By Jake Coyle

Oh, to be the other “Tiger” on Netflix. Alan Yang’s “Tigertail” is either blessed to arrive in the stormy wake of “Tiger King,” or doomed to be the other “Tiger” title Netflix users accidentally select when they’re looking for the tabloid story of a zoo owner, not a patient and personal immigrant tale.

Yang’s film, he has said, sprang from both the upbringing of his Taiwanese father and his own imagination. It’s a gentle and pensive intergenerational story about love and leaving home, about how an immigrant father’s experiences might not be as distant from his first-generation daughter’s as he imagines.

“Tigertail,” which debuted on Netflix on Friday, is the directorial debut of Yang, a writer-producer on “Parks & Recreation” and a co-creator of “Master of None.” On the latter, with Aziz Ansari, Yang often stretched sitcom-like comedy in unpredictable arthouse directions.

In “Tigertail,” he has dispensed with the comic setup and gone straight for the arthouse, striving for the kind of lyricism of Wong Kar-wai or the elliptical beauty of Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Yang’s film, heartfelt but inert, only briefly touches on anything like the work of those filmmakers. But it’s an earnest stab at a drifting kind of memory piece that crosses generational divides, from Taiwan to New York.

The movie’s most vibrant images come early. It opens on a young boy running through shining rice fields in rural Taiwan. The boy, Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma), grows up to be a factory worker. He reconnects with a girl he met in those fields, who becomes his first love. Their scenes together, dancing, are handsome. But when PinJui is given the opportunity to go to America, it comes with the bargain of an arranged marriage, to a woman named Zhenzhen (Fiona Fu).

These scenes are overlaid with contemporary ones of an older Pin-Jui and his grown daughter, Angela (Christine Ko). She is navigating her own heartbreak but finds her stoic father indifferent to her pain. His reflections of his past play out as a withheld history that, if he relents, could bond them.

“Tigertail” comes off more as an idea of an arthouse movie than one propelled by its own volition. While the 1960s-set scenes have a warm glow, the modern-day ones are flat. We’ve been blessed lately with films that chronicle multi-generational tales, straddling Asia and America, like last year’s “The Farewell” (in which Ma also co-starred) and the upcoming Sundance winner “Minari.” “Tigertail” doesn’t rise to the level of those movies, but it contributes to a heartening trend.

“Tigertail,” a Netflix release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for some thematic elements, language, smoking and brief sensuality. Running time: 91 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Choice

Four years ago, when “Master of None” co-creator Alan Yang started writing a film loosely based on his Taiwanese father, Hollywood wasn’t exactly clamoring for Asian American stories. “Crazy Rich Asians” had not made over $200 million, “The Farewell” was only a “This American Life” episode and “Parasite” hadn’t yet swept the Oscars. It was a long shot that “Tigertail” would even get made, let alone with a partner like “Netflix,” where it will be available to stream Friday.

“This was a crazy, crazy choice on my part to write a movie with no white people in it,” said Yang from his home in Los Angeles. “This is the only movie I know that starts in Taiwan, segues into Mandarin and ends in English.”

But he carried on, winnowing down the 250-page odyssey to something more focused: A story about a Taiwanese man named Pin-Jui who leaves his great love for an arranged marriage and a new life in America. It splits between his life as a young man in the 1960s and the present day with his now grown daughter.

Yang has described it as his, “Fever dream of my dad’s stories melded with some Wong Kar-Wai and some Hou Hsiao-Hsien.”

Thanks to “Master of None,” Yang had a pre-existing relationship with Ted Sarandos, the streaming giant’s chief content officer. So while it was easy to get the script to him, anything beyond a read was hardly a guarantee. “It’s an art house-inflected movie that’s almost entirely in Mandarin and Taiwanese and it features no Marvel stars,” Yang said with a laugh about its marketability.

But Sarandos didn’t need convincing: He loved the script and that was that. The movie was a go.

“I’m incredibly grateful to Netflix for taking a chance and allowing us to make the movie in the way we saw fit,” Yang said. That included shooting the past on 16mm film to give it a dreamier feel and the present on digital.

“The first thing Alan told me was his dad was a doctor,” Ma said. “Already I know this is a huge departure. (Pin-Jui) is common man. This is a common man’s journey.” Ma knew just who this character was regardless. “This character is modeled after my brother,” Ma said. His brother was an architect in Hong Kong before their family immigrated to the United States, where his degree wasn’t recognized.

“Basically, in the 60s there were two businesses we could get into as Asian Americans, Chinese Americans in particular: Restaurants and laundry,” Ma said. “So we bought a restaurant on Staten Island and he became the cook.”

When they moved, Ma remembers a distinct change in his brother who was once so vibrant and full of life.

Actress Christine Ko, who plays his grown daughter Angela in the present-day scenes, had a similarly personal connection to the material.

“It felt like therapy for me, two years of therapy,” Ko said. “I grew up in a home that was a little more strict and wasn’t as emotionally forthcoming with discussions of feelings and all that so I felt like I could really relate to the distance that Angela has with her father.” (AP)