The Captive (La Captive)

 

Director Chantal Akerman

THE CAPTIVE (La Captive)             B+                                                                              France  Belgium  (118 mi)  2000  d: Chantal Akerman

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

—Marcel Proust, Chapter 1, La Prisonnière, 1923

I thought that literary works should not be adapted to film, that music should not be used, that cuts and shots/counter-shots should not be used – these kinds of prohibitions.  I was very radical, undoubtedly too much so, but I needed to be in order to define myself, form myself as a filmmaker.

—Chantal Akerman, 2001

Listed by Cahiers du Cinéma as their #2 film of 2000, it must be said that literary adaptations are not something typically associated with experimental or auteurist directors, though Godard and Truffaut made several films based on literary sources.  Akerman was an avid reader since adolescence and initially skeptical about literary adaptations, believing they were diametrically opposed to her radically innovative film style, alternating between fiction and documentaries, writing her own scripts, nonetheless, having read Proust when still in school, she began to toy with the idea of adapting Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927) just after she completed Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976).  But it was only 25 years later, after having experimented with a wide range of genres and film styles, that she felt ready to try again, with the help of film scholar Eric De Kuyper who shared script ideas, though Akerman wrote every word, inspired by their mutual admiration for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964), eventually making a film loosely inspired by the fifth volume, La Prisonnière.  While Proust’s modernist style and narrative complexity have deterred directors, believing the work is unadaptable, in particular the existential interior focus, as it follows the narrator’s autobiographical recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood, but it was precisely these challenges that attracted Akerman’s interest, where she is quoted as saying, “I remembered that there was that apartment, and the corridor, and the two characters—I said, that’s a story for me.”  Having come from experimental traditions, where nearly all her films deal with captivity and the many forms it can take, this is a study of women as an enigma, in particular lesbian desire, explored exclusively through a male perspective, yet what’s exceedingly fascinating is a lesbian filmmaker’s vision of a gay writer’s work.  The first of Proust’s books published posthumously, this is a complex and multi-layered  novel, with its fabulous cast of characters, its rich evocation of a Belle Époque period and society and, above all, its intricate plot, with Proust conceiving love as tragic, becoming a film about the haunting effect of memories and fantasies, where there’s something completely disorienting about this film that mirrors Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), revered for its suspense, hypnotic camerawork, and astute character psychology, even matching Hitchcock’s rear projection effects out the back of the car, but even more importantly both films accentuate how the destructive male obsessions of projecting their own desires onto unsuspecting women have disastrous consequences.  Opening and closing with the sounds of the sea, we’re introduced to Stanislas Mehrar as Simon, a spoiled and wealthy young man who is initially seen watching Super 8 homemade video of a woman with friends during their seaside summer together in Normandy, freezing the frame like a still image of her face, before transitioning into her silent stalker, Akerman’s version of Truffaut’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, both dressed in a suit and tie, each a narcissistic voyeur of young women.  Completely obsessed with Ariane (Sylvie Testud), the camera follows him through a labrynthian journey through Paris as he tails her car (a Peugeot convertible), follows her footsteps in the city, where the heightened shadows on the staircase walls recall film noir, leading into the Musée Rodin, filled with sculptures, paintings, and art objects, where she finds herself pausing in front of an Aphrodite bust, a creature who emerged from the sea, perhaps an ideal representative of the female form, becoming an encounter between the real and the mythical, where Ariane is ultimately viewed as one of his prized collectibles, having no identity of her own, as she appears to exist only in his fantasies.  The formal precision of Sabine Lancelin’s camera has a hovering presence, following them both closely, with Simon watching from an adjacent room, his moves repeating hers as she appears and disappears, always just out of his grasp, where their forms are merged into the same frame.  In something of a surprise, we discover she is living with him in his aging grandmother’s massive home with her own room, where she is something of a willing prisoner, passively following his every wish, which is spelled out in great detail.  One of the unforgettable scenes has them bathing together, but in separate tubs, as there is a frosted glass pane between them, which is not initially recognizable, where it appears Simon is talking to himself in an extended monologue that veers into explicit sexual references, still quite surprising in this day and age, as if drawn from the pages of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, but eventually she casually responds as the camera pulls back allowing a fuller perspective, with Ariane, seen naked behind the screen, becoming a shadowy presence, as if lurking only in his imagination. 

Volker Schlöndorf made his Proust film SWANN IN LOVE in 1984 and Raúl Ruiz his TIME REGAINED in 1999, both partial adaptations, but sadly, Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay that was never filmed, while the Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey projects from the 1970’s were never realized.  Having the self-reflective quality of Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959) and My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), the minimalist existential quandary of Bresson’s Une Femme Douce (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), yet also the feel of one of Rohmer’s moral tales of alienated youth, what’s striking, however, especially for a Chantal Akerman film, a director known for her ruminative observations of women, is how the film sticks with the male perspective, as everything is seen through his naïve eyes, literally everything.  Women are viewed as something for him to possess, forcing viewers into experiencing the excruciating yet pervasive oppression of male patriarchy, a viewpoint that borders on the absurd by his inability to comprehend anything about the mindset of his female lover, as his jealous suspicions overshadow everything he knows and feels about her.  This is a highly stylized, intensely personal art film that is not for everyone, very slow in pace, where not much happens, yet the subdued charm and dispassionate manner in which things are realized defies realism, feeling more theatrical or surreal, as if sleepwalking through a dream, fixated on nonsensical recurring phrases, where the absurdly sounding dialogue could just as easily be spoken by Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  With the protagonists renamed from the source material of Albertine and Marcel, most of the key scenes of Simon’s tormented relations with Ariane remain intact, as this is a plunge into the suffocating effects of jealousy in a contemporary love affair, with Akerman ridding herself of the historical context of Proust’s novel, so there is no looking into the past, no remembrance, yet she was spellbound by the actual dialogue, but the most radical changes come from the ending, which turns into a kind of road movie reminiscent of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), offering a liberating release from the confined enclosure of the Parisian apartment, which feels more like a tomb.  Simon is a sickly recluse, subject to allergies and pollen, and mostly confined to his room, where he looks pale, like a ghost, often seen alone in his room reading the newspaper, or frustrated by his writings, his bedside surrounded by notebooks, yet continually perplexed by that blank page he never seems to fill.  While Ariane dutifully comes to Simon’s room when requested, he also enters her room while she sleeps, or appears to be sleeping, offering no hint of resistance, allowing him to “do what he likes,” which only frustrates him even more, where so little is known about her inner nature, always present, yet sexually elusive, as we never see him shed his clothes or alter his extreme sense of bourgeois reserve, suggesting there is an overwhelming sense of detachment that defines them.  Despite her unconditional availability, she is indifferent and emotionally vacant, where there is little reciprocal intimacy, with Simon sensing that she’s holding out on him, as she’s evasive in her noncommittal responses or explanations about where she’s been, using one of her friends, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy), to basically spy on her and report back to him, yet she’s equally vague, amusingly omitting or forgetting details (like they may be having an affair!) while reporting contradictory information back to him, where he has this incessant need to control and have ownership over every facet of Ariane’s life, insisting there be no secrets between them.  However, he’s under the impression that she may actually prefer the company of women, frenetically driven to understand the secret of what women do together, suspecting she may be having an affair with a female opera star, Léa (Aurore Clément), brilliantly realized in a balcony scene where Ariane amateurishly sings a love duet from Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti with a more professionally sounding older woman (Sophie Assante) from an opposite window, Prendero quel brunettino I Cosi fan tutte - Glyndebourne YouTube (3:07), while Simon powerlessly watches the scene from below, as if appearing in someone else’s dream.  So this turns into something of a detective story, expressed through voyeurism and his insatiable need for control, as he has an obsessive curiosity about what she does on her own, with an overcontrolling nature that blinds him to any existing connection between them, while also ignoring any fascination with the world outside.  

Premiering at Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, but never released commercially in the United States, made between two rare excursions into lighthearted comedies, this somber work is a modernist melodrama that elaborates on the styles, themes, and moods of other melodramas dating back to the silent era, becoming a study of pathological jealousy and unfulfilled desire, yet what’s remarkable is that Simon verbalizes every thought in an extremely rational and analytic manner, leaving nothing to chance, while Ariane keeps her thoughts and emotions to herself, almost like a silent screen siren, where the stark contrast between them expresses itself in underlying emotional turbulence.  The old-fashioned décor in Simon’s apartment, with its imposing antique furniture, heavy draperies, and multiple doorways, suggests a wealth of space, while the aesthetic sumptuousness and perfectly framed compositions recall Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), another film that famously explores the structure of memory through a metaphor of grandiose architecture, as the empty corridors and closed rooms of the apartment come to represent the internal landscape of Simon’s fixation, an expression of his own captivity.  Whenever they go out, they’re always alone, finding themselves living in a vacuum, as the sidewalks and streets are strangely empty, where the surrounding population may as well not exist.  Known for portraying unconventional sexual relationships, a precise form is always present with Akerman, and just the way the film unravels reveals a relationship fraught with tension, with Simon continually tightening the noose, increasing the pressure in wanting to learn more and more, where he is never satisfied, as it’s not sex but her very soul that he desires, needing every secret exposed, as only then can he maintain his dominance.  Much of this film plays out in his own mind, as he verbalizes what transpires internally, where he needs to speak the words for them to resonate, while Ariane is his submissive accomplice, yet her unspoken thoughts and desires remain a complete mystery to him, and instead of being enthralled by the challenge, he is completely undone by what he cannot comprehend, feeling stymied by the walls of an invisibly perceived resistance that he finds overwhelming.  Simon’s adventure into the Bois de Boulogne red-light district accentuates the obsession, as he’s searching for someone like Ariane, not only in looks but with her same passive demeanor, someone he can control sexually, but he’s disappointed in his efforts, while he also awkwardly interrogates two young lesbian actresses (Bérénice Bejo and Anna Mouglalis), hoping to learn some of Ariane’s secrets, yet his singleminded takeaway is startlingly naïve in its chauvinistic arrogance.  A radical deconstruction of self, time, and space, there are compulsively repetitive motifs that only inflame the jealous lover’s suspicions, like chasing her in his car around the chic fashionable districts of Paris, being caught in a labyrinth, walking around in circles, unable to find his way out, with the camera using slow tracking shots to meticulously follow the time it takes to move step by step, forcing viewers to feel the passage of time, or continually peppering her friends with questions, hoping to penetrate her mysterious interior realms, but rather than add light to his dilemma, he ends up feeling paralyzed, remaining stuck in an unresolved predicament.  The more he spies on her, the less he knows, ultimately losing himself in the process and drowning in his own pathetic ineptitude.  Unable to cope with uncertainty, he is the exact opposite of the more adaptable Ariane, an opaque presence who just goes with the flow, not letting anything really bother her.  While his rigidly controlled behavior is the very picture of obsession, caught in the prison of his own jealousy, it is the male rather than the female protagonist who is the real captive, as he cannot escape his own debilitating insecurities, which replace his anxiety about writing.  By the end, the morose musical soundtrack from Rachmaninoff - The Isle of the Dead, Op.29 - Vladimir Ashkenazy - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra YouTube (21:10) adds such a pensive tone, creating an intimate yet dark space, where the final sequence explores all the possibilities of night, with the sea devoured by an inky blackness, becoming a dance of death through the light reflected on the water. 

LECTURE & FILM: Das Kino von Chantal Akerman // LA CAPTIVE (2000)  Lecture by co-writer Eric de Kuyper at DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (in English except the introduction), January 11, 2018, YouTube (1:37:44)

2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)

MY GOLDEN DAYS (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)                  A-            
France  (120 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Arnaud Desplechin 

