind woman who he spends a great deal of the movie raising money for, while obviously lifted from Chaplin’s City Lights, I felt was quite tenderly potrayed and I like how this really feels from the gutter, no glamorous locations here. I’m not sure Chu intended the jarring tonal shifts here to work in the way they do, or if it was just a case of throwing everything into the pot, but they do create a picture of the extremes of life and with a charming lead actor, hey, it moved me. Also, considering that the two tones are semi effectively brought together in the bizarre yet strangly effective boxing sequence, maybe he does know what he’s doing after all.

The Clown (1980).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 14 min
Size: 	2.33 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	4 275 kb/s
BPP: 	0.413
Audio
#1:   2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/DC405E1C64347DB/The_Clown_(1980).mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:Chinese, English hardsubbed

Many thanks to @Bjarne for this copy

The post Yen-Ping Chu, Yang-Ming Tsai – The Clown (1980) first appeared on Cinema of the World.