I cannot remember how I decided to watch this Netflix series, maybe because of Paris, maybe because of fashion, anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it, in a lighthearted amused way that we all need sometimes.
There are lots of pleasant déja-vus that produce in me knowing smiles. The French resentment of the American everything: the happy ending, the love for work, the lack of mystery, the six-month-long freshness of a frozen deep dish pizza. The American astonishment of the French everything: the marriage with all kinds of affairs except a wedding ring, the pain of work, the abundance and audacity of talking about sex, the lack of sensitivity about the political rightness of the gender, and the food. However stereotyped everything is presented, I get all, and most importantly, I like all. American vulgarity or practicality, French sophistication or arrogance, I appreciate both. The plot is highly coincidental, the characters are however all lovable. The setting is impeccable, and the dressing styles are inspiring. Bonus is Ashley Park who has a beautiful voice and an eventful / courageous life of 32 years. Looking forward to Season 4 in August.
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The challenge of the middle age is (though for me it's the very beginning of the middle age): every time I come back to China it is either to attend someone’s funeral, or to see someone for the last time. The charm of the middle age is: I’m being presented with the unfathomable depth and width of life, from its very beginning, through its ongoing process, till the end of it.
I thought China was close, but now I think it’s very far. Nevertheless, I am going to make more return trips as long as my father is still there. The hardest part about leaving for the first generation immigrants is not the decision to leave, nor the moment of leaving, but to leave everything behind and never being able to come back again, or being able to come back but only to leave again with more and more left behind and less and less hold upon to.
The heart-wrenchingly realistic and humane 2011 Iranian film “A Separation” is about the hard decision and process for the wife to leave and the husband to stay, with the complications of a teenage daughter, an Alzheimer father and a baby died in the belly. There's nothing right or wrong about leaving or staying. It is about the price of justice, the price of personal choice. For either side, the leaving and separation will just be the beginning of a story that will last and impact several generations. Peter Bradshaw’s review about Past Lives is so astute that I don’t have anything more to say about this wonderful feature debut by Celine Song. Read this: “This is a story of lost love and childhood crush, the painful and dangerous access to the past given by digital media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the futile luxury of regret. And it’s a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future.”
And how fitting the circumstances were under which I watched it. I started watching it on the plane back to Seattle from China two months ago by myself, only for about half an hour before the plane landed and me back to the role of a mother. I resumed it on the plane to China from Seattle three days ago again by myself but had to pause it due to my eyes aching from crying (not over the film but my mother). I finally finished it at 3am lying on the bed where mom was used to. I have always been all about going to new places, better places, bigger dreams, but I am just a Chinese girl from a tiny village in China, being instructed and cared by dozens of uncles and aunties and brothers and sisters about every step in mom’s funeral, after having left the village 25 years ago. I miss her. The last TV series I watched in 2023 is “Sex Education”, all the four seasons, and I was very impressed by the performance of the crew, especially Emma Mackey (who also starred in “Eiffel” with Romain Duris), Asa Butterfield, Ncuti Gatwa, Aimee Lou Wood, Connor Swindells, Mimi Keene, Gillian Anderson. I am also impressed by the very mature and exemplary treatment of its sex and communication themes.
The story boils down to how to deal with human relationships, particularly the intimate part, between boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls, man and woman, husband and wife, parents and children, sisters and brothers, believers and non-believers, white and black, all in a very honest, realistic and relatable way. Growing up in China where everything seemed to be a taboo except for food, I envy with red eyes and an aching heart about the open and thorough communication permeating in the series. Actually I am as envious as to doubt whether a small-town British 16-year-old is really capable of those master-level communication and action about those petty and necessary challenges of life, like using or asking to use a condom every time during sex; being proud and determined, even though not without any bitterness or challenges, about their gender identity; apologizing or making up for their mistakes or misbehaviors in a timely manner; and going all the way to the essence of their intentions and desires (except between the two main characters Maeve and Otis where delays and misunderstandings were necessary props for story development). But whether a 16-year-old is capable of all those sensible words and deeds is not the point. The point is that I learnt a lot from those teenagers and their parents, and I started to imagine and hope that life could be so rewardingly eventful for my own children as they would be entering adulthood, or is this more or less what is happening with the teenagers now? (The 2021 French high school TV series “Voltair High” seems to be comparable to “Sex Education” but it is set in the 1960s France and has a different focus, even though they share some topics and the character setting is quite similar too. “Voltair High” has only released one season so far.) I have very mixed feelings towards the actor Shu Qi. I cannot say that I really like her, but I am definitely fascinated by her. Her style of performance in most of the films is quite similar. The numerous drunk scenes easily remind one of “Millennium Manbo” (2001) by Hsiao-Hsien Hou. Her characteristic smiles shine through in each of the films she has starred in. If Maggie Cheung embodies the classic beauty, Shu Qi radiates the urban spirit. She also has this seductively innocent look of a child that makes one hard not to sympathize with. I do like her.