While not exactly a prequel, but a reimagining of an original story used in an earlier film, MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), which was a sprawling three-hour French relationship talkathon, while in this film Desplechin has resurrected the central character of Paul Dédalus, played nineteen years apart in both films by Mathieu Amalric, who opens the film as a present day character remembering events occurring in the late 80’s and early 90’s, where a more accurate French title translates to Three Remembrances of My Youth.  Winner of the SACD Prize (Best Screenplay) in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, the director (along with Julie Peyr) has written a memory play that explores the Proustian autobiographical memories of the Dédalus character from childhood through adolescence, told in three segments, where the first two, Childhood and Russia, preface a larger story entitled Esther that blends into the early periods of MY SEX LIFE, a film that falls within a great tradition of French coming-of age-films, having made some of the best, including Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), and Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994).  The brief opening sequences are actually the weakest in the entire film, as the viewer doesn’t have a handle yet on Paul Dédalus, or even a connection to the earlier film.  Instead he’s seen as a middle-aged man leaving his lover, returning to Paris for a government post in Foreign Affairs after spending a decade working as a scholar and anthropologist in Tajikistan.  It’s only at the airport where he’s stopped and questioned, interrogated by a French official, dutifully performed by Resnais regular André Dussollier, with questions about his passport, which shifts the film into a lengthy flashback sequence, often expressed through a round (iris) frame, a holdover technique from the Silent era, suggesting memories of long ago, recounting three seminal moments from his past.  Like Truffaut’s young ruffian alter-ego character Antoine Doinel, a petrified 11-year old Paul Dédalus (Antoine Bui) also ran away from his home in Roubaix escaping from his deranged mother, depicted in a panicked German Expressionist horror scene where he holds her off with a knife (shadows appearing on a staircase), warning her not to come any closer, before running away to his kindly great-aunt Rose, Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), looking better than ever, observed by a curious young Paul as the affectionate recipient of a sweet lesbian kiss.  While he’s sad to learn of his mother’s suicide shortly thereafter (claiming he never loved her), it has a permanent effect on his emotionally depressed father (Olivier Rabourdin), whose mind is elsewhere and is unable to look after his children, where Paul along with his sister and younger brother share their formative teenage years raising themselves. 

However, this does not account for why there is another Paul Dédalus living in Australia with a registered passport using the same birthdate and birthplace.  For that, the scene shifts to Russia, where Paul takes an eventful student high school trip to Minsk in the USSR as an idealistic 16-year old, now played by Quentin Dolmaire, turning into an amateur spy thriller when he along with his Jewish friend Marc (Elyot Milshtein) agree to help the Refuseniks (Refuseniks - Jewish Virtual Library), sneaking away from a student tour of the National Arts Museum to help a group of Russian Jews denied permission to leave the country, providing secret packages filled with money, while Paul goes so far as to offer his passport, allowing someone else to assume his identity.  To cover for his own lost passport, he gives himself a black eye and claims he was mugged and his passport stolen.  Filled with plenty of Cold War tension, including bribing a suspicious police officer that stops them with a pack of American cigarettes, the young boys actually pull it off, blending into his teenage years where he’s with his sister Delphine (Lily Taieb) and brother Ivan (Raphaël Cohen) watching television footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Paul finds sad as “I can see my childhood ending.”  But most of all he remembers Esther, played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, an absolute delight as the girl of his dreams, the beauty of his eye, and his soulmate, something he realizes from the moment he sets eyes on her, as she’s “the one,” a dazzling beauty who is mature beyond her years, amusingly aware of the effect she has on men, and couldn’t care less what others think of her, an earlier version of the same character played by Emmanuelle Devos in MY SEX LIFE.  Inviting her to come to a party at their father’s house (believing he is away), Desplechin perfectly frames her entrance, shifting to slow motion with her initial appearance, where celestial music honors her as the Goddess of Love and Beauty.  The same device is used several times, each time more amusing than the next, as this is exactly how high school boys envision their first love.  They’re not just “in love,” but the moon and the stars orbit around her very presence.  Paul has a clever way of showing his interest, especially when she shows up with somebody else, which is to ignore her while she dances with all the other guys, staring ponderously at her throughout, waiting until the guy she came with decides to leave, expecting to take her home, but she insists upon staying, rudely telling him to scram.  Thus begins the long journey of a tumultuous decade-long love affair, but that night, all he does is walk her home, romantically walking through the city streets just before daybreak, awkwardly trying to make clever conversation, confessing whatever comes out of his mouth, which she finds amusing, ending the night with the cinematic perfection of a gentle kiss, conveying in our eyes exactly how he feels and just what she means to him. 

