A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi)

A SUMMER AT GRANDPA’S (Dong Dong De Jia Qi)      A-          
Taiwan  (93 mi)  1984  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien

Time passes amidst the laughter,
What’s left are the memories. 

—opening valedictorian oration

The film is inspired by screenwriter Chu Tien-wen's childhood memories.  It is the first installment of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's coming-of-age trilogy that features three different coming-of-age stories by three prominent Taiwanese screenwriters, including A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985) inspired by Hou Hsiao-hsien himself, and Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986) inspired by Wu Nien-jen.  A sweet, gentle, and unconventional film, in the sense that a story is never really told, instead reality unfolds using a detached calm where we observe what happens with little or no commentary.  In this manner, the filmmaker deflects all powers of purpose and meaning to the viewer.  Told using natural sounds and a series of personal event vignettes, the film centers around the lives of two children, 11-year old Tung-Tung (Wang Chi-kwang) and his 4-year old sister Ting-Ting (Sun Cheeng-Lee).  When their mother is hospitalized with gall bladder complications, the father, played by fellow Taiwanese film director Edward Yang, stays by her side while their uncle takes the two kids to spend the summer with their grandfather, a stern, elderly doctor in a small, rural town.  The film seems to have had a profound influence on two other Asian films in particular, including Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterwork MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), which has a similar storyline of children the same age, an absent mother recovering in a hospital, a community search for a child temporarily going lost or missing, but also a similar color palette where the gentle, pastoral look of the countryside bears a strange resemblance.  In that film, the children’s imagination constitutes the developing storyline, while here the world is seen through the eyes and experiences of two young children.  The other is Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000), which also has a missing mother sequence while reprising the role of Ting-Ting as a teenage girl who develops a special affection and close-knit relationship with her grandmother, becoming a profoundly insightful family drama that beautifully balances the carefree innocence of youth with their initial exposure to the difficult and sometimes threatening realities of adult life.  Interestingly the end credits theme music for the film was composed by Edward Yang. 

This trilogy is particularly influenced by Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, especially the incessant use of trains rumbling by, which reflect the passage of time, but also the fixed camera placement, omitting the use of close ups, where scenes are frequently shot from a single point of view, where any action is often seen in the farthest regions of the shot.  Interior shots have a painterly composition with a ground level camera, where characteristic locations are empty rooms or kitchens, where the visual style is quietly contemplative, capturing the mood with meticulous detail of banal and ordinary events.  While Taiwan was a colony of Japan for over 50 years, it’s interesting how pervasive their aesthetic has become imprinted into the Taiwanese consciousness, where this director would eventually develop a love affair with long shots, but he was also one of the first Taiwanese directors to use indigenous dialect in his films.  Born as a member of the Hakka ethnic minority in southern Guangdong province in mainland China, but raised in rural Taiwan, as his parents emigrated to Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1949 while escaping the bloodshed of the Chinese civil war, Hou entered the National Taiwan College of the Arts after serving in the military, graduating in 1972 where he worked as a salesman for a year until he landed a job as a screenwriter and assistant director in the commercial Taiwanese film industry.  Working his way up, his earliest films are examples of low-budget products from that industry, which had extremely rigid and often ineffective guidelines for churning out technically proficient commercial movies at the time, often starring pop stars in lightweight comedies.  Once Hou became a director, he began dismantling many of these practices one by one, finding them cumbersome and overly limiting, developing the groundwork on his 80’s pictures for a new aesthetic that makes him such a significant director in the world today.  The films he produced in the 90’s are among the most original, aesthetically impactful films of the last 50 years, where French director Olivier Assayas flew to Taiwan and filmed a living documentary portrait, HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (1997). Today, like everyone else it seems, this director has had difficulty obtaining funding for new films, where he hasn’t made a film in 7 years, the longest period of absence throughout his entire career.   

