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The shifts of history, the lens of youth. The discombobulation of a new land, from Chinese mainland to Taiwanese backwater, just "some memories" by Hou Hsiao-hsien arranged into an art of images and movements. Mother (Mei-Feng) labors to keep rituals alive but tradition has been decentralized, the sickly father (Tien Feng) slumps on a bamboo chair while the grandmother (Tang Ru-Yun) wanders the terrain in search of Mekong Bridge. Meanwhile the filmmaker's callow surrogate (You Anshun) enjoys the carefree games of childhood, the weight of dislocation is not fully felt until the indolence of adolescence. News from home filter lightly through letters and radio announcements (chatter of "patriotic and glorious sacrifice" is background noise for a snack of popsicles), shooting marbles give way to pool hall scuffles, before anyone notices the late Forties have become the early Sixties. A sense of disintegration darkens the bucolic languor yet the camera maintains a tranquil vibrancy throughout, the smallest detail (gradations of sunlight caught between scrims, stamps drying on a glass pane) is infused with the shimmer of remembrance. Transience and mortality are the motifs, as evidenced in the English title's echoes of Ecclesiastes and Remarque, and Hou can be remarkably subtle and forthright in his contemplation: Granny's faint voice as she calls out for the boy is what connects her to the following shot of kids at play, a power shortage has the family stumbling in the gloom until the lights suddenly come back to reveal the lifeless patriarch. A song and a recollection in the rain ("Life without you is darkness"), wild guavas on the trail to point up the kinship with Ray's Pather Panchali. So it goes, serenely preparing for a devastating composition of loss and guilt. "You'll find a way when you're older..." Kurosawa shares many of its harmonies in Rhapsody in August. Cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-Bing.
--- Fernando F. Croce |