[Netflix] Tigertail: touching portrait of a Taiwanese exiled to New York in the 1970s

Director Alan Yang very gently recounts the journey of a man over several decades and who, at the end of his life, takes stock of the key moments in his life and of his failures. A moving film to discover on Netflix!

|Copyright Netflix

Here is a film that might silence the bad tongues who say that you can’t find an auteur film on Netflix. To those we will offer to watch Tigertaithe director’s film Alan Yang | who participated in particular in the very nice series Master of None A few years ago or still Parks and Recreation.

Tigertail

The film is inspired by the story of Alan Yang’s own father in which the director tells the childhood but especially the adult life of a man and who made the wrong choices in his life. Especially when the boy, now a young adult, decided to leave Taiwan and a job at the factory to go live in America with his boss’ daughter, leaving his beloved behind without any explanation. So began for him a life of frustration, regret and resentment, far from the American dream he imagined.
Now retired and alone, Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma), reunites with his daughter Angela (Christine Ko), with whom he cannot communicate and decides to return to the places of his youth as if to try to exorcise the past.

With a certain grace and a rather careful staging, the director also shows a lot of sensitivity through the composition of his characters, describing fragile, lost, uprooted beings who are trying to rebuild themselves. If the central character is a man, women are very present in this rather touching story, full of melancholy and sadness.

Despite a small feeling of déjà vu and a construction that is a little too linear at times, the film shows through the portrait of this man filled with regret enough qualities to be appreciated at its true value.