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   

2020 Top Ten List #4 I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi)

Director Jia Zhang-ke







 

 

I WISH I KNEW (Hai shang chuan qi)                   A-                                                          China  (119 mi)  2010  d:  Jia Zhang-ke

If you don’t care, why let me hope and pray so?
Don’t lead me on, if I’m a fool just say so.
Should I keep dreaming on, or just forget you?
What shall I do, I wish I knew.     

⸺Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, from Diamond Horseshoe, 1945, Betty Grable - 'I wish I knew' (2:06)                

Premiering at Un Certain Regard at Cannes ten years ago but never released here, this film has a belated distribution with a slightly shorter edit, an extremely poetic time capsule made in coordination with the upcoming 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, commissioned by the Expo’s planners, as Jia explores and re-evaluates Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux, drawing a connection between the historical and contemporary setting, inquiring about the history of the city by speaking to older, influential people whose lives were shaped there, heard describing their family memories, revealing how the city affected their often shattered lives, delivering a personal meditation on China’s recent past.  Initially interviewing over 80 people, it is cut down to only 18, very rich in detail, with the same sense of urgency as Jia’s majestic film STILL LIFE (2006), using an elder generation for historical purposes, as they lived in an Old Shanghai that no longer exists, having transitioned to a modern global city, yet an essential component of the film is capturing their memories before they fade away, as their personal testimony is as revealing as it is riveting, providing a collective living history that often deviates from official accounts, describing an era of assassination and revolution, pitting Chinese against one another in a civil war, where the military leaders were familiar with one another, having attended the same military schools, now divided strictly on political grounds, where the cost of Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists was enormous, resulting in a fractured nation and constantly changing Chinese identities.  Perhaps the most revealing were open discussions about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, where the city was a stronghold of radical leftism, requiring mandatory confessions on what was perceived as counter-revolutionary activity, which included family migrations to Taiwan and Hong Kong, often for safety purposes to avoid arrests and political persecution, but these visits had negative repercussions long afterwards, as the state was interested in the reasons for leaving Shanghai.  Using clips from older films, while speaking to artists associated with those films, Jia cleverly interweaves images of past and present-day Shanghai, suggesting the thriving film industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong were nurtured by Shanghai refugees who fled the mainland during the Communist takeover.  Omitted, however, are the films of Stanley Kwan, a Hong Kong director whose historical pieces set in Shanghai are legendary, Center Stage (Yuen Ling-yuk) (1991), Red Rose, White Rose (Hong mei gui bai mei gui) (1994), or Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), where the latter film is set through different historical periods spanning some fifty years from the 30’s to the 80’s, and is as much a love story to the city of Shanghai as to the people whose lives passed through there, where the roving eye of the camera curiously becomes an unseen character.  In much the same manner, Jia links his connecting pieces with an anonymous character portrayed by his wife, Zhao Tao, who never speaks, dressed all in white, walking through the contemporary city as an eye witness, sailing through the seemingly interchangeable straits of both Hong Kong and Shanghai, gazing upon the futuristic architecture or the muddied Expo construction site filled with workers in hard hats, where streets still under construction reveal demolished buildings, vacated lots, and newly renovated neighborhoods, with Zhao soaking it all in, mirroring the perception of viewers watching and evaluating this film. 

