Song of the Exile [1990] – ★★★★
Such recent popular films as Past Lives (2023) and Return to Seoul (2022) may be all about the themes of national and cultural identity, immigrant experience and making peace with the past, presenting these topics movingly and convincingly, but more than three decades before, Hong Kong director Ann Hui was also adamant to explore the same tricky intercultural barriers and people’s re-connection with their roots from a curious perspective. Her semi-autobiographical film Song in the Exile charts the course of a life of a Chinese family and one daughter’s journey to establish a closer relationship with her mother, who is Japanese.
Hueyin (Maggie Cheung (In The Mood for Love (2000)) is a westernised Chinese girl who has just finished her studies in London, looking for a job in television, and comes to China for her sister’s wedding. At home, she notices the distant demeanour of her mother Aiko (Lu Hsiao-fen), and seeks to understand more of their uneasy relationship. The film opens with the shots of vibrant London of the 1970s, and young and carefree Hueyin is enjoying her time with her British girlfriends. It is only upon her return to China that she starts to question her individuality and place in the world as her tender childhood memories, full of her grandparents’ love, and the full impact of the Sino-Japanese war on the family come to the surface. Then, Hueyin’s decision to accompany her mother to her homeland, Japan, finally has a chance to re-kindle the strained relationship between the mother and her daughter.
Song of the Exile does not always stay focused, but the film still impresses with its narrative complexity and non-linear story format. Hueyin’s childhood memories intermingle with Aiko’s own past, including her experience of trying to accustom herself to living in a new-to-her country, China, after she fell in love with a Chinese soldier (Hueyin’s father). Ann Hui manages to weave together these different memory episodes so seamlessly, contrasting the present with the past, that her film becomes a very convincing picture of people trying to make sense of their identities and homelands. For Hueyin, her mother is that final enigma to solve, and Maggie Cheung does a fine job playing a newcomer who has just stepped on that unknown territory that is her mother’s identity and her native land’s culture. Lu Hsiao-fen is not far behind, as her character Akiko, once a bold and flirtatious woman, intrigues simply on the basis that she is presented as being so different from her serious and studious daughter.
Aiko and Hueyin’s time in Japan makes up the rest of this film as we discover more of Aiko’s troubling past and the reason for Hueyin’s hesitant approach towards uncovering her mother’s conundrums. While in Japan, Hueyin has a chance to experience first-hand what it was like for her mother when she first came to live in China, a country whose language and culture she did not know. But, even in these dramatic moments of experiencing a foreign culture, Ann Hui never forgets either sporadic humour or poeticism. The former is evident in one film episode where Hueyin accidentally “steals” a tomato from a local Japanese farmer, and the latter probably comes to the fore through the wonderful use of music that accentuates the most poignant film moments.
Song of the Exile is probably Ann Hui’s finest film. It is both personal to the director, partly encapsulating her own past life experience, and showing off all of the elements that make Ann Hui’s films so memorable, including the narrative pull, and the fusion of the important, documentary-worthy themes with nostalgia and character sensitivity. “The ones dearest to us are always the furthest away” is one of the final quotes of the film, and even though the film intends to bridge the gap between two seemingly distant people, it also shows just how similar these two people really are, and they do not even realise that. By making peace with the past and being willing to share identities, connections between people can be made, but Song of the Exile also suggests that understanding and attachment may not be something “to achieve”, it may be simply something “to discover”.