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   

Raining in the Mountain (Kong shan ling yu)

 

Director King Hu

The director with actor Sun Yueh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN (Kong shan ling yu)                    B-                                    Hong Kong  China  (120 mi)  1979  ‘Scope  d:  King Hu

In this film Hu asserts himself as the screenwriter, director, producer, art director, and editor, thus ensuring a high degree of authorial control over the total visual design of the film while imparting a calculated display of cultural and historical scholarship.  In many ways Hu’s own preoccupation with Chinese culture partly arose out of a confrontation with the growing popularity of Japan’s cultural assertiveness, with the rise in popularity of artists such as Kurosawa or Mizoguchi, which largely increased once the postwar American occupation of Japan eased in determining the dictates of film content and subject matter, allowing artists a fuller range of expression.  Hu nearly leaves the wuxia genre behind altogether in this more austere film, shot concurrently in Korea with the similarly-titled but quite different LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN, both released in 1979, as there’s barely any action at all, appearing only at the end.  Instead Hu seems fascinated with the location, remarkably photographed in Scope by Henry Chan, choosing a sprawling 8th century Bulguksa Buddhist temple set in the mountains.  Set during the Ming Dynasty, the magisterial opening is a long, drawn-out pilgrimage to a faraway place, involving extensive walking through a great distance, from the flatlands to the trees, featuring picturesque shots through craggy tree branches, or sunlight wafting through the trees, or foggy mists hovering over the hills, leading up into the mountains in a precarious climb, but as they approach the monastery, the remote Three Treasures Temple, they are greeted by one of the monks who escorts them into the grounds, passing what seems like an endless variety of buildings and climbing up a gazillion stairs, where the spaciousness of the place is epic and grandiose, only to have to walk even farther before finally reaching their accommodations, a spare yet unassuming room on the grounds, revealing the identities of a wealthy aristocrat merchant known as Esquire Wen (Sun Yueh) and his concubine White Fox (Hsu Feng), accompanied by her sidekick Gold Lock (Wu Ming-Tsai) disguised as a servant.  Yet she and Gold Lock immediately scamper around the maze-like grounds in search of a mysterious ancient scroll, as the two sneak, hide, and leap over walls, running and leaping about to evade detection, past hidden alleys and sloping roofs, where you’d think they’d be physically exhausted just arriving to such a remote destination on foot, yet the pair is a bundle of untapped energy.  The surprise here is that this turns out to be a heist film, with people scurrying around all the time spying on others, getting into other people’s business and trying to get the upper hand, yet it takes place at a Buddhist monastery where ethics are supposedly beyond reproach, yet everyone’s seemingly plotting nefarious activities.  High end production values with a low end story, this could be a plot for a Marx Brothers movie, as it’s a lot of talk seemingly about nothing, with misdirection everywhere.  To celebrate one hundred years of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards released a list of The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures, with this listed at #59, Hong Kong Film Awards' List of The Best 100 Chinese Motion.

Also arriving to the temple is General Wang (Tien Feng), the governor of the district, and his police chief associate, Lieutenant Chang Cheng (Chen Hui-Lou), who immediately recognizes White Fox as a notorious master thief, so he follows her, attempting to disrupt and thwart her plans.  Both of the distinguished men are outsiders that have been sent for by the aging Abbot (Chin Chang-ken) as advisors and asked to help mediate his choice for a successor.  Both Wen and the General have their own designs on who should be chosen, having carefully established back channel contacts within the monastery through the years, both hoping to get their hands on the sacred Mahayana Sutra scroll of Tripitaka, a priceless relic with undreamed of value.  White Fox was brought here specifically to steal the document, as was Lieutenant Chang Cheng, and both counter each other’s stealthy moves for the duration of the movie, spying, plotting, and outmaneuvering the other, becoming repetitious and somewhat ridiculous after a while, bordering on a farce, turning into a comedy of errors routine.  In this film, characters run around a lot, athletically and acrobatically getting into forbidden locations, keeping out of sight, with Hu constructing a series of long, habitual rhythms that continuously reoccur, like a cycle of life montage.  Yet making matters worse is the arrival of Master Wu Wai (Wu Chia-hsiang), a layman with an expert knowledge of Buddhism, who is followed by an entourage of beautiful young women, outrageously conducting an outdoor prayer session while the women bathe in the nearby waters, an obvious distraction even to some of the monks.  While ostensibly grounded in Buddhist tradition, following meditative contemplation rituals from centuries old practices, this offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how prominently greed and corruption have infiltrated the holy grounds, offering a scathing portrait of devious monks resorting to the same nefarious activities that take place on the outside, sneaking off to buy things from local merchants that feed their own personal desires, ambitiously vying for power through unscrupulous practices, underlying the reputation of the monastery, exacerbated further by constant complaints from the disgruntled monks.  In terms of the Abbot’s succession, one of the higher ranking monks Hui Wen (Lu Chan) has agreed to give Wen the prized manuscript if he is selected, while General Wang has a similar agreement with Hui Tung (Shih Chun), though the disciple spending the most time at the Abbot’s side is the implacable figure of Hui Ssu (Paul Chun Pui).  Adding to the mix is a released convict, Chiu Ming (Lin Tung), who has paid a special fine to enter the monastery to seek a peaceful life, falsely accused of a crime by the corrupt General, yet vowing no retaliatory animosity.  When the Abbot assigns him to guard the library housing the ancient scrolls, he intercepts the apparent masterminds who are there to make off with the ancient manuscript, then accused by the thieves themselves of being a thief.  

