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Effects come naturally to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he places his camera on a locomotive lumbering out of a tunnel and gets an expanding iris—the connection to the cradle of the medium is sealed by the sight of a sheet flapping in the wind, "they're going to show a movie." Boy (Wang Ching-Wen) and girl (Hsin Shu-Fen), out of the mining provinces and into Taipei, work and studies. He toils at a print shop before fumbling lunchbox deliveries, she becomes a seamstress' assistant, afterward they meet at the local theater. (Their heads are silhouetted in the foreground as a wuxia epic unfolds on the flickering screen, cf. Ray's The World of Apu, a reverse view has the projector's shaft of light like a spec in the darkness.) They're separated when he's drafted off to mainland shores and the delayed punch of loneliness arrives in the barracks. "Fate.You can't fight it." Dislocation in nation, family and couple, further developments of the emotional density of the master shot. The paterfamilias back home lets the lad follow his own path ("If you want to be an ox, there will always be a plow for you"), his gift of a "100% waterproof" wristwatch ends up at the bottom of a full glass next to his son's homework. How Green Was My Valley figures in the dream-memory, miners riding the cart out of the pit toward blinding light, slow-motion for the crying wife in the wake of an accident. "The gentleman of faith holds on to his youth." A hundred tragic severities are revealed by Hou, whose touch nevertheless remains as light and wry as the grandfather (Li Tien-lu) who gives the callow soldier a firecracker send-off and later pauses his rumination on potatoes versus ginseng to breathe in the lushness of rural Taiwan. Cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-Bing.
--- Fernando F. Croce |