Hong Khaou (2014)

According to Wikipedia, Hong Khaou’s script was originally called ‘Lilting the Past’.  Abbreviating the title of his first feature to one word gives it greater impact and mystery.  (‘Lilting the Past’ would also have called to mind the Stephen Poliakoff television drama Shooting the Past.)  In the film’s opening scene, the elderly Chinese widow Junn moves round her room in the old people’s home (in or on the outskirts of London) where she now resides.  Her son Kai arrives and asks her, ‘Were you dancing?’  She says not really – she can’t dance when Kai keeps forgetting to bring the CD he’s repeatedly promised her.  (The CD turns out to be an Oriental cover of ‘Sway’.)  Kai’s visit to Junn is a memory interrupted by the arrival in her room of one of the staff at the home, come to change a light bulb.  These suggestions of movement and remembering give a clue to Hong Khaou’s original title.  Tim Robey in the Daily Telegraph finds the eventual title apt for the film because ‘lilting’ is ‘a lovely word, slightly preciously chosen’.  There’s no doubt that some elements  are self-consciously sensitive – the beautiful images of winter trees and skies (photographed by Urszula Pontikos), the sparse, melancholy piano score (by Stuart Earl) – but Lilting is both more affecting and emotionally tougher than I expected.

Junn first entered the retirement home because she was suffering from memory loss and her son felt she should no longer live alone.  It was meant to be a temporary measure but Kai is now dead; Richard, the man with whom he lived, begins visiting Junn.  She’s far from happy to see him; she seems to blame Richard for her son’s death.  Junn knows that they lived together but Kai’s story to his mother was that he was Richard’s lodger; the viewer soon learns they’d been lovers for several years.   One is so used to seeing films in which the two principal characters move from mistrust/hostility towards closeness/mutual respect that the limited extent of Junn’s thaw towards Richard makes Lilting unconventional.  The revelation of the gay relationship and of the cause of Kai’s death is delayed until the film’s closing stages.  Lilting was the subject of Sight and Sound’s regular ‘Development Tale’ feature in the magazine’s July 2014 issue.  As explained there, Khaou originally wrote ‘Lilting the Past’ as a theatre piece and the most important change that occurred in the development of his screenplay was to alter the sex of Kai’s lover from female to male in order to create an extra layer of secrecy – of what Junn didn’t know about her son and his life.  Junn, although she’s lived in this country for years, hasn’t learned English; when Richard first visits her, she has made friends with another of the residents, Alan, even though he doesn’t speak her language.   Richard arranges for a young Chinese-British woman, Vann, to translate their conversations, as well as his own conversations with Junn.  In the latter, he several times refers to his relationship with and feelings about Kai then quickly asks Vann not to translate these references; it’s only in the last visit we see him make to Junn that Richard tells all to her.

This doesn’t elicit much of a reaction, though – perhaps because Junn already knew.  Whether or not she did, Junn’s response to Richard makes clear that Kai’s sexual orientation is of secondary importance now.  She tells Richard that she doesn’t want change in her life.  She wants to retain her memories of Kai and the comfort that grieving for him, through these memories, brings her.   Hong Khaou works this strand of the story cleverly, setting Richard and the audience up to expect Junn to give full vent to her anger once she’s been told that Kai and Richard were lovers – but achieving greater impact through the unexpectedness of her reaction.  Khaou could do, though, to reveal sooner how Kai died.  It’s important to keep in reserve the circumstances of the fatal road accident – he was on his way to collect Junn, to bring to her to Richard’s home, where Kai would tell her the truth about their relationship – but withholding information about the cause of death simply increases one’s curiosity about it and this is distracting.  It would have been easy enough for Khaou to reveal what happened without playing his hand about exactly how it happened.

The uncomfortableness of Junn’s final admission of how she sees life without her only child, although it’s startling, fits with the persistent emotional hardness of Lilting.  Ben Whishaw, in a fine performance, suggests more than once that Richard is determined to assert that it’s his loss of Kai that matters and hurts most:  Richard wants, on behalf of Kai, to do the right thing by Junn but there’s a sustained competitiveness between them – something for which Junn eventually chides herself.  The power of language – in particular, what can be revealed and concealed when one person doesn’t understand the words that another is speaking – is a central theme of the film.  Decisions as to when to provide and when not to provide subtitles have been made carefully and intelligently.  The linguistic theme thus extends to the audience’s having to read Junn without knowing, unless they speak Mandarin, what she’s saying but the face and body language of Cheng Pei-Pei, who plays her, are impressively eloquent.

Tim Robey is dismissive of the Junn-Alan subplot:

‘There’s a lot of intended levity about the sex lives of the elderly – even a Viagra joke. This all falls limp, feeling unspontaneous, a device to sweeten the sad tone. “It’s so romantic,” Richard and Vann patronisingly observe, more than once.’

It’s true that the twilight romance is a bit protracted but Robey is missing the main point – that Richard likes the idea of Alan making Junn happy because it would, for Richard, more easily solve the problem of what happens to her now that Kai has gone.  For as long as Junn and Alan aren’t able to communicate verbally, what they don’t like about each other remains unspoken and the mild physical affection between them survives.  Once they can tell each other more, through the co-operative and long-suffering Vann (well played by Naomi Christie), Alan complains about Junn’s garlicky breath, she that his whole person smells of urine.  When she learns about his estrangement from his sons, Junn decides she doesn’t like Alan at all.  Peter Bowles as Alan is charming and amusing in his early scenes; once things start going wrong, he doesn’t have enough of the coarse energy Alan needs to be offensive to Junn – and the character disappears too abruptly.  Even so, this subplot too has an asperity that runs counter to the surface tastefulness of the film.  The olfactory is the most important sense in Lilting – and not only in the unpleasant odours that Junn and Alan breathe from each other (and in the feeling you get that Junn experiences Richard’s presence, virtually from the start, as a bad smell).  Just as Junn recalls Kai’s last visit to her before his death, so Richard remembers the final moments of being in bed with him; this sequence ends with a lurch into the present as Richard sobs that he really misses Kai’s sniffing his armpit.  When Junn visits what had been the men’s bedroom, she puts the sheets to her nose and later tells Richard she can still smell Kai on them.

Andrew Leung looks more than the quarter-European that Kai is meant to be but he’s a quietly strong presence – he acts less naturally in his scenes with Cheng Pei-Pei but this makes sense:  Kai is being less than honest with his mother.  The scenes between Leung and Ben Whishaw are particularly good – not only the physically intimate moments between Kai and Richard but also a tetchy, well-written conversation in a coffee shop, in which Richard keeps saying precisely the wrong thing.  Junn’s and Richard’s memories of Kai, repeatedly interrupted by the invasion of the real world, are structurally reminiscent of some of Margaret Thatcher’s fantasising in The Iron Lady but they’re effective.  There’s next to no backstory about either Richard or Kai – in terms of how they earn a living, for example – but it’s plain to see that Richard is comfortably off.  The retirement home looks a bit too high end but Junn’s room there works well as a visual expression of her state of mind, her sense of isolation and imprisonment.

19 August 2014