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When the autumn tempest comes, it can launch a buffalo into the air, according to a middle-aged woman working at a remote mountain temple. Wen-Hsiang (Yang Ching-huang) is in the spring of his life, but the tempest is coming for him too as he finds himself consumed by the desires he’s supposed to be shaking off after becoming fixated on a lonely, young-ish novice at the temple in flight from a failed marriage.
Su-pi’s (Kang Soo-yeon) decision to become a nun is reflective of the repressive patriarchal social codes under which she was living. We’re told that she’s essentially been rejected because she was unable to produce a male heir. Her husband has since got his mistress pregnant, or so he thinks, and the mother-in-law, who is really the one in charge, has decided to move her in, telling Su-pi she can like it or lump it. Unsurprisingly, Su-pi chose to leave but the temple hasn’t really accepted her either. Su-pi wants to shave her head and be admitted as a nun, but the abbess says she’s not ready.
Su-pi does indeed have lingering attachments to this world and they seem to lead in two directions, firstly her unfilled and at the time taboo sexual desires, and her resentment towards her husband couple with the sense of righteous anger over her unfair dismissal. This desire to be desired is what draws her to Wen-Hsiang who is probably not all that much younger than her but is also a “kid” too young to know anything of real love. She asks him if she’s still young and pretty and if he loves her to which Wen-Hsiang readily agrees though it’s more that he becomes obsessed with her, drunk on his desire and his own need to be needed.
Wen-Hsiang’s parents’ marriage collapsed some years previously though they’ve never divorced because of the social stigma and now Wen-Hsiang’s mother has taken his sister to the US leaving him behind. Not getting along with his father, his doting grandmother sends him to the temple to help him study so he can fulfil his familial obligations, get into medical school, and follow in his father’s footsteps. No one seems to want Wen-Hsiang, not even the old girlfriend who wouldn’t stop calling when he first went to the temple but has since moved on. But even on decamping to the mountains, Wen-Hsiang can’t leave the city behind. He packs a series of coffee-related accoutrements as well as tapes of Western and Japanese pop music he listens to while he studies. When he finds the Buddha’s eyes intrusive, he simply throws his jacket over them.
But the transgressive sexual relationship they enter into also nearly kills the abbess who is struck down by some kind of psychic force that seems to emanate from it. Though the couple think they’ve kept it quiet, everyone appears to know, the abbess warning Su-pi that young men are impulsive, like bulls who can’t be tamed, and should be avoided. Struck by the weight of this spiritual transgression, Su-pi tries to end it but is both drawn by her own desire and by Wen-Hsiang’s obsession. The realisation that she is pregnant forces her hand, though we might also wonder if in the end her greatest desire was always for revenge or just to avenge herself by forcing her husband to realise the fault lies with him. She is fully capable of fulfilling the role society has forced on her though she may also reject it symbolically by becoming a nun while fulfilling her own desires by telling her husband where to go when he comes crawling back.
Though the film sets out to punish Wen-Hsiang for his transgressions, it cannot help but implicate Su-pi for his downfall, implying it’s is her fault rather than resolutely his own in his inability to overcome his desires. She meanwhile is equally punished by the film’s ambiguous ending in which she may have to live with the unintended consequences of embracing her sexuality as opposed to abandoning it by joining the temple. Even so, there’s something so classical about her features that they almost resemble the face of Buddha, not unlike that Wen-Hsiang’s grandmother prays to in the hope he’ll get into medical school. Huang frequently uses natural imagery to express the tumultuous emotions of the pair of lovers in contrast to the ordered and tranquil environment of the temple but also perhaps suggests that not even here can they really free themselves of the authoritarian oppressions of the city.
Autumn Tempest screened as part of the BFI’s Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.
Windows on Worlds 