Dear Reader: I'm assuming you would never read a monograph about a film you haven't seen.
Page contents: A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) / Miss Julie (1951) / Black Narcissus (1947) / The French Dispatch (2021) / Fox and his Friends (1975) / The Worst Person in the World (2021) / In the Valley of Elah (2007) / Oleanna (1994) / Maborosi (1995)
A Time to Live and A Time to Die — (1985) — Hou
Rumble young man, rumble
This film is about the simple moments of happiness that a child collects while growing up and the inevitable disintegration of family. At the end, the house has been overrun by the three remaining males who live their lives like slightly feral bachelors before it is vacated and sold. The film opens with a final stroll through the empty house, our hero is assailed by the flood of memories that comes racing back; stopping at his father’s study he imagines him still sitting at his desk and the story begins. Even more impressive, as a child he would go out and play after school and his grandmother would be sent to fetch him home—across the vista of countless, forgotten years, he conjures up the voice of his grandmother calling him home for supper one last time.
These recollections are drawn from two time periods (essentially) when Hsaio (our hero) was growing up in a suburb of Fengshan, a small town on the southern tip of the island of Taiwan. At the outset, he is too old to be seen wandering around hand in hand with his grandmother and instead scampers off to play with his mates, so the great guava adventure when his grandmother and he set off to find their family shrine was a flashback to an earlier period when he still could believe their ancestral village (in mainland China) was just down the road and over a bridge.
The first time period one is set during the last months of primary school and the summer vacation. A radio broadcast refers to the Second Taiwan Strait crisis where Taiwan and China were openly shooting down each other’s planes, so that would make him about eleven years old there. In an early sequence, the lads and Hsaio innocently gather round and admire some electrical workers juicing up a house in the neighbourhood and watch all the copper wire falling from the sky. When enough has accumulated; they do snatch and grab then race off like bandits. They convert it into cash at the local scrap dealer then he has some spinning tops lathed at a lumber yard. Ever resourceful, Hsaio adds the metal pins in the bottom himself to make them last longer. Huilan (his big sister) mentions her hooligan brother has natural abilities that allow him to coast through life. During tests in school, he supplies the answers to the slower boys around him (in exchange for a small stipend). Although his mother no longer dusts for fingerprints when five dollars disappears from her purse, she simply shreds another fan against his backside.
His father has severe asthma and we see him wheezing every so often. When feeling fatigued, he simply leans his head back, slumps in his chair, and takes a nap. His bed is just a few steps removed from his desk, it’s almost as if the father lives quarantined from the rest of the family. His fragile health is emphasized by the fact the wall behind him is always open, a few absent minded shuffles in his chair and he would fall right out of the house and disappear.
Hsaio seems to inherit some of his father’s distance; He loves to sit and day dream beside the big window in the living room. He always chooses a window desk in school. There is a visual motif of Hsaio always looking at the world around him and the film is studded with his observed moments. During the cat-watch scene he notices the way cigarette smoke (in a non-smoking house) curls around the ceiling light. He notices how the rain always empties the street of children. His sister observes the world around her with the same intensity as he does, but she immediately applies everything into practicable knowledge. The first time Hsaio seems to do this is during the second section when he learns some broad has skipped out on a debt to a grieving family and dropped an I.O.U. in a funeral dowry. He immediately saddles up and goes a knocking, but standing in her living room and looking at the broken down shack she lives in … he gives her a pass. This is first indication in the film that he may not be destined to become a gangster; a real thug would have put the screws to her and forced her to pay regardless of the cruel burden for her.
His grandmother is already a little ditzy at the beginning of the film which nicely complements his parent’s political disorientation. Over time, the grandmother confounds her daily quest for the family shrine with the memory of the day she and Hsaio found an abandoned fruit grove together. In her later excursions (the lady loves to tramp) notice how she always returns home with a sack full of guavas. The father’s trip to Taiwan was essentially a job opportunity in another province and not permanent exile to a hostile country. The situation in China is like a bad rash that one day will simply go away and they will all return home.
