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AUTEUR IN THE MAKING
A trio of early features shows
Hou Hsiao-Hsien forging a
path to maturity and asserting
his own directorial style
HOU HSIAO-HSIEN EARLY WORKS
CUTE GIRL/GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME/
THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI
Taiwan 1980-83; Cinematek/Region 0 DVD; 86/87/95
minutes; 2.35:1/1.85:1; Features: video essays on
each film by Cristina Alvarez López and Adrian Martin,
brochure with essay by Tom Paulus (2016)
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
The Royal Film Archive of Belgium’s welcome
region-free DVD set, available through Amazon,
offers restored versions of three early films by
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, all with English, Dutch and
French subtitle options. It contains Hou’s first,
third and fourth features, but not his second
(Cheerful Wind/Feng’er Tita Cai, originally known
in English as Play While You Play, 1981) or his
episode ‘Son’s Big Doll’ (‘Erzi de Da Wan’ou’) from
the portmanteau movie The Sandwich Man (also
titled Erzi de Da Wan’ou, 1983). Controversially,
the main title cards of the first and fourth features
have been changed to replace the original
English titles (Lovable You and All the Youthful
Days) with Cute Girl and The Boys from Fengkuei
respectively – without acknowledging that the
new English titles were invented by Shu Kei
in Hong Kong (who hadn’t seen either Lovable
You or Play While You Play) when he distributed
The Boys from Fengkuei in the then-colony.
It would be ridiculous to claim too much for
Cute Girl (1980; the Chinese title Jiushi Liuliu
de Ta translates better as ‘She’s So Cute’) or
Green, Green Grass of Home (Zai na Hepan Qing
Cao Qing, 1982). Both are vehicles for the Hong
Kong pop star Kenny B (sometimes ‘Bee’), a
refugee from boy-band The Wynners who
parlayed his independence into a fairly shortlived acting career. Cute Girl is a conservative,
conventionally plotted romcom: an uppermiddle-class girl (Taiwan pop star Feng Feifei)
who doesn’t mind getting dirty in the countryside
runs away from an arranged marriage but is
allowed to marry her true love only when it
emerges that he’s also solidly middle-class.
Hou was then working regularly with director/
cinematographer Chen Kunhou, eight years
older than Hou and a professional DP in the
industry since 1971, and the film’s orthodoxies
follow directly from the four movies they’d
already made together with Chen as director
and Hou as his assistant and screenwriter.
The other two films in the set were also shot
by Chen, but they show Hou progressively
asserting his own directorial ideas by refusing
to follow Taiwan’s industry conventions. Green,
Green Grass of Home is less frivolous, less sappy
and much more nuanced than Cute Girl: Kenny B
plays a Taipei teacher replacing his sister at a rural
school, where he gets involved with eco-projects
98 | Sight&Sound | July 2016
Going up the country: Cute Girl
and falls for a local girl. There are still scatological
gags and romantic clichés, but there are also
some eye-grabbing extended takes that were
clearly not mandated by the need to conserve film
stock, not to mention some scenes with nonpro child actors in which spontaneity is king.
And that’s the point here: we look at Hou’s
early work to find pre-echoes of the later
films, to understand better how he became
a ‘great’ of modern cinema. But the auteurist
approach needs other perspectives too: an
awareness of the constraints on filmmaking
under Taiwan’s martial law in the early 1980s
(censorship, material limitations), of the
island’s changing sense of itself (especially
in relation to China) and of developments in
Taiwan’s other arts (notably literature). Not
much of those frames of reference is available
on this set; you’d do better to read James Udden’s
Here’s a director finding
his feet as an independentminded chronicler of Taiwan’s
particular history
Making a splash: The Boys from Fengkuei
flawed but always interesting No Man an
Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2009).
The real turning-point in Hou’s career was
The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), which flopped
in Taiwan but won him his first festival prize.
Hou formed a company with ‘bad-boy’ producer
Zhang Huakun to make it, and their partnership
endured – despite at least two bankruptcies –
until The Puppetmaster ten years later. The script
was Hou’s first collaboration with the novelist
Zhu Tianwen, she being the one who had
recommended him to read mainland writer Shen
Congwen for lessons in aesthetic perspective.
Three young men from Fengkuei in the Penghu
Islands move to Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s southern
port city, in search of brighter futures. They
make every mistake country hicks can make,
but their brushes with factory work, conmen,
crime and women provide a steep learning curve.
Flashbacks to childhood in Fengkuei make
the structure engagingly complicated, but it’s
Hou’s new preference for long, fixed-angle shots,
ideally framing the characters in the middledistance, that makes the social-realist approach
magical. Here’s a director turning away from
old industry practices, mediating his own path
to maturity through fiction (he gives himself a
cameo as a mahjong-playing roughneck) and
finding his feet as an independent-minded
chronicler of Taiwan’s particular history.
The Cinematek discs offer state-of-the-art
restorations (from the original negative in
the case of The Boys from Fengkuei). Image
quality is a marked improvement on 35mm
prints seen back in the day; English subtitles
are also improved, though far from expert
in matters of transliteration and formatting.
The video-essays by Cristina Alvarez López
and Adrian Martin (15-22 minutes) are
pedestrian-going-on-platitudinous; they take
a resolutely blinkered auteurist approach and
mangle all Chinese names except Hou’s.