The quiet of a sleepy Taiwanese fishing village is interrupted one day in the 1960s by American tanks rumbling into town for joint training exercises with the Taiwanese military. The village’s inhabitants are first unnerved, then curious and then quickly become jaundiced as they take to stealing whatever they can from the invaders. The film’s protagonist (played by filmmaker Lin Cheng-sheng) is a former teacher eager to capitalize on the US presence, and the film traces his disillusionment. (The HFA featured a retrospective of Lin’s films last year.) Although there is much more onscreen sound and fury than in A Borrowed Life, Wu’s camera retains that film’s long takes and its steady and subtle attention to landscape. The tone of Buddha Bless America is gently comic much of the time, but underneath the humor are sharp (and timely) observations about cultural colonialism and the uneasy relations between a local population and an occupying force.