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.
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