The Contemporization of Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Renowned for his mastery of the static long take, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien caused quite a stir in the critical film community when his camera first began to move in 1995’s Good Men, Good Women. While it may seem like a superficial, ultimately insignificant stylistic tic to get hung up on, there was something simultaneously disconcerting and exciting about a director so committed to stasis and detachment suddenly deciding to openly follow his characters around their environment. With the mere loosening of a tripod head for greater mobility, Hou embarked upon a new chapter of his career that continues right up to his most recent film, Flight of the Red Balloon. This is a chapter of willful naiveté and unassertive observation that intentionally removes the traditional director/subject dynamic. For the first time, it is the agency of the characters - more so than the direction - that seems to dictate the flows and meanings of these post-2000 works.

Hou’s early films, right up until his renowned Taiwan Trilogy, were already thought of as radical redefinitions of conventional film grammar. They were particularly antithetical the films residing within Taiwan’s cinematic heritage. Using long, single-take scenes and a suppression of dramatic events and dialogue, the films luxuriated in objective reality in a way that is not entirely dissimilar from the director’s contemporary approach to his material, but there was a dense, serious historical-political dimension to the work, a predilection towards grand and unorthodox statements about Taiwan’s troubled national heritage that suggested a common understanding of cinematic authorship. The film’s lofty intentions were distinct, if not always totally clear. In the past decade, however, Hou has preferred to leave the meanings of his films in the hands of the viewer more openly than ever before, and his focus has shifted in more ways than one. Particularly when placed aside his early, heavily studied, and historically engaged offerings, these films (Millenium Mambo, Café Lumiere, Three Times, and Flight of the Red Balloon) not only signal the director’s substantial artistic and intellectual development, they also yield abundant insights into the still-turbulent relationships between Taiwan and its neighboring East Asian countries, and introduce new perspectives on his signature motifs of time, history, and the irreversible effects of the political on the personal.

One major shift is clear enough from the outset: though already present in his filmography in less overt fashion, Hou’s work in the 2000’s displays an intimate fascination with the youth of Taiwan. A possible practical explanation for this is that Hou is now 64 years old, and nestling his camera within the environment of twentysomethings is one convenient route to feeling younger. But over thirty years of work commenting upon the fractured history of the island nation of Taiwan, it’s easy to see this recent preoccupation as a gesture of simultaneous hope, concern, and curiosity. The idea that history repeats itself, and that shocking national changes force a rupture in collective psychology that remains insoluble, is given repeat emphasis in Hou’s cinema, so naturally his contemporary films reflect a profound desire to break that damaging mold. Guo-Juin Hong summarizes this tendency in his book Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen: “To write history, to represent history, is finally a desire for a future hidden under the backward temporal movement of cinematic retrospection that has been, from the beginning, casting its longing gaze forward.”

Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) A Film by Hou Hsiao-Hsein

The titular balloon from Albert Lamorisse's veritable French classic The Red Balloon has aged well. In the approximately fifty years since its initial appearance as a shy, impressionable, lonely orb of red plastic, it has grown to be as wise and observational as its new director, Hsiao-Hsein Hou. Hou's own spiritual reprise of the quiet coming-of-age tale, Flight of the Red Balloon, casts the balloon in an entirely separate role. In Lamorisse's film, the balloon was a humanized emblem of companionship and creativity. In Hou's, the object's precise meaning is elusive as it plays less of a narrative role than a metaphysical one, hovering haphazardly over the earthbound dramas that are the film's primary focus and only having seemingly tangential significance. Hou, who controls the film with Zen-like patience, prefers to let the balloon gather its import on a scene-to-scene basis, resonating in new, distinct ways as his loose narrative gently explores hectic adulthood, jostled childhood, nostalgia, and the very mechanics of filmmaking in the guise of a director surrogate who is making her own intentional remake of The Red Balloon. This is potentially overwhelming, convoluted material, but Hou's supreme lightness of touch makes it not a cerebral effort but a sensual one, ebbing and flowing in ways that don't require heavy-handed analysis.

