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| 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
