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It’s easy to see which clichés a different coming-of-age movie with A Summer at Grandpa’s same premise — two city-dwelling kids go to live with the grandparents they aren’t particularly close to in the countryside for a few months and emerge changed — might indulge. Comic set pieces poking fun at how out of their zone these children are in unfamiliar, slower-paced terrain. An initially icy relationship between these kids and their folksier elders eventually melting the more each set of people gets used to the other. An onslaught of life lessons from which its young characters, and perhaps even similarly aged viewers watching, can learn. 

But A Summer at Grandpa’s, released in 1984, is co-written (with Chu Tʽien-wen) and directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, a filmmaker whose approach to narrative feels unintrusive, less concerned with hitting certain beats in the storytelling than capturing life’s sometimes capricious, sometimes monotonous rhythms. You feel a little voyeuristic watching the film, not because anything particularly lurid happens but because the action unfolds like slivers of footage from variously planted hidden cameras. Some of that sensation comes from Hou’s propensity for long takes. More of it comes from how much you don’t sense its performers acting, the curvatures of plotting.

From a nerve-wracking health scare responsible for many a sleepless night to a surprise pregnancy of a woman who isn’t ready, a lot objectively happens in A Summer at Grandpa’s. But Hou’s methods, so effectively recreating the doldrums of the day-to-day, make the movie feel almost uneventful, its predisposition to incident not really hitting you until you’ve taken some time to reflect. A Summer at Grandpa’s reminds you how tedious everyday routine and unexpected flashes of the dramatic can co-exist — how there might only be a single thing in a given week that might be considered exciting, and that, in hindsight, could come to define an entire year, maybe more. 

From A Summer at Grandpa’s.

The film is mostly rooted in the perspectives of two young siblings: Tung-Tung (Chi-Kuang Wang) and the pipsqueak-sized Ting-Ting (Shu-Chen Li). They’re being sent to live with their grandparents for the summer by their father because their mother is recovering from an illness with which she’s still not entirely out of the woods. Much of their time is spent going on adventures with other kids in the area (Hou is a gifted director of children), though Ting-Ting is often frustrated by how much she’s condescended to by kids barely older than her as an unwanted nuisance. She acts out on one occasion by throwing her brother’s clothes, and the clothes of his new friends, into the water while they swim in a spring cow dung sometimes dirties. On another, she’s dramatically lying prone on some train tracks, saved at the last second by an intellectually disabled local woman she’ll befriend whom the boys write off as a mere madwoman.

A Summer at Grandpa’s maintains a kind of double vision. You feel how much wonder these naïve kids can still find in the world, sometimes intruded on by the hard realities they’ll be better able to digest when they’re older. You also have a real sense, even if less time is spent with them, what kind of summer their grandparents are having, steeped in the stresses incurred by familial uncertainty and by Grandpa (Koo Chuen) running a health clinic in a tiny town where his all his patients know each other. 

It’s a transitional time for everybody. A Summer at Grandpa’s is moving for how seriously it takes childhood’s ephemeral innocence, and for how much it cares about this family trying to get through a summer that could very well see the death of one of their own. It’s understatedly lyrical; it’s also refreshingly persistent about simulating life’s fickleness to the very end. Right when Hou could conclude things elegantly, a character is moaning about a painful hemorrhoid treatment he’s just gotten. Life is just as susceptible to beauty as it is to bad luck. You can never tell what it’ll offer next.