The young Taiwanese woman, Song (Fang Song), who is making her own digital version of The Red Balloon has come to study film in Paris and has taken a job on the side as the daytime babysitter of Simon (Simon Iteanu), a content 7-year-old with a swamped mother. In the opening shot, the closest thing to a direct lift of a scene in Lamorisse's film, Simon is dangling on the railing of the Metro station, pleading for the floating red balloon to return home with him. As if to announce the film's fundamental distinction right off the bat, Hou has the balloon not follow Simon. Instead, it has a mellow, indifferent air, justified in the subsequent credit sequence set to elegiac piano music. The balloon has not an individual role linked to youth but an egalitarian one that supports the characters of Song, Simon, his mother, and the various explicit and implicit figures. A divorced mother of two and a passionate voice actress in a local marionette production, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) mounts the film's most accessible plot points (an anger towards a neighbor/friend who does not pay rent, various quotidian struggles such as scheduling piano lessons, explaining her plans to Song, and arguing with her absent husband who has relocated to Montreal to write a novel and shows no signs of returning) and ushers in the bulk of the film's ensemble (the irritating tenant Mark (Hippolyte Girardot), a visiting Chinese puppet master, a pair of hulking, modest piano-movers, and the (mostly) offscreen presences of both her secretive husband and her estranged daughter Louise (Louise Margolin), who is studying in Brussels and only appears in the film via a seamlessly materialized memory that Simon describes to Song).

By building up a patchwork of subtle tension and conflict, The Flight of the Red Balloon achieves the texture of everyday life. Hou's narrative concerns, which are slight to begin with, remain elegantly understated as a democratic weight is assigned to the various mini-stories. All of this is showcased exquisitely in the film's predominant image, a simple wide shot of the family's cluttered Paris flat that Hou keeps returning to. On the left is the door and a packed shelf of books extending outside of the frame that Suzanne ostensibly never would have enough time to delve into, in the middle is an all-purpose dining table, and on the right is the narrow kitchen illuminated by a gorgeous stream of natural light flooding in from the window. It feels as if half of the film is spent observing this segmented domestic sphere, divided up to visualize coming, going, resting, cooking, and zipping around with purpose. Meanwhile, Hou's camera just sits in one spot, occasionally floating from side to side at a pace far too leisurely to accommodate the circus of workaday chaos, which balances the hysterical restlessness of Suzanne, the youthful time-killing of Simon (playing gameboy, drawing), and the quiet introspection of Song, who is perpetually seated at the center table reviewing her daily footage or dreaming up new scenarios in which to place Simon, the balloon, and the man in the lime green suit (to be digitally erased later). It would be disingenuous to overlook how technically proficient these long, often busy sequences are though; in an orgiastic bit of restraint, Hou unfolds one of the lengthiest takes of the film that casually observes several dramas at different intervals (Suzanne's yelling at Mark, her subsequent calm chat with Song, the clatter of the piano tuner in the foreground, and Simon's omnipresent rustling). It's a tumultuous mise-en-scene that manages a distinct poetry thanks to Hou's characteristic economy, the way he willingly has these components butt heads yet is equally prepared to allow a potentially compelling subject to wander offscreen.



None of this is to suggest that The Flight of the Red Balloon is a relentlessly boisterous, hyperactive endeavor; in fact, some of its best moments lie in the relative silence, the pauses from the "action". Like one of his prominent filmmaking fathers, Yasujiro Ozu, Hou routinely resorts to variations on the proverbial "pillow shots". Many times this entails dreamy interludes studying the uncanny soaring of the red balloon, shown in both long shots and with a tight, moving camera. But it also refers to the numerous instances of urban minutiae that Hou likes to turn his camera towards. In one compelling cut, he moves from the interior of the apartment room to the galloping shadows on the ground below a carousel, then the small metal ring at the edge that the riders interact with on their way around. Given the fact that it's Hou's first feature outside of East Asia, it all gives off the impression of an ecstatic outsider's perspective, devoid of cliches (and Paris is certainly full of those) or oversimplifications, which mirrors Song's own cultural assimilation through her Red Balloon remake. Another scene of blissful peace and quiet involves Simon's memory of jaunting around Paris with his sister Louise, which gradually transforms from verbal recollection to literal re-staging. Here Hou makes generous use of visual reflections and layers, shooting the action diagonally through shiny windows to emphasize the coexistence of past and present.

