In the movie Daughter of the Nile, Hou Hsiao-hsien returns to the terrain of contemporary youth experience with pop star Yang Lin as a teenager who escapes her fraught family situation into the fantasy world of a Japanese comic book in which a female time traveler in ancient Egypt falls in love with a pharaoh—echoing her own infatuation with her brother’s gigolo associate.
Daughter of the Nile is an artfully subdued and unostentatiously refined portrait of nocturnal teenage anomie by one of cinema’s giants.
Cohen Media Group restored the film for its 30th anniversary.