These two, Roy-Lecollinet and Dolmaire, both first time actors, literally light up the screen, where their ecstatic combustible energy is something to savor, as Esther is viewed as royalty, where every male in the vicinity is attracted to her, so she quickly learns to fend them off and has become a master in the art of the put-down, showing an instant disdain for people that get on her nerves, believing life is too short for people to waste her time, but she has the whole world beckoning her, wanting to be with her.  Initially Paul appears to have little chance, spending his time traveling back and forth between Roubaix and Paris, where it turns out absence makes the heart grow fonder.  In an era before social media, where now kids routinely send hundreds of text messages every day, the preferred technique back in the day was writing letters, pouring out one’s heart and soul in confessional outpourings of love (which are read directly into the camera), where every spare moment is dedicated to an idyllic “her,” keeping her foremost on his mind even as he pursues his Parisian studies and a life as an academic, where their exchanges are electric, literally flowing with excitement and energy when they meet, exhibiting all the signs of a sweetness of youth, becoming passionate lovers before long, where they can’t live without each other.  The beauty of this film is really the playfulness of Desplechin’s cinematic presentation, the way he mixes it up, showing plenty of offbeat humor, tenderness, moments of despair, crude awakenings, and a world where nothing makes sense except each other, but where their journey together is anything but smooth as she fights to maintain her fiery independence, often shown facing straight into the camera with a cigarette in her hand, where she’s literally posing for the audience, becoming a snapshot in time.  On again, off again, she’s put off by the extent of his absences, and freely acknowledges she sleeps with other guys, where they go through a series of breakups and reconciliations, but Paul has a way of charming the pants off her (which happens literally with another woman in the film), where she loves the way he’ll poetically describe a work of art, like one of his favorite paintings, putting her somewhere in the center of its majestic beauty, a sacred, unreachable perfection, while he sees himself as some lonely figure off to the side, but perhaps the only thing in the frame alert enough to notice the power of her staggering presence.  It’s a fascinating free-wheeling style that matches the furious pace of his earlier film, literally painting a window into their damaged souls where they have such a special chemistry together that is rare in films today.  With a throbbing soundtrack that matches the elevated emotional reach of the film, there’s something bewitching and enchanting about it, where Desplechin’s masterful direction breathes life into an age-old Romeo and Juliet love story, becoming intensely personal, fiercely sincere, especially a scene late in the film, with tinges of sadness when looked back upon because it never lasted, but the thoughtfulness and thorough detail of the remembrances are a brilliant ode to youth, as illuminating as they are intoxicating.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi)

A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE (Tong nien wang shi)          A          
Taiwan  (138 mi)  1985  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien      co-directors:  Lao Jia-hua, Yang Lai-yin, Xu Xiao-ming

Hou’s autobiographical film bears a strong similarity to Edward Yang’s later masterwork A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), almost as if it is a trial run of the same film, though seen from a different perspective.  Both directors were born in the exact same year (1947) in China with families that emigrated shortly afterwards to Taiwan, where in each film the Japanese style homes of the protagonists reflect the remnants of half a century of Japanese colonization, including the presence of samurai swords left behind, where so much was expected of the first generation of offspring, but the uncertainties of the parents, whose lives were uprooted, are passed onto their children, thinking initially the move to Taiwan would be short term before returning to the mainland.  Set against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent and often bloody history, the significance of education is similarly ignored by bored and disinterested kids, where even the depiction of gang fights is similar, using a static camera to capture a long shot of a street scene, where people move in and out of the picture, where the only depicted violence evolves out of a quick rush of gang members followed by threatening offscreen sounds of yelling and screaming.  These moments of instantaneous chaos erupt out of complete stillness.  The second installment of a coming-of-age trilogy featuring three different Taiwanese screenwriters, coming after A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) (1984, inspired by the childhood memories of Chu Tien-wen), and before Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986, inspired by Wu Nien-jen), the film chronicles the family’s attempt to acclimate to life in postwar Taiwan in the aftermath of the Chinese revolution when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops along with nearly 2 million Chinese were driven by the Communists off the mainland into exile on the tiny island of Taiwan, where the film can be seen as a longterm search to recapture their own identity.  Only the second of Hou’s films to reach the West (following the first segment of the trilogy), the film won the International Critic’s Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986.

