Summertime, when the living used to be easy
Ting-ting (Shu Cheng-lee) on the banks of the village river (courtesy of City Films).
By Rebecca Park, Contributor
Childhood is one of the most universal of experiences. Like it or not, we were all kids once. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’ early film A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), recently screened at the Freer and Sackler Galleries as part of their “Salute to Le Festival des 3 Continents,” explores themes that know no national boundaries: youthful innocence, the terrifying first encounters with adulthood, and the eventual realization that one must grow up.
When their mother falls ill, brother and sister Tung-tung and Ting-ting are sent to spend their summer vacation with their grandparents in the country, a conventional couple and setting for what is, on the surface, a generic out-of-school retreat. Their interactions with family and fellow townspeople are at the heart of story, more a series of loosely related vignettes than a tight narrative. As the summer continues, the sun still shines, but the mood grows darker, as the children become more aware of the complicated comedy and tragedy of the adult world.
Watching the film is like taking one of those fabled trips down memory lane, even if your childhood never included a sick mother, premarital pregnancies in the family or the titular summer at Grandpa’s. But Hou designs his movie not around the experiences themselves but rather how his young characters experience this new world. The excitement of meeting new playmates, the fearful reverence for elder relatives, the hushed and anxious awe of the local mad women: the impressions and ideas take center stage, rather than the generational drama.
Tung-tung (Wang Chi-kwang) prepares for a summer away from his city home
(courtesy of City Films).
Remember being told that “children should be seen and not heard”? Hou makes that old axiom the stylistic center of his film, a piece of cinema that is best described as quiet. Observation, not narration or dialogue or dramatic camera tricks, create the story, the characters, the general ominous feeling that something is about to happen, yet never does. Sets are empty spaces—like a still village plaza or the shadowy hallways at Grandpa’s—on the verge of being occupied, just as his young subjects await the lessons the adults in their life will one day, knowingly or not, teach them. Long, slowly paced tracking shots follow the train as it cuts through the country town, announcing the eventual arrival of some kind of less-than-innocent maturity.
We don’t go to sleep one day and wake up adults. We grow slowly but surely, and Hou recreates that steady process through his seemingly anti-climatic style, never insisting on one event, character or moment more than another. Whether in Asia or America, town or country, childhood follows the same basic pattern of innocuous pleasures and new discoveries. Despite the cultural specifics of A Summer at Grandpa’s, it is as universal as that first experience away from home.
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