Hong Kong showbiz doyen Eric Tsang (曾志偉) liked Taiwanese director Tom Shu-yu Lin’s (林書宇) autobiographic debut feature Winds of September (九降風) so much that it inspired him to produce two more films, both of which also tackle the same topic — youth — and are being made by up-and-coming directors from Hong Kong and China.
The first installment of the Winds of September trilogy, Lin’s coming-of-age tale vividly recreates high school life in mid-1990s Taiwan with a tale of friendship, bonding, disillusionment and betrayal.
Set in Hsinchu in 1996, the film follows a group of seven high school boys who spend their time chasing girls, smoking, drinking beer, engaging in late-night skinny dipping, and rooting for their favorite baseball team. Yen (Rhydian Vaughan), is a Casanova and the group’s charismatic leader who is unaware that the less popular and quieter Tang (Chang Chieh) is secretly in love with his girlfriend Yun (Jennifer Chu). When Tang is beaten up by the boyfriend of one of Yen’s conquests in a case of mistaken identity, friendship and admiration quickly turn into envy and rivalry.
Loyalty and personal integrity are further put to the test when two motorcycle incidents put Sheng (Chiu Yi-cheng) in the police station and Yen in a coma. Meanwhile, news of match fixing in Taiwan’s professional baseball league sweeps across the country like a wildfire.
On graduation day, Tang decides to fulfill a promise he made with Yen and travels south to find their baseball hero. When he arrives he looks onto an empty field, and seems to find the answer he had been seeking.
Title film’s title is a locally coined term for the strong winds blow through Hsinchu, Lin’s hometown, during the ninth month of the lunar calendar. It offers Taiwanese audiences in their thirties a trip down memory lane. With everything from KTV rental shops, BB calls (pagers), and NSR motorcycles to the closing song, I Look Forward To (我期待), sung by Chang Yu-sheng (張雨生), who died in a coma after a car accident in 1997, the period details and sensibilities summon the ambiance of that era and provoke nostalgic flashbacks of teenage days that seem eons away and are yet so close to the heart.
The team of young actors is very well-cast, and audiences will have little difficulty identifying with the characters and following their experiences through this well-structured story.
Director Lin cleverly uses the match-fixing scandal as a metaphor for the end of innocence, as news reports following the prosecution of China Times Eagles players parallels the dissolution of the gang of friends.
Winds is a neatly executed piece. Though the plot is formulaic and offers no surprises, this high school drama about friendship, loyalty, betrayal and disillusionment still moves the heart.
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