The Boys from Fengkuei

(, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1983)

Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López

I’m Still There

In essence, The Boys from Fengkuei is simple, direct, plaintive. Three teenage boys move together from Fengkuei, in the Penghu Islands, to Kaohsiung, a city on Taiwan’s southern port. This is a stark displacement for the characters from a rural village – where their daily lives are related to us in a series of episodic vignettes – to a bustling, noisy, big city.

Hou had already depicted the opposition of country and city in his previous films, Cute Girl (1980) and The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982). But here a strong dimension of trenchant social observation begins to appear in Hou’s cinema: a frank look at a changing world, and how this world transforms the type of personal interactions that occur within it.

Hou’s vision of country life is not totally idyllic: violence, neglect and economic hardship exist there, too. But the business-driven city brings a whole new level of alienation, deception and shock to the characters who move there, as they negotiate a range of people who have already integrated into its fast, sneaky, amoral ways – such as the mysterious figure of the “unregistered brother-in-law”, seen only in one scene (played by Hou himself).

The Boys from Fengkuei marks a departure from the pop-commercial formulae Hou had worked with earlier in the romantic comedies Cute Girl, Cheerful Wind and The Green, Green Grass of Home – while still retaining a connection with the coming-of-age teen movie/young adult genre that was highly popular throughout the world in the 1970s and ‘80s.

At this level, The Boys from Fengkuei – which is also known under the title All the Youthful Days – invites comparison with American teen flicks like American Graffiti (1973) or Big Wednesday (1979) – and also with an earlier model for these films, Federico Fellini’s picaresque tale of young layabouts, I Vitelloni (1953).

Stories of this type – tracing both the interpersonal changes in a group of friends, and the social changes happening in the world around them – often have a sadness at their centre. The world, with its increasing industrialisation and consumerism; and people’s personal paths, inexorably turned more toward a professional career and dutiful obligation to family – these two realms are not necessarily getting any better as they march toward the future.

So, nostalgia – intense, bright memories of an earlier time, in childhood or teenagehood – becomes a central part of an individual’s experience. Everything was simpler, more intense, more complete, back then – or so it increasingly seems.

Hou sharpens this inherent sense of melancholia in The Boys from Fengkuei, as he will do in his later work. Although it begins with familiar teen movie hi-jinks involving a toilet prank, the mood quickly turns less cheerful.

The entire film is marked by the symbolic absence of a good, strong father-figure in the life of the central character, Ching-tzu (Doze Niu). This father is literally present, but (as the result of an accident we see in flashback) severely mentally disabled, unable to look after himself or communicate in even the simplest ways. This absence creates a gaping, depressive hole in Ching-tzu’s life which seems impossible to ever fill.

Likewise, the spiritual and superstitious practices that fill the life of Hsiao-hsing (Lin Hsiu-ling) seem completely out of place in the big city – practices that appear to be on the point of vanishing forever from the fabric of the culture.

One could say that The Boys from Fengkuei is a typical male-centred teen movie, with Hou showing what he knows (or at least remembers) best: the ritual bonding between young men – jovial, yet with a sometimes abrasive edge. Girls, on the other side of the gender barrier, are depicted as pretty, evanescent, mysterious, hard to comprehend – screens for idle, even ignorant, male fantasy projection.

Yet ultimately, all the characters, whether male or female, are given to similar behaviour: periods of sulking, depression, inwardness, boredom; followed by sudden outbursts, displays of anger, frustration, blockage. Although the character of Hsiao-hsing is as taciturn, as little given to verbalising her emotions as any classic Hou character, we come to understand the bind she is in, in her relationship with Huang Chin-ho (Tuo Tsung-hua), and the crushing pain she feels when he acts in his own reckless way – or ultimately leaves her with hardly a goodbye.

We have compared The Boys from Fengkuei to American youth movies; it also calls up a range of other references, especially from the various realist movements in French and Italian cinema. Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1960) is viewed, a little reluctantly, by the characters sitting in a cinema; Hou has frequently joked that it was the masculine idol of Alain Delon that drew him to this film in his teen years, not Visconti or the concept of neo-realism. Nonetheless, the reference is significant: Rocco and his Brothers is also about a group that moves from a familiar, unified style of family life to an industrialised city, where all values and ideals painfully disintegrate.

The figure of an absent father also evokes, from the post-war period of Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948) – where the central figure of the boy (Edmund Moeschke), like the boys from Fengkuei, also walks around an unfinished or abandoned building. And, on the French side, the way in which Hou and his cinematographer Chen Kun-hou meticulously map the spatial co-ordinates and relationships of the apartment block – up, down, left, right, the stairs, the entrance – recalls Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936).

In The Boys from Fengkuei, Hou begins to explore a visual style keyed to distant observation and long-held moments of stillness; he kept telling his cinematographer to “move back further” with the camera. Many things – people, vehicles, animals – may move in and out of the frame, but the camera often remains still, taking in a whole picture, a large context. Things are often momentarily hidden, obscured, made invisible, even right inside the frame.

Hou’s cinema is often discussed with words like objectivity, naturalism, realism. There can be no doubt that, starting in 1983, Hou and his collaborators aimed for a greater naturalness and true-to-life quality on many levels – such as filming on real locations and using previously untrained actors – as we can see in the images that play under the opening credits.

However, Hou’s style is just that: a style, a method – very formal in the way it calls attention to its own point-of-view, its way of looking from an often fixed camera position. Hou’s approach to both cinematic style and storytelling is all about distance.

Let us study some examples. Early in the film, there is the remarkable scene of a street fight. The conception of this mise en scène is bold. It is nothing like an action movie: no fast editing, no close-ups or inserts, no special emphasis on punches or wounds. It is not a spectacle for our excitement. Instead, there is a mostly static frame, once the initial panning movement has ended – where the characters enter and exit the field of vision, unpredictably, and in the distance.

The little kid and his uncle’s emergence into the scene at the start, and our heroes’ desperate flight on foot at the end, are just as significant as the act of the physical fighting itself. And just as interesting are the passers-by and bicycle riders who look on but pay no real attention to what’s happening.

Another example: the domestic argument between Hsiao-hsing and Chin-ho. Phase One: It begins indoors, in the bedroom, and is played out more in gestures than in words: her hair brushing, his flinging of a piece of paper.

Phase Two: out on the terrace, where so many scenes in the film take place. Now the camera is further back, and it takes in a bigger, more cluttered space. Hsiao-hsing comes out and reads the now crumpled piece of paper, revealing what was written on it: a prediction of her fortune – or lack of fortune. Their dialogue exchange is bitter and indirect. They each respond to what they imagine, assume or project is in the mind of the other person: the desire to get away in his case, or the opposite, the desire to marry in her case.

There is no cut until well into this scene, when we need to see an important, surprising gesture, a true dramatic move in the given situation: Hsiao-hsing’s setting fire to the paper, and then to her own hair (the hair that she’s just been brushing so fastidiously, to look good for him). It’s an implosive, self-destructive gesture, of a kind we will often see in Hou’s cinema.

And now there is a further move back, over to a specific spectator position: that of the pining Ching-tzu, with his growing but unreciprocated feeling for Hsiao-hsing. When he exits, we are left to contemplate the entire tableau for a few moments.

The way in which scenes like this are edited – by another long-time collaborator of Hou, Liao Ching-sung – emphasises the distance or face-off between, in one space, the event that’s seen, filmed from dead-on in front; and, in another, adjacent space, the seer or spectator – in this case, a girl who is not very impressed.

In general, The Boys from Fengkuei shows Hou moving swiftly toward a style where life is experienced less as action to be lived ‘in the moment’ like a psychodrama, and more a kind of screen, a movie to be watched, without the power to enter into and influence the situation. This attitude is reflected in the scene where the boys are tricked into watching a movie supposedly “in colour and on the big screen” – which turns out to be the city itself, framed by concrete.

All of the stylistic techniques and the nuances of mood that we have so far mentioned come together in Hou’s presentation of Ching-tzu’s subjective memories in the film.

His initial flashback is disconcerting: from a provocative image of Annie Giradot in Rocco and his Brothers, we pass to what we will realise is Ching-tzu as a child, witnessing his father’s brain trauma accident – with the English dubbed soundtrack of Visconti’s film still playing on. Photographically, the image of the past is desaturated. Then we return to Ching-tzu in the cinema: did he see his own past on the screen, or experience it completely internally?

There is always a memory-trigger in The Boys from Fengkuei, functioning like the famous madeleine cake in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time – memories that can also be epiphanies.

Ching-tzu’s second flashback is also handled in an unusual manner, because it does not appear when he is actually relating the story of his father killing a snake. Rather, it appears in the following scene, on the basis of another unexpected madeleine: the dead insect impaled on his notebook page that he doodles around. This time, classical music accompanies the flashback. As he seems to literally embroider this recollection with his biro, Ching-tzu is shaken (as it were) from both the image and sound reverie by the calling of his name back in the present.

The most complex and beguiling memory sequence arrives near the film’s end, following the news of Ching-tzu’s father’s death and the journey back home for his funeral. This time, both the character’s memory and our recall as viewers are woven together, masterfully. The sequence unfolds in eight, carefully modulated shots, or steps.

The scene begins with a silent shot full of associations for us: the father’s now empty chair. Through the open gate, we see what we presume is a mother and child. Step 2 reveals the spectator of this scene: Ching-tzu; in the background, we take in the daily ritual of food preparation by his mother. An adult man enters, and banal conversation ensues in this background.

Step 3 is like a magical zoom of Ching-tzu’s gaze, but in desaturated colour. Step 4: the same view of Ching-tzu as before. But now the shot will be transformed in an extraordinary way. We – and he – will literally enter and merge with the space of the remembered past as cued by the presence of the childhood bicycle. Music begins as if to contest and usurp the everyday voices. And miraculously, in this very same shot, we see the father, young and alive, in his chair, readying to go to work.

The desaturation tells us, on the plastic plane, that we are in the past. The voices of the present are faded out completely; the music soars; and the mother, as she was when young, enters the frame. After some rapport between the parents, there is a gesture, a call to Ching-tzu off-screen.

Step 5 works a second cinematic miracle: Ching-tzu is a child once more – the boy who is always, still there, within the growing man. Then he moves and, in Step 6, enters the image of the family, united and happy as we have never seen it anywhere else in the film. In deep focus, Hou maintains the camera’s gaze on the action of the father leaving, passing into the distance before he almost disappears. This is a leave-taking, a poetic representation of both his death and the grieving over it.

Step 7: still with the child. His mother calls from off-screen, quite loudly and harshly, again contesting the music. Young Ching-tzu ignores the call. Step 8: back to the mother in the present; the music fades out as she strides over. A motorbike has replaced the humble bicycle; the empty chair dominates the foreground. The mother rearranges the scene and instigates, once more, the normality of routine. But Hou lets us linger, just for a few more contemplative moments, with Ching-tzu.

Where can a film like The Boys from Fengkuei end – in the bleak despair of resignation, or with an upbeat note of affirmative, life-must-go-on optimism? Hou, as he will often do in his future work, finds a way to have both moods, simultaneously or in rapid alternation.

In the final scene, Ching-tzu’s friend Ah-jung (Chang Shih) faces his imminent future, drafted into military service; and the street business stall, selling tapes, is not doing too well. Ching-tzu, in a sudden mood-changing act that expresses both energy and desperation, cynicism and hope, turns into a boisterous salesman. “Everything must go!”, he exhorts the passing crowd.

In the montage of the final images, our central characters are swallowed up in the bustle, by the city and by the rising music. But still, their action, their energy, counts at least for something: some vitality, or resistance, in the face of the forces that bear down on all these city-dwellers.

It is little wonder that the great Chinese director, Jia Zhang-ke, a great admirer of Hou and particularly of The Boys from Fengkuei, sees in it something touchingly universal, and at the same time something specifically historical – what he calls “a distinctly cinematic depiction … of a social transformation”.

Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia concludes, is “the genius narrator passing down the memories of a nation through films”.

This text is a version of the voice-over narration composed for an audiovisual essay included in the Belgian Cinematek DVD boxset Hou Hsiao-hsien Early Works (2015) and re-used by Carlotta for their French boxset Hou Hsiao-hsien 6 œuvres de jeunesse (2017).

MORE Hou: Good Men, Good Women, Millennium Mambo, Three Times

© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin August 2015