The film “A Beautiful Life” is a pretty banal romance with lots of hard-to-believe plots and too-perfect-to-be-real characters, but I still cried over it. Even as an ultimate and thorough pessimist, I still would like to believe those life-changing accidents, coincidences and decisions, because life is full of surprises, good or bad. If you find them hard to believe, it’s probably that you haven’t lived long enough or you are just being lucky not having to experience the unfathomable depth of life. Yes, there can be tragedies like those in the film, and yes, there can be true love and a happy but never easy ending like that. I have been avoiding this film due to its Kung fu theme, but Wong Kar-wai never disappoints. Even a Kung fu film becomes so art-house in his hands with his characteristic aesthetics and his all-time favorite crew (Tony Leung, Chang Chen, Ziyi Zhang, etc) The Kung fu scenes are artistic and to the point, the dialogues are minimal but each sentence is classic, the love story between the two main characters is restrained but holds up the whole film, the background spans about 15 years through numerous historical events but changes barely noticeably. It’s a film not about Kung fu after all, but about human relations, between husband and wife, teachers and students, father and daughter, lovers, opponents, oneself and the world. Tony Leung is impeccable, Ziyi Zhang is perfect with every pose of Kung fu just as she did 13 years ago in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Their partnership naturally reminds one of their collaboration 9 years ago in 2046. It seems they never aged but they have, and an era will be gone.
Directed by the tenaciously intellectual female director Ann Hui, Boat People is the most heart-wrenching and mind-blowing film I’ve seen since at least a decade.
Set in a period of Vietnamese history which is a taboo for Chinese history education, it is eye-opening and value-challenging for Chinese audience. The Vietnam War was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, while the south was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The film starts about three years after the Communist takeover, a Japanese photo-journalist travels to Vietnam to document the country’s seemingly triumphant rebirth. When he befriends a 14-year-old girl and her destitute family, however, he begins to discover what the government doesn’t want him to see: the brutal, often shocking reality of life in a country where political repression and poverty haver forced many to resort to desperate measures in order to survive. George Lam looks perfect to act as the Japanese photo-journalist (but why Japanese one may ask?), and the acting of the fresh and new Season Ma as the teenage is impeccably stunning (one may ask why she chose to stop her acting career in the 1990s). The deeply controlled and humanistic approach by the transcending polemic HK New Wave director Ann Hui makes the harrowing experience of the characters so haunting for the spectators. Shot in China’s Hainan island, the film was banned by Taiwan because one of the leading actors is from Mainland China (Qi Mengshi). It was also banned by China because it portrays the cruel slaughter of the victorious Communist Party in Vietnam. Still, it was already a wonder that it was allowed to be shot in mainland China at all. So hail to the 1980s! There are numerous details in the film to be talked about, but I will leave them out. The French is always freaking frank about things, such as the translation of the film: Passeport Pour l’Enfer, on this incredible poster. A film customized for Maggie Cheung by the French director Olivier Assayas who became Cheung’s first and only husband shortly after the completion of the film. Cheung was playing herself, a HK actress who was known in the west as the parter of Kongfu master Jackie Chan but was surprisingly chosen by a French director to remake Louis Feuillade’s 1916 classic Les Vampires. The film was shot complete in a couple of months without a single retake. It must have been a very refreshening role for Cheung to be dressed in a latex cat suit found in a sex shop working with a chaotic and arrogant French crew who showed no respect or understanding to her acting or opinions, and this is where Assayas made Irma Vep into a memorable film, by cleverly demonstrating the ridicule of the French film industry as well as paying homage to the Nouvelle Vague masters. All typically French I would say. As for Cheung’s performance in it, I like what Nick Burton said in his review: “To see Maggie Cheung in this remarkable film is to fall in love with her.” I think that applies to most of her films from 1998.
