Cinema of sadness

Recapturing lost illusions in the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien

by Peter Keough

"DIRECTOR OF THE DECADE: THE FILMS OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN," At the Museum of Fine Arts, March 3 through 30.

The titles alone tell you that this is not your typical feel-good film fare. But A Time To Live and a Time To Die (1985; screens March 29 at 5:45 p.m.), Dust in the Wind (1986; screens March 3 at 8 p.m.), and A City of Sadness (1989; screens March 18 at 2:45 p.m.), to name a few of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's alien and oddly familiar masterworks, offer a good feeling of their own: they ache with melancholy, loss, and the pathos of, to use the director's favorite word, the quotidian. Named the best director of the '90s in a recent poll of film critics, the Taiwanese master is celebrated in "Director of the Decade: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien," a monumental retrospective of all 14 of his works at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The films are an elegy to the everyday, capturing the transience of individual experience in the flux of time and history. They also strain the limits of film form -- and some viewers' patience -- in their efforts to re-create the real world and thus achieve the ultimate artifice. Though these are film titles that a solid, subversive master of melodrama such as Douglas Sirk might have been comfortable with, the films themselves aspire to the transcendent naturalism of a Robert Bresson or a Yasujiro Ozu.

These ambitions weren't always obvious. Hou's third film, the saucy, if cornball, The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982; screens March 4 at 2 p.m.), tells the story of a city-slicker teacher from Taipei who moves into a small town and, despite initial provincial suspicions, earns the affection of his new community, winning the heart of a pretty fellow teacher. Green is appropriately named, as it is bumpkinish in its broad comedy -- lots of crude schoolboy pranks, sappy background music, stereotypical characters, and pat resolutions. The teacher, played by an actor who resembles an Asian Hugh Grant, even unites his neighbors in a local environmental crusade. But the themes of ephemeral childhood experience and the breakdown of traditions, the specificity of detail (the sound of cicadas and play of light as children splash in a stream), and a preoccupation with certain motifs (trains passing through tunnels, and the abandoned theater in which the teacher takes lodgings, to mention two metaphorically loaded examples) suggest a sensibility beyond generic limitations.

That promise is fulfilled in A Summer at Grandpa's (1984; screens March 5 at 4 p.m.). This time it's the schoolboy who leaves the big city for the country: the young hero, his mother in the hospital, has to spend his school vacation at the country house of his forbidding grandpa, a doctor in the south. The boy takes the train there with his gawky uncle and plucky little sister, and he indulges in some of the usual kid stuff after he makes friends with the local tykes. But the film soon abandons the safety of its genre. Hou spies on the uncle as he gets a girl pregnant and falls out with grandpa, and follows the little sister as she bonds with the local madwoman. It's all seen from a child's innocent, non-judgmental, and morbidly fascinated point of view.

That point of view prevails in A Time To Live and a Time To Die, Hou's first unqualified masterpiece. An unabashed autobiography, it's introduced by the filmmaker in voice-over in the beginning as "memories of my youth, in particular impressions of my father." The film, however, becomes "My Lifetime with Grandma," with Dad proving more significant in his absence (a look at the father's "autobiography" late in the film explains why, in brilliant flashes of melodrama); the lonely hero Ah-ha finds his only reliable companionship with his dotty grandmother. (It's far from a sentimental portrait, however -- wait until she turns up on a mat.)

At first Time seems meditative and episodic to the point of formlessness, with long takes and elliptical cuts enclosing the homely details of a life passed from bruised childhood to stormy adolescence. But the view from Ah-ha's favorite window in varying seasons and weather takes on a familiar feel, and the disorienting rhythms of the editing begin to resemble the meanderings of consciousness and the murmurs of thought. With a chill, one recognizes how 10 years can vanish with the ruthlessness of a single match cut.

With Dust in the Wind, a conventional tale of teenage lovers from the country who lose their grip after moving to the big city of Taipei, Hou pretty much left all conventions behind. Dust isn't structured so much by narrative as by the director's obsessive motifs and a sprinkling of allusions to other directors -- a fizzled reprise of a key moment in The Bicycle Thief, a 400 Blows-style walk on the beach minus the final freeze frame. Like Time, Dust invokes the dynamics of memory and transience, of longing and grief.

