Vince Ha | Empty Nest / 2014

adagio for father and son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vince Ha and Mezart Daulet (screenplay), Vince Ha (director) Empty Nest / 2014 [16 minutes]

 

The Asian family at the center of this short film first come together at a dinner with the father, Gerald (Aries Cheung), his daughter June (Maggie Ho) and her daughter Fanny (Kayenne Sin Lu), and the father’s younger son, Alex (Christian Hui).

     It is quite apparent from this scene that Vince Ha’s Empty Nest will once more engage with the problem in traditional Asian families of a young boy or woman being gay that signifies a failure not only of the individual but of the entire family, an embarrassment that the queer individual must bear, feeling never again to be totally part of the beloved family into whose traditional values he or she was raised.

     Alex, as established in the first few frames of this film, is gay, and we might at first suspect that the film will be about his gradual struggle to admit that fact, explaining perhaps his disinterest in a traditional career that his sister has followed, with a successful job as well as a daughter—even if there no explanation of the child’s missing father.

      This family who has obviously immigrated from Singapore to Canada seems to be highly representative of the successful transition of Asian immigrants to cities such as Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, but now faces the problem of the second generation’s variances.

     We soon discover during the dinner washing-up session with the father and his son, that Alex has long ago come out to his family, and still is having difficulties explaining his lack of career motivation to his family. We soon discover that much of that reason has to do with drugs.

     We join him and others, shortly after, in a therapeutical group discussion where the young Asian males speak of their problems not only about being gay in relationship to family pressures but their attempt to resolve those pressures with drugs.

       When it is finally Alex’s turn to discuss his problems, moreover, we discover that his problems are even deeper since he has been tested and found to have Hepatitis C, what we first might have expected was AIDS.

      Interspersed with sexual scenes that involve several forms of drugs, shared at one point, with a member of the group, Jeremy, who has reported that he has been drug free for a month, we begin to realize the complexity and interrelationships of these issues, problems so intense that in Alex’s case it appears to lead to a suicide attempt.

     Yet director Vince Ha takes his small work ever further as, in the final scenes, we see the father caring for his son, as Alex expresses his deep sense of embarrassment and failure. The father, however, reassures him that he still loves and is proud of him, if sad for his difficulties. But he brings up even further issues concerning his own failures, of how he has not known how to be there to help Alex as he grew up. Gerald finally expresses his sense of despair as his son moved out, visiting him only on holidays, and then, gradually, not returning home at all. He describes the profound sadness of the “empty nest” syndrome, suggested obviously in the film’s title, and which forces the parents often to suffer just as deeply as do their sons and daughters who have abandoned them in their feelings of failure.

     In short, the entire family situation that has created expectations and desires for their children that ends up spiraling out of the control into a condition where all family members are lost in fear and confusion, unable to live the dreams they had spun for themselves.

    Although the acting of this film is a bit amateurish, the subjects it explores are profound. A nice piano musical score by Joachim Heinrich contributes to the sense of the film being a tender adagio between father and son.

 

 Los Angeles, September 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).