Master filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien directs this wistful story about lost love and lost innocence among Taiwan's working class. Wan (Wang Chien-wen) and Huen (Hsin Shu-feng) are high school sweethearts living in a down-and-out mining community of Jio-fen in Taiwan's backwaters. Too poor to continue their education, the two drop out of school and move to Taipei to find employment. When Wan's father learns of his son's decision, he simply says, "When you are willing to make yourself an ox, there will always be someone with a plow." Huen finds work as a seamstress. Wan becomes a printer's assistant and then a motorcycle delivery boy. The time passes as they work all day, pursue their studies at night school, and spend their scant free time drinking with their friends -- all working similarly menial jobs. One friend is beaten with an iron bar by his abusive boss; another has his finger chopped off in a machine. One by one, these friends are called up for their obligatory two years of military service. One day, while taking Huen shoe shopping, Wan has his bike stolen. Furious and out of a job, Wan wanders around the streets of Taipei until he contracts bronchitis. Huen lovingly nurses him back to health. Then he gets called up for military service. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
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Dust in the Wind is a loosely autobiographical account of screenwriter Wu Nien-jen -- a major figure in Taiwan, perhaps most famous in the West for playing the lead in
Edward Yang's masterful Yiyi. Though the film is told in the present, the tone is one of remembrance and regret. Fate and society dooms the couple -- first through the hardship of their dead-end jobs and their poverty, and then through Taiwan's mandatory two-year military service. In the end, Wan learns that all of youthful plans come to naught when Huen marries a more financially stable suitor. Apart from this, Dust in the Wind is a gorgeously restrained mediation on Taiwan's rapid industrialization. Every character is exploited in some manner. Huen is horribly scalded by an iron; Wan's friends are beaten and maimed; his father is injured in a mining accident. His hometown grinds to a halt due to a coalminers' strike. The film's avowedly blue-collar point of view drew fire from the government for being anti-progress, while its understated impressionistic story line was derided by the left for being politically evasive. Director Hou Hsiao Hsien is clearly doing something right. Stylistically he is starting to develop the elegant formalism that marks his subsequent film
City of Sadness -- an outright masterpiece by anyone's yard stick. The shots are long, static, and observational. He elevates the nuances of the moment over the machinations of plot. Dust in the Wind is a brilliant, elegiac work that is also among Hsien's most accessible. A must-see for anyone interested in film outside of Hollywood. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide