Hsiao-hsien Hou - Lian lian feng chen AKA Dust in the Wind (1986)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091406
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Language Taiwanese
Subtitles idx/sub +srt, Chinese+Japanese idx/sub
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/169/dustinthewind9xh.jpg
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Dust in the Wind is a remarkable film, and one which will, no doubt, reward multiple viewings. Like most of the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien, viewers will be divided into two, sharply opposed camps.
The main characters in the film are two high-school students. The first is Wan, who - seeing his village as a dead-end career-wise, decides to leave their home town to go to Taipei to find work, intending to complete his education via night-school. His girlfriend Huen also leaves for Taipei after graduation. The other personages are family members, employers, friends and co-workers.
The story presented consists of a number of vignettes in typical Hou fashion, with stationary camera and naturalistic performances. Glimpses are given of their occupations, their moments together and their times apart. Though varying from the very funny to the emotionally raw, they have a cumulative effect, resonating with a reality that is not idealised, and is yet still filled with moments of sublime grace, somehow existing with situations of despair, misery, boredom and loss. There is little music, only a solitary guitar used to punctuate scenes, almost like a musical interlude, often combined with stunning scenery.
Apart from the immediate plot, something can also be glimpsed of the attitudes of the rural, native Taiwanese towards the city and the higher classes, as well as to the vicissitudes of life in general. On a whole the film seems imbued with the melancholy, fatalistic philosophy indicated by its title.
A worthy member of Hou's inimitable body of films, 'Dust in the Wind' was touching and memorable, though with an absence of schmaltz. It is a film I hope to revisit soon. As for recommendations, I'm not sure that it will be everyone's 'cup of tea'. Some will find many of its aspects, in particular its detachedness, quite alienating. Certainly those already familiar with Hou, or fans of Taiwanese cinema in general, will want to see it. Those who like Ozu, Bresson or Tarkovsky may find it worthwhile also. There is the same naturalistic feel, understated acting and long takes. But it is also very much the work of an original auteur who is honing his craft and producing unique, personal films.
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This bleak coming-of-age family drama about the hardships of love and economics by noted Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou ("A Time to Live and a Time to Die") falls below his usual high standards though it still manages a certain resonance. It is based on a true account of an early episode in the life of novelist and screenwriter Nien-Jen Wu (he starred in Edward Yang's Yiyi). The film acts as a sociologist's treatise and somber meditation on Taiwan's unsympathetic urban society and also offers a severe criticism of the military system. Though performances are excellent and production values are more than suitable, the film is never able to be as moving as it is insightful.
"Dust" chronicles the lives of two young impoverished and uneducated high school lovers, Huen (Hsing Shu-fen) and Wan (Wang Ching-wen), who move from their backwater country mining town of Jio-fen to Taipei to get menial jobs in order to survive.
The proud Wan quits school and moves to the city first and finds work as a printing press operator at a family-run 'ma and pop' shop during the day and then as a motorcycle delivery boy. He ambitiously attends evening classes, as he strives to better his social position. After high school graduation the more timid Huen joins Wan in Taipei and obtains work as a seamstress at a dressmaking shop that includes room and board, allowing her to send a part of her wages home to her family. The young couple spend their remaining teenage years working hard in Taipei and spend their rare leisure time with fellow hard-pressed workers commiserating together about their sorry lot in life. They make regular visits back to their hometown, with Wan's upcoming two year compulsory military duty looming as an obstacle before they dare marry.
One day, while taking Huen shoe shopping for her family, Wan has his most valuable possession stolen--his bike.
This leaves him desperately without a job, so he roams the streets of the big city until he comes down with a severe case of bronchitis. Huen nurses him back to health, but then he gets called up for military service. Hou then asks if their love will be able to overcome their grim economic prospects and the harshness of their cultural environment, as the filmmaker wonders at the high price the individual must pay for industrial progress and asks us to reflect if it is worth it.
The film leaves deeply impressionable visual messages that linger long after seeing the film. There is the scintillating images from a speck of dust blowing in the train tunnel that eventually reveals a light at the end of a tunnel coming from an oncoming passenger train, a Buddhist ritual in front of a roaring ocean, and soldiers silhouetted against a darkened sky. There is one noteworthy scene of a frightened fisherman from the mainland who has to get his boat repaired, that is a scary reminder of how ominously close Communist China is to Taiwan.
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"What can we do?" asks an aged grandfather in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1986 critical hit Dust in the Wind, a meditative film about one teenage Taiwanese couple's journey from their rural hometown to the city. The old man's question, spoken solemnly while sitting alone on the steps of his house, articulates the film's fixation on man's inability to halt the forward march of time. Wan and Huen are childhood sweethearts who, seeing the limited opportunities of their small town lives, move to Taipei, where Wan gets a job working at a printing press and Huen finds a position at a tailor's shop. The two seem ill at ease with their new surroundings, and Hou -- interested in criticizing the burgeoning urban migration movement -- uses deep-focus master shots that feature disharmonious spatial organizations (such as whenever Wan speaks to Huen at work through iron metal bars) to illustrate Wan and Heun's isolation, desperation, and increasing despondence. When Wan discovers that his motorcycle has been stolen and attempts to steal another despite Huen's objections, the sight is one of abject moral degradation.
Recurrent images of watches/clocks and forward-moving trains -- including breathtaking first-person shots from the front and rear of a locomotive -- highlight the theme of time's inevitable progression. Although Wan's failure to make it in the big city leads to thoughts of suicide, he eventually returns home for a brief visit, only to learn that he's been drafted by the National Army to serve a two-year stint on an island off the coast of mainland China. A touching farewell meal with his father, in which the regularly drunken patriarch lights his son's cigarette and then gives him the lighter as a gift, serves as Wan's ceremonial entrance into adulthood. After his letters to Huen are returned, Wan learns that she has married a postman in his absence. In a gorgeous final tableau, Wan, his family, Huen and her husband are frozen in profile, and the image represents Hou's final attempt to stop the inexorable progress of human life and, specifically, the quickening pace of urban migration. Such a goal is dubious at best -- the director's characterization of the countryside as bucolic and the city as malignant is ludicrously simplistic -- but Hou's intense sympathy for rural communities in the face of modernization, as well as his sorrow over Wan and Huen's decimated affair, is nonetheless anguishing.
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---not my rip------
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