General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Cheerful Wind (风儿踢踏踩)

Cheerful Wind (風兒踢踏踩, also released internationally as Play While You Play) is a 1981 Taiwanese romantic comedy directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, his second feature film. It reunites the stars of his debut Cute Girl (1980), the Taiwanese pop singer Feng Fei-fei and the Hong Kong singer and actor Kenny Bee, in a love triangle set against a television commercial shoot on the island of Penghu.¹^•² Although made within the commercial star-romance genre of early 1980s Taiwan, the film shows the director beginning to assert the realist style that would later define the New Taiwanese Cinema.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	風兒踢踏踩 (Feng er ti ta cai); international titles Cheerful Wind and Play While You Play⁴
Director and writers	Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; written by Yao Chiung and Hou Hsiao-hsien⁵
Year	1981 per most festival and archive listings; 1982 per the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and the Taiwan Cinema catalog²^•⁶
Cast	Feng Fei-fei (Hsing-hui), Kenny Bee (Chin-tai), Anthony Chan (Lo-zai), Mei Fang¹^•⁷
Technical	91–92 minutes, color, Mandarin and Taiwanese, produced by Kam Sai (H.K.) Company⁶^•⁷
Crew	Cinematography Chen Kun-hou, editing Liao Ching-sung, music Tso Hung-yuan⁷
Restoration	Digitally restored in 2018 by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and IMAGICA Lab from the 35mm original camera negative⁵^•⁷

Spoilers

Story

Hsing-hui (Feng Fei-fei) works as an assistant cameraperson for the advertisement director Lo-zai (Anthony Chan), who has been pursuing her romantically. A commercial shoot takes the crew to Penghu, where she meets Chin-tai (Kenny Bee), a doctor who is losing his sight. The two grow close and agree to meet again in Taipei after Chin-tai undergoes a corneal transplant. After the surgery restores his vision, Chin-tai proposes, and Hsing-hui must choose between him and Lo-zai, who still hopes to win her by fulfilling her dream of traveling to Europe.⁸^•¹

The film spends much of its running time on its characters' middle-class aspirations, often marked by Western consumer goods; in one scene Hsing-hui's father, visiting from the countryside, is taken for pizza and Coca Cola and finds the meal unappealing.⁹ The ending resolves the triangle happily, though one reviewer describes it as perhaps too fantastic to take at face value.⁹

Place in Hou Hsiao-hsien's career

Hou Hsiao-hsien entered the film industry in 1973 and rose within the production teams of the established directors Li Hsing and Lai Cheng-ying, working with the cinematographer Chen Kun-hou; the two alternated as director and cinematographer on a string of commercially successful romantic films of the early 1980s.⁷^•¹⁰ Cheerful Wind followed his debut Cute Girl (1980) and, like it, was a Lunar New Year box office hit built around its two stars.⁷

A departure within the genre. The film is an adaptation of a romance by the popular writer Chiung Yao, who produced it herself, but it departs from the literary romances of the 1970s: its characters are unpretentious, independent, and focused on career as much as romance, and the film's humor is casual rather than melodramatic.⁴^•⁷ Hou subverts the usual dynamic of the idol movie by making the female lead an assertive career woman and the male lead, blind, an introvert by necessity.⁹ The Festival des 3 Continents notes that the film hints at Hou's growing determination to address how gender relations were changing in Taiwanese society.⁴

The film also contains the stylistic seeds of Hou's later work. A Taiwanese study of his early films records an average shot length of 12.7 seconds, well above the prevailing rhythm of the period, with one field scene lasting a full two minutes; the same period is seen as a source of the later Taiwan New Cinema.¹¹ Observers point to the long shots and wide compositions, the use of the Taiwanese language alongside Mandarin, naturalistic performance, and attention to children, nonprofessional actors, and the rural-urban divide as elements that would blossom in his later films.⁷^•³ The USC screening notes describe the film as Hou "learning to write the slogans" of the commercial genre while coloring in his own portraits.³

Release and restoration

The film was produced by Kam Sai (H.K.) Company and shot on 35mm color stock.⁶ Dating varies across catalogs: the WOWOW listing, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Festival des 3 Continents place it in 1981, while the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and the official Taiwan Cinema catalog date it 1982.¹^•²^•⁶ A promotional poster held by the National Museum of Taiwan History, a vertical color lithograph of 54.7 by 79.1 cm, advertises the film as the 1982 new work of the "original cast" of Hou's first film.¹²

The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute restored the film in 2018, scanning the image from the 35mm original camera negative and the audio from a 35mm print. The restoration screened at the 2018 Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, the 2019 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival, and other retrospectives of Hou's early work.⁵^•⁶^•⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Comedy-dramas of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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