Looking back at the 1980s, three of Hou Xiaoxian's films have a strong biographical color.
In addition to Hou Xiaoxian, who recalled the rebellious time of his youth in "Childhood Past", Wu Nianzhen, a well-known director and screenwriter who has cooperated with Hou Director for many years, also looked back at a fruitless love affair with trepidation in the film "Love Wind and Dust".
The story of another film comes from Zhu Tiantian, who is known as the "Hou Director's Royal Screenwriter".
In 1983, Zhu Tiantian worked as a screenwriter in "The Man from the Wind Cabinet", which was her first collaboration with Hou Xiaoxian, and the two have since formed a fixed partnership.
Behind many films such as "Tragic City", "Childhood Past", "Assassin Nie Yinniang" and so on, we can all see the figure of this talented woman, Zhu Tiantian and Hou Xiaoxian have cooperated for more than 30 years and won many awards.
In this 35-year-old movie, Zhu Tiantian traced his childhood memories for the first time.
"Winter Holidays"
The film is adapted from Zhu Tiantian's short story, and with his film Hou Xiaoxian, he won the Best Director Award at the 30th Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the Best Feature Film at the 7th Nantes Three Continents International Film Festival in France, and many other awards, and screenwriter Zhu Tiantian was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 21st Golden Horse Awards.
It is worth mentioning that most of the actors in this film that has won many awards are newcomers, including Wang Qiguang, a small actor who plays the protagonist Dong Dong in the film.
For his outstanding performance in the film, he was nominated for Best Child Star at the 21st Golden Horse Awards, which was recognized by everyone.
Although the film has gained recognition in the industry, the box office when the film was released was not ideal.
Hou Xiaoxian revealed in an interview that "Winter And Winter Holiday" was filmed by him with his house, because the box office was dismal, and his personal finances were also dragged down.
This film, which was not optimistic many years ago, has now been well received by the audience and is a good film worth brushing.
The Douban score is as high as 8.5, and it is known as the warmest one in Hou Xiaoxian's movies.
The film tells the story of Dong Dong's mother being hospitalized due to illness, dong Dong and her sister Tingting taking the train from Taipei to the countryside to spend the summer vacation with her brother-in-law, and growing up between the two worlds of children and adults.
As soon as he got off the train, Dong Dong exchanged the turtles of the country children with a fashionable remote control car and entered the children's group.
Childhood is closest to the world and nature.
Winter and winter chase laughter with their friends in the countryside, and watch the turtles race under the trees.
They took off their clothes on long afternoons and jumped into the clear waters of the stream, frolicking in the middle of summer with the sound of cicadas.
But in addition to the simple and happy play time, Winter and Winter also watch the ups and downs of the adult world with the eyes of children.
Dong Dong and his friends inadvertently bump into a thief in the middle of play, and the truck driver who got out of the car to rest fell asleep, and his belongings were taken away by the thief.
Another accomplice of the thief held up a stone to prevent the driver from waking up, while threatening dong dong who was passing by with his eyes and waiting for a group of children to leave.
The epileptic woman Hanzi is teased by the scoundrels who catch sparrows in the village, and Dongdong and her friends look at the house outside the door, but they don't know what happened.
The camera watched Hanko's father enter the house, several children hid in the distance, and a moment later a roar came from inside the house.
In the picture, Hanko's father chases the rogues on the path of the field with a hoe, and in the long shot from afar, several ignorant children watch everything that happens in front of them.
Dong Dong and his brother-in-law play billiards, the brother-in-law's girlfriend comes, and the lovers in love are in love in front of their nephews.
The brother-in-law took his girlfriend into the back room to "run errands", and the laughter of the two people was heard in the room, while Dong Dong, who only cared about playing billiards, was ignorant and unaware.
Dong Dong's eyes are fixed on everything that is happening in front of him, but he does not really understand, and he is always far away from the adult world.
Also isolated from the adult world is Dong Dong's sister Tingting.