This political limbo leaves one generation without a past and the other generation without a future; the generational clash becomes evident when the country comes to a complete stand still with the passing of the Vice-President (and inept war hero) Chen Cheng. The older generation stands piously at attention during the official state broadcast of his funeral; whereas, their children horse around in the background and couldn’t care less. This juvenile disrespect also extends to education, during a disciplinary meeting with the principal; Hsaio has the nerve to swipe a paper awl from his desktop right out from under his nose.
Although Hsaio says the main recollections are about his father, I think there are far more observations about his big sister and life’s unfairness towards her. He watches as she quietly becomes the family matriarch, taking on additional duties like representing the family during parent/teacher conferences, or chaperoning a visit between a woman and a potential suitor. In the first part, Huilan is already set to be married off and in the second part, her departure from the house is only signaled when she brings over her husband for some wedding mementoes in the backyard.
During an intimate mother and daughter talk, her mother reveals that she hid her first pregnancy from her grandmother and only returned home for her second one. At the birth of her younger sister, her grandmother stopped helping her for cranking out two duds in a row (boys are the only viable option) and when an unwanted male preemie became available in the district, the family immediately snatched him up. Her baby sister died shortly afterwards from a tragic case of botulism after visiting a shrine; although reading between the lines, the grandmother may have poisoned her to free up more resources for the boy.
This cruelty towards women is emphasized in a scene where her mother gently prods the oldest son forward, but Huilan is positioned between them and her mother talks through her daughter at him as if she wasn’t there. Listening to all this flowery encouragement aimed at Huilan, her grandmother finally has to put her foot down and voice her disapproval about this nonsense: girls do a little cooking; a little cleaning; and help bring in the harvest, but that’s it. A little exasperated, she turns to granny and explains that she is not telling her to follow all her heart’s desires, but encouraging her (adopted) brother to scramble after his. Ironic since she is the eldest (respect should be naturally accrue to her) and brightest child in the family but her amazing future was set aside for her far more academically challenged brothers.
It was painfully evident I was missing things during scenes where a large Chinese ideogram from a sign would peek out from behind a character: was that suggesting something relevant? I was also drawing complete blanks from the inserts of written text. His grandmother always enunciates his name as “Aha” instead of “Ah-how” which is the source of some amusement amongst his friends and the origin of his nickname. [Children can particularly lethal in zeroing in on body parts that rhyme with one’s name, yeah, I’m referring to you, Dolores.] I can’t quite make out if this was her rural mainland Chinese accent or an affectionate diminutive on her part; older family members also inflect his name (for instance “Ah-how-a”) at certain occasions.
The film left me with a list of lingering questions; for instance, there’s a scene where Hsaio intercepts and reads a letter and I can only guess this was a warning from the school telling his parents he was in danger of being expelled? A political purge on the island is obliquely referred to in the first section and the increasingly bloody clashes between the two street gangs in the second section implicitly suggest US imperialism simply exploits the island as a pawn, a forward military base to launder money to state-side corporations, and an endless opportunity to throw barricades against the Chinese with Realpolitik.
I think the essential shot in the film is when Hsaio catches his mother’s keen during the cat-watch sequence; he doesn’t quite register this depth of feeling yet, but the camera lingers on his face. At the beginning of the film, his grandmother calls for him, but he is too busy playing marbles with his friends and ignores her. There is an echo to this later in the film when his mother is going through a difficult period and some late night runners have been dispatched to bring him to a street brawl. He lends his “samurai” sword for the fight, but chooses to remain at home. In coming of age films, one rarely sees a character actually become an adult on-screen. Before returning to the living room, Hsaio composes himself in the alcove, which is a mirror image of the same shot earlier; except this time, rather than turned away and looking over his shoulder as a small child trying to fathom that emotional outburst, he now stares directly ahead, understanding what losing the love and devotion of someone close to you actually means and when he returns to the living room, he is no longer a child.
