Un temps pour vivre, un temps pour mourir

For me, this transparent, transcendental film ranks with with the very best of Bresson and Ozu. Meandering, episodic and deceptively detached in tone, A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE is quite probably Hou Hsiao-Hsien's most daring formal experiment, as well as--surprisingly--his most moving film to date.

Although I think The Puppetmaster is the real best masterpiece of Hao, Time to live and the time to die is the one I love most. Despite the implication and background of Taiwan history in the film, as I am not so clear about it and not close to me, the story about growing-up is the reason that the film move me so much. The trip of the main kid "ar Ha" and his grandma become the warmest and most unforgettable part of the film. By the way, I think the relatively slow and quiet style of Hao extremely suit the story of rural and history background, much better than modern city background.

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.

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!

"A Time to Live and a Time to Die" reads like a family saga, but it is just as much a film about the passing of traditional China and the dislocation of exile. Of course the plot points are given away; Hou isn't interested in dramatic tension and Aristotelian unities--these are so dependent on Western ideas of

personality and the separation of individual and world that they make little

sense in China. He doesn't push the events in our faces, either--they just

happen, often in the middle distance with a tree in the foreground, the way real life happens. (Remember Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts", with Icarus plunging

in the sea far off while a ploughman works on his field?)

The space Hou gives his events and his characters doesn't give us the intimacy with people that we expect in the West. But it gives us a rich sense of the

texture of life and the things that pass among members of a family and a

community, even one that is thrown together and can just as suddenly fall

apart, as it begins to here. It's that feeling for social space, in part, that allows this film and others of his to address social and historical questions without ever losing the sharp particularity of a personal story.