If Dong Dong is a bystander in the adult world, then Tingting is another bystander outside the adult world and the child world to which Dong Dong belongs.
Throughout the film, Tingting's figure is lonely.
The strict grandparents would only reprimand her, and the children's group led by Dong Dong would not take her to play until Hanzi appeared.
The appearance of the character of Hanzi made me a little moved, and when I was a child, there was also a madness like Hanzi in the village.
The children avoided him from a distance, and the adults watched coldly, and no one knew or cared about what such a crazy life was like.
The hanzi in "Winter Holiday" is also such a distant existence.
But cleverly, hanzi saved Tingting in the movie, so that we finally have the opportunity to understand the epilepsy in the eyes of everyone from the perspective of an ignorant little girl in the movie.
Tingting fell in front of the tracks, and the passing Hanzi saved Tingting from death in the whistle of the train, holding a broken umbrella to carry the isolated Tingting home.
When Tingting picked up the dead bird, Hanzi covered the bird in the palm of her hand and whimpered uncomfortably, in order to put the dead bird back into the nest, the pregnant Hanzi fell from the tree and unfortunately miscarried.
Unfortunately, no one saw hanzi's kindness, and in the eyes of the villagers, hanzi was always the nervous and crazy numbness that could beat people.
Tingting may understand Hanzi's kindness, but she can't empathize with the pain that Hanzi suffered, and like Dongdong, she is only a bystander in the adult world after all.
Fortunately, in "Winter's Holiday", those cruelties, sins and diseases are not directly presented, but only vaguely.
Dongdong's sick mother only appears briefly at the beginning of the movie, and later the mother's condition is either learned from the adult population or transmitted by phone, and never really faces the camera.
If the mother's illness is the background, then the anxious grandparents, the worried Dongdong and Tingting together constitute the foreground of the picture.
The two-layer structure makes "Winter Vacation" blur those cruel realities, and this narrative method makes the film sad, but there is also warmth, not as heavy and bitter as "Childhood Past" that faces life and death.
The depiction of family affection in the film is meticulous and warm.
The brother-in-law Changmin and his girlfriend Biyun in love have a relationship, Biyun's mother learned that her daughter was pregnant and ran to her grandfather's house to make trouble, and the disgraced grandfather chased after the brother-in-law in anger and drove him out of the house.
Worried that the brother-in-law was wronged outside alone, the grandmother hid the money from the grandfather to give the brother-in-law, and the brother-in-law who secretly returned home was afraid of being seen by the grandfather, so he only dared to go through the back door.
And the grandfather who said "you leave, don't come back" is actually not as cold and ruthless as it seems, after the brother-in-law was taken away by the police, the grandfather pretended not to care, but privately quietly entrusted someone to protect him out.
This is the love of parents for their children, on the surface they all follow the tradition and are very strict, but the grandmother will secretly stuff money for the brother-in-law, and the grandfather is always paying attention to the son behind the scenes.
Both generations have a soft heart in private, always concerned, but never revealed.
The film uses a large number of long shots and empty mirrors, in addition to separating the distance from the characters in the picture, but also casts a hazy poetic layer on the film.
Children swim by the river, farmers in the rice paddies burn straw in the distance, smoke rises, and trains come in the distance, making a "clanging" sound.
Looking into the distance in the cool winter of the big trees, the sound of cicadas, the wind, the trees moving, and occasionally a person passes by, and the village is quiet.
These empty shots carry a strong local memory, as Hou Xiaoxian said, it is not to introduce the environment or burden the plot to advance, although it is "empty", but there is an atmosphere, a meaning there.
Although "Winter Vacation" is Zhu Tiantian's look back at childhood, we can still find our hometown in these shots, and we can find the emotions we have also experienced in the story.
After the holidays, the summer cicadas are still noisy, and Dongdong and Tingting are about to return to Taipei, standing on the road in the countryside waving goodbye to friends.
The youth of the countryside embarked on the road to leave, and we waved goodbye to childhood.