A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

The Boys From Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1983)


Cast: Doze Niu, Chang Shih, Chao Peng-chue, Lin Hsiu-ling, Chen Shu-fang, Jang Chuen-fang, Tuo Tsung-hua, Hou Hsao-hsien, Lang Li-yin. Screenplay: Chu T'ien-wen. Cinematography: Chen Kunhou. Film editing: Liao Ching-song. Music: Jonathan Lee, Su Lai. 

Like the boys of its title, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Boys From Fengkuei isn't going anywhere in particular. The boys are in a kind of limbo, out of school and waiting to be called up for military service, spending the time as adolescence segues into adulthood by goofing off and getting into fights. It centers on Ah-ching (Doze Niu), the most thoughtful of the group, but also the one who gets them in trouble with the police, spurring their departure from the small town of Fengkuei to the larger port city of Kaohsiung where they manage to do a little growing up. A colorful coming-of-age movie, its strengths lie in the way it universalizes its particulars, capturing an epoch in the boys' lives and vividly depicting its Taiwanese setting.

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