Direction: Jonas Bak
Country: Germany
Focusing on a naturalistic reality instead of the artificial, debutant German director Jonas Bak fixates his observant lens on a recently retired widow (played by the director’s mother Anke Bak) who tries to reunite with her daughter and son in the seashore house where they lived before. Since her elusive son, Max, couldn’t make it, she decides to travel to Hong Kong, where he lives and works, only to find the city immersed in pro-democracy protest.
After sleeping the first night in a shared room of a local motel, she was able to get into his apartment, located in the metropolitan area of Wan Chai. But no sight of him. To kill time and cover up the loneliness, she does tai-chi with the building’s doorman (Patrick Lo) and goes to a fortune teller, where she interacts with a former painter turned social activist (Ricky Yeung).
Favoring a slow, simple style that recall Tsai Ming Liang’s contemplative cinema, Bak builds a ponderous story moved by a broad sense of emptiness, nostalgia and sadness. By using tilt shots to capture the main road and skyscrapers, he creates a sensation of slow motion that is reinforced by the minimalist drone-ambient music of Brian Eno, and even finds the time to incorporate some visual parcels of artistic sensibility. This is one of those drama films that requires patience. In that case , I hope you can extract something interesting from a handsomely framed meditation that straddles between documentary and fiction.