More than any other Hou Hsiao-hsien film, this quiet and contemplative film also bears a strong aesthetic resemblance to Ozu, particularly themes of transience and mortality, where the interior shots are framed by a fixed, ground level camera inside a home featuring Japanese architecture, where conventional narrative is abandoned and emphasis is placed on establishing a rhythm through the framing and pacing of observational shots, where the passing of time is reflected through the slowly evolving lives and experiences of a single family, where death plays a prominent part.  Narrated by the director offering “some memories from my youth,” the film covers three generations, a kindly grandmother (Tang Yu-Yuen), the parents, and children, including young Ah-ha (You Ashun), a stand-in for the director, where each develops a unique relationship between the present and the past.  The grandmother continues to believe she’s still on the mainland and keeps looking for a Mekong Bridge that isn’t there, but that doesn’t stop her from searching for it, while the parents, the dutiful mother (Mei Feng) and sickly, asthmatic father (Tien Feng), believe their stay is temporary in Taiwan and that soon life will return to the way it was in the past, while the children are oblivious to any connection to the past and lead rootless lives.  Unfolding in long, lingering shots by Mark Lee Ping Bin, the first in what has become a lifelong collaboration with this director, the film is given a flowing, naturalistic style where a collection of detail accumulates power over time, as the audience grows more invested with the family.  Mostly seen through the eyes of Ah-ha, where due to his father’s asthma, the family has to move from the urban city of Hsinchu further south to the backwater town of Fengshan, where a conflict between urban and rural values is a recurring theme in many of Hou’s films.  Adding authenticity to the story, the film is actually shot in the house where the director grew up as a youth, as do the other stories in the trilogy, as A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) was actually shot at screenwriter Chu Tien-Wen's grandparents’ home in the countryside, and Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) in Wu Nien-Jen's home town.

The film is a flow of recurring memories, seeing his father sit at his desk, or his mother and elder sister working in the kitchen, while he and his brothers play around the house or outside on the street, or we’ll see the entire family sitting around chewing sugarcane while a parent reads a letter received from a relative back home, as the audience is regularly invited into the family home through the director’s perspective.  While the parents are stricken with emotion, realizing the fading connection to their pasts, the kids are more interested in adding the envelope’s stamp to their growing collection, seen peeling the stamp off the paper in steaming hot water, then placing the stamps on a windowpane to dry.  Early on there are images of soldiers arriving in town on horseback, or one can hear the sound of tanks rumbling through the village in the middle of the night.  While these military references are clear, including belligerent radio reports of various military activities, there is no follow up discussion about it by the family, as they all but ignore it.  In contrast, there are also random power outages where families in the darkness must rely upon candlelight, or a recurring image of sounds of the rain pattering against the windowpanes with Ah-ha looking out, often associated with illness or loss, sounds and images of loneliness and isolation.  One of the more poignant scenes comes the night before elder sister’s wedding, where her mother reminisces about the past with her daughter, describing how she lost the second daughter under dire circumstances, a quiet moment where the daughter sits in silence and only the rain outside can be heard, a poetic use of silence and emptiness, where the sound of the rain emphasizes the spreading atmosphere of sorrow, all told in a single shot where the camera never moves, where in only a few sentences we sense how the experiences of a lifetime are being distilled and transmitted to the next generation.  In a single shot, the time jumps ahead ten years with no other accompanying explanation, but a new set of actors play the children.  The shifts in daily routine are accurately recorded, where the balance of childhood is beautifully contrasted against a devastating portrait of growing old.  The death sequences have a jolting power, not that they’re unexpected, but the haunting impact they have on the family can be overwhelming.  Of interest, Hou uses recurrent theme music from Wu Chu-chu that adds a lyric grace note to this exquisite Proustian meditation that may as well be called In Search of Lost Time.