天時地利人和。很多經典的組合都只能夠一次，所以才稱得上是經典。
Song of the Exile (1990)
Review/Film; Finding Home in Emotional, not Geographical, Terms
Ann Hui's delicate, finely observed "Song of the Exile" tells a tale that is at once singular and universal. The particulars of this largely autobiographical film, which opens today at the Quad Cinema, involve the marriage of a Japanese woman and a Chinese man just after the Sino-Japanese war, and the ostracism faced by the wife as she tried to make peace with her husband's relatives.
But the film's larger story is one of discovery, as the couple's Western-educated daughter returns to Hong Kong from London and resumes contact with her embittered mother. The film gently traces the rapprochement of these two, with a keen grasp of mother-daughter tensions as they might occur in any corner of the globe.
While conveying the resentment and love that govern relations between Hueyin (Maggie Cheung) and her mother, Aiko (Shwu-Fen Chang), "Song of the Exile" also offers a detailed look at life in Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao. Hueyin's relatives have at various times lived in each of these placeswithout ever truly feeling at home.
Once Hueyin gives up hope of a broadcasting career in London and returns home for her sister's wedding, she is at loggerheads with her mother almost immediately -- over her hairdo for the wedding, which could become a bone of mother-daughter contention in any culture. Miss Cheung, a beautiful and demure actress, looks convincingly torn between petulance and obedience as she finally gives in to her mother's wishes, and lets herself be drawn into a furious and unaccustomed intimacy with her sole surviving parent.
Aiko, played furiously by Miss Chang, is a difficult, dissatisified person, for reasons made clear in a series of flashbacks to Hueyin's girlhood. The child shunned her mother and insisted on being raised in Macao by grandparents, who doted on the little girl and complained cattily about Aiko's cooking. Aiko, already estranged and unhappy, never allowed this particular wound to heal.
The film's especially memorable glimpses include the sight of Aiko leaving Macao with her husband, as their daughter refuses even to wave goodbye. Later, there is a look at the teen-age Hueyin, now returned to her parents in Hong Kong and sharply critical of Aiko for being spoiled, lazy and not sufficiently maternal.
In the gentlest way imaginable, Miss Hui and the screenwriter Wu Nien-Jen allow the film's perspective to shift from Hueyin's to Aiko's, a change prompted by Aiko's impulsive wish to take her daughter on a visit to rural Japan. There, facing enormous cultural and language barriers, Hueyin begins to develop some sense of what her mother's life of displacement must have been like; at the same time, Aiko realizes how far she has traveled from what she once thought of as home. The film, after all its wandering, ultimately locates home in emotional rather than geographical terms, and gracefully binds mother and daughter in a newly discovered closeness.
Miss Hui, also the director of "Boat People," displays remarkable control of her material as she shifts between cultural and interpersonal conflicts, between the two women's varying points of view. The film's loveliest moments are those that elegantly enhance the daughter's understanding of where she fits into her mother's world. Song of the Exile Directed by Ann Hui; screenplay (in Cantonese with English subtitles) by Wu Nien-Jen; cinematographer, Chung Chi-Man; edited by Yih-Shun Huang; music by Yang Chen; produced by Deng-Fei Lin and Nai-Chung Chou; released by the Kino International Corporation. At Quad Cinema, 13th Street west of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Running time: 100 minutes. This film has no rating. Aiko/Kwei Tzu . . . Shwu-Fen Chang Hueyin Cheung . . . Maggie Cheung Hueyin's Father . . . Chi-Hung Lee Hueyin's Grandfather . . . Tien Feug