Tung-Tung arrives from the city, bringing his mechanized remote control car, while the local kids are playing with turtles, where the contrast between city and country is immediately apparent.   We witness rural methods of catching birds, climbing trees, or boys swimming naked in a river, where they have a rude habit of constantly excluding Ting-Ting, who reluctantly clings to her toy electric fan, eventually throwing the boys’ clothes into the river.  The film shows how the children try to insulate themselves from the outside world but can never quite escape it, being compelled to include adult events in their life of which they have little comprehension.  There’s such an effortless, natural feel to this film, where the film’s strengths are catching fleeting moments, finding the rhythms of everyday life, where summer represents all the time in the world for young kids, constantly seeing groups of children at play, teasing one another, witnessing something odd or terrifying, sometimes discovering something unexpectedly, other times just laying around the floor, bored with nothing to do, all told without pretense, seen through the vantage point of the children, where we hear the continuous sound of trains mixed with children’s voices.  Tung-Tung writes beautiful letters to his parents that show a delicate sensitivity but also a lack of understanding of what the adults around him are up to.  While most of the film is bathed in sunshine, the film has a hard edge without a hint of sentimentality.  The kids witness a robbery and mugging in progress and stare silently from afar, completely non-judgmental, while also enjoying the firecrackers going off on the street filled with food vendors with their stacks of food, while the offscreen explosions of sound continue through many of the next scenes.  The grandfather (Koo Chuen) shows a social concern, leading a discussion among neighbors of what’s in the best interest for a wandering, mentally ill girl who has gotten pregnant, but he is also harshly judgmental, forbidding the children's uncle Chang-ming to marry his girlfriend Pi-yun, even angrily attacking his son's moped when he learns he has gotten his girlfriend pregnant.  Clearly the absence of Ting-Ting and Tung-Tung's mother is deeply traumatic for both, but the film gets at this sorrow and confusion without ever simply stating it.  Also there is a gorgeously affecting relationship that develops between Ting-Ting and the mentally ill woman which is all done without a word of dialogue.  This typifies what the filmmaker is attempting to do, using no embellished musical themes, relying instead on recording the natural rhythms of life, as recalled in childhood remembrances of things past.

HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien

HHH – A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN – made for TV     B    
aka:  Cinéma, de Notre Temps – TV series

France  Taiwan  (91 mi)  1997  d:  Olivier Assayas

France is known for its Cinéma de Notre Temps television interview series of famous directors, where for decades they’ve been following various filmmakers, including the groundbreaking Jacques Rivette interview with legendary French director Jean Renoir, while one of the best ever American interviews is with a young John Cassavetes as he’s filming Faces (1968), an interview that’s included in the Criterion Collection edition of his 5-films.  What’s unique here is that the interviewer is French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is obviously as fascinated by what Hou Hsiao-hsien contributed to the Taiwanese New Wave in the 80’s and 90’s, which are still in full swing at the time this film is being made, along with Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu, and screenwriters Wu Nien-jen, and novelist Chu Tien-wen, where Chu, often interviewed alongside the director, collaborated on all of Hou’s screenplays for over twenty years.  Filmed in the late 1990’s, this serves as a time capsule into the still young life of the Taiwanese director.  At 50 years of age, he’s in fine form throughout, often seen chewing gum and recalling what a recalcitrant child he was, often getting himself into trouble by hanging out with the street gangs, but he matured after entering the army and performing his military service, where he decided he was interested in film, something he attributes to his childhood vantage point spending time in trees, which both stimulated and altered his spatial conception.   After directing a couple of successful comedies starring pop stars, he collaborated with two other directors on THE SANDWICH MAN (1983), generally regarded as the first film of the Taiwanese New Wave, where the intent was to alter the uninspired direction of the nation’s old-fashioned cinema, making it connect more with real life people and their situations.  But it was Hou’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983), the only film of Hou to use Western classical music, a remarkable story of the director’s own awkwardly troubled adolescence, where he is searching for a distinctly Chinese way of telling the story, the first to display what has become the traditional Hou style, minimalist dramas with extended long takes and a fixed-camera angle that heightens the sense of real time. 

