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The I Vitelloni beachfront makes an appearance but the kinship is with Ozu's early college comedies, "all the youthful days" as a fond and exasperating anagram of experience and remembrance. The backwater village is recalled in pearly tones, there's the elderly scorekeeper at the pool hall who can no longer see the billiard balls, the patriarch resting placidly with a dented forehead, an armada of fishing boats lining the undulating horizon. Teenagers vegetate and argue, on a specially productive day they take time off from brawling with rival gangs to sneak into an English-dubbed screening of Rocco and His Brothers. Life in the big city is rapid and noisy and full of vacant spaces, new family members turn up unannounced and letters inform of dead ones. Between factory work and military service, the pensive loner (Doze Niu) bashfully falls for his shady neighbor's mistress (Lin Hsiao-ling). Finding an insect flattened between the pages of his notebook, he's struck by a sepia recollection of a serpent in a baseball field. "How can you remember so clearly?" Hou Hsiao-hsien already with the perfect long-shot for memories, close enough to vividly caress these moments yet far enough to feel them evaporating into eternity. Tricked with promises of dirty movies, the fellows wander into a dilapidated building and discover a different form of cinema, a widescreen window on a cement wall that opens like a camera obscura into a panoramic glimpse of their future. Grammar exercises on an open patio and drunken revelries into the night, a languid panning shot that fills an empty wicker chair with a faded daydream, Eliot's "fragments shored against my ruins" one and all. Teeming crowds and disembodied cries mix at the close, Hou's films barely have to raise their voices to be devastating. With Chang Shih, Tou Chung-hua, Chang Chun-fang, and Yang Li-yin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |