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.
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
RSS