Hou Hsiao-hsien, in this new film, takes a step away from the world of childhood and personal memories which were the basis of his three acclaimed films, The Boys from Fengkuei, A Summer at Grandpa's, and A Time to Live and a Time to Die (see November 9). But the mood is the same in Dust in the Wind, "less the imitation of life than its distillation," in the words of Village Voice critic J. Hoberman. Hoberman writes, "Dust in the Wind opens in a mining village in the mountainous interior and concerns the dislocation that's one of Hou's major themes. (His films are mainly about young people and their families, actual and surrogate.) Following a pattern common to their village, two students, a boy and a girl, quit high school and move to Taipei. She unhappily finds a job as a seamstress; he works for a printer, then quits and becomes a delivery boy. In the evening they hang around a friend's studio or have drinking parties to send off other friends as they're drafted into the army. Small incidents eddy this indolent calm: The boy's motorbike is stolen, the girl scalds her arm. Like his friends, the hero is drafted and stationed on Quemoy (where the major activity seems to be interrogating terrified fishermen who have drifted over from the mainland). When his brother writes to tell him the girl married someone else, the film suddenly comes together as an affecting saga of impossible escape, of biding time, of the iron rule of history, and of unhappy love."