Likes? Usually a (long) establishing shot is coupled with an additional one that pushes forward into the scene and centers the action; this wonderful structural one-two device repeats through-out the film. There is a strong rectilinear feel inside the Japanese style-house from the frames within the windows and sliding wall screens. Each room is an enclosure that suggests a warm intimacy that can be pulled around you like a blanket but also a living space where secrets are paper-thin and loud, annoying, chopping from the kitchen can be heard through-out the house. The mosquito nets neatly segment the rooms into sections at night. There is a wonderful shot of Hsaio seeing his mother working by lamplight and he works his way across these ghostly barriers to talk to her. Conversely, emotional distance can be created by partially or completely shutting a screen. The sound seems to have been added with imperfect dubbing during post-production; certain sound effects are overlarge and at times, voices can be spatially removed their image. The musical motif always kicks in to remind the audience we are looking at memories.
The Fengshan of his childhood is a magical place where one can flag down any passing rickshaw and say: “take me home” and they will always return you safely to your door step—only once in the film do they cart someone away. In the second half, the rickety bamboo chair is always placed in the foreground and background during important family events, as if their father was still sitting there watching over them. There is almost a subliminal use of circles and rings in the film (the school parking lot and the pots and ladles in the kitchen) foreshadowing change. The balance wheel on his mother’s sewing machine always marks her place in the home. His grandmother has a delightful hobby of making tinsel covered coins that once minted go directly into her celestial bank account; she has amassed quite a bag full of money here on earth and she will be a very rich woman when she finally arrives in heaven.
To finish up, fate here is always a glancing blow, but one that knocks you completely off course. His father bumped into an old pal from school that lead to the lucky promotion in Taiwan. The girl of his dreams accepts his declaration of love but tells him they should hold off hooking up until after he enters university which gives him added incentive to academically apply himself, saving him from either a miserable future in the military and acquiring a violent skill set that would come in handy later as a gangster. Her gentle promise of love alters the course of his life.
A Time to Live and A Time to Die — ★★★
Page contents: A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) / Miss Julie (1951) / Black Narcissus (1947) / The French Dispatch (2021) / Fox and his Friends (1975) / The Worst Person in the World (2021) / In the Valley of Elah (2007) / Oleanna (1994) / Maborosi (1995)
A Time to Live and A Time to Die — (1985) — Hou
Rumble young man, rumble
This film is about the simple moments of happiness that a child collects while growing up and the inevitable disintegration of family. At the end, the house has been overrun by the three remaining males who live their lives like slightly feral bachelors before it is vacated and sold. The film opens with a final stroll through the empty house, our hero is assailed by the flood of memories that comes racing back; stopping at his father’s study he imagines him still sitting at his desk and the story begins. Even more impressive, as a child he would go out and play after school and his grandmother would be sent to fetch him home—across the vista of countless, forgotten years, he conjures up the voice of his grandmother calling him home for supper one last time.
These recollections are drawn from two time periods (essentially) when Hsaio (our hero) was growing up in a suburb of Fengshan, a small town on the southern tip of the island of Taiwan. At the outset, he is too old to be seen wandering around hand in hand with his grandmother and instead scampers off to play with his mates, so the great guava adventure when his grandmother and he set off to find their family shrine was a flashback to an earlier period when he still could believe their ancestral village (in mainland China) was just down the road and over a bridge.
The first time period one is set during the last months of primary school and the summer vacation. A radio broadcast refers to the Second Taiwan Strait crisis where Taiwan and China were openly shooting down each other’s planes, so that would make him about eleven years old there. In an early sequence, the lads and Hsaio innocently gather round and admire some electrical workers juicing up a house in the neighbourhood and watch all the copper wire falling from the sky. When enough has accumulated; they do snatch and grab then race off like bandits. They convert it into cash at the local scrap dealer then he has some spinning tops lathed at a lumber yard. Ever resourceful, Hsaio adds the metal pins in the bottom himself to make them last longer. Huilan (his big sister) mentions her hooligan brother has natural abilities that allow him to coast through life. During tests in school, he supplies the answers to the slower boys around him (in exchange for a small stipend). Although his mother no longer dusts for fingerprints when five dollars disappears from her purse, she simply shreds another fan against his backside.
His father has severe asthma and we see him wheezing every so often. When feeling fatigued, he simply leans his head back, slumps in his chair, and takes a nap. His bed is just a few steps removed from his desk, it’s almost as if the father lives quarantined from the rest of the family. His fragile health is emphasized by the fact the wall behind him is always open, a few absent minded shuffles in his chair and he would fall right out of the house and disappear.
Hsaio seems to inherit some of his father’s distance; He loves to sit and day dream beside the big window in the living room. He always chooses a window desk in school. There is a visual motif of Hsaio always looking at the world around him and the film is studded with his observed moments. During the cat-watch scene he notices the way cigarette smoke (in a non-smoking house) curls around the ceiling light. He notices how the rain always empties the street of children. His sister observes the world around her with the same intensity as he does, but she immediately applies everything into practicable knowledge. The first time Hsaio seems to do this is during the second section when he learns some broad has skipped out on a debt to a grieving family and dropped an I.O.U. in a funeral dowry. He immediately saddles up and goes a knocking, but standing in her living room and looking at the broken down shack she lives in … he gives her a pass. This is first indication in the film that he may not be destined to become a gangster; a real thug would have put the screws to her and forced her to pay regardless of the cruel burden for her.
His grandmother is already a little ditzy at the beginning of the film which nicely complements his parent’s political disorientation. Over time, the grandmother confounds her daily quest for the family shrine with the memory of the day she and Hsaio found an abandoned fruit grove together. In her later excursions (the lady loves to tramp) notice how she always returns home with a sack full of guavas. The father’s trip to Taiwan was essentially a job opportunity in another province and not permanent exile to a hostile country. The situation in China is like a bad rash that one day will simply go away and they will all return home.
This political limbo leaves one generation without a past and the other generation without a future; the generational clash becomes evident when the country comes to a complete stand still with the passing of the Vice-President (and inept war hero) Chen Cheng. The older generation stands piously at attention during the official state broadcast of his funeral; whereas, their children horse around in the background and couldn’t care less. This juvenile disrespect also extends to education, during a disciplinary meeting with the principal; Hsaio has the nerve to swipe a paper awl from his desktop right out from under his nose.
Although Hsaio says the main recollections are about his father, I think there are far more observations about his big sister and life’s unfairness towards her. He watches as she quietly becomes the family matriarch, taking on additional duties like representing the family during parent/teacher conferences, or chaperoning a visit between a woman and a potential suitor. In the first part, Huilan is already set to be married off and in the second part, her departure from the house is only signaled when she brings over her husband for some wedding mementoes in the backyard.
During an intimate mother and daughter talk, her mother reveals that she hid her first pregnancy from her grandmother and only returned home for her second one. At the birth of her younger sister, her grandmother stopped helping her for cranking out two duds in a row (boys are the only viable option) and when an unwanted male preemie became available in the district, the family immediately snatched him up. Her baby sister died shortly afterwards from a tragic case of botulism after visiting a shrine; although reading between the lines, the grandmother may have poisoned her to free up more resources for the boy.
This cruelty towards women is emphasized in a scene where her mother gently prods the oldest son forward, but Huilan is positioned between them and her mother talks through her daughter at him as if she wasn’t there. Listening to all this flowery encouragement aimed at Huilan, her grandmother finally has to put her foot down and voice her disapproval about this nonsense: girls do a little cooking; a little cleaning; and help bring in the harvest, but that’s it. A little exasperated, she turns to granny and explains that she is not telling her to follow all her heart’s desires, but encouraging her (adopted) brother to scramble after his. Ironic since she is the eldest (respect should be naturally accrue to her) and brightest child in the family but her amazing future was set aside for her far more academically challenged brothers.