So where does the balloon come into play in this gentle, stoic drama whose chief concern appears to be people and their relationships? It seems to underline, in one big swoop, each of the film's major themes: nostalgia (in its reference to an earlier iteration), the transience of life, the ongoing impact of the past on the present, and the simultaneous melancholy and beauty of the everyday. The balloon hovers alone, but its luminous red sheen remains charming, just as Simon is for the most part, due to forces outside his control, incapable of a perfect childhood, yet he maintains a mask of complacency. And the presence of the balloon also reminds the viewer of Hou's enlightening worldliness, his openness to all forms of cross-cultural artistic associations. As witnessed in Binoche's impassioned recitations of the ancient Chinese story, where the dramatic bombast onscreen is countered by Hou's extended, unadorned gaze, nothing - not even a flurry of conflicts and obligations - threatens to dilute the timeless immersion in art.

The Ice Storm (1997) A Film by Ang Lee

Fate is the engine that drives The Ice Storm and its cast of characters - the members of two Connecticut upper middle-class suburban families - into a flurry of entanglement that proves devastating. The touch of magic realism that brews beneath the spot-on period piece naturalism should come as no surprise in an Ang Lee film (the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and is all the more respectable for its subtle deployment, the opposite of which contributed to the bloat of a film like American Beauty, another examination of the effects of suburban blues.

The Ice Storm, an adaption of Rick Moody's acclaimed novel, is set in 1973, a few years after the massive cultural and sexual revolution that occurred in the late 1960's. The Hood's and the Carver's are still living within this jostled cultural landscape, either fostering adulterous or criminal habits or experimenting with sex, alcohol, and drugs. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is frequenting the Carver house for afternoon delights with the bored wife Janey (Sigourney Weaver), thus triggering simmering suspicion in Elena Hood (Joan Allen). All of their children have uncertain romantic or scandalous pursuits: the rebellious Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) speaks casually about sexual encounters with her friends at school and is secretly admired by Sandy Carver (Adam Hann-Byrd), to whom she makes the offer, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours.", Sandy's spacey brother Mikey (Elijah Wood) uses Wendy for strictly experimental purposes, and Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) has "that feeling" for a fellow student with knowledge of Dostoevsky and existentialism but with a serious aptitude for heavy drug usage. They are all considerably unsure of their actions, a sentiment that is mirrored by their parents. Ben knows what he's doing is wrong but is too shallow and immersed in himself to properly inform his wife who stubbornly remains silent until the situation intensifies.

The film is structured modularly; to an extent, the scenes that make up the middle portion of the film (all occurring during a Thanksgiving weekend) could be rearranged without risking a loss of clarity. Lee opens the film on the night of the ice storm, revealing small fragments, shifts backwards, and returns to the storm for the final act. Therefore, the motif of ice is omnipresent, with there being nicely detailed shots of freezer trays scattered throughout. Water can frequently stand in as a symbol for sex, in its inexorable renewals and flow, so what exists for the characters is a kind of sexual freeze, a reduction of the sexual act to something that is rigid, cold, devoid of feeling, and ultimately physical. Because sex and sexual anxiety is the source of immaturity and much of the unspoken distress that the characters (both young and old) feel, the ice storm is somewhat of a karma device. It inevitably causes a death that is part of one of nature's domino effects.

To visually convey this metaphorical depth, Lee wisely chooses to not do a tremendous amount with his camera; instead he only occasionally provides gentle shots of the ice frozen solid to tree branches, and more tellingly will shoot through windows at his characters, the precipitation on the windows shrouding a mosaic of the outdoors reflected against the glass and the scene inside to evoke the double lives of his confused souls. The rich cast, made up of established Hollywood actors (Joan Allen being the highlight) and promising newcomers who have only currently become stars (i.e. Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood), does a stellar job of bringing this ennui to life. Christina Ricci's performance is especially fantastic. With its simultaneous period relevance and timelessness (ancient Native American flute reverberates on the soundtrack), The Ice Storm is the most important film of Ang Lee's career.

The River (He liu) A Film by Tsai Ming-Liang (1997)

A small selection of obsessive filmmakers say that they make one film in their career, simply rehashing the same themes with imperceptibly slight changes. If there is a current director to whom this idea can be most aptly attributed to, it is Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang. His third feature, The River, is his first spot-on representation of his career-long concerns: existential solitude within the modern, urban consumerist environment, difficulty of communication, meaningless, merely physical sexual consumption, objective struggles as spiritual struggles. In 1997, when the film was released, it was Tsai's deepest, most complex, and most ambitious film to date. Today, a wealth of critics still consider to be his finest work, however I have trouble applying favoritism to any particular film of his considering they do contain such a string of similarities.

