After having a certain lack of enthusiasm for Dust in the Wind, which is the only other Hou film that I’ve seen, I was reluctant to try another. While I thought that Dust in the Wind occasionally attained moments of genuine poetic beauty, on the whole, I found it rather uninteresting. A Time to Live and a Time to Die, however, is like a movie that’s a collection of nothing but what I enjoyed about Dust in the Wind.
The opening hour (or so) in the film consists of relatively sentimental scenes of Hou’s childhood. They’re not sentimental in that wacky saccharine Spielbergian sense of “I could have saved one more! Just one more! Oh noes…” but rather, they have a genuine ethereal quality and affection for that period of Hou’s life. This, more or less, represents to the ‘Time to Live’ part of the title. This period, however, ends abruptly with the death of Hou’s father, in which Hou is first introduced to death and mortality – the ‘Time to Die’ part of the title and the end of that period of ‘living,’ so to speak.
When we next see Hou, we see that he’s been (at least metaphorically/symbolically) tainted by his encounter with death: he’s with his friends plotting the mugging of a street vendor. While even from the beginning of the film, he was always a bit of a troublemaker, his earlier escapades had the quality of innocence to them. Touched with a contemplation of mortality, that innocence is lost.
As it seems with 99% of all acclaimed Asian films and directors, there is little camera movement, and there is not much motion within the frame (which is not to say I found it boring). Looking at each shot, I found that, true to a certain Asian aesthetic, what surrounds the actors is almost as interesting to look at as the people in the shot. The people, while they’re the center of interest, don’t command the visual interest, as they so often do in Western art. Hou does not seem (I can’t quite say with certainty, considering that I’ve seen only 2 films from him) to be a director that creates power or emotion through flashy camerawork or the collision of shots – he’s not a Welles or an Eisenstein. Rather than using the varied faculties of film/the camera, it seems, he uses the concept of film to create depth. For example, different shots exist to elongate physical distance. While Hou’s father is alive in the opening, he is generally shown to be in different shots than Hou, stretching the physical and emotional distance between them. One of the few moments where they are in the same shot, and even the only moment where they eliminate the physical distance that film editing creates, is after the father dies and Hou holds his hand. As alluded to above, it’s only the realization of death that eliminates the emotional cavities.
The film cycles back to its halfway mark near the end: as Hou’s mother is carted away due to her own illness, the musical themes from the beginning of the film returns: as Hou reflects, his friends continue with their street wars. The meaning is clear: this second realization of mortality forces Hou himsef to cycle back to how he was at the beginning.
In other words: a real masterpiece for the soul.
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