Hong Khaou | 轻轻摇晃 (Qīngqīng yáohuàng) (Lilting) / 2014

softly spoken plaintive wails

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hong Khaou (screenplay and director) 轻轻摇晃 (Qīngqīng yáohuàng) (Lilting) / 2014

 

Cambodian-born British director Hong Khaou’s 2014 film Lilting is one of the many beautifully intimate dramas that are killed by the kindness of well-meaning reviewers and descriptions such as “lost gems,” or “forgotten treasures.” This film is far more than a gentle confrontation between cultural and social forces, or even a slightly oblique dramedy about gay sexuality and coming out.

     It encompasses those elements surely, but it is also a far more profound exploration of how we define our worlds and ourselves through language, and how language shapes our own experiences. A great part of the divisiveness of international relationships might be attributed to the impossibility of bridging the gaps of language.

 

     Certainly, the central characters of Khaou’s film begin the movie at war. Both have just lost their most beloved companion, Junn (Pei-Pei Cheng), her son (Andrew Leung), and for Richard (Ben Whishaw, who came out as gay the year of the film) his lover of 4 years. Although the mother is the major offender in this unnecessary struggle, constantly refusing to even acknowledge the existence of her son Kai’s “friend,” and telling her son to his face that she doesn’t like Richard, his inability to communicate with her and Kai’s fearful refusal to explain Richard’s role in his life help to fan the flames of the battle over who is the rightful focus of Kai’s love.

    What she doesn’t know is that her attitude, given the couple’s relationship, was what has put her in the lamentable situation in which she now finds herself, “locked up,” as she puts it, in a poorly decorated assisted living home supposedly because of early signs of forgetfulness. In fact, she is anything but forgetful, as she reimages again and again from different perspectives, the last visit of her son to her before his untimely death by being run down by an auto.

    During that last meeting, Jun has, as is her nature, made her son feel guilty for “putting her away” while continuing to disparage Richard, the very reason why she has been relocated. And obviously Kai has felt deep guilt, attempting to find a way to tell her about his gay relationship and perhaps bring her home to live with them. One of the very last things he does is to invite her to their home where, we later discover, he intends finally to explain to her that he is gay while Richard is walking several times around the block. The somewhat ridiculous scenario never occurs because of Kai’s death during his early shopping for the dinner.

     Junn, we gradually discover is an intransigent conservative, never truly assimilating into the British world which her deceased husband so readily embraced, and refusing to even try to learn the language. To cast the famed martial arts actor in this role was a brilliant decision. As Los Angeles Times reviewer Betsy Sharkey put it, “Cheng has set her legendary martial arts prowess aside to portray the malcontented matriarch. There is certainly the steel you see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the many other martial arts movies she is known for.” And for that reason, if for no other, we comprehend why Kai has so long resisted fully explaining his sexuality and, for her, his quite alien love.

     But in this film, also, we see, as Sharkey also observes, a character with greater vulnerability and a far deeper emotional makeup. For as she confesses to her son, she and another of the assisted living dwellers, Alan (Peter Bowles) have begun a kind of romantic affair with neither of them being able to speak each other’s language, perceiving one another as sort of exotic beings. They kiss, dance, and touch one another a bit like human’s dealing with pets, delighted for having the company.

     Oddly, given the centrality of Kai and Richard’s relationship, we know little about them, how they met (mentioned once in passing) or what kind of life they’ve shared—although we do later see the beautiful home they’ve mutually created and into which both would like to bring Junn if only she could fully accept their relationship. We do not even know how they are employed or anything about Richard’s background or family. All we allowed are glimpses of the loving couple in bed, which, although certainly a pleasant image to reassure us of their love for one another, does little to explain their relationship, which is arguably a failure of this otherwise powerful film.

     But then, we also have to admit that the relationship between the two young men is not at the dead center of Khaou’s work, nor is the relationship between Jun and her son the true focus. Rather, it is the relationship between Richard and Junn, and most importantly, their connection through language that matters most in this narrative.

