Song of the Exile (Ke tu qiu hen)

Director Ann Hui

 

SONG OF THE EXILE (Ke tu qiu hen)                    A-                                                             aka:  Autumnal Lament in Exile                                                                                                  Taiwan  Hong Kong  (100 mi)  1990  d: Ann Hui

Really, the one’s dearest to us are always furthest away.                                                       —Aiko (Lu Hsiao-fen)

In 2020, Ann Hui became the first woman director to win the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement from the Venice Film Festival.  Born in Manchuria to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, director Ann Hui’s parents moved to Macao and then Hong Kong, where she received a Master’s degree in English and comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, studying for two years at the London Film School where she wrote her graduate thesis on French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Returning to Hong Kong afterwards, she became an assistant to prominent Chinese filmmaker King Hu (one of the film’s producers), helping with the English subtitling of A Touch of Zen (Xia nü) (1971) before starting her career making socially conscious documentaries for television, including scripting, shooting, and editing, where the touchy subject of exposing the corruption and bribery of Chinese and British police officers was so controversial that several were banned from ever airing.  She became part of a group of young, groundbreaking New Wave Hong Kong filmmakers in the 1970’s and 80’s that included Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, and Yim Ho, creating films with a contemporary Hong Kong identity while using the Cantonese dialect, as opposed to Mandarin (dubbed over the original Cantonese), also introducing themes of displacement and migration.  With this film Hui took a feminist turn, using her own life as a basis of personal exploration, creating a bittersweet melodrama about how the past affects the present, surprisingly layered in its storytelling, beautifully shot by Zhiwen Zhong, using brief moments of poignant, yet nostalgic music by Chen Yang that bridges all national barriers, Song of the Exile - YouTube (4:08), becoming one of the better films on people of mixed cultures.  Written by Wu Nien-jen, who played NJ in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), and was also Hou Hsiao-hsien’s screenwriter during the 1980’s and 90’s, and co-writer of Yang’s THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983), the film traces the post-World War II life of a Japanese woman married to a Chinese nationalist soldier, her adolescent daughter’s discovery of her mother’s ethnicity, and their reconciliation as she accompanies her homesick mother back to her native town in Japan.  Moving between the past and the present through a series of extended flashbacks and voiceover narration, examining themes of home and exile, the story is set in the 1970’s and takes place across China, Britain, Macau, Hong Kong, and Japan.  The film explores the politics of difference between the film’s three major female characters, representing three generations, all of whom have differently constructed feminine boundaries.  Maggie Cheung as Hueyin is the child of a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, yet due to the influence of her nationalist Chinese grandparents constantly overriding her mother’s influence, stressing her Chinese roots, instilling a love of Chinese culture, such as language, literature, and food, she has always felt estranged from her mother, Aiko, brilliantly played by Taiwanese actress Lu Hsiao-fen, who keeps her Japanese identity concealed, lost in a divisive cloud of patriotic Chinese nationalism.  China and Japan were at war for the first half of the 20th century, where the Chinese suffered terribly from Japanese war atrocities, such as the Massacre and Rape of Nanking, The Nanking Massacre, 1937 - Internet History Sourcebooks, where Chinese nationalists were united in their hatred of the Japanese.       

First screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, and one of the first Hong Kong films to receive international recognition, this initial release came in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, when Hong Kong was in a state of heightened panic and extreme distrust over the impending handover to Communist sovereignty in 1997.  The film opens and closes with a bridge across water, where travel becomes a central theme of the film, both internally and externally, as bicycles, boats, buses, ferries, rickshaws, and trains are all part of the personal journeys undertaken by characters in the film where friends and family are often seen waving goodbye.  Set in the early 1970’s in the English language with the playing of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man (Live at the Newport Folk Festival. 1964) YouTube (5:55), Hueyin receives her Master’s degree in London, but is bypassed at her first job opportunity at the BBC, so she decides to take her mother’s advice to return home to Hong Kong for her younger sister’s wedding.  Immediately, she is out of place and uncomfortable with all the rigid and conforming demands of her mother, all seemingly a show for the neighbor’s sake to show family solidarity.  Unaware of how important this is to her mother, there is a flashback to Hueyin as a child in Macao, somewhat belligerent, disobedient, always ignoring her mother, running instead to the support of her grandparents, Xiang Xiao and Tien Feng, who refuse to scold her.  More and more, we see how out of place the mother is in Chinese society, how she is all but ignored, exiled within her own family while her husband works in Hong Kong, actually despised by the grandparents, as they associate her with the Japanese occupation of Canton which caused them to flee, where Hueyin is the last to learn her mother is of Japanese origin.  In a telling flashback, Hueyin remembers the time when her father (Waise Lee) returns to Macao to take his family to Hong Kong since Aiko found life so unbearable with the Chinese in-laws, but Hueyin refuses to leave her grandparents, so they leave without her, seen waving farewell from the window overlooking the street.  Aiko’s feelings of abandonment by her daughter mirrors her daughter’s later feelings of abandonment by her grandparents after they choose to return to mainland China, where in another flashback, we see the adolescent Hueyin in a bitter cultural misunderstanding with her parents after joining them in Hong Kong, which results in her attending boarding school, finding herself just as isolated there as she does later in London, where we never see but only hear about her father’s early demise.  As her younger daughter has moved to Canada, Aiko decides to return to Japan, longing to see her birthplace of Beppu on the island of Kyushu, and brings her daughter Hueyin along as a prize of success, again to impress the family and friends.  Interestingly, it is now the daughter’s turn to feel out of place, as she is lost in the exoticism of Japanese culture and a language she fails to understand—exactly, Aiko reminds her, as her mother felt in China for so many years—exiled, excluded and ignored.  But oddly enough, after having lived so long abroad, Aiko is never truly accepted back home in Japan either, where for both mother and daughter, Hong Kong becomes a home for the exiled, ascending out of the shadows of being a former colony of China, Britain, and Japan, reflecting an emerging Hong Kong identity.       

