China Film Journal

Each generation of youth in Taiwan deserves its own movie, a paean to the times, to the challenges they faced. Director Tom Lin does this for a group of nine high schoolers living on the edges of Hsin Chu city in northern Taiwan. The cultural landscape of mid-1990s Taiwan is all there: cigarettes, baseball, girls, fights, pool halls, motorbikes. And like Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, tragedy lurks behind it all, and the forces of fate test the bonds of friendship.

It’s not as if this turf hasn’t been covered before, but Winds of September does make a worth successor to this sub-genre. Beautifully shot in some kind of eternal spring/autumn where there is always a gentle breeze and its never too cold to go skinny-dipping.

Winds of September manages to walk the tight rope between slow arthouse film and something more commercial, and while it doesn’t have the blockbuster potential of Cape No. 7, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or despite the tragedy at the center of the film, get too dark. The film’s most impressive feat is in its pacing and exposition: the deft interweaving of both dramatically light and dark scenes, humor to leaven tension, and no untoward attempts on the audience’s heartstrings. The movie begins with nine undifferentiated characters, and while you have your instantly recognizable stud, nerd, hooligan, fat kid, and pretty girl character types, they do, through each scene, outgrow the cardboard-cutout version of themselves, developing into distinct personalities, with their own thoughts about what the bonds of friendship mean and what responsibilities and obligations they, as friends, have towards each other.

Director Tom Lin has worked as an assistant director for Tsai Ming-liang and Winds is his second feature, part of Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang’s series of three films, all set in different Asian countries, but all telling the same basic story of the vicissitudes of youth and friendship.

First of all, NO, I wasn’t downloading porn. I was actually looking for information about Taiwanese films, and what search result pops out other than 台湾情色电影拍摄现场记录／组图 (Taiwan sex film production stills). These pictures were given with no explanation in writing whatsoever—and on a health website no less. The funny thing is that more than half of the pictures they show are not really from Taiwanese porns, but are stills from arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang’s ouevre, and although it’s been awhile since we’ve seen his films, we believe that the shots in the article are from The Wayward Cloud, which is the last film in a loose trilogy: What Time Is It There?, The Skywalk is Gone, and ending with The Wayward Cloud. His films have gotten more sexually explicit of late—they’ve always had some weird (e.g. son and father) sex, but in his earlier films it was a bit more oblique, no spread legs pointing at the ceiling business. But things changed when, at the end of Skywalk, we find that Lee Kangsheng’s character, Xiao Kang, no longer peddles watches and has instead gone into the commercial penetration business (the last scene is him “auditioning” for his new job in a very un-Boogie Nights but typically Tsai-style scene). So, make a film about a porn star, and you’d expect people to be gettin’ jiggy widit at some point in the movie. OK. This is sexually explicit arthouse fare, not your average seqing movie. What is the point of such inaccurate and misleading postings, and for a health site no less?

If you’re scratching your head and wondering who Tsai Ming-liang is, put on your thinking cap and read what Darren Hughes has to say on Senses of Cinema.

On February 16, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅) won his second Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, taking honors for best script for his new film In Love We Trust 《左右》, a film that has one whopper of a premise: the daughter of a divorced couple develops leukemia and the only way that they can save her is by having another child (which will serve as a donor for the first?). There are a couple of previews and interviews on the video-sharing sites. We’re not sure when it comes out in China, but we like Wang’s movies despite their get-under-your-skin-in-a-weird-way sentimentality, so we’re looking forward to this one. The first video is a preview and the second one an interview with the cast and crew.