Murmur of the Hearts

念念

Hong Kong/Taiwan, 2015, colour, 1.85:1, 118 mins.

Director: Zhang Aijia 张艾嘉 [Sylvia Chang].

Rating: 8/10.

A metaphysical meditation on the need to let go is the maturest work to date by Taiwan director Zhang Aijia [Sylvia Chang].

STORY

Taiwan, the present day. In Taibei, Huang Yumei (Liang Luoshi), a painter, visits her boyfriend Zhou Yongxiang (Zhang Xiaoquan), a boxer, and they make love. He is in training for an important match and says she can’t stay. She leaves, in an agitated state. In fact she’s pregnant, but hasn’t told Zhou Yongxiang yet; and as she tells a psychologist (Xingxing Wangzi), she’s still tortured by longtime feelings of anger and betrayal against her parents. Zhou Yongxiang is also facing a crisis over an injury to his eye that is affecting his boxing, a sport he’s practised since he was a young boy under the distant encouragement of his sailor father, now dead. Zhou Yongxiang’s trainer (Wang Shixian) bans him from boxing when he finds out about the eye injury and, when pressed, tells Zhou Yongxiang he has no natural talent for the sport anyway. Meanwhile, down south, Lin Yu’nan (Ke Yulun) works as a guide for tours of Lv Dao (Green Island), just off the southeast coast of Taiwan, opposite Taidong, where he lives. (From the late 1940s until the 1980s Lv Dao was used as a penal colony for political prisoners by the ruling KMT.) Born on Lv Dao, Lin Yu’nan was left with his father, who ran a small restaurant, after his abused mother Huang Xuezhen (Li Xinjie) ran off in desperation with her daughter. Lin Yu’nan, who was trapped by a typhoon on the mainland when his father had a heart attack and later died, still misses his mother and elder sister but has never tried to find them in Taibei. In his spare time he helps out a priest (Deng Zhihong) at a small local church on the island. In Taibei, meanwhile, Huang Yumei has an attack of morning sickness while at a restaurant with Zhou Yongxiang and finally admits she’s pregnant. Zhou Yongxiang has to decide whether he’s up to the responsibility of being a father.

REVIEW

Seven years after her last feature as a director – triad-becomes-a-dad comedy-drama Run Papa Run 一个好爸爸 (2008) – veteran Taiwan actress-filmmaker Zhang Aijia 张艾嘉 [Sylvia Chang] comes up with one of her best works, and certainly her maturest, with the long-limbed but finally very affecting Murmur of the Hearts 念念. Suffused with themes that have run through all her films as a director – friendship and family, parenthood, buried emotional scars, the need to let go – her ninth feature as solo director is the most purely metaphysical to date and, though she shares the writing credit (with Taiwan-based Japanese actor Kageyama Yukihiko 荫山征彦, The Passage 经过, 2004, Father’s Lullaby 手机里的眼泪, 2012), it feels absolutely her own. Though different in tone, it’s up there with Zhang’s best as a director – Siao Yu 少女小渔 (1995), Tonight Nobody Goes Home 今天不回家 (1996) and 20 30 40 (2004) – but exploring emotional areas those earlier works never aspired to.

It’s difficult to discuss the plot without spoiling the sense of discovery for the first-time viewer as relationships and back-story become clear during the first hour and the various strands resolve themselves during the second. Suffice it to say that the story is spread across some 30 years and, though the free-flowing structure that bounces around between various time-periods is initially confusing and sometimes needlessly complex, the movie does pay off in the second hour once the set-up is complete. For audiences unfamiliar with Taiwan’s geography and social/political history it makes few concessions, even though the general emotional thrust is clear and doesn’t entirely rely on detailed local knowledge.

Despite that, there’s actually enough here for a much longer film, with some areas of the screenplay crying out for more development. The island’s repressive political past lurks in the shadows behind several of the characters’ lives, and finds direct expression in one of the main settings, the tiny offshore island of Lv Dao (Green Island), which was used from the late 1940s to the late 1980s as a penal colony for political prisoners by the KMT government but is now, in a more democratic era, a tourist attraction. (In contrast, the capital, Taibei, is hardly characterised.) The fact simply sits there throughout the film, to be absorbed by the viewer or not; but when one character (an uncle, nicely sketched by Taiwan actor-playwright Shan Chengju 单承矩) is directly identified as a former prisoner, one yearns to know a bit more detail. However, Zhang, 62, has never been an overtly political filmmaker, and the decision not to get sidetracked from the movie’s metaphysical slant seems a deliberate one – and largely successful, frustrating as it sometimes is.

Instead, the screenplay sets up a range of characters who are all prisoners of their past: a painter in her late 30s who still bears unresolved anger against her parents and now finds herself pregnant by her self-centred boxer boyfriend; the latter, who’s still scarred by the loss of his father and now finds his beloved boxing career at an end; and a Lv Dao tour guide who still misses his mother and elder sister from a painful family breakup when he was young. Their inability to move on is partly ingrained, partly self-imposed – though refreshingly the film doesn’t wallow in their masochism. The complex time-structure, moving hither and thither, and sometimes working on a subliminal, dream-like level, keeps things moving and builds up a web of feelings that are powerfully resolved in the final half-hour.

As the beached boxer in search of a replacement father figure after he’s ditched by his trainer (Wang Shixian 王识贤, excellent), Zhang Xiaoquan 张孝全 [Joseph Chang] (Eternal Summer 盛夏光年, 2006; Gf*Bf 女朋友  男朋友, 2012) turns an initially unlikeable role into an eventually touching one, notably in a beautiful scene near the end when he communes with the spirit of his late dad. It’s a typically slow-burning performance by Zhang (now in his early 30s) that has gradually made him one of the most interesting Taiwan actors of his generation. Less affecting as the tour guide who still misses his mother and elder sister, Ke Yulun 柯宇纶 (Au revoir Taipei 一页台北, 2009), son of Taiwan New Wave director Ke Yizheng 柯一正 (Last Train to Tanshui 我们的天空, 1986; Blue Moon 蓝月, 1997), is okay but less affecting.

Providing the strongest emotional threads are the two main actresses – Macau-born, half-Chinese Liang Luoshi 梁洛施 [Isabella Leong] and Malaysian Chinese Li Xinjie 李心洁 [Angelica Lee] (The Eye 见鬼, 2002; 20 30 40; Ice Kacang Puppy Love 初恋红豆冰, 2010). As an abused wife who inculcated her children with stories of mermaids and the hope of better lives than her own, Li, now 40, brings a mellowness to the role that anchors the flashbacks. Liang, who’s still only in her late 20s but convincingly plays a decade older, gets her best role so far, after a seven-year layoff from a career than never really took off (The Eye 10 见鬼10, 2005; Isabella 伊莎贝拉, 2006; Spider Lilies 刺青, 2007). Morphing from a self-absorbed victim to a mother in charge of her destiny, Liang is the film’s present-day anchor and its biggest surprise.

As usual in Zhang Aijia’s films, technical credits are tip-top. Hong Kong-born d.p. Liang Mingjia 梁铭佳, in his first major Chinese outing after work in Southeast Asia (Mundane History, 2009) and the US (Mutual Friends, 2013), shows a versatile command of atmosphere from crystal-clear exteriors to more textured flashbacks and interiors. Editing by Taiwan veteran Chen Bowen 陈博文 is spot-on and unindulgent, while occasional music by Chen Yang 陈扬 (Osmanthus Alley 桂花巷, 1987; Song of the Exile 客途秋恨, 1990) succinctly points up mood, especially with his use of solo cello.

The untranslatable Chinese title embodies feelings of remembrance, thought and obsession. A better English title would be Murmurs of the Heart rather than the present Chinglishy one.

CREDITS

Presented by Dream Creek Production (TW). Produced by Red On Red (HK).

Script: Kageyama Yukihiko, Zhang Aijia [Sylvia Chang]. Photography: Liang Mingjia. Editing: Chen Bowen. Music: Chen Yang. Art direction: Cai Peiling. Sound: Du Duzhi.

Cast: Zhang Xiaoquan [Joseph Chang] (Zhou Yongxiang), Liang Luoshi [Isabella Leong] (Huang Yumei), Ke Yulun (Lin Yu’nan), Li Xinjie [Angelica Lee] (Huang Xuezhen, mother), Chen Zhiming (father), Wang Shixian (boxing trainer), Jia Xiaoguo (Mao), Shan Chengju (Shen Zhong), Qu Youning (bar owner), Xingxing Wangzi (psychologist), Deng Zhihong (priest), Su Yuanling (woman in hospital), Gao Peishan, Song Weiqian (mermaids), Cai Songyou (Liu Yu’nan, aged 7), Hong Qing’an (Liu Yu’nan, aged 13), Lin Pinyu (Huang Yumei, aged 4), Jiang Yu (Huang Yumei, aged 10), Que Xinzhan (young Zhou Yongxiang), Zhou Xincheng (Xiaohai, Huang Yumei’s daughter).

Premiere: Hong Kong Film Festival (Opening Film), 23 Mar 2015.

Release: Taiwan, 10 Apr 2015; Hong Kong, 30 Apr 2015.