在侯孝賢的電影《戀戀風塵》中，主角阿遠偷竊機車的插曲不只為了表達對狄西嘉《偷車賊》的敬意，更是宣稱對新寫實主義精神、形式與主題的繼承與延續：以充滿社會意識的視角，呈現個人與社會協商的過程。在電影中，個人與社會力的協商首先表現在從鄉村到城市的移民，但結果並沒有帶來階層的流動，只揭露了城市與鄉村同屬一個壓迫性與剝削性的資本主義生產模式的現實。其次、個人所要協商的包涵現代的時間性，如精確、準時的要求，而在當時勞力密集工業的微型重複與巨型發展的多重時間性下，宇宙的大循環似乎提供個人在重重社會力制約下超越生命悲喜的契機。然而與《偷車賊》相較，《戀戀風塵》的結尾一方面以個人感悟取代了結構性的批判，削弱電影原本的社會意識；另一方面，將社會力化約成自然律，間接昭告了與社會協商的不可能。因此，《戀戀風塵》片末的抒情置換提供的是一個象徵性的解決方案，流露作品本身在政治潛意識中的焦慮，呼應戰後台灣抒情傳統下的感覺結構。

In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film Dust in the Wind, the episode of Ah Yuan’s attempt to steal a motorbike obviously refers to the storyline of De Sica’s masterpiece Bicy-cle Thieves. Apart from paying homage to one of the most important directors in film history, this episode also claims its own spiritual predecessor and thematic inheritance: to examine the process in which the individual negotiates with various social forces. In Hou’s film, the individual’s endeavor for negotiation starts with the migration from the country to the city. As the efforts to move up in the class ladder end up in vain, the film gradually reveals that the seemingly binary opposition between the city and the country, between economic opportunity and career stasis, turns out to be an optical illusion. In reality, the city and the country have been subsumed under the same capitalist mode of production that is oppressive and exploitative especially to those from the subaltern class. Secondly, social forces that the individual has to negotiate also include the temporality of modernity that stipulates exactness and regularity. In a labor-intensive industry as the case in Taiwan during the 1970s, the temporality of capitalism appears as a paradoxical synthesis that compromises micro-repetition of unskilled work and macro-development of the economic miracle as a whole. Under such circumstances, the Nature that still coexists with the country comes to be an alternative route through which the individuals can escape from their hardships and frustrations encountered in the city. Compared with the ending of Bicycle Thieves, however, that of Dust in the Wind displaces its social criticism with a metaphysical view of cosmic order that has nothing permanent but capricious changes in life and thereby reduces the social to the natural, implicitly suggesting the impossibility of individuals’ negotiation with social forces. The film’s lyrical mediation and the protagonist’s initiation at the end provide only a symbolic solution to real social contradictions and can be seen as a symptom of the invented Chinese lyrical tradition in Postwar Taiwan.