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The valedictorian speech at the outset ("We are striding into a new journey") is reflected in the priest's preamble at the wedding ("The order of the world starts from the order of the family"), Hou Hsiao-Hsien shows them to be little more than memorized speeches next to the thorny and graceful opening up of a child's universe. The bedridden mother is too weak for surgery, the children are sent out to the countryside for the summer, a welcome change of scenery. (A vast hospital is mostly what's seen of Taipei.) At the train station, a charming nod to Ozu: Uncle is running late for chaperoning duties, the camera pans left with the preteen boy (Wang Chi-Kuang) as he and a friend shout goodbyes across opposite platforms, then back right to find the little sister (Li Shu-Chen) remembering that she has to pee. The remote-control toy jeep is promptly traded for a tortoise upon arrival at the village, the boy further adapts to the new environment by going skinny-dipping at the local pond and losing his clothes. Grandpa is the town doctor and no smiler, he banishes the "black sheep" uncle in a wide composition lasting just enough to establish swaying plants and a rattling locomotive as co-stars. Slipping and sliding on a hardwood floor, climbing trees and leaping into fountains, a carefree pastoral enlarged by a certain "incomprehensible sorrow." Ruffians robbing napping truckers, the "mad woman" suffering a miscarriage after being seduced by the bird-catcher—the adult domain, glimpsed accidentally through a half-opened window and only half-understood. Epiphanies soft as a breeze and mighty as a blow, already the Hou specialty. "Time flies. I'm homesick." Summer's over, a little hope goes back the city's way. With Chen Bor-Jeng, Yang Lai-Yin, Chen Koo, Mei-Feng, and Edward Yang.
--- Fernando F. Croce |