Tsai has cast Lee Kang-Sheng as the lead in every one of his films, and he also resorts to several other regulars including Miao Tien, Chen Shiang-chyi, and Lu Yi-Ching (save Tien, these figures are non-professional). For the most part, Kang-Sheng plays drifters either jobless or with a minor job, and usually develops some physical or emotional ailment. The two always inevitably overlap, as in The River, when he develops a severe neck pain following his spontaneous involvement in a film shoot, appearing as a corpse floating in the polluted Tanshui River in the film's opening scenes. Just as he is the source of contrived tragedy in the film that is being shot on the water by Ann Hui (in a special appearance as herself), Tsai plants his camera nearby the film within a film, asserting Kang-Sheng's character (Xiao-Kang) as the narrative catalyst as well. There is a taste of Kiarostami in this scene, a need to make the audience aware of the fact that it is indeed a film. Although Xiao-Kang was initially against the idea of appearing in Hui's film due to the dirtiness of the water, he takes up the offer and pays for it.

Shortly thereafter, Tsai casually begins observing the lives of a man (Tien), who spends ample time bumming around Taipei's gay saunas, and a woman (Yi-Ching), a bored elevator attendant. It is not until about thirty minutes into the film that we see the two and Xiao-Kang living in the same apartment, a triumvirate of lonely souls that hearkens back to Tsai's previous film, Vive L'Amour (1994). This time however, the focus is on a family which is not so much dysfunctional as they are nonfunctional. They barely speak, and if they try to it is in vain, such as when the father calls the mother (the only time he tries to communicate with her in the film) and only receives an answering machine. Nonetheless, the parents feel obligated to do what they can to cure Xiao-Kang; they try acupuncture, medicine, an herbal doctor, folk rituals, and a faith healer, none of which show promise. Meanwhile, there is incessant rain that is leaking into the father's bedroom, an issue he attempts to fix by capturing the water with a plastic sheet and channeling it into the apartment's drain system. When he and Xiao-Kang are out of town to visit the faith healer, Master Lui, this flooding problem becomes extreme, leaving the mother alone in the apartment with little means of solution.

The only escape for these characters comes unsatisfactorily through sex; the mother maintains a silent affair with a pornographic video dealer, the father shimmies through the dark hallways of the saunas, one in a mob of shirtless zombies peering into rooms in hopes of finding another pleading male, and Xiao-Kang encounters several affairs throughout the film made useless by his uncertain sexual identity, one of which involves his father, quite uncomfortably, in the lowly lit sauna. Feelings of confusion and dehumanization run throughout the film, and it is most stirring in the aforementioned scene, which is all the more nerve wracking because the dank lighting of the sauna obscures body parts, most adversely the head.

Tsai's visual style foreshadows his late works, which have reached the extremes of modernist minimalism. In the most complex scenes, the camera will remain fixed in its objective, detached position for minutes on end, acquiring an eerie realistic quality that builds tension until it is almost unbearable to watch. The River does however also contain a surprising amount of camera movement, an element that is entirely done away with in Goodbye Dragon Inn. The symbol of uncontrollable water appears here as the link between the family's several troubling agendas, and one can't help but see that, on a broader scale, it helps Tsai flow smoothly from one film to the next, carrying the same themes and images down the river.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Hei Yan Quan) A Film by Tsai Ming-Liang (2006)

A celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday in 2007, marked as the New Crowned Hope Film Festival, comprised of some challenging films including Apichatpong Weerasethakul's two-part Syndromes and a Century, Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon, and Tsai Ming-Liang's ninth feature, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. Strand Releasing issued the film in 2007 with gaudy design, but Ming-Liang is a brilliant auteur, so his dreamy film naturally makes up for it. Lee Kang-Sheng plays both a lethargic vagabond rescued from the streets by a group of immigrant construction workers and a bald comatose son being nurtured by a waitress (another Ming-Liang regular, Chen Shiang-chyi) that is bossed around by the mother. It's difficult to tell at first that both characters are Kang-Sheng - given that the homeless man's hair is like a mop as opposed to the paralyzed man - but their situations and demeanors are suspiciously congruent as to perhaps suggest a dual personality or "two sides of the same person", or perhaps something different altogether: both the men are being cared for by another, and both are emotionally repressed. Kang-Sheng's performance is typically silent and pensive, with his wandering mannerisms on constant cruise control as he drifts through the hazy Malaysian streets (the backdrop of the film being Tsai's native country).