     Now truly bitter about her son’s loss, Junn is even more infuriated by the sudden appearance at the home in which she now feels totally trapped by Richard. In the midst of her and Alan’s courtship, she hardly acknowledges that he has come bearing a gift. What does he want with her? And why does he even bother to visit a mother of a friend?

     Truly frustrated after the many attempts he has made over the years to accommodate her without Kai’s help, Richard suddenly gets the idea to hire a translator fluent in both Mandarin and English, Vann (Naomi Yang), presumably to help Jun communicate with her elderly courtier Alan. Of course, in the process Vann cannot help—mostly unintentionally but occasionally intentionally— but intrude, expressing the viewpoints and emotional state of her employer Richard as well.

     Perhaps inevitably as Vann begins to translate for Jan and Alan, they begin to discover a great deal about one another that they do not at all like, particularly when they begin to catalogue what they don’t enjoy about one another, which includes Alan’s womanizing behavior of pinching Jan’s ass, and both the smells they carry with their bodies, in Junn’s case a mouth that reeks of garlic, and in Alan’s the pungent odor of piss. The two break away, Junn to gargle, Alan to shower.

     At a dinner celebration at the apartment Alan still maintains, Richard is asked to cook one of his famous Chinese dinners (something Kai refused to permit him to demonstrate to Jun, presuming she would only hate it), and the two warriors are forced once more to meet up. But even here, at one point, the chef and translator are ordered out of the room, as the two would-be lovers express their preference for not fully having all their feelings communicated to the other.

     Over time, however, Junn discovers than she and Alan are completely incompatible. Yet increasingly, due to Vann’s intrusions she begins to comprehend that there is a deeper reason why Richard has brought in a translator, and increasingly she becomes interested in his motives. If for no other reason, she now at least can demand her son’s possessions be returned to her, for which Richard is reluctantly willing; she insists his ashes be returned as well, which Richard refuses, obviously a mystifying resistance in her mind.

     Strangely, for all of his long criticism of his lover for resisting telling his mother of his sexuality, Richard is just as silent about their true relationship as was Kai, refusing to allow Vann to speak of it.

      It is only in the film’s final scenes in which he has invited Junn to their home, perhaps even with intention of permitting her to live there if she might come to terms with his role in her son’s life, that the two finally have it out.

    At first, he hurries to clean out any evidence of their relationship, pictures, shared clothing and the like. As it is, Jun is even somewhat taken aback to find that he has “moved into” Kai’s bedroom, a room obviously which he has always shared. She asks to be alone for a while in the room where she carefully takes up her son’s garments and objects, smelling the bedsheets, announcing after that she still smells the odor of her son. Richard responds that so too can he.

    That, in turn, finally begins an angry retort in which he finally lays out the truth that she has continued to manipulate her son through guilt, describing their actual relationship including her son’s sexuality, the conversation too long delayed—all of which Vann almost joyfully translates.

     But the film ends, oddly, with Junn talking aloud, half to herself in Mandarin only (her words now translated through subtitles, meaning Richard cannot know the meaning of what she says), about the real problem, that it is not her son’s sexuality or even choice of a mate in Richard that is at the heart of her problems, but that she cannot deal with her irreparable loss. And finally, both of the battlers realize that it is not one another they are fighting, but their own feelings of the loss of love, the vacuum in their lives, and the attendant guilt for not having been able to love more fully and better. Their anger has simply been misplaced, bounced off the other when it is truly an anger over the inequities of fate.

     If that does not explain Junn’s behavior for the long while before Kai’s death and Kai’s incriminating silence regarding who he truly was which simultaneously denied Richard his position in their relationship, the feelings expressed at film’s end at least ameliorate the situation enough that we might now at least imagine a pact between the two grievers, perhaps even allowing a change in Junn’s unhappy living conditions as the two find out more about their loved one in each other.

     The film does not promise this, however, since both must come to terms with their loss within the structures of their own relationships, their own cultures, and their own languages. Perhaps the title alone hints of a future: to lilt, lilting: “to sing, speak, or play with a light, graceful rhythm or swing,” an act long unavailable to the two warriors of this tale of their softly spoken plaintive wails.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).