Hsiao-Hsien Hou

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Based on an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun, and starring Hong Kong film and recording star Tony Leung, Hou’s first film set outside of Taiwan takes place in the elegant brothels of late nineteenth-century Shanghai, a hermetic world with its own highly ritualized codes of behavior. It traces the destinies of the beautiful “flower girls”, whose lives depended on their ability to win, and then hold, the affections of their wealthy callers. A mesmerizing and seductive tale of sexual intrigue.Read More »

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Dust in the Wind is a remarkable film, and one which will, no doubt, reward multiple viewings. Like most of the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien, viewers will be divided into two, sharply opposed camps.

The main characters in the film are two high-school students. The first is Wan, who – seeing his village as a dead-end career-wise, decides to leave their home town to go to Taipei to find work, intending to complete his education via night-school. His girlfriend Huen also leaves for Taipei after graduation. The other personages are family members, employers, friends and co-workers.Read More »

The pop-star leads from Hou’s first feature, Cute Girl, are reunited in the director’s follow-up, a brisk work of bubble-gum romance that begins to experiment with the rules of the genre. This time, Taiwanese singing sensation Feng Fei-fei plays Hsing-hui, a trendy photographer visiting a seaside village in Penghu with her successful boss/fiancé. When she happens upon a flute-playing medic blinded in an ambulance crash (Kenny Bee), sparks fly, songs are sung, and she’s left with the tough decision of who to say “I do” to. Despite the eye-rolling premise, Hou infuses the film with enough formal ingenuity (long takes, telephoto lenses, on-location shooting) that a case can be made for its auteurial significance.Read More »

An assassin accepts a dangerous mission to kill a political leader in seventh-century China.

J. Hoberman wrote:
“The Assassin” is extraordinarily beautiful. The film’s editing and narrative construction are, however, no less remarkable. For all its exquisitely furnished interiors and fantastic landscapes, “The Assassin” is far too eccentric to ever seem picturesque. Nor does it unfold like a typical wuxia. Mayhem is abrupt, brief and fragmentary — predicated on suave jump-cuts and largely devoid of special effects.Read More »

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Lung, a former member of the national Little League team and now operator of an old-style fabric business, is never able to shake a longing for his past glory. One day, he runs into a forme teammate who is now a struggling cab driver. The two talk about old times and they are struck by a sense of loss. Lung is living with his old childhood sweetheart Ah-chin, a westernized professional woman who grew up in a traditional family. Although they live together, Ah-chin is always weary of Lung’s past liason with another girl. After an argument, Ah-chin tris to find solace by hanging out with her sister’s friends, a group of westernized, hedonistic youths.Read More »

Synopsis:
The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.Read More »

Nick Schager (Lessons of Darkness) wrote:
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a restaurant. However, since the director is more interested in atmosphere and conveying a sense of time’s relentless progression than he is with straightforward narrative clarity, Goodbye South, Goodbye is more elliptical mood piece than traditional gangster flick. Gao and Flathead organize illegal card games, attempt to sell pigs at inflated prices, and engage in a variety of other misbegotten business ventures, all the while drinking, smoking, and coasting through life with the vague, imperceptive grogginess of men incapable of seeing the forest from the trees.Read More »