Tiempo de vivir, tiempo de morir

The Taiwanese movie Tong nien wang shi was shown in the U.S. with the title A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985). The movie was co-written and directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou, and is said to be semi-autobiographical.

The film is a coming of age story of Ah-Ha, whom we meet as a boy of about seven, and whose life we follow until his late teen years. Ah-Ha's family fled China in 1947, and now live in Taiwan. At first, there was still talk about recapturing the mainland, although those discussions faded away as the reality became clear. Still, Ah-Ha's grandmother is convinced that she can walk back to the mainland, and frequently asks people to help her to get there.

If the movie does, indeed, contain autobiographical elements, Hsiao-hsien Hou had a difficult boyhood. His family was poor, and Illness stalked them. As a teenager, Ah-Ha joins a gang that is extraordinarily violent. (The violence takes place off screen, but it is an ever-present plot element in the second half of the film.)

The plot doesn't give us too many heart-rending moments, but it's still very grim. In fact, as I thought back about it, there was only one truly positive scene when—to Ah-Ha's astonishment--his grandmother is able to juggle three guavas. Imagine a movie that is more than two hours long, and has only about 30 seconds of true happiness in it.

It's hard to recommend a movie like this, but, on the positive side, the camera work is brilliant, the acting is excellent, and the film gives us a glimpse of what life was like for a Chinese subculture—people from the mainland who migrated to Taiwan.

We saw this movie at the excellent Dryden Theatre at Eastman House in Rochester, NY as part of a Hsiao-hsien Hou retrospective. It will work well on DVD.

Very good movie in every aspect: acting, performance, cutting, quality of images, and plot. This is based on the true memories of the life of the director growing up in Taiwan. We follow this evolution in this movie in such realistic and natural images and scenes that we forget we are watching a movie and it looks like if we were watching real life scenes through someone's window. The main plot tells the story of a young boy who is dealing with family and other issues as he grows up during a certain period in Taiwan's history. A fascinating movie. Good foreign arthouse movies are so underrated on imdb and I don't even know why. I guess this site is for popular movies only and top 250 is ridiculous.

It's kinda weird and almost become universal, many of the screenplay writers and directors in Asian Pacific area, such as Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam...seemed to never be able to grow out of their teenage syndrome and phobia of their young and immature romances and loves. The formulaic trend, if I tried to trace it back, most likely was from Japan, originally from their Manga, their anti-social young writers who never had the working experiences or social lives, stayed in their bedrooms, read animated Manga stories, then wrote about their own limited experience from their elementary school to their high school, retrospected their puppy loves to their classmates, boys or girls in their uniforms, timid, shy and reserved, didn't know how to express their love to their opposite gender.

Ho is just one of them, so typically unable to grow out of such remembrance of his teenage love loss and his inability to deal with those impotent situations again and again. It changed and narrowed his thinking, lifestyle and sexuality. His movies most were nostalgic to his teenage time, about the young and fruitless romances, the melancholy regrets, the failures of his romantic adventures in a tightly conservative society he grew up with. His and many other similar Taiwanese writers and directors are exactly like those Japanese and Korean counterparts, many of their products are about romances in uniforms and satchels, after-school encounters, or shyness during classes to each other. These kind of romances never lost their charm to their audiences in puberty, never failed in box office. But it narrowed and hurt their advances in literature and movie production since they couldn't and even refused to grow out it.

It's time for you guys to grow up, not just to grow out of it!

Besides being a great film about an emerging new generation in Taiwan after the war, this film is also full of authentic atmosphere.

There is the Japanese style house the family lives in; Japanese sandals, nowadays still worn by some elder people. Ah-ha and his granny eating water ice after he passed the entrance exam for middle school - the ice machine with it's big wheel in the foreground. The only street lamp, the kids play under in the evenings; the games they play in the streets. The haircut of school children - boys three centimeters, girls three centimeters below their ears. Their school uniforms, some of them still the same in Fengshan today (believe me). Gangs fighting with water melon knifes and the little red police jeep.

The film is close to real everyday life in Taiwan at that time, although you won't find much of it there nowadays.

I recommend A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE as a great introduction to the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien, who I consider the greatest director working today. Like most of his films, this one is about the telling of history, the effort to recreate the memories of the past, in this case his childhood memories growing up in rural Taiwan. His family has escaped Communist China but live as if they will make their return someday. That someday never comes, the family grows old, and members die one by one. These tragedies (filmed with heartbreaking solemnity) serve as punctuation marks for the film's narrative, which isn't so much concerned with plot details as it is with capturing the sense of what it was like to live at that time, as the kids develop their own sense of belonging, in a country they have adpoted just as it has adopted them. His method of editing and storytelling is something close to revolutionary, and he would refine it in his later films. His ability to set scene after impeccable scene and let the ideas ferment over their totality is unparalleled. This is perhaps his most accessible film, full of heart and pathos. It may seem slowgoing by Hollywood standards, but if you have the willingness to let it wash over you, you will be transported, both mentally and emotionally.