The Abbot holds a public outdoor hearing with all the monks assembled, as well as the distinguished outsiders, to consider the fate of Chiu Ming.  Lieutenant Chang Cheng makes the case that he caught the man red-handed being somewhere he had no authorization to be (unaware of the Abbot’s instructions), apprehending the man at the scene of the crime, leaving out why he happened to be there, while General Wang argued that he previously arrested and convicted this scoundrel, claiming he could only be up to no good, with Master Wu Wai interrogating each of them with direct questions that call into question their own motives.  Yet when discipled monks are asked for their input, they indicate the General would not be satisfied unless significant punishment was rendered.  Accordingly, the Abbot has him locked and chained to the library door, which, of course, means none of the thieves have access to the manuscript.  The General relents, claiming the punishment is too harsh, pleading for the convict’s release, which then opens the door for more maneuvering behind the scenes, with each player caught in a web of betrayal.  The spatial Buddhist architecture, in its primal stillness, stands in stark contrast to the restless and elusive flurry of physical activity among the competing crooks, with most of the film set outside amid majestic forests and open-air temples, with Hu’s interest in Buddhism on display with its crucial relationship to the laws of the natural world.  After spending the next morning walking with various high ranking monks, the Abbot is ready to render his decision, surprising all with his pick of an outsider, none other than Chiu Ming, whose calm humility in the face of the storm is a quality the others lack, which disappoints everyone, all concealing their motives and identities yet vying to overturn this decision.  The benevolence of the newly chosen Abbot is immediately on display, thwarting all power plays, while demonstrating compassion, yet the undaunted Esquire Wen has the stolen scroll in his possession, urging White Fox to make her escape, eyed by Lieutenant Chang Cheng, who follows her as she escapes into the woods, with first one and then the other continually stealing it from the other in a comic Keystone cops routine of misdirection.  With characters running in opposite directions with their prize until smacking into an immovable obstacle, shocking cuts occur when characters unexpectedly appear behind trees in the forest chase, leading to a long escapade that finally features some daring martial arts battles and some nifty stuntwork.  It’s ultimately Esquire Wen and White Fox that win the prize, followed by a contingency of monks on their tail, with Wen having no other option but to hire a ferry boat across the river, very pleased with himself, until the boatman’s identity is revealed and Wen is exposed as a scam artist, bringing to light his own ruthless ambition and indiscriminate corruption.  Traversing through the mountainous rocks and boulders, the monks block all exit avenues, yet it’s Master Wu Wai’s stable of women that surprise them in the forest, turning into flying shamans with their robes fluttering in the breeze, finally cornering them and dealing a final blow of karmic retribution.  The new Abbot sends them all aghast when he burns the sacred document, dismissed as a “tattered old scroll,” claiming it was the cause of too much unwanted attention, handing out new copies that he carefully transcribed himself, claiming the scroll’s power lies in its written message, not in the object itself.  Ostensibly a morality tale, where the rain in the title refers to outside worldly influence wreaking havoc in hallowed quarters, it does feature a long and extensive battle of wits, where the frenetic underhanded subterfuge is matched by a calmer, more virtuous display of selflessness, the moral of the story apparently is crime doesn’t pay, with underlying implications that moral justice matters.