SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
A Summer at Grandpa’s, which Hou Hsiao-Hsien made in 1984, is his sunniest picture, a nostalgic recollection of a childhood that was very close, he says, to his own. It’s his most Ozu-like film, with overtones of works like Ohayo and even of Tokyo Story. [The film] was a dress rehearsal for A Time to Live and a Time to Die, which by common consent is Hou’s first masterpiece. It is the ultimate nostalgic film, a lament for a world that was hard, but perhaps wiser and happier than modern times. Closely autobiographical in many respects (including the death of the young boy’s mother from throat cancer at an early age), it has a maturity and a gravity that transcend his previous work.
Notionally a rites-of-passage story like so many other Taiwanese films, it goes beyond them to attempt a full-scale analysis of the origins of modern life on the island. It is the rural, personal and intimate counterpart of what A City of Sadness later achieves on the urban and political scale. The three deaths in the film – the father peacefully in a chair, the mother painfully of disease and the grandmother in squalor on a mat on the floor, rotting from the underside even before the family know she has died – are like a settling of accounts with the old Taiwan. With them pass the rustic life that Hou himself knew as a child and, by inference, the aspiration to go back to the mainland. When the father dies we learn that he would only buy bamboo furniture because he anticipated an imminent return and was persuaded only reluctantly to buy a sewing machine.
Grandma is even more adamant. She spends the whole picture thinking and talking about the great return and, as senility encroaches, it becomes her one topic of conversation. ‘Where is the Mekong Bridge?’ she asks a young shopgirl and gets a vacant stare in return. For the younger Taiwanese, the goals of the older generation are not merely irrelevant but incomprehensible. But grandma does make her last journey back to the mainland, if only in her mind. Her grandson leads her there down the dusty lanes of Taiwan, picking guavas from the roadside as they go. It is a poetic image of great power, crowned with the wonderful moment when grandma, wandering in mind but still in command of her senses, performs an impromptu juggling act with the guavas for her grandson.
In a film of many heart-wrenching scenes, two especially stand out – the ‘requiem’ in the form of a Chinese version of ‘Silent Night’ and the hypnotic shot three minutes and 42 seconds long in which the mother reminisces to her daughter about her own early married life. The effect is like exorcising ghosts, calling up the past one last time so that it may rest ever after in peace. And throughout the scene torrential rain pours steadily on the veranda outside – cleansing, washing away old sorrows.
Alan Stanbrook, Sight and Sound, Spring 1990
Hou Hsiao-Hsien on ‘A Time to Live and a Time to Die’
In A Time to Live and a Time to Die, I wanted to get back to a one-to-one relationship between filmmaker and subject, much as I’d had in The Sandwich Man. 60-70% of the film is drawn directly from my own memories, the rest from conversations with other members of my family and from research. Of course, the narrative isn’t structured in terms of chronological autobiography. The strongest structuring elements are the three deaths; beyond those, it’s structured in terms of memories and impressions. Both the family in the film and my own memories are essentially vehicles for the discussion with people of my generation of some things that should be discussed: the political and social predicament of those people in Taiwan who originally came from the Mainland. It’s something that simply hasn’t been talked about, least of all in films.
After I’d shot the film, but before I edited it, three images came together in my mind that helped me to rationalise what I was doing. First, a guy from Hong Kong told me how he used to make annual trips with his family to visit his old grandfather in Guangdong province. One year the grandfather took them all out to a mountain overlooking the sea. He clutched a compass in his hand and said: ‘This is where I want to be buried’. I somehow made a mental connection between this faintly absurd scene and the man who carries a magnet everywhere to prospect for precious metal in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the time. And then I made the association of both images with my grandma and her road back to the Mainland. It struck me that all three images combined something fundamentally real with something surreal or absurd. I’d never thought of things in terms of the coexistence of the real and the surreal before. For me, this was a kind of conceptual breakthrough.
I suppose that many people in Taiwan must have thought that bringing up the question of our isolation from the Mainland was a touchy thing to do. It obviously is a delicate issue. But the very existence of the film proves that it needn’t be touchy, which strikes me as useful. I guess the authorities let me do it because my other films have shown that I try to be sincere and that I don’t have ulterior political motives.
Interview by Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1988
A Time to Live and a Time to Die Tóngnián wangshì
Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Production Company: Central Motion Picture Corporation
Presented by: Hsü Hsin-chi
Executive Producers: Lin Teng-fei, Hsü Guo-lieng, Chao Chi-pin
Producers: Chang Hua-kun, Yue Wan-li
Assistant Directors: Hsü Hsiao-ming, Lao Chia-hua, Yang Li-in
Screenplay: Chu Tien-wen, Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Director of Photography: Mark Li Ping-pin
Lighting: Chen Fu-hsing
Editor: Wang Chi-yang
Assistant Editors: Chen Li-yü, Sung Fan-chen
Art Director: Lin Chung-wen
Costume Supervisor: Chu Ching-wen
Make-up: Chang Chin-fang
Music: Wu Chu-chu
Sound Recording: Hsin Chieng-cheng
Post-sync Director: Mei Fang
Sound Re-recording: Tu Tu-chih, Yang Ta-ching, Meng Chi-lieng
Cast
Yu An-shun (Ah-hsiao as a teenager)
Tien Feng (Fen-ming)
Mei Fang (mother)
Tang Jü-yün (grandmother)
Hsiao Ai (Hui-lan)
Yan Sheng-hua (Ah-chung)
Chu Tung-hung (Ah-chu)
Hsin Shu-fen (Wu Shu-mei)
Chen Shu-fang (Wu Shu-mei’s mother)
Lin Chung-wen (Chun-ying)
Hu Hsieng-ping (teacher)
Tao Te-chen (Tao, middle school teacher)
Chen Han-wen (Tang Da-wei, gang leader)
Chieng Pao-te (‘Cat’)
Gao Chung-li (relative)
Chen Chi-chen (Mrs Ye)
Chang Ning (‘Ah Ha-gu’, Ah-hsiao as a child)
Luo Tse-chung_,_ Luo Cheng-ye, Chang Chia-pao, Luo Hsun-lin, Liu Guo-pin (children)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (narrator)
Taiwan 1985
137 mins
Digital (restoration)
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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