Film Forum

Taiwan, 1985
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
Written by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chu T’ien-wen
Starring Yu An-shen, Tien Feng
Approx. 138 min. DCP Courtesy Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute.

“The strands of intimate and historical memory twist together in this delicate, haunted drama, from 1986, in which the director Hou Hsiao-hsien conjures his reminiscences of childhood and adolescence in a remote Taiwan village in the nineteen-forties and fifties. There, the young Hsiao-yen lives with his family (including his ailing father and his increasingly loopy grandmother), shadowed by the story of his father’s 1947 departure from mainland China on the eve of the revolution. When his father dies, the boy grows up (a moment dramatized brilliantly by Hou in a single jolting cut) and turns into a quietly wild adolescent of the streets. The ambient menace of war and the militarized culture lend a hectic tint to daily life and give rise to Hsiao-yen’s inner turmoil (the teen-ager even considers going to a military academy). The older generation’s devastated lives and poignant secrets provide the silently roiling undertones of Hou’s sharply drawn and tender yet nostalgia-free recollections.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Reviews

“The style of this family saga is spare and simple but eloquence itself.”
 – Derek Malcolm, The Guardian