SPOILER insofar as events towards the end are mentioned.

This study of family life is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's most personal and deeply felt film. The voice-over narration by the central character is clearly autobiographical and there can be little doubt that these are recollections of the director's childhood and in particular of his parents. As in other Taiwanese films by Hou and his outstanding compatriot, Edward Yang, a sense of history is crucial to understanding how the families they portray think and feel. These are Chinese cut off from their mainland roots by revolution. For the adults the dream is to return and it is a question of making do with the island as a temporary refuge, albeit one that has become all too permanent. For the senile grandmother reality is poignantly blurred and she imagines her mainland home to be just down the road. Meanwhile the children happily play their games, spinning tops and occasionally wondering at such mysteries as telegraph poles being erected, until adolescence brings disillusionment, their loss of innocence manifesting itself in gang conflict. In an attempt to show things as they are, Hou eschews narrative connections which is why his films sometimes seem confusing at first acquaintance. How many young members of this family are there for instance? In itself this is rather unimportant as the interest mainly centres on Ah-ha the autobiographical son. It is only as we get into the film that we realise that the boy has three brothers, one of them much older and a sister. This is a film that does not give up its secrets during its first half-hour, so much so that whenever I watch it, I start by wondering if I have overrated it. It seems sketchy and formless - a wealth of domestic detail not leading anywhere in particular. Then suddenly there is a sequence that tears me apart. During a powercut the asthmatic father, who has long been in poor health, dies. This unleashes a torrent of family grief so powerfully traumatic that it is almost without equal in cinema. Only Satyajit Ray in his "Apu" trilogy has captured family bereavement as movingly. From this point onward the film exerts a compelling power. The middle section alludes to the type of youth gang warfare that is explored more fully in Yang,s "A Brighter Summer Day". Death dominates the final third of the film , first the lingering one of the mother who refuses cancer treatment and then the grandmother whom those younger members left behind unwittingly neglect. We as Westerners can perhaps empathise with young adolescents placed in this position, but, in the eyes of the Eastern mortician, they are irredeemably guilty of filial neglect. Although "The Time to Live and the Time to Die" is arguably Hou's greatest work, it is at the same time his most depressing. Like Helma Sanders-Brahms in "Germany, Pale Mother", a film depressing almost to the point of morbidity, the director forces us to confront aspects of life we would rather not think about, but by so doing enriches our understanding of the human condition in a way that only the very greatest can achieve.

This film, which first brought Hou and the Taiwanese New Wave to international attention, seems deceptively simple, like your run-of-the mill growing-up-humbly-in-a-third-world-country narrative: a young boy, whose family has been transplanted from China to Taiwan, faces a hard path to adulthood complete with neighborhood tussles and family deaths. But gradually its manner of telling draws you in: at first, events seem like fragmented vignettes, but are actually blended in a succession that has been described as `like watching clouds floating by.' His propensity towards graphically composed, image-driven storytelling recalls the styles of Ozu, Satyajit Ray and even Tarkovsky, but where Hou excels is in applying his style towards an examination on the nature of history. For my money, there has never been a filmmaker as consumed by the idea of history than Hou, and this deeply autobiographical film may shed light on his motivations. By the time we reach the devastating ending, there's an overwhelming feeling of a time and place, an entire way of life, that has slowly disappeared before our eyes, but even more heartbreaking is the profound sense of guilt, of youthful opportunity squandered in hoodlum-like loitering, of parents whose presence was taken for granted until the sudden arrival of their ineffable absence. Watch this film to see how movies are humankind's noble, anxious attempt to retrieve lost time, and how the retrieval only reflects back on the mournful permanence of that loss.