The Time to Live and the Time to Die

Plot

Spanning the years 1947–65, the film follows the maturation of Ah-ha (Ah-hsiao) as he and his family (parents, grandmother, older sister, three brothers) cope with the shock of leaving their homeland (the grandmother keeps talking about returning to the mainland to visit the ancestors). Having been only a child during the move, Ah-ha quickly acclimatizes himself to the new country, often putting him at odds with his more traditional family; he joins a street gang and has to choose between that life and taking the college entrance exam.

Cast

Awards

Reception

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports 100% approval for The Time to Live and the Time to Die, based on five reviews with an average rating of 8.2/10. Janet Maslin of the New York Times praised its cinematography and wrote that "much of the film is about suffering and loss, detailing the painful circumstances in which family members, one by one, grow ill and die. The simplicity and tact with which these illnesses are chronicled help to give an otherwise largely uneventful film some emotional impact…It's an unpretentious and largely unremarkable film that occasionally reaches unexpected depths of feeling." Variety called it a "beautifully controlled and highly nostalgic picture of childhood."

Legacy

Derek Malcolm has compared Hou Hsiao-hsien to Satyajit Ray and wrote that the film's honesty and truth "manage[s] to summon up this little microcosm of the world perfectly…Everything is right: the miraculous use of sound, the limpid cinematography, the natural acting create an atmosphere you can't forget." Jonathan Rosenbaum praised its long takes and deep focus cinematography and called it "unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent." Geoff Andrew of Time Out wrote that "It is the unflinching, unsentimental honesty that supplies the elegiac intelligence: Hou's quiet style bursts forth, here and there, into sudden, superlative scenes of untrammelled emotional power. It's a brilliantly simple but multi-faceted portrait of loss and the complacency of childhood: quite literally, we can't go home again."