In a complete surprise, the majority of this joint Taiwanese/Hong Kong film takes place in Japan speaking Japanese language.  This is interesting, as Japan colonized Taiwan for 51 years, but withdrew at the end of WWII at a time when Taiwan was still fighting to regain the mainland.  This film all but ignores that aspect of history until near the end of the film and shows no malice or ill will towards the Japanese, who are depicted with the utmost respect, complete with religious customs and family shrines.  There is a wonderful Japanese sequence where Hueyin goes out on her own riding her bicycle through the countryside, but gets lost in a forest, in a style very closely resembling Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), which depicts children on their own, lost, having to find their way.  In this case, Hueyin, unable to comprehend a word of Japanese, is caught stealing a tomato, and the neighbor chases her down, as if to harm her, but it is only to save her, as the tomato has been sprayed with pesticides.  She is paraded by curious neighbors into town, complete with a basket full of fresh tomatoes, only to meet a town translator, who wins the applause of the crowd when they finally understand one another.  Later flashbacks provide a more sympathetic view of the mother, as Aiko describes the heartbreaking story of how she met and fell in love with her husband, a Chinese nationalist army translator who helped her as she was about to be deported back to Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese war, where love affairs from warring nations were a rare occurrence given the heightened xenophobia of the times.  But here it’s rendered as a beautiful, culturally interconnecting personal odyssey, turning into a tender moment of reconciliation between mother and daughter, where the real obstacle placed between them is the toxic effect of nationalism.  This heartrending moment is interrupted, however, when the mother is notified that the grandfather has had a stroke after being interrogated by the Red Guard.  Adding to Hueyin’s sense of estrangement is her trip to Canton to visit her dying grandfather who mistakenly returned to mainland China in hopes of being part of the dream of a unified China, but was instead questioned and tortured during the openly hostile suspicions of the Cultural Revolution, a vivid portrait of alienation within one’s own country, a subject similarly depicted in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwanese Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), but rarely seen in Hong Kong films.  At her grandfather’s bedside, shot in dark, claustrophobic lighting, Hueyin witnesses the stark poverty in Communist China for the first time and hears him describe the importance of a unified China, currently looking to individuals such as herself to help China find its way through the turmoil of its past, with Hueyin eventually finding a job as a journalist at a local television station.  The patriarchal men in the film are largely figureheads, powerless against the winds of change, offering instead an alternative world of strong and enduring women.  The final image is a somber shot of the bridge connecting Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, an image with personal and political implications, linking Hueyin to her grandparents on the mainland and Hong Kong to the mainland regime that would eventually reclaim Hong Kong in 1997.  Arguably the most haunting and poignant of Hui’s films, with a Hong Kong DVD that’s long been out of print, it remains a rare and hard to find film. 

Ke tu qiu hen (1990) AKA Song of the Exile  entire film available at Rare Films with English/Chinese subtitles, (1:39:04), or on YouTube here: Song of the Exile 1990   

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 A Simple Life (Tao jie)

A SIMPLE LIFE (Tao jie)            A-               

Hong Kong  China  (118 mi)  2011  d:  Ann Hui

One of the more thoughtful and lyrical films on the subject of aging, told without an ounce of condescension or pretense, where the director herself is about the exact same age as actress Deannie Ip, coming out of retirement, as she hasn’t made a movie in over a decade.  Much like Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010), where Korean actress Yun Jung-hee performed in over 300 films in her career, coming out of retirement after sixteen years of living in Paris to be in nearly every scene of the film.  While this doesn’t have the novelesque density of that movie, Ip dominates this film as well, though the writing is more quietly observant, paying attention to small details, where many sequences during the opening half hour are near wordless.  In an innertitle following the opening credits, the audience quickly learns about Ah Tao (Ip), whose father died during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, while her mother gave her away to a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong, making her an orphan, where she served that same family as the household maid through 4 generations for the next 60 years, where all but one have moved away, either to Mainland China or to the United States, where the seventyish Ah Tao remains the servant of Roger Leung (Andy Lau), a middle aged bachelor otherwise living alone, a successful movie producer with a knack for reading financial records.  The circular choreography of the elderly Ah Tao serving meals to the young Master is a sight to behold, as they needn’t utter a word to be on the same wavelength, where she serves the various courses of the meal exactly as he desires.  Earlier we see her shopping in the market, asking the price, checking each item for freshness until finding the very best vegetables in the marketplace, which are the only ones she’ll use.  Based on the real life of co-writer and producer Roger Lee, Ah Tao is a perfectionist in the kitchen, as is Roger, both extremely picky about what food they’ll eat.

The film takes a turn when Ah Tao suffers a stroke, losing muscle control on one side, relying heavily upon a cane to walk, announcing she’s retiring and intends to live out her years in an old folk’s home, insisting she pay her own way, nothing fancy, just something practical, as she refuses to be a burden.  Roger offers to pay but complies with her wishes, where despite his busy schedule which requires extensive travel throughout Asia, he discovers he misses her, as she may be his best friend, as the two have shared their lives together, perhaps never realizing how important they are to one another.  When he finds a place for her, it’s little more than a storefront operation, where it’s hard not to believe seniors are warehoused in the cheapest manner possible, fitting them into tiny cubicles with no ceilings, where it more likely resembles a prison, as at night it’s impossible not to hear the uncontrollable sleep noises of everyone else.  The initial experience is something dreadful, but over time, she comes to know each and every one of the residents and the staff, including their interests and their eccentricities, making no judgments, offering them what help she can, as initially she’s one of the more able bodied, where she soon has the run of the place.  All the other residents take an interest in her regular visits from Roger, calling him her godson (ironically mimicking their real life relationship), instead of her former employer, a mistake neither one ever attempts to correct, where he’s one of the few to make regular appearances.  Soon his mother shows up to visit as well, each time offering respectful gestures and a host of presents, more than Ah Tao can handle, so when her visitors leave, all the other residents are salivating over the sumptuous food dishes left behind, where her visitors have a way of improving the group morale.  One of the more delightfully amusing sequences is when Roger takes Ah Tao to a dress-up gala movie premiere, where cameo appearances by real life Hong Kong director Tsui Hark, tough guy actor Anthony Wong, martial arts producer Raymond Chow, and fight choreographer Sammo Hung only add to the enjoyment of the event, especially seeing Roger work a room filled with important dignitaries.  

Born in Manchuria, Ann Hui came from mixed parents, a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, first working with acclaimed director King Hu, but her films have taken a special interest in the role of Asian women in contemporary society.  With few embellishments, using a near documentary style, Hui establishes a precise rhythm of life which she sustains throughout, continually keeping her focus on Ah Tao’s daily routines and her generosity of spirit, where her relationship to the characters around her are allowed to evolve, developing into a clearer picture of their significance to one another over time.  Deannie Ip is remarkably appealing, literally inhabiting the role with complete understatement, always deflecting to others, never seeking out attention, never seeing herself as any better or worse than anybody else, where she understands her unique role in being a part of so many lives, where she knows better than them what kind of kids they were or how difficult they may have been.  The family always shared things with her they might not have expressed to their own parents as she was more accessible, less harsh or judgmental, and always supportive.  She was the one who made sure they got to eat their favorite meals, prepared exactly as they preferred, and when others tried to emulate her, they’d forget a key ingredient or lacked her sense of grace, getting teased by others afterwards as they couldn’t live up to her high standards.  But Andy Lau, one of Asia’s biggest stars, the distant romantic interest in Wong Kar-wai’s lushly impressionistic DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990) or the ever vigilant police inspector in the high powered action flick INTERNAL AFFAIRS (2002), tones down his performance here, becoming a highly intelligent, but somewhat loner character, who discovers after her stroke that Ah Tao, like him, both carefully guarding their secrets, may be the most directly plain speaking and honest person he knows, and probably had the most influence in his life, but never took any of the credit for it.  An extremely low key and humble woman in a world full of people who more often think only of themselves, she’s singularly unique.  For a director to paint such a complex and fully developed portrait through a series of what feels like very ordinary moments is no small task, but this is a meticulously drawn and deeply heartfelt testament to a woman who lost her family, yet ultimately made the lives of everyone around her feel greater appreciation.