Australian-based director Clara Law follows up her 2015 Chinese-Hong Kong thriller spoof, The Unbearable Lightness of Inspector Fan, with serious art house material in Drifting Petals. Weaving an off-screen woman filmmaker into a confusing cast of characters she knew from other times and places, the film is generally hard to interpret. But it becomes riveting in later scenes featuring newsreel footage of the 2014 democracy protests in Law’s native Hong Kong, which are compared to other pushes for democracy in the city’s long history. This is clearly a film that is going to be most meaningful for the Chinese community who will understand it best, while other viewers can easily lose their way in the story’s deliberate obscurity. After bowing at the Sydney Film Festival, it has most recently been seen in Rotterdam’s Big Screen competition.
Law, who works closely with her co-screenwriter and co-producer Eddie Fong, was one of the first Asian Australian directors to come to prominence when her 1996 Floating Life became Australia’s first submission in the Academy Awards’ Foreign Language category. The film dealt with the cultural difficulties that two Hong Kong parents had in moving to Australia to be close to their daughter. Its uneasy atmosphere of displaced persons reappears in the much more abstract Drifting Petals, dreamily shot between Hong Kong and Macau.
The screenplay is supposedly based on the evocative novels of W.G. Sebald, and one can feel the influence of the great German author of Austerlitz in the film’s theme of memory and forgetting. Above all, the connection is stylistic: characters pose in the warm yellow glow of old-fashioned sodium lamps that illuminate the unnaturally deserted streets and urban highways. These solitary individuals hover between reality and ghostly status as they flit between past and present moments. Also Sebaldian is the way the fictional story about young people slowly spirals into real-life videos of the Umbrella Movement and stirring accounts of historical figures, like Chinese revolutionary Yang Quyun (also written Yeung Ku-wan) who militated against the Qing Dynasty to establish a republic in China, and who was assassinated in Hong Kong in 1901.
Here Sebald’s formal, literary prose is transmogrified into classical music. Rachmaninoff, Lizst, Chopin, Bartok, Mozart and Brahms pour from the fingers of the talented young pianist Jeff (Jeff Lai, who actually performs all the pieces), who has returned to Hong Kong after studying in North America. Now he despairs of ever having the opportunity to become a concert pianist.
The screenplay tends to obscure the relationships between people, turning the film into a guessing game of who’s who. A few more clues would have made the story much more satisfying and engrossing. Behind her invisible camera, the filmmaker talks to a young man (Dickens Ko) who was once her brother’s best friend. Only later does he confess to being a ghost who has been killed by a bullet out of nowhere at a student protest.
Other self-consciously odd characters interact with Jeff on the empty streets and overpasses of the city, which sometimes is Macau (identifiable by the Portuguese writings and Baroque churches) and at other times is identified as Hong Kong. The angry, upset girl in torn blue jeans is Mien (Ariel Ng); she’s desperately looking for her boyfriend Simon (Pink Yung), who she thinks was killed in a protest. Simon (Pink Yung), however, is alive and not looking for her. Jeff’s efforts to help them connect are useless and a bit tedious. Mien’s rather comic Dad (Gary Lee), who’s even angrier than she is, adds his negative energy to the scene for no obvious reason other than to show society’s conservative forces as violent and mindless. Later Jeff identifies a homeless man (Indy Lee) as his former piano teacher, an uncompromising, misunderstood genius fallen on hard times.
The most memorable and enjoyable part of the film is certainly the air of mystery and waiting created by Eddie Fong’s cinematography and the constantly drifting camera which, as it follows the characters, turns a deserted upscale urban landscape an eerie, non-human protagonist that seems to have a life, and history, of its own.
Director: Clara Law
Screenwriters, producers: Eddie Fong, Clara Law
Cast: Jeff Lai, Ariel Ng, Dickens Ko, Pink Yung, Indy Lee, Gary Lee, Kwan Chi Kit, Clara Law
Cinematography, editor: Eddie Fong
Production companies: Lunar Films (Australia)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen competition)
In English
110 minutes
