Taipan Chin stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray to mull it all over for a while; suddenly she raised her head to grin maliciously into the dressing room mirror of the Nuits de Paris ballroom.
On screen we see her, Jolin Chin: the tired smile raising the corners of her lips, worse than crying. She is wrapped in a tight-fitting black chiffon chih pao shot through everywhere with gold thread. She has fashioned her sleek black hair into an enormous bun on the top of her head. The once famed Jade Goddess of Mercy of Shanghai taxi dancers has begun her last day on the job, hypnotized by memories of a career that has covered over 20 years.
The movie is almost a one-woman show for actress Yao Wei, who provides a spectacular performance as a ballroom-queen-of-Shanghai-turned-taipan (boss or director) of the severely scaled-down Nuits de Paris ballroom in the Taipei of the mid-1950s.
Jolin Chin is a street-smart, sophisticated woman facing a mid-life crisis. But in her background, the younger, tender Jolin peeps out still, from the cold mask of heavy makeup and social pretensions.
It is easily the most talked about movie of the year. One reason is certainly that the original novel on which the movie is based has made its own impact over all its years in print-since the 1950s. When the news came out that The Last Night of Taipan Chin was to be adapted for a movie of the same name, it became the focus of movie circle gossip as well as its 30-year-plus covey of readership.
Pai Hsien-yung, who helped to rewrite his own work into a script for the movie Jade Love and also worked on the play Wandering in A Garden, Waking From A Dream, has steered the whole project from its beginning. He says that all the other difficulties and misunderstandings he met during the planning—deciding on a director, writing the script, etc.—do not compare with the difficulty he had in casting for the lead. Pai was particular about the actress for the role of Taipan Chin because he had kept the book in his head for years, and now putting together a script for the movie, he had her pictured firmly in his mind—as both vulnerable, single-minded Jolin in Shanghai, and as older Taipan Chin, weathered now by the storms of life. Yao is both women.
Men came and went in Jolin Chin's life, leaving behind them only traces of remembered pain. The first wounds came early. Only a few years after she entered the dancers' world, she was already the most popular of all. Her graceful dancing skills and a certain unattached coolness carried all before her. But Jolin remembered it as 20 years in a sea of bitterness. Her sobriquet, Jade Goddess of Mercy, suggests the living environment that turned Jolin into a hard-boiled, practiced coquette-captain of dancers.
But, how vividly she now remembered her first love, before all the hurt: a moony boy who said "I don't dance" while sitting right at the dance floor, eyes shyly looking into her own. An inexperienced boy who moved her to tears on her first night with him. That rich family boy whose father forced him to leave her despite the fact that Jolin was expecting their baby.
She remembered, also, the pain when her own mother and brother grabbed her by the arms and forced the strong herb potion through her hurt lips to abort the child of love. Most of all, she remembered the courage she had gathered to return, and to once again become the number one dance queen of Shanghai.
Jolin was never to be the same again. The hard, coquettish Jade Goddess of Mercy now descended on the secular world, determined to bewilder, not be bewildered. She expressed contempt now for her "sisters" who grabbed any "old man with one leg in the grave" to get out of the ballroom and get married. She was going for money and an independent life.
Jolin's subsequent involvement with a young seaman was, nevertheless, a struggle between renewed love and her desire for fortune. This clash reached a psychological climax when, one day, Jolin decided to buy her sailor new clothes, only to find her old ballroom rival presiding behind the store counter, gracefully manipulating a sandalwood fan. How Jolin had despised her years ago when Lilac married old Pan, the textile king. Lilac, now eyeing the young man at Jolin's side, greeted her: "Oh, my dear Jade Goddess of Mercy, are you still out there on the Sea of Bitterness redeeming poor souls?"
But later when Old Man Chen announced, "I have a house at Yang mingshan and a couple of small factories in Southeast Asia. My two grown children now have their own shares of my wealth. What do you say?" —Taipan Chin said yes.
Jolin left her sailor without telling him she was leaving.
In the last night at Nuits de Paris, Jolin twice revealed her true feelings. She was first furious, then concerned for one of the young girls who had gotten pregnant. Jolin took off her diamond ring: "The money will last at least a year and a half. Don't you ever come back here after that, either. This place is not for you." Following this incident, she approached a young man sitting near the dance floor, alone. "I don't dance," he said shyly. "No matter, It's a waltz. I will keep time for you. Come on," Jolin was suddenly overwhelmed with first-love -memories.
It is more proper to consider the movie faithful to the novel's account of Jolin Chin's love and life, than to see it as the director's account of Taipan Chin's last night at the dance hall. One cannot help comparing the Jolin Chin of the novel and the screenplay, however.
At this final point, the Jolin Chin in the novel would probably have uttered a few choice four-letter words and walked out of the Nuits de Paris into her planned world. In an extension of the movie, the tender Jolin Chin would keep dancing, dancing, reliving old memories.