Film Analysis: Monga

Monga (2010) is a gangster film set in the Monga district of Taipei, Taiwan in the 1980’s. It was written by Tseng Li-Ting and Doze Niu, and it was also directed by Doze Niu. It stars Ethan Juan and Mark Chao.

The film’s protagonist is Mosquito (Chao), a young high school student who is a constant victim of bullying. One day, he decides that he has had enough and decides to fight back against a gang member who steals part of his lunch. His actions are noticed by a rival gang, the Temple Front, and they offer him a spot in their group. Mosquito accepts this offer and joins them for a chance to finally experience the friendship and brotherhood his life has always been missing. Unfortunately, as the turf wars between gangs over the Monga district violently escalate, Mosquito’s brother Monk (Juan) ends up betraying the rest of the group to settle a personal vendetta against their leader. Mosquito ends up paying the ultimate price for his naivete in putting brotherhood before all other things.

Monga’s themes and storytelling lend themselves to Tiawan’s turbulent history with violence, colonialism, and gang warfare. As a country that has spent a lot of its history being occupied by other countries, it has a confused, muddled identity on the international stage, particularly when it comes to its cinema. Appropriately, Monga’s writing has at its center a character whose ultimate problem is that he is lost. He has no father or father-figure to guide him as he comes of age, he has no friends, and he has no ambitions in life. The themes of brotherhood and belonging are central to the story and his character’s arc.

Monga also has a recurring theme of disassociating acts of violence with the psychological nature of violence. It starts as a means of self-defense, but quickly becomes glorified as a way for brothers to bond with each other and to reclaim power in their volatile lives. Mosquito is a gentle person by nature, but gets invested in the violence of gang culture. There is a scene where he has a conversation with a prostitute, Ning, and asks almost condescendingly why a nice woman like her would choose that line of work. She simply responds “Why did you become a gangster?” It helps to convey just how deeply Mosquito has gotten into gang culture, and how much it has warped his moral compass.

Monga also has interesting choices made in its cinematographic style and production design. It uses a lot of wide angle shots with deep focus to capture the city environments and all of its details. Its colours start off relatively muted and white at the start, reflecting the innocence and static nature of the characters at that point in time.

As the story progresses, the colour grading becomes much more vivid, especially in the primary colours. In particular, there is a lot of attention paid to the colour yellow. In some cases, the yellows are brought out and emphasized from their cool surroundings.

In other cases, entire environments are vibrantly yellow, as can be seen in the following clip. This is a brief snippet from a scene after Mosquito's first involvement in a gang fight. He is lounging with the rest of his Temple Front brothers, bonding over personal stories and life aspirations.

This may be because in Chinese culture, yellow symbolizes both royalty and masculinity. This is a film that glorifies masculinity, brotherhood, and violence, as well as the lifestyle of power that one can gain through these things. Although Taiwan is not China, its culture is undoubtedly shaped from many years of occupation by the latter, and perhaps this choice of colour was made for that reason.