Ann Hui’s The Way We Are
Ann Hui’s latest film The Way We Are, starring Hew Ching Paw and Cheung-lung Leung, is getting the most limited of limited releases a mere seven screenings in one cinema. Is it so bad or just a victim of the summer blockbusters.
Categories: 2008, hong kong
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December 10th, 2008 at 10:27 am
THE WAY WE ARE caught me completely by surprise. I was startled that such a small film with absolutely no commercial value was made and released in Hong Kong.
The Chinese title of this movie is “Tin Shui Wai Days and Nights,” and it’s a fitting one. The film is set in Tin Shui Wai, a.k.a. The City of Sadness, and follows a hard-working mother and her teenaged son over a few months.
She works at the supermarket. He hangs out with friends but doesn’t get into trouble. He’s waiting to find out the result of his Form 6 test. They visit their relatives, who are wealthier than them. The boy’s grandmother gets sick and is hospitalized. The mother says she is too busy to visit the grandmother at the hospital.
In effect, the movie trudges along on the strength of a handful of false leads. Is there some dark family secret behind the mother’s not visiting the grandmother at the hospital? Will the boy get into Form 6? Will the mother eventually lose it and unleash the pent-up anger and resentment from the sacrifices she’s had to make all her life? Will the boy be led astray by his friends and do some horrific crime?
But none of these things happen.
Instead, the major event in the movie is that the mother-and-son pair befriend a neighbor, an elderly woman who is alone in the world, and form their own family unit.
This film has won critical acclaim and has been praised for its integrity of vision, subtlety, and refusal to depict a troubled slum in a negative or sensationalistic manner as other films have done.
Indeed, whether the slum is in the New Territories of Hong Kong or in the inner-cities of Baltimore, films that are set in the ghetto usually follow two main trajectories:
1) nihilistic hell-on-earth story in which crime, violence, and drugs prevail and all hope goes out the window.
2) quiet dignity of individuals despite the odds socially-conscious story – in the U.S. these films are usually about community activists or young people who find a way out of the ghetto and often contain brief snippets of 1) nihilistic hell-on-earth to contrast and heighten their protagonist’s dignity.
THE WAY WE ARE definitely falls into the second category.
But what’s noteworthy is that unlike other movies of this type that are made elsewhere, THE WAY WE ARE categorically refuses to point the finger of blame for the plight of its protagonists at any social or government institutions, individuals, or even deities.
The two protagonists are not angry at anything. They don’t fault any of the usual suspects, namely the school system, the government, the housing estate, gangs, drugs, the media, their relatives, friends, one another…
It seems as if the two main characters have no problems whatsoever. And the only complaint the mother ever voices is that the newspaper stand guy was mean and didn’t give her the free pack of tissues that the convenience store guy gives.
As an outsider, I found great interest in the film’s many depictions of the minutiae of daily life, and the film worked for me also on the level of anthropology. But above all, the film struck a chord in me by being so very different from other Hong Kong movies.
On top of all that, seeing the elderly third character in the film deal with her loneliness made me pick up the phone and give my parents a call.
If that’s not the power of cinema, I don’t know what is.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I came across this film while on one of my many trans-pacific flights and really enjoyed it, although I wondered throughout the whole movie where it was going, and it really wasn’t! I guess maybe that was the whole point. But it is interesting how a movie that does nothing but shows how human beings relate to, care for, and are cruel to each other can be so absorbing.
For me there are two most touching scenes, the one where the old lady cooks and then eat alone, in her apartment…the loneliness is utterly gut-wrenching. Who among us have not experience this in our lives? The other was when the main character, the mom, was riding back with the old lady in the bus and choked back tears when the old lady gave her the jewerly after her ex-son in law refused it in the restaurant. I almost lost it in that scene!
I just read in today’s paper that this movie was a surprise hit at the Hong Kong Film Awards, where it got several nominations among big budgeted films like Red Cliff and Ip Man.