I have been puzzled by the film “In the Mood for Love” over years. One of my and many’s favorite, it is one of the world classics thanks to its masterful cinematography, and editing, use of colors, montages and music, not to mention the dazzling visual presentation of the two stars. The story is simple, the dialogue is minimalist. Every frame is essential and crucial with little to no transition between them. You need to pay attention to every detail to get the sense of the passing of time, changing of space, fluctuations of mood: the Qi-pao she wears, the food they eat, the wall paper of the rooms, the color of the telephones, the pattern of the neckties, the way they sat to each other, the position of the clock hands, the direction she walks the stairs, the way he looks, the fleeting smiles on his face.
I’ve been feeling like a self-absorbent detective, watching the film again and again, trying to solve the mystery of their not being together. I am not satisfied with the answer of personal moral constraint or social pressure, or even the innate personality of shyness and passiveness, which have been conversed and concluded by so many reviews, as if it’s just a pure story of masterfully suppressed love filled with longing and missing. Even if he was not sure if she would leave her cheating husband to follow him to Singapore, by the time she made it all the way from Hong Kong to his room in Singapore, took away her slippers that he had been carrying with him all this time, called him from his room while he was working in the newspaper office but without saying a word, he should have known about her feelings towards him, that he could be together with her if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He never wanted actually, not because of any moral constraint, or social pressure, or lack of courage, but because that was never part of his plan. Yes, he had a plan, and the plan was to seduce her, and to abandon her, in order to punish her husband who has an affair with his wife, or simply to punish her because she holds herself so high that she keeps saying that she is not like his wife. It is hard for me and probably many, to perceive him as a player and a schemer. That would totally destroy the innocent and noble image of the two loving birds, but looking even closer to his facial expressions, and listening more carefully to his conversations with his closest friend A-Bing, that is the only answer to the agonizing question of them not being together. His plan went very well, except that he found him falling in love with her as well. He is not plagued by morality, but guilt. Morality is passed to us from the society and you could shake if off. Guilt is caused by yourself, and there’s no way to run away from it. A newspaper reporter and amateur martial arts novel writer, his closest friend is a street gangster who gambles on horse matches even when he is hospitalized, and after losing the gamble, goes straight to a brothel with no money left and has to leave his ID there, cannot buy back his ID after the deadline and comes to borrow money from him, he is definitely a much more sophisticated person as shown in this film. What we see is just the tip of an iceberg, which doesn’t emerge fully until in the equally masterful film of 2046, where he evolves into a womanizer. The idea of him planning to seduce and abandon her is not my original thought. I have learnt this from some in-depth reviews written in Chinese. I searched to see if there’s any review in English with the similar idea, but none. Though everyone is entitled to have their own understanding and interpretation of the film, I cannot help lamenting about how much gets lost in translation, when presenting to an audience of another culture. I have similar feelings about another one of my favorite Chinese films: Comrades, Almost a Love Story. All of the reviews I read in English simply regard it as a love story full of unbelievable accidents, fates and predictions, a love story that spans a decade, and over two continents, with a cliched happy ending, even though the title of the film clearly states that it is just “almost” a love story, that it is about two “comrades”. The comrades who are indeed lovers are not separated by wars, conspiracy or any third party, and tried their best to be together, as a typical epic love film would be. Instead, they are not together simply because she chose to out of her own will, and she made that choice not once, but twice. And the most interesting and cultural part of this film is to understand why she would make that choice again and again. The reviews I read in English never come to ask this question, the ones I read in Chinese do. And your answer to this question reflects your own values and experiences. To share a bit of mine: I totally understand and may even agree with her choices. What about you? |
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May 2024
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