His next series of films, his coming-of age trilogy, each written by a different screenwriter reflecting an autobiographical segment based upon their own lives, was highly successful, especially the one written by Hou, A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (1985), which Wu Nien-jen is heard calling the greatest Taiwanese film ever made, the story of his family’s move from mainland China to Taiwan, thinking it would only be temporary before they moved back, as his elderly grandmother thought the mainland was just around the corner, where they often went searching for the (non-existent) dead ancestor’s graves.  While a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas was one of the first to recognize Hou’s profound talent, meeting him for a Cahiers article in 1984, having a marked influence on his own work, so in this film he follows Hou around various locations in Taiwan, meeting in Taipei before returning to the provincial town of Fengshan where Hou grew up under the nickname Aha, recognizing a few old friends, reminiscing about how they used to be street punks and raise hell on these same streets, causing quite a commotion when he arrives with a French filmmaker’s camera following his every move, becoming something of a cause célèbre.  Assayas remains behind the camera for the most part, though occasionally we see an interpreter in his ear, but the television interview format is to observe and listen to the filmmaker, as Hou shows us the modest teahouse where he writes his screenplays, while also showing  various set locations that he used, including an old abandoned gold mine where the accompanying structures remain largely intact, preserving its original look.  For Hou, who filmed historical dramas, he was looking for sites that maintained their original look, where in outlying rural areas, people still live and dress much the same way as they did 50 years ago.  In something of a surprise, especially considering how lyrical and gently flowing his films are, Hou has something of a swagger to him, where in his youth he wanted to be a pop star before becoming a filmmaker, but developed stage fright onstage, and he also felt he was too short. 

One of the more interesting interviews was with Chen-Kuo-fu, director of THE PERSONALS (1998), but he originally worked as a film critic, and he gives an excellent appraisal of the untapped inspiration and furious energy on display at the dawn of the Taiwanese New Wave era, where everyone often met to share ideas, recalling how they’d all gather at Edward Yang’s home, an old Japanese structure, where they fed off each others rampant enthusiasm, where they all loved what they were doing.  It’s quite apparent he misses those days, that they were the best years of his life, which wonderfully comments upon an era that spawned a rebirth in Taiwanese cinema.  While Assayas doesn’t get into it, Hou remains something of an enigma.  While his films are acclaimed abroad, he has not received an enthusiastic reception at home, where theaters continue to screen primarily American films.  While Hou had a hand in actually shaping the history of his country, coming after the lifting of restrictions in 1987 imposed by martial law, which had remained in effect since 1947, making what are arguably his greatest films, a history trilogy beginning with A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), a powerful film that traces Taiwan’s history from the Japanese defeat in World War II through the retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949.  The film had a major impact in Taiwan, as certain previously forbidden subjects were touched upon, very carefully Hou explains, and objectively, not criticizing anyone, followed by The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993), that examines life under the Japanese occupation covering the years 1909 to 1945, while the third, Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), covering the period of 1949 to the present, tells the story of a small band of communist intellectuals that travel to mainland China to help fight the Japanese, only to see their leader executed later by his own countrymen.  What was never discussed was the relationship between the mainland Chinese filmmakers and the Taiwanese Chinese, once the doors opened, as these are collectively some of the best and brightest directors working anywhere in the world today, where one is curious how they felt about each other.     

Assayas describes Hou’s personality, “His manner of slipping from grown-up rationality to childish laughter is intact, as is his way of moving between intellectuals and small-time Mafiosi’s in a sort of studied uncertainty, hazy with grass, alcohol, or bin-lan (a plant-based kind of speed).  But here where only instinct matters, theory and philosophy assume a growing importance; and it isn’t simply a matter of a notion about perception—generally interesting only to filmmakers—but also the classical Chinese tradition, with the gravity and intensity peculiar to autodidacts.”  We see some of that personality emerge as he questions a local teahouse proprietor whether the watermelon seeds used for tea are fresh, then proceeds to display a ritualistic method of preparing tea, first pouring it into tiny teacups, then one by one pouring that tea over the teapot, creating a pool of tea underneath that continually gets recycled in this manner.  When Hou lets loose with a few friends in a karaoke house, he’s not kidding, as he takes this endeavor quite seriously, where he happily wails away singing old popular ballads that have a way of unleashing his soul.