A Time to Live and a Time to Die
This is an odd, misdirecting film which begins by promising memories of a man we barely meet, and ends with a piece of cruel neglect that we utterly sympathize with. The protagonist, Ah-Houa, is a stand-in for director Hou Hsiao-hsien - A Time to Live and a Time to Die is the middle film of Hou’s “Coming of Age Trilogy,” which chronicles Hou’s childhood and teenage years before, in a meta-trick of its own, switching over in the third film to portray the young adulthood of another major figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, Wu Nien-Jen.
The man we are promised memories of is Ah-Houa’s (Hou’s) father, who immigrated to Taiwan from China, settling in the town of Fengshan; and who eventually brought over his wife, children, and mother. Ah-Houa himself was born in China, but so far as we know remembers only Fengshan; and since China is now controlled by Mao’s Communist Party, and Taiwan by the Kuomintang, he and his family have no prospect of returning. When the film begins, Ah-houa’s father is already very sick with tuberculosis. He spends his days prostrate in his chair, rarely speaks, and avoids contact with his children so as not to infect them. He will die halfway through the film, setting off a single-cut time jump of ten years or so, moving Ah-houa from childhood to adolescence.
I think that it’s fair to say that the focus, the point of the film is this back half, and that the opening is preparatory matter. Ah-houa is a dervish child, a thief and a gambler, but not a brat. He integrates well within his large family. This is in fact a large-casted movie, although its lightness belies the fact. Hou self-identifies as a reader, and has co-written nearly all of his films with the novelist Chu T’ien-wen; A Time is interested in the tools of literary fiction, particularly the telling detail (we learn that Ah-houa’s father only bought wicker furniture when he first came to Fengshan, rather than anything more expensive and permanent, because he did not expect to stay long). But it takes advantage of cinema’s wide aperture of sensation to treat its characters in glancing fashion. We get a brief monologue here, a knowing look there. Ah-houa’s grandmother is in many ways a thematic device: she longs for the home she grew up in, she speaks of bringing Ah-houa back there with her someday, she is constantly wandering away from their house in Fengshan – the bicycle taxis that bring her back each time punctuate the film, an insistent rhythm within its gauzier textures. But she works as a character as well – has depth – because of the skill of the actress playing her, and the skill of Hou and Chu in deploying her within larger scenes, allowing her to develop in the margins.
A Life follows a single rule – we never move backwards. Each scene comes after the next, but we never know how much after, and Hou is able to create tension with each cut – will we remain in the now, or leap ahead? After the big leap of ten years, we re-orient around a teenage Ah-houa who is, on the surface, extremely unsympathetic – we first see him trying to mug a traveling salesman. He is deeply closed off, with a flat affect and bursts of sullen anger. In a different film we could imagine this architype developing into a killer, or a gangland kingpin. Here however his inner life is filled for us by his childhood, by his future (he will become the film director Hou Hsiao-hsien), by his family, by the limitations he lives within – both economic and political. With this fullness of context, his anger is completely understandable; and when we see traces of feeling from him, we connect these naturally to the artist he will become. Hou puts immense narrative pressure on prying open avenues of sympathy for his past self; to me it felt not like egotism, but like a use of personal resources (memory) to allow a connection to someone he expects his audience to feel quite far from. Although A Time is densely woven into the sociology and history of its setting, it was sponsored by the Taiwanese government as part of an export-oriented strategy of cultural expansion – it was expected to win awards at the big international film festivals.
The second half of the film is paced by two more deaths – mother and grandmother – each jarring and terrible, occurring in the open exposed spaces of the family’s Japanese-style home (Japanese-style because of course Taiwan was once occupied by Japan; there are layers to the cross-currents of oppression on display). The deaths have a biological intimacy – the film is sensual but not sexual; it is familial in its approach to the body, and at times claustrophobically over-familiar. In one scene Ah-Houah gets up after a wet dream to change his underwear, and comes upon his mother, sitting up in the dark, distraught; doctors have found a growth on her tongue.
We see Ah-Houah in tears at his mother’s funeral, and in its final stretch the film seems as if it will soften towards him. He commits an act of wordless charity towards a family even poorer than his own; he slips a lover letter to a young woman. The woman responds, saying that she will date him after he passes his college exams. Ah-Houah had been planning on joining the military but now, in the rush of feeling, he takes the exams instead. We seem set up for an ending that is tentatively hopeful - the kid will be alright. But the last five minutes of the film are a thorough uprooting of any sentiment. Ah-Houah fails his exams. The family he tried to help moves away. His grandmother dies and lies rotting in the living room before anyone realizes she is dead. This veer towards miserabilism is not done with any malicious - or for that matter dutiful - intent; it is just life’s slight-of-hand. Expectations do not equal fulfillment.
With the death of Ah-Houah’s grandmother he has lost his connection to the family’s deep past; and because he is in a sense exiled, he has no hope recovering it. His only trip to the mainland came as a form of play, a single-day excursion with his grandmother when he was a child, when he entered into her fantasy of return. Change in this film is painful; so is stasis. The compromises of memory and fantasy are held out as at least a slight relief. We leave Ah-Houah stricken, but with the path of art open to him.
NOTES
This is a pointillist film, done in long takes - long takes can be a form of pointillism, if spread out over a long enough period of objective time. That is to say, the size of the point is relative to the size of the painting.
Everything about the film’s sound is distinctive. Much of the dialogue was post-recorded and dubbed in, detaching it from the character speaking, and making it feel a bit as if we are reading their thoughts instead of listening to them talk. In contrast the atmospheric sound is rich and precise; A Time is encyclopedic on the various sounds of falling rain. Finally, the soundtrack is very eighties soap opera - the kind of thing that the Twin Peaks theme narcotized and ironized. It’s actually very beautiful, in its extremely specific way - and original, in that I can’t think of any other film that matches this musical mood with the kind of uninflected realism that Hou deals in here. It could be read as irony. I don’t know. It’s strange.
