There is a director in Taiwan who can tell stories through movies, his name is Hou Hsiao-hsien. The story is set in Taiwan in the 70s. I don’t know if I should classify this film as a literary film, because I think it is more like a piece of moving prose, with the scent of life flowing in the quiet and light ink, or it is more like a black-and-white ink painting, which looks like the distant mountains and the near water, but only when you look at it, you find an old man in the mountains holding a boat and looking far away, in a plain way, but without losing the meaning. Zhang Yimou once described this film as “a subtlety that makes the flowers more colorful”, and probably people who have seen this film can’t help but agree with it.
The story shown in the film “Love and Dust” is the story of Taiwanese writer Wu Nianzhen’s first love. The hero, Ah Yuan, is Mr. Wu Nian Chen himself, while the heroine, Ah Yun, is based on Mr. Wu’s first love, Ah Zhen. During his two years of military service, Yun eventually failed to wait for Yuan’s return and married a letter carrier who delivered letters for them. Mr. Wu Nianzhen said that this incident made him feel very painful at first, so he started to write novels and began to submit them. One day he asked his sister to help him with the submission, and she changed his original name from “Wu Wenqin” to “Nianzhen”, and the pen name has been used ever since.
I started to like Mr. Wu Nianzhen’s storytelling because I read “These People, Those Things”, probably because he was always able to write his stories about souls who seemed to be unattended or abandoned, so the main characters in his articles were unknown passersby, and these seemingly unpredictable episodes were able to knock into people’s hearts word by word. I think, probably Hou Hsiao-Hsien director and he can always coincide in this regard, and that’s why he often borrowed Mr. Wu Nianzhen’s articles to make the film.
The film is 110 minutes long and begins with a picture of Ah Yuan and Ah Yun talking about their studies on the train. They grew up as childhood sweethearts and have gotten used to each other’s company, and perhaps they never thought that their youthful trajectory would lead them to different ends, but the film ends with one person getting married and one person returning home alone. I think Yun is not the kind of person who is not willing to wait for the return of Ah Yuan, but Ah Yuan is too confident in himself. There is not even a word of love in the film, because Ah Yuan believes that the companionship given to him by Ah Yun has become a habit, and habits do not need to be deliberately maintained, and it is precisely this no commitment and can not wait for the end of the relationship so that Ah Yun fell in love with the mailman who delivered their letters.
I believe that Yun is not an easy to fall in love, otherwise she would not have come all the way to Taipei to work with Ah Yuan, and will not turn their daily lives into a letter of longing sent to Ah Yuan. But youth is always wild, thinking that parents will never age, thinking that the people who love you will be by your side with all their hearts, because it is easy to get, so reckless, so full of confidence, but do not know that one day, the loss is faster than the gain.
The film is about youth, regardless of the age, youth is easy to impulsive and difficult to place, but the good thing is that I saw a young man who came from the countryside to the city to work for his dream and a poorly expressed ignorant feelings. I believe this teenager’s heart must have been like the sea before the heavy rain, but also in front of the hard life and reality eventually became the occasional ripples in the water after the rain, and soon disappeared in a whirl.
The grandfather repeated three times at the end: taking care of the fava is more tired than taking care of Bazen, because the previous planted vines are not rain, and this year were blown off by the typhoon. Youth is probably the same, you have a dream higher than the sky, chasing the girl you love, you keep fighting fate, you do not want to give in, think that as long as you work will change everything, as long as you want to get all, until the reality knocked, one day it dawned on you, those who grow, those who love, but in the end is just an experience in life, and these experiences will eventually only tend to bland with the The experience will only end up being a bland life together with life.
Just like Ah Yuan looking at the vines blown off by the typhoon, listening to the grandfather nagging about these trivialities, may recall the days when he worked hard for his dream in Taipei, may recall the company that Ah Yun used to take for granted, but these beautiful memories can only be locked in memory for a lifetime, and this unfinished loneliness is probably the taste of dust.
The good thing about the film is that it is more about the subtleties of life: in the city, the printing machine is “thumping”, the movie is playing loudly outside the door, and the workers are paid more than a thousand dollars a month. In the countryside, the family is often strapped for a good meal, the father can only buy a brand-name watch for his son in installments, and the mother chases the child on the roadside while scolding him. In the face of reality, as if a relationship worth crying over, but only to follow the flow of life and go. Probably the best part of this film is that it tells you that even your sad feelings can’t resist the hardships of life, because you have to live your life in addition to giving the world a middle finger in anger, thankfully, life is not easy, and you don’t have the time to stop and wallow.
Yes, life is always trying to grow in constant loss, and we have to spend our lives learning that there are some roads we can’t go to the end of, there are some people we have to learn to say goodbye to, even if even someone like old Mr. Wu Nianzhen would say with some emotion, “I’ve never held her hand in this life”.
