Alan Yang’s ‘Tigertail’ on Netflix Is a Tragic, Beautiful Love Story

Netflix released several new original films this Friday, but if you’re going to watch only one, make it Tigertail. The feature directorial debut from Alan Yang—who co-created Master of None alongside Aziz Ansari—is not an autobiography, but it is, according to Yang’s director’s statement, based on his imagining of his father’s immigration story. It’s a sweeping, beautiful, and ultimately tragic love story that spans decades. It’s a story about missed opportunities, lifetimes wasted and finding meaning in new generations. And it’s absolutely worth your time.

We first meet this fictionalized version of Yang’s father—named Pin-Jui—as a young boy living with his grandparents in the rice fields in Taiwan. Pin-Jui explains via voiceover that his father died when he was young, and his mother couldn’t afford to care for him, so she temporarily left him with his grandparents while she looked for work.

The film opens with a note at the start of the film that Mandarin subtitles are in white, while Tawainese subtitles are in brackets. If you don’t understand why that’s significant when you first see it, you will soon. This is Taiwan in the 1950s when the Chinese Nationalist Party was arresting “political dissidents” left and right. Even if you don’t know that history, you will understand there is tension between mainland China and Taiwan when soldiers search Pin-Jui’s grandmother’s home and chastise her for not speaking Mandarin.

The film cuts back and forth between Pin-Jui in the present day—now an aging father (played by Tzi Ma) who is unable to connect to his grown daughter (Christine Ko)—and flashbacks of Pin-Jui’s life in Taiwan. As a young man (now played by Hong-Chi Lee), Pin-Jui falls in love with a free-spirited woman named Yuan (Yo-Hsing Fang). It’s the 1960s now, and the two share cigarettes, listen to Otis Redding and dine and dash at restaurants they can’t afford. But poverty feels less romantic when Pin-Jui’s mother gets injured at their shared factory job. Pin-Jui resolves to give her a better life, and he decides the way to do this is to marry a girl named Zhenzhen (Kunjue Li), whom he has nothing in common with, but whose father is willing to pay for them to move to America.

As great an actor as Ma is in the present-day sequences, these flashback scenes are just irresistible. The way Yang recreates Taiwan in the ’60s, and then New York City in ’70s, is intoxicating and I never wanted to leave. Romantics will hold out hope that Pin-Jui and Yuan will make it work still, somehow—because Yang has cleverly designed the film that way—but in the end, Pin-Jui made the wrong decision. It’s a choice that altered his life forever, and one that he has to learn to live with. And he does, eventually.

While some of the time jumps and editing choices are jarring, by the film’s end, I was in tears. Anyone who has had the profound, bittersweet experience of tracing the steps of your parent’s childhood will be similarly moved. It was a pleasure to watch Tigertail and feel something via art again. It was a nice reminder that great films are still coming out. For now, anyhow.

Watch Tigertail on Netflix