The Time to Live and the Time to Die

A family crosses from the mainland to Taiwan in 1947 believing the move is temporary. The film then follows the next twenty years, from the son Ah-hsiao's childhood into his adolescence. First the father dies, then the mother, then the grandmother; in between, the boy brawls in the street, plays pool, writes a letter to a girl. What interests the film is not the history of political exile but the way that exile quietly moves into a house and stays. The grandmother keeps setting out to find the road back to the mainland and keeps ending up on the same bridge. It is the film's bitterest joke. The form is built from long takes and a static camera. Deaths mostly happen behind a door or at the edge of the frame, and the camera does not move in. Grief is therefore not narrated; it is left standing in the room. Hou Hsiao-hsien wrote it out of his own childhood, and the Chinese title, Tongnian Wangshi, means exactly that: things past in childhood. Hou's own narration opens the film. The production belongs to the stretch when he turned an impressionistic style back on his own past, the most productive years of Taiwanese New Cinema. The cast includes Yu An-shun, Tien Feng and Mei Fang. Who it is for: viewers who want patient autobiographical cinema told through daily detail. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for plot and turning points; here almost nothing happens except time passing.