Mostly, though, it mimics the ennui and alienation of its protagonists as they wander dreamlessly through nowhere jobs and, ineluctably, away from one another. He ends up in the army, and she marries the postman who delivers his letters from his outpost on Quemoy. The only consolation is another grandpa (renowned octogenarian puppeteer Li Tien-lu, who here began continued collaboration with the director), repeating himself about the state of the yam crop as the camera tilts up to reveal a ravaged seascape.

Dust does cough up the occasional surprise -- in one emblematic scene, the lights go out during a screening at a makeshift movie theater. Blackouts always portend serious changes in Hou's films (a fuse blows in A Time To Live and a Time To Die, and when the lights come back on, there's one less character). Here the outcome is not so dire -- the hero's grandpa ignites what he thinks is a candle; instead it's a firecracker, and the blast causes no injuries but offers a brief comic light.

Not much comedy crackles in A City of Sadness, the first in Hou's trilogy on contemporary Taiwanese history. It's a crowded City indeed, with the fates of several family members intersecting during the volatile years between the end of World War II and the consolidation of Nationalist power in 1949. I haven't seen the film in about 10 years (it was unavailable for screening), and my recalled impression is one of confusion and fitful amazement. Many compare it to the Godfather films, and my sense is that it is like Coppola through a reversed telescope -- everything that is jolting and in close-up is far away, and vice versa. The violence, in particular, as in all of Hou's films, is seen in the distance, an absurd flurry of rage and pain observed with Olympian detachment and often through intervening frames of windows or doors or greenery. Like all of Hou's deceptively simple, inexhaustibly rich works, it's a movie I would like to see again.

Simpler and more radical is the second film in the trilogy, The Puppetmaster (1993; screens March 11 at 3:30 p.m.), a fictionalized quasi-documentary on the life of Li Tien-lu, the patriarch from Dust in the Wind and subsequent Hou films. A puppeteer who learned his craft as child (under Dickensian conditions) and prospered under the Japanese propaganda shows during World War II, a husband and father who scarcely mentions his family but lingers on the prostitute who was his one true love, he's more an iconoclast than a traditional "national treasure."

Nor does the film follow any traditional documentary or narrative path; instead it heads into unmarked episodic territory, obliquely edited, and tied together only when the crotchety Li sums up his story so far in direct address to the camera. It's a stunning fusion of fiction and nonfiction, and of Hou's elusive, raw poetry and accessible story structure. Some of its images (such as the last shot of Taiwanese scavenging scrap metal from sabotaged Japanese planes) are as dense and limpid as haikus. With its theatrical interiors and lyric landscapes, The Puppetmaster could almost serve as a primer for Hou's developing aesthetic -- if not as a miniature of the fate of the artist in modern history.

Which is a problem with some of Hou's later films; they seem more exercises in form than explorations of the spirit. Director of the decade he might well have been, but I suspect that decade might have been the '80s rather than the '90s, or perhaps the decade to come. Good Men, Good Women (1995; screens March 30 at 7:45 p.m.), the third film of the trilogy, stretches the limits of reflexivity, telling the tale of an actress who imagines her role in a movie about persecuted patriots from the '40s even as mystery faxes and intrusive flashbacks remind her of her own checkered past. Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996; screens March 10 at 7:45 p.m. and March 23 at 5:45 p.m.) seems a tribute to Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets: three lunkheads -- a middle-aged loser, his younger sidekick, and the latter's flaky girlfriend -- try to put together a winning scam but mostly end up talking on cell phones in messy hotel rooms.

With Flowers of Shanghai (1998; screens March 24 at 7:45 p.m. and March 25 at 3:45 p.m.), Hou seems to have reached an aesthetic dead end, a breakthrough, or both. Set in the title city at the turn of the century, it is a period film without a period. All the action -- the obsessive or frivolous loves of rich idlers, the wiles and woes of their concubines -- takes place in the chambers of a sumptuously appointed and photographed brothel sealed off from the rest of the world (there is one scene in which the characters call attention to a disturbance outside; we never find out what it is). It's as if Proust and Zhang Yimou had collaborated to make a G-rated version of Nagisa Oshima's Realm of Passion. Perhaps Flowers achieves the artistic stasis that was Hou's goal all along -- the triumph of naturalism as ultimate artifice.