Much of the film ebbs and flows almost randomly, deeply establishing its destitute characters before finally advancing its laconic narrative about an hour and a half through. Therefore, much of the film is viewed as a moment-to-moment appreciation that eventually gets tiresome, but this slow fizzle is reciprocated in the engrossing final act. A toxic smoke, the result of a fire, begins to capsize the city streets and acts as a powerful counterpoint to the character's suffocating longing for one another; gas-masks and all, Kang-Sheng's homeless man gropes at the passionate Shiang-Chyi as Rawang, the homosexual construction worker forging a connection with him, accumulates humid jealousy. Ming-Liang uncharacteristically reveals himself as an adept, if still faint, dramatist here, even imparting a brief scene of reverse close-ups.

Aside from this interjection, Tsai's visual style is still his miraculous formalism. The compositions are immaculate in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, capturing the creaky dwellings of claustrophobic Malaysian alleyways, the impersonal immediacy of the Kuala Lumpur's urban culture (restaurants, apartment complexes, and a football stadium), and most ravishingly, a flooded construction site with sunlight seeping in. Tsai works mindfully with the frame, filling it up tastefully with dead space or entrancing appliances (such as a fan or radio), and often splits it into two scenes: one a smooth vanishing point and the other a tight point of stasis which often comprises an odd human behavior. Although almost all of the words in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone come from either radio broadcasts, music, or off-screen comments, the film speaks poignantly about love and alienation (two common Ming-Liang themes), and like most of his films, leaves a viewer swarmed by thoughts for days.

What Time is it There? (Ni na bian ji dian) A Film by Tsai Ming-Liang (2001)

From the cramped quotidian living spaces of Taipei to chilly Parisian streets, What Time is it There displays the alienation of two souls with graceful sensitivity. Like the rest of Tsai Ming-Liang's cinema, it is contemplative and lingers on the loneliness of its inhabitants, but it also has a humorous poignancy that is rare in his films. Where Goodbye, Dragon Inn shifts into hollowness, What Time is it There delves into Charlie Chaplin on depressants. Most of the comedic sequences are very dry, but there are a few that exhibit methodical physical comedy.

The overarching sentiment is not a humorous one however; just gaze into the powerfully stagnate expression on Lee Kang-Sheng's face and you'll get the idea. He plays the characteristic loner in Ming-Liang's work. Here he is a twentysomething living with his mother after his father died, and working on the streets of Taipei selling watches. When a young woman confronts him one day and shows an interest in one of his watches, the two forge a mystifying connection. She informs him that she's taking a trip to Paris, so he sells her the watch before she leaves and proceeds to set as many clocks as he can find to Paris time. His actions seem trivial, but they also appear to be rooted in a kind of supernatural longing for the girl. Presumably to feel connected with her, he even watches and rewatches the classic French film The 400 Blows. Simultaneously, the mother whom he's distancing himself from prays incessantly in hopes of regaining the spirit of her lost husband, whether in his original form or in that of a cockroach in the living room fish tank. (The explanation for this odd sentence can be found in one of the hilarious scenes of the film).

The lives of these three quite Bressonian characters are observed silently. Deviations from the apparent "plot" are aplenty, but it's the cumulative urban remoteness that is important. Feelings of hopelessness are only eradicated partly by the meaningless erotic behaviors that the three engage in late in the film. Ming-Liang's film is substantially alienating because of the spare camerawork. There is always a feeling of existential detachment in the wide angled shots that reveal several important compositional elements before the faces. Not a single camera movement is existent either; instead the audience is left to imprint the gorgeous visuals that are forever static on the screen. Red, green, and black swirl at different depths in each shot, creating mesmerizing mosaics as beautiful as any shot in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. After the enigmatic ending of the masterful What Time is it There, I was left with a brain stamp of a Ferris wheel and loads of thoughts.