It is easily his most beautiful and artistic work. He is a master of evoking feelings and spaces, almost like Storaro / Bertolucci here.
Watching Somai's films in order, every time I think he reached some formal apex, his next one is even better. What a study for cinephiles.
The images are just unreal. The overall feeing of melancholy, perhaps peaking with the children in the typhoon it is both apocalyptic and freeing. Even nostalgia comes short as a description. At points it feels metaphysically surreal. Think about how the school is being repurposed in front of us, as shelter from the typhoon. No schedules, no classrooms, all those chairs and items unused.
This adjustment does something to the mind, taking you somewhere outside the frame of your existence into a higher plane. It's a rare power for a film to evoke. The review calling it an anti-coming of age film is spot on. One thing I gather to expand on that, with Somai working in the 80s is it is not going to give you classic films on those old fashioned terms.
That reminds me of the American Gen X punk attitude, the aggravation in Somai's work, while yet is so formal, its edge mixes in the broader wisdoms. Rather than the instinct of the young artist, to throw all the past in a basket fire of hate. Thinking they invented everything.
Somai's deepest cutting films respect one thing I see in the arts, is I wonder if artists really know what they sign up for? To be a champion soldier of cinema, one must carry the burden, the weight of the human soul. A good one will go there knowing you can't quite come back from it. The pain of it all reads so deeply here along its beauty, forming an impact of wisdom.
