A Borrowed Life · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a calendar on the wall of the miner's house. The father reads his own life off it in Japanese imperial reign years. His children, at school that same week, are learning to count those same days from the founding of a Chinese republic. Nobody in the film stops to argue about this. It sits there, a clerical discrepancy inside one small household, and Wu Nien-jen lets it carry the entire wound.

Deleuze has a name for what that calendar is doing, and it's worth borrowing, because the obvious description of this film is wrong. The obvious description is that the father is a man stuck in the past. He isn't. In Deleuze's late writing on cinema, the films that matter most are the ones where time stops being the thing you use to measure movement and starts appearing on its own account. One of his names for that is a series, or peaks of present: two presents that exclude each other, running at the same moment, in the same room. The father is not remembering the emperor's years. He is living in them, at the dinner table, while his son at that table lives in the Republican count. And the film never flashes back. It has no dated memory anywhere in it. That absence is what turns the calendar from nostalgia into a direct image of time. There is nothing back there to return to. There are only two incompatible nows sharing a house.

Notice where the camera stands. It keeps a middle distance from the father and almost never comes in close on his face. We get him from across a room, or through a doorway, the way a child gets an adult: you learn his moods long before you learn his reasons. Deleuze calls an image like this a dicisign, a clumsy word for something simple. The shot isn't a view of a man; it's a view of somebody's view of him. The framing has an owner. Because Wu is that son, the owned look is also the film's ethics. This is what Deleuze meant by free indirect discourse in cinema: the director neither narrates his character from outside nor dissolves into him. The two see together. It explains the film's tact. A man who was frequently unreasonable and sometimes a poor husband is neither excused nor diagnosed, because a boy in a doorway can't do either.

In the cinema Deleuze calls the movement-image, which is most cinema, a person perceives a situation and acts, and the acting changes the situation. Nothing in this house works that way. Which empire owned your childhood, which language the state will conduct itself in, what the coal is doing inside your chest: no one at that table can act on any of it. So the film gives up the machinery of action and becomes watching and listening. Deleuze's word for whoever is left in that position is voyant, a seer. Not a hero, a witness. The father is one. The son is one. The television is the clearest case. It arrives, becomes the household hearth, and begins talking Mandarin over dinner every night, which is how state language policy gets into a living room. You can't argue with a newsreader. You sit there and eat while it happens to you.

That's also why scenes are shaped the way they are. Wu lets them begin before anything dramatic is happening and keeps them running after it stops. Deleuze took the phrase temps mort, dead time, from the Italians, and it misdescribes what it does here. The dead stretches are where the film keeps its evidence. History doesn't enter a family as an event. It enters as an evening. The nearest thing in film theory is André Bazin's old wager: a shot that keeps an event whole, with the room around it, leaves the viewer free to judge, while cutting the event into pieces has judged it for you already. The Taiwan New Cinema built its whole style on that wager, against the varnished studio realism of the 1970s, and this is one of its plainest statements.

Then the thing this film does better than almost anything else, which is to make sound carry sovereignty. Hokkien is what the family speaks. Japanese is what the father feels in, and what he understands as civilized. Mandarin comes from school, the newsreader, officialdom. His children acquire it. He declines to. Deleuze's term for an image that loses its self-evidence and has to be deciphered is the lectosign, the readable image. What you read here isn't a symbol in the frame. It's which language a sentence arrives in. That is the historical event, occurring inside a line of dialogue about dinner. Wu had already co-written the device into A City of Sadness, where Japanese, Taiwanese, Mandarin and Shanghainese collide inside one household; here he narrows it to a single man whose interior life is only fully available in the language his country would prefer he forget.

The locations work in layers too. Wu shot in the real pit country of the Keelung valley, and by 1995 that country was already a ruin, the coal industry killed a decade earlier by disasters and cheap imported fuel. The period setting wasn't built. It was inherited, standing derelict and available. So a shot of the 1960s is materially also a shot of the wreck the 1960s left behind. Deleuze calls that a stratigraphic image, one you read the way you read rock. You don't need the word to feel it. The hillsides look posthumous.

The father's body keeps its own strata. Dust accumulates. The ellipses work the way pneumoconiosis works: between one scene and the next nothing visible happens, and then years have gone by inside a man's lungs. Deleuze describes this shape as a line of slope, an irreversible downward gradient, and it's the only thing in the film with real momentum. The last stretch belongs to oxygen and hospital machinery that keeps a miner breathing without letting him live.

Which leaves the political question, and here Deleuze earns his keep. He took a line from Paul Klee: the people are missing. His claim was that modern political cinema can't address a people that already exists and knows itself. It has to work in the gap where one is absent. Look at what this father belongs to. An empire that left in 1945 and never came back for him. A republic he never accepted and whose language he never learned. An island whose name for itself was, in 1995, eight years out from martial law and still an open argument. There's no existing people this man is a member of. The film doesn't solve that. It puts him on screen unresolved and makes the absence the subject.

The craft debts are unusually traceable, because Wu wrote most of them himself. Dust in the Wind came out of his own adolescence in this same mining district, and A Borrowed Life reuses its exact grammar: the branch-line train, the static wide that keeps figures small against slag and mountain fog, the ellipsis that skips the dramatic event and holds the aftermath. What he changes is the seat. Dust in the Wind watches from the departing son. This one stays at the table with the father. The episodic build, joined by tone rather than plot, and dialogue written in Taiwanese vernacular instead of dubbed Mandarin, with the job and the wage and the uniform doing the characterization, is the method he developed adapting Huang Chun-ming for The Sandwich Man. The Puppetmaster supplied the memoir architecture: a Japanese-era laboring life recounted in Taiwanese, time indexed by reign years, chronology carried by testimony in unbroken frontal takes rather than by montage. Hill of No Return had already shown how to film a pit mouth as a real workplace instead of a period backdrop. And Edward Yang's Taipei Story is why Tsai Chen-nan works: Yang had proven a pop singer's unschooled bearing could hold a New Cinema lead, and Tsai brings a Taiwanese balladeer's ease with exactly the songs this father's life is made of.

So the lineage runs backward into a body of work Wu helped build as a writer, then used as a director. What he added, first time out, is easy to state and hard to do. He located a colonial history in a man's taste. Not in incidents, in preferences: the songs, the sports loyalties, the calendar, the sense of what counts as civilized. That's the invention. Colonialism as personality, filmed from the distance at which a child actually sees his father.

Watch it again and watch three things: the calendar, the doorways, and which language each sentence arrives in. Then the title. Duo-sang is Taiwanese phonetics wrapped around the Japanese word for father. The most intimate word this family owns came secondhand, from the empire that owned them. That's the borrowed life, and it's worth asking while the credits run whose it is. The father's, lived out in a country that never fit? Or the son's, who had to borrow his father's to make this.