It is hard to imagine a mediocre film coming from accomplished director Wang Toon (王童), best known for his Taiwan trilogy, Strawman (稻草人, 1987), Banana Paradise (香蕉天堂, 1989) and Hill of No Return (無言的山丘, 1992). But Where the Wind Settles (風中家族), Wang’s ambitious epic work that spans over six decades, from the 1940s to the present, seriously misses the mark and fails to deliver its promising story about the diaspora experience of his and his parents’ generation, who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the civil war to the communists.
To Wang, who left China for Taiwan with his family in 1949 when he was seven, the project is undoubtedly close to his heart, but ends up being lost.
The film begins on the battlefield where KMT troops flee from the doomed battles against the communists. Injured, captain Sheng (Tony Yang, 楊祐寧) is among the last to retreat, followed by his subordinates Shun (Lee Hsiao-chuan, 李曉川) and Fan (George Hu, 胡宇威). During their trek across the Chinese outback to escape the pursuing enemy, they rescue an abandoned boy named Feng Hsien and adopt him as their own son.
Soon, the four manage to get on a ship bound for Keelung.
What greets them in the foreign land is a dilapidated, leaking hut in a crowded veteran’s village, or juancun (眷村). Down and out, the three men and their adopted son struggle to start a new life. While Shun’s marriage with Yu (Alice Ko, 柯佳嬿), an earthy Taiwanese woman, ends prematurely in a tragic fire, Sheng’s secret love for Chiu Hsiang (Bea Hayden, 郭碧婷), a professor’s daughter, doesn’t bear fruit. Chiu Hsiang later leaves for the US.
Years have gone by, and Feng Hsien (Mason Lee, 李淳), all grown up, marries Chiu Mei (Amber Kuo, 郭采潔), Chiu Hsiang’s younger sister, forming the kind of family that his caregivers long for, but are never able to achieve.
Sheng dies of heart attack before he can return to his homeland, which was impossible while he was alive due to a travel ban across the Taiwan Strait.
In a coda, the gray-haired Feng Hsien visits Sheng’s hometown in China, only to find that the captain’s wife passed away, heartbroken.
Following director Niu Chen-zer’s (鈕承澤) Paradise in Service (軍中樂園) last year, Where the Wind Settles is another ambitious attempt to capture a turbulent chapter in history through a story of personal tragedy, longing and strength. Yet, its elliptic storytelling and sketchy script fail to provide an emotional ground for the characters to develop. Devoid of flesh and blood, they are like pale, cut-out characters drifting from one historical event to another.
The fear and relentless oppression during the White Terror era is only briefly touched on through a sequence in which Chiu Hsiang’s father is taken away by the secret police.
In the otherwise flat film, Yang invests a much needed dose of genuineness in his role as a displaced man trapped faraway in nostalgia for his home. However, apart from Yang, most of the actors are miscast. Mason Lee, Ang Lee’s (李安) 25-year-old son, for example, really has no business playing Feng Hsien, unless there is a good reason why a character coming from a Chinese village should speak Mandarin with an American accent. His pairing with Kuo, appearing as dull as ever, generates a stiff, if not entirely disastrous, performance.
After a long hiatus from feature filmmaking, director Wang makes an unsuccessful foray into Taiwan’s modern history, both personal and collective, and hopefully, it is just a bumpy beginning of many new films to come.
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understand than for what he does. Ai simply lacks the reflective understanding that the loneliness and isolation he imagines are “European” are simply the joys of life as an expat. That goes both ways: “I love Taiwan!” say many still wet-behind-the-ears expats here, not realizing what they love is being an
William Liu (劉家君) moved to Kaohsiung from Nantou to live with his boyfriend Reg Hong (洪嘉佑). “In Nantou, people do not support gay rights at all and never even talk about it. Living here made me optimistic and made me realize how much I can express myself,” Liu tells the Taipei Times. Hong and his friend Cony Hsieh (謝昀希) are both active in several LGBT groups and organizations in Kaohsiung. They were among the people behind the city’s 16th Pride event in November last year, which gathered over 35,000 people. Along with others, they clearly see Kaohsiung as the nexus of LGBT rights.
In the American west, “it is said, water flows upwards towards money,” wrote Marc Reisner in one of the most compelling books on public policy ever written, Cadillac Desert. As Americans failed to overcome the West’s water scarcity with hard work and private capital, the Federal government came to the rescue. As Reisner describes: “the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.” In Taiwan, the money toward which water flows upwards is the high tech industry, particularly the chip powerhouse Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). Typically articles on TSMC’s water demand
Every now and then, even hardcore hikers like to sleep in, leave the heavy gear at home and just enjoy a relaxed half-day stroll in the mountains: no cold, no steep uphills, no pressure to walk a certain distance in a day. In the winter, the mild climate and lower elevations of the forests in Taiwan’s far south offer a number of easy escapes like this. A prime example is the river above Mudan Reservoir (牡丹水庫): with shallow water, gentle current, abundant wildlife and a complete lack of tourists, this walk is accessible to nearly everyone but still feels quite remote.
RSS