The only characteristic of Hou's style that critics consistently single out is the long take. City of Sadness consists of 222 shots (including intertitles). With a running time of 158 minutes, that puts the average shot length at around 43 seconds, with individual shots reaching over 3 minutes long. When the long take is invoked to describe a given film, closer analysis will often show that it's used only sporadically. For example, according to Barry Salt's number crunching, the average shot length in Renoir's Le Crime de M. Lange is 21 seconds, for Citizen Kane, 12 seconds (Salt: 697). In Hou's case, the long take is surprisingly consistent from the first shot to the last. Furthermore, all of his films are similarly consistent; for example, the average shot length of Dust in the Wind is 34 seconds. Hou said, "I renounced fragmentary editing in favor of a sweeping style of montage, cutting not for the flow of the rhythm, but to capture the atmosphere and 'feel' of the shot and smooth transitions between the shots." (Scott) This is not to say that there is no sense of rhythm; indeed, the distinction in Hou's use of the long take is the expansive sense of a steady progression of shots at the slowest of beats, articulated by a profound application of ellipsis that is described below.
While this proclivity toward the long take nearly always invokes comparisons to Italian neorealism, there are significant differences which set Hou's approach apart. In general, this comparison has surfaced more in regards to New Taiwan Cinema (especially for its deployment of non-actors), as neorealism remains the standard against which any self- proclaimed realism is measured. We would suggest that Hou's narrations (and most of the early New Cinema, meaning films like Kuei-mei, a Woman (Wo zheyang guole yisheng, 1985), Ah Fei (Yioma caize, also known as Rapeseed Girl 1984), That Day, on the Beach (Haitan sheng de yitian, 1983), and all of Hou's films) are essentially based on melodrama. However, Taiwanese film tends to be more subdued than neorealism, which has its moments of hysteria; it's tempting to call them "melodramas without excess." (Although in Hou's case we will see how truly excessive his own style is.) In terms of the long take, Hou uses it in a more constant, rigorous manner than any of the international directors it is generally identified with, especially neorealists.
Furthermore, while neorealism was about "Italy Now," much of the New Cinema --- particularly Hou's work --- has been a search for identity through reminiscences about "Taiwan Then." In Asian film, this brand of soul-searching often leads to the countryside to find a more "authentic" or "pure" remnant of one's culture in the face of encroaching industrialization and explosion in consumer culture in the urban areas. Taiwan is a small island, however, and modern transportation and media have shrunk the distance between country and city, erasing the differences between the two. This forces identity crises to the past as a site for self-examination, often using regional literature (or those writers' scripts) as a vehicle of exploration. City of Sadness works in such a mode, setting the plot at the repressed site where "Taiwanese" identity (as opposed to "Chinese") was negotiated, formed in opposition to the self-imposed centrality of the KMT. Before this moment in history, the Taiwanese relationship to the mainland culture was more or less unproblematic. From the 1950s to the present, the turbulent, originary period of 1945 to 1949 remained banished from the public discourse until Hou made City of Sadness. Thus neorealism is not an operative model here; its reputation in the history of cinema is simply hard to ignore.