Hsiao-Hsien Hou's Dust in the Wind centers around two teenagers, Wan and Huen, high school sweethearts who live in a secluded, low-income mining community of Jio-fen. Uninterested in the dead-end lifestyle Jio-fen offers, Wan and Huen dream bigger, deciding to move to Taipei in an effort to find employment and support their respective familes. Wan spends his days working at a paper mill, fully intent on continuing his education via night school. Huen soon joins him after finishing school in Jio-fen, finding work as a seamstress. Hsia-Hsien Hou's Dust In The Wind is a poignant, mediatative coming of age story that runs the emotional gamut of love, loss, happiness, and despair. Using a minimalistic approach, Hsia-Hsien Hou has created a film that captures what it means to become an adult in a profound and meditative way. Wan and Huen are youngsters who set out into an unknown environment, and Dust In The Wind effectively captures the effect this has on young minds who attempt to adapt, believing the world is very much theirs for the taking. Dust in the Wind is a quiet film that carries tremendous poetic weight, deconstructing our notions of individuality and simultaneously questioning how much we and individuals control. With cinematography that evokes the sure magnitude of nature and life itself, Dust in the Wind argues that us are individuals are not as free as we believe, with all of us being slaves to the hands of time and fate. While the film's clinical nature is sure to turn off some viewers, Hsiao-Hsien Hou's Dust in the Wind is not a cynical film but it's certainly a somber one, beautifully deconstructing the passage from child to adult that effectively touches on just how little we as individuals actually control.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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