Becoming Hou Hsiao-hsien

Cute Girl shares a few obvious similarities with these works: a reliance on major stars, a plot that prioritizes density of incident over coherence, and a dedication to uplifting moral messaging. The film follows two city dwellers (Feng and Kenny Bee, the superstar lead singer of the Hong Kong band the Wynners) who meet and fall in love while visiting the Taiwanese countryside but are separated when the woman’s parents arrange for her to be married upon her return to the city. The story is perfectly pleasant and absolutely generic, but Cute Girl departs from genre norms in significant ways. The first is location: unlike the healthy-realist films, which focus exclusively on rural life, and the “Lins and Chins” films, which largely take place in urban settings, Cute Girl moves between the two milieus, forming a dichotomy that Hou—who grew up in the country and did not move to Taipei until he was an adult—has returned to throughout his career.

The second distinctive thing about Hou’s romantic comedies is their visual style. Though Cute Girl was shot by Chen Kun-hou—who also served as the cinematographer for Lover on the Wave—the compositions are much more artful in the later film. Hou makes frequent use of visual humor, employing tricks of editing and perspective that give the movie a comic charm independent of its script. He demonstrates a talent for staging, spatially arranging human figures in such a way that he doesn’t need to rely on cutting to emphasize different characters or ideas.

Third is his use of nonprofessional actors, especially children. In the coming years, Hou would work with a handful of bona fide international movie stars (among them, Tony Leung in A City of Sadness, Shu Qi in Millennium Mambo, and Juliette Binoche in Flight of the Red Balloon), but most of his work is built around unknown, inexperienced performers, like the kids in Cute Girl, who play a small but important role, notably in an early mud fight sequence that reflects the chaos and community of the rural location, a kind of freedom absent from the film’s urban settings.

In the aftermath of The Green, Green Grass of Home, the New Taiwan Cinema was inaugurated with the 1982 omnibus film In Our Time. Hou contributed a short to a follow-up, The Sandwich Man, which came out the following year, and a few months later he and Chen released Growing Up, based on a story by Chu T’ien-wen that Hou read in a literary magazine. Told through the eyes of a young girl who watches her neighbor deal with domestic and economic problems, the film invokes a theme of autobiography by framing itself as the recollection of a woman writer. As much as the director’s idiosyncratic visual style, the adoption of this perspective marks the mature Hou Hsiao-hsien: almost all of his subsequent films are biographies of some sort, based on memories of his own or those of his collaborators (The Time to Live and the Time to Die, Dust in the Wind) or adapted from a memoir or personal story (A City of Sadness; Good Men, Good Women; Flowers of Shanghai).

As fine as Hou’s romantic comedies are, they are built not out of experience but out of genre conventions—out of other movies. The Boys from Fengkuei marked a major shift to reality. Whereas Cute Girl and The Green, Green Grass of Home were more or less idealized representations of country life, Fengkuei digs deeper. Its small-town setting is not just a lovable community of misfits, oddballs, and regular folks just trying to make do amid the gorgeous rivers and mountains, but a place of deep poverty, despair, and struggle. In The Green, Green Grass of Home, the local butcher gives Bee a deal on an order of pork because she is smitten with him; in Fengkuei, a young woman deftly scales a fish in a courtyard, surrounded but apparently unbothered by an enormous swarm of buzzing flies.

One moment in Cute Girl offers a hint that young Hou was in search of something more than movies. About a third of the way through the movie, Feng sits high up in a tree reading a book in an idyllic pastoral scene. A close-up of the cover reveals its title—Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang’s 1939 English-language novel, which became a best-seller in Taiwan thanks to a 1977 Mandarin translation. The book is a sweeping account of one extended family in China in the early years of the twentieth century, from the events of the Boxer Rebellion through the then-ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War, modeled on great classics of Chinese literature like The Dream of the Red Chamber. In a brief preface, Lin outlines his approach to his characters: