General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Mahjong (麻将) (1996 film)

Mahjong (麻將; also romanized Majiang) is a 1996 Taiwanese black comedy film directed by Edward Yang (楊德昌), the second installment of what the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute calls his "New Taipei Trilogy," following A Confucian Confusion (獨立時代, 1994).¹ Set in a Taipei of big money, big dreams, and big cons, it follows a gang of young swindlers and a lovelorn French teenager whose paths collide in the city's nightlife.² The film competed at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival and later received a restoration that returned it to international circulation in the 2020s.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1996¹
Runtime / format	121 minutes, 35mm, color (the Hong Kong festival archive lists 119 minutes)¹^•³
Languages	Mandarin, Taiwanese, English, and French¹
Screenplay	Edward Yang⁵^•¹³
Principal cast	Virginie Ledoyen, Tang Congsheng, Ke Yulun, Chang Chen, Wang Qizan, Nick Erickson⁶
Festival honors	Competed for the Golden Bear at Berlin 1996; received a Berlinale honorable mention; 1996 Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actor³^•¹
Place in Yang's career	His penultimate feature, before Yi Yi (2000)⁶

Spoilers

Story and characters

The film centers on four young men who form a con-artist crew in Taipei, gathered like the four players at a mahjong table. Red Fish (紅魚, played by Tang Tsung-sheng) is the leader; Hong Kong (香港, Chang Chen) seduces young women; Little Buddha (小活佛, Wang Qizan) poses as a feng shui master to swindle the superstitious; and the naive Luen-luen (綸綸, Ke Yulun) serves as translator.³ Their dream is to get rich quick, and their schemes target naive foreigners and gullible believers.¹^•³

Into their orbit comes Marthe (Virginie Ledoyen), an 18-year-old Parisienne who has come to Taipei looking for her British boyfriend Marcus, whom she finds in the arms of his Chinese lover.⁵ The gang plans to trick her into working for a madam, but the plan goes wrong, and Marthe, hiding from her boyfriend, begins a relationship with Luen-luen, the one crew member with scruples.¹^•⁵^•² Meanwhile Red Fish has problems of his own: his father, a businessman with enormous debts, has disappeared, and mobsters come to collect.⁵^•² Metacritic's summary puts the father's debt at $100 million owed to Taipei's underworld.⁷

The supporting cast includes the Hong Kong-born actress Carrie Ng and the scriptwriter and filmmaker Wu Nien-jen (director of A Borrowed Life), who plays one of two mob enforcers.⁵^•⁸

Style and themes

Yang lets his protagonists meet "like the stones in a game of Mahjong: each encounter means a new possibility, each step can bring profit or loss," as the Rotterdam festival program put it.⁵ The film is a sprawling tragicomedy in which languages, classes, and ideologies collide at a rapid rate, with at least a third of the dialogue in English.⁸^•⁷ Its primary setting is a trendy night spot around which mob enforcers, an American escort-service madam, and a lovelorn Frenchwoman circulate.⁸

Thematically, the film extends the satirical analysis of modern society Yang began in A Confucian Confusion, now with an international dimension: a world ruled by money in which values are confused and people are lost.³ The French newspaper Le Monde described it as Yang's film of globalization, where the cosmopolitanism of the characters and the mingling of Mandarin with international pidgin answer to flows of dirty money, the monetization of social relations, and the collapse of family structures.⁹ Red Fish has made a mantra of his fugitive father's advice: "Do not make sentiment" ("Ne pas faire de sentiment").⁹

Critics have noted the film's unusually bleak view of human nature for Yang. The New Zealand International Film Festival's notes called it possibly his most divided and divisive film, mixing comic, touching, ironic, and horrific moods, and observed that even the most sympathetic character, Marthe, has ignoble motives.⁶ The Chicago Tribune praised Yang's evocation of "a world of pervasive greed and brutality, where conventional moral values have gone dangerously awry."⁷ On Metacritic the film holds a Metascore of 72, based on 7 critic reviews.⁷ Despite the darkness, the Hong Kong festival notes credit the film with what it calls the purest and most romantic ending in Yang's work.³

Production and place in Yang's career

Edward Yang (1947–2007) was one of the pillars of the Taiwanese New Wave that emerged in the early 1980s; he worked as a computer engineer before filmmaking and left seven features made over roughly twenty years.⁹ Mahjong was produced by his company Atom Films & Theatre, with production design by Yu Wei-yen and cinematography by Li Yixu and Li Longyu.⁵^•⁶ According to Yang himself, the film drew on a childhood friend who became a billionaire by building an information and communication empire designed to "tell people what they want."¹⁰

The film premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1996.³ Sources describe its Berlin recognition differently: the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute records a Berlinale honorable mention,¹ while a Nagoya University thesis on Yang's career states that the film won the Alfred Bauer Award,¹¹ and the Hong Kong festival archive adds a Nantes festival city prize.³ At home, the film won the 1996 Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actor.¹

Mahjong was Yang's penultimate feature.⁶ Alert viewers can spot characters from it occupying the background of Yi Yi (2000), his final film.⁶

Restoration and availability

A newly restored Mahjong has screened in recent years at festivals and cinematheques, including the Austin Film Society's Essential Cinema series on Edward Yang and the 2024 San Diego Asian Film Festival.⁴^•¹² Janus Films holds the film for North American theatrical booking, listing it at 120 minutes in a 1.85:1 DCP.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026