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.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she
RSS