It was painfully evident I was missing things during scenes where a large Chinese ideogram from a sign would peek out from behind a character: was that suggesting something relevant? I was also drawing complete blanks from the inserts of written text. His grandmother always enunciates his name as “Aha” instead of “Ah-how” which is the source of some amusement amongst his friends and the origin of his nickname. [Children can particularly lethal in zeroing in on body parts that rhyme with one’s name, yeah, I’m referring to you, Dolores.] I can’t quite make out if this was her rural mainland Chinese accent or an affectionate diminutive on her part; older family members also inflect his name (for instance “Ah-how-a”) at certain occasions.
The film left me with a list of lingering questions; for instance, there’s a scene where Hsaio intercepts and reads a letter and I can only guess this was a warning from the school telling his parents he was in danger of being expelled? A political purge on the island is obliquely referred to in the first section and the increasingly bloody clashes between the two street gangs in the second section implicitly suggest US imperialism simply exploits the island as a pawn, a forward military base to launder money to state-side corporations, and an endless opportunity to throw barricades against the Chinese with Realpolitik.
I think the essential shot in the film is when Hsaio catches his mother’s keen during the cat-watch sequence; he doesn’t quite register this depth of feeling yet, but the camera lingers on his face. At the beginning of the film, his grandmother calls for him, but he is too busy playing marbles with his friends and ignores her. There is an echo to this later in the film when his mother is going through a difficult period and some late night runners have been dispatched to bring him to a street brawl. He lends his “samurai” sword for the fight, but chooses to remain at home. In coming of age films, one rarely sees a character actually become an adult on-screen. Before returning to the living room, Hsaio composes himself in the alcove, which is a mirror image of the same shot earlier; except this time, rather than turned away and looking over his shoulder as a small child trying to fathom that emotional outburst, he now stares directly ahead, understanding what losing the love and devotion of someone close to you actually means and when he returns to the living room, he is no longer a child.
Likes? Usually a (long) establishing shot is coupled with an additional one that pushes forward into the scene and centers the action; this wonderful structural one-two device repeats through-out the film. There is a strong rectilinear feel inside the Japanese style-house from the frames within the windows and sliding wall screens. Each room is an enclosure that suggests a warm intimacy that can be pulled around you like a blanket but also a living space where secrets are paper-thin and loud, annoying, chopping from the kitchen can be heard through-out the house. The mosquito nets neatly segment the rooms into sections at night. There is a wonderful shot of Hsaio seeing his mother working by lamplight and he works his way across these ghostly barriers to talk to her. Conversely, emotional distance can be created by partially or completely shutting a screen. The sound seems to have been added with imperfect dubbing during post-production; certain sound effects are overlarge and at times, voices can be spatially removed their image. The musical motif always kicks in to remind the audience we are looking at memories.
The Fengshan of his childhood is a magical place where one can flag down any passing rickshaw and say: “take me home” and they will always return you safely to your door step—only once in the film do they cart someone away. In the second half, the rickety bamboo chair is always placed in the foreground and background during important family events, as if their father was still sitting there watching over them. There is almost a subliminal use of circles and rings in the film (the school parking lot and the pots and ladles in the kitchen) foreshadowing change. The balance wheel on his mother’s sewing machine always marks her place in the home. His grandmother has a delightful hobby of making tinsel covered coins that once minted go directly into her celestial bank account; she has amassed quite a bag full of money here on earth and she will be a very rich woman when she finally arrives in heaven.
To finish up, fate here is always a glancing blow, but one that knocks you completely off course. His father bumped into an old pal from school that lead to the lucky promotion in Taiwan. The girl of his dreams accepts his declaration of love but tells him they should hold off hooking up until after he enters university which gives him added incentive to academically apply himself, saving him from either a miserable future in the military and acquiring a violent skill set that would come in handy later as a gangster. Her gentle promise of love alters the course of his life.
A Time to Live and A Time to Die — ★★★
Last edited by thracian dawg; 07-06-23 at 03:11 PM.