Early on, a woman tells the story of her Communist father’s execution at the age of 24, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek just before Shanghai was liberated, now a little known revolutionary martyr, an event that happened shortly before her birth, recorded by a Hong Kong journalist in black and white photos, where the last image moments before execution is described as a brave revolutionary with a fearless smile.  “I only know my father through these images,” she tearfully reveals, recalling that her mother went a little crazy afterwards, running alongside the Communist troops when they entered the city in 1949 still searching for her dead husband, much like the wives and girlfriends of lost or missing German soldiers greeting each incoming train to Berlin in Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978).  This personal recollection of family heartbreak is contrasted by propaganda images from the Wang Bing film TO LIBERATE SHANGHAI (1959), featuring deliriously happy crowds greeting victorious Communist soldiers, red flags waving, with an officer proudly declaring, “The liberation of Shanghai marks the complete smashing of imperialist forces in China!”  In accordance with the revolutionary fervor, Jia speaks to textile worker Huang Baomei, who recalls being called into an ordinary factory plant meeting and being floored to see none other than Chairman Mao Zedong present, congratulating her on her profession, as the nation was relying on her for clothing, becoming one of the “model workers” in a 1958 film by Xie Jin where she plays herself in a film named after her, becoming the face of the Great Leap Forward, emblematic of a patriotic Socialist working class heroine and a household name in Mao’s China (occurring simultaneously to the great famine when millions starved to death), spending decades in the same factory, now seen shut down and empty (with songs of union solidarity faintly heard offscreen), an abandoned relic of what it once was.  Wang Toon, director of the Taiwanese film RED PERSIMMON (1966), reflects on his childhood recollections of fleeing Shanghai as the Communists closed in on the city, where the chaos surrounding a departing ship to Taiwan was so severe his grandmother had to tie together ten children to prevent them from being lost in the swelling crowd.  Other elderly Shanghai residents stranded in Taipei since 1949 are interviewed as well, offering their experiences, including legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, interviewed on a train crossing through the mountains, recalling similar imagery from Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986) while also showing brief moments from the luminous introductory scene from Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), where he expressed great curiosity about returning to the city to shoot the film, describing how prominent arranged marriages have been throughout Chinese history, with little concept of love, yet was excited at the prospects of opening up 20th century floodgates for romance, also showing clips from Hong Kong director but Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990), where actress Rebecca Pan plays an aging Shanghai refugee.  Speaking to the director, Ms. Pan is herself the daughter of a Shanghai woman who fled to Hong Kong in 1949, choking back tears as she describes her mother’s plight, seen singing bits of a song she recalls, perhaps the title song of the film.  It’s curious how these other cities of Taipei and Hong Kong play a part in Shanghai’s legendary history, but Jia’s film does a formidable job connecting them all to one another, as that’s something not seen in other films with this degree of complexity.  According to film historian Tony Rayns (Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China) - Cinema Scope, who provided the English subtitling for the film, “these Taiwanese voices have never been heard in Mainland China before.”  

Wei Wei, the heroine in Fei Mu’s SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (1948), describes the dismissive hostility on display from the city while shooting the film, eventually fleeing to Hong Kong afterwards, while the director’s daughter, Fei Mingyi, also describes how political unrest was so severe that the family also fled to Hong Kong, believing at the time it was only temporary, but the situation altered drastically, as Fei Mu’s reputation was ruined, vilified by the Communist Party, dying in exile only a few years later in 1951.  The film was ultimately banned for many years in China, but over time is now considered one of the greatest Chinese films ever made, voted # 2 in a 2019 poll conducted by Time Out Shanghai, The 100 best Mainland Chinese films - Time Out Shanghai.  When Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came to China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972 to make a documentary film CHUNG KUO – CINA (1972) about China at the invitation of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, he was welcomed with open arms to make a 4-hour film that Western viewers found sympathetic, where we hear the story from a Shanghai TV journalist that accompanied him around the city, surprised by what he felt were “backwards” images, believing it was not featuring the positive aspects of China’s resurgence.  When the film was released, providing a somewhat detached, neo-realist view of daily life (as is Antonioni’s style), it was instantly denounced in the People’s Daily, claiming Antonioni had “evil intentions,” labeled a counter-revolutionary, claiming he had defamed the image of a new China, setting off nationwide criticism (Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film), officially banned by the Gang of Four, not shown in China until a 2004 screening at the Beijing Cinema Institute, and roundly condemned by people who never saw the film, including the journalist who was himself punished, losing two years of his life suffering his own political persecution, forced to attend self-criticism sessions.  Of note, China offered a public apology to the filmmaker in 1980.  Ironically, this Jia film received much of the same criticism in China, claiming it didn’t capture the boldness of the city’s colors, but much of that can be attributed to his use of a digital camera, lighter, and easily transportable, making it easier to move around with ease.  The film supposedly lacks contextualization, according to the critics, as there are no archival photos of Old Shanghai, and the director fails to provide revolutionary sentiment.  Largely overlooked at the time of its release, what critics failed to comprehend was the depth of humanism provided by those interviewed, as it’s their life stories onscreen that vividly encapsulate distinct moments in Chinese history, providing a tragic and sorrowful assessment of what it was like to live during historical times, describing the ordeals of parents and grandparents as told by the family survivors, where oral history is akin to Vertov’s symphony of voices, finding universal themes of displacement, lives uprooted, families split apart, providing innovative editing techniques showing a city under massive construction, but also under the influence of Hong Kong and the nation of Taiwan, revealing how they are all interconnected, as an ancient city is transformed into a modern metropolis seemingly overnight, revealing a natural progression from then until now, with younger people featured more towards the end.  The continual presence of Zhao Tao onscreen is significant, giving voice to the voiceless, a bystander on the threshold of history, becoming a stand-in for all the citizens of Shanghai, as it’s not just about those 18 voices.  Jia’s film construction is a composite of many forces working together, showing great insight in challenging the official explanation of history which has been appropriated by the Communist Party, with evocative music by Lim Giong, becoming an impressionistic mosaic of art and journalism, uniquely allowing viewers to make up their own minds about the human toll exacted by progress.