Dust in the Wind (1986)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Dust in the Wind (1986) – H.-H. Hou

Do the early films of the great Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou qualify as “transcendental”, referring to Paul Schrader’s description of films by Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer?  (I haven’t read the book so how would I know?). The other term I see bandied about is “spiritually significant” – but I’m not sure whether this is something different from humanism and whether films that harbor no religious connotations, symbols or meanings count (after all, existentialism is a humanism!).  Which is a long way of saying that this quiet story about two teenage lovers who leave their rural mining community for the big smoke of Taipei and face ups and downs there has qualities that make its themes seem to rise above the text to become more universal and yes, affecting.  But it takes a long time for this transcendent feeling to arise (nearly the final minutes of the film) which is not to say that what goes before is boring or superfluous (instead it is necessary for us to earn the conclusion, I think). Indeed, Hou’s style, which manages to use colour, framing, and background subtly and artistically, even while in neo-realist mode, makes the journey worthwhile.  I think I need to revisit his other great, perhaps greater, films of this period (e.g, A Time to Live and A Time to Die, 1985; The Puppetmaster, 1993) and to seek out those I have not yet seen.  Transcending one’s own existence is a balm for troubled times (all we are is the title of this film, after all).