Ann Hui and her Song of the Exile - Movie Review Example

Ann Hui and Her Movie "Song of the Exile" The representation of female figures in the movie genre is a topic that has attracted a great deal of attention from moviegoers. Nevertheless, even with contemporary liberal and feminist attitudes, women are still portrayed in stereotypical ways following in the chauvinist tradition that has underscored much or the world literature and the arts. Their roles in modern film typically fall into categories of famme fatales, who act as the antagonist, the conventional woman deficient of self-awareness or simply a damsel in distress awaiting salvation form a manly hero. In most cases, male directors make such films and to counter this, numerous female ones have come up with ways that the role of women can be represented form an objective point of view. In this paper, Ann Hui is examined both as director and as a culturally integrated citizen in the context of her film the song of Exile, despite the fact that she has been claimed not to be a feminist, there are very few works that bear as much feminist authenticity as hers. One of the revolusionally female directors who has for the last few decades tried with considerable success to portray women from a more realistic and objective perspective is Ann Hui, who has been behind the production of over 20 films. While she has dabbled in a range of genres, she is noted to have a turned the subject of women’s role in history into a specialty of hers, largely this is based on her personal experience1. Born to a mixed race family of Chinese and Japanese parents, she grew up in Macau and Hong Kong and later moved to London where she underwent her education, she was influence by a multiplicity of cultures from an early age given her parents’ origins and the cosmopolitan Hong Kong and London life2. On completion of her studies in London, she moved to Hong Kong where with a new generation of directors such as Patrick Tam and Tsui Hark she initiated the new wave 3. Song of the exile is one of her more prolific films and this paper will discuss her veracity as a female director focusing on how she rendered the movie and the thematic concerns in it that set her apart from other directors as an influential gender and intercultural icon. The film is a coming of age story going around Hueyin a female protagonist and the complicated relationship she has between her Japanese mother and her Chinese grandparents. She graduates from a media school but she is disappointed when unlike her Caucasian roommates, she does not get an invitation for a job interview at the BBC; from the onset of the directors gives the audience a view of the discrimination facing the antagonist both for her gender but more prominently for her race. The particulars of the semi autographical film involves the marriage between a Japanese woman and Chinese man in the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese conflict and the inevitable discrimination faced by the woman as she tries to relate with her Chinese in-laws3. However, there is a larger overlying story of discovery as their daughter who to some degree can be considered the directors alter ego, returns from London where she had received a western education. She tried to renew contact with her embittered mother and at this point the film provided as keen grasp of the conflict between the two in more or less the same way it would play out anywhere in the world. Even as it portrays the tension and resentment between the Japanese mother and her mixed race child, the song of exile gives viewers a refreshing albeit blunt outlook at lie in the mainland China, Japan Hong Kong Macau where the family has at some point lived but never really found a place they could call home. After her disappointment in London Hueyin abandons her hopes of broadcasting in London and heads home ostensibly for her younger sisters nuptials. Even then, she still fights with her mother as Aiko tries to convince all the three women to have the same hairstyle, which Huiyen is against. The haircut scene is compared to an almost similar one when Hueyin was a young girl and her mother forced her to an elementary Japanese school haircut on her. Patricia Erens proves into the troubled self-identification reflected in these scenes as mother and daughter are presented through the mirror underscoring the illusion of a divided and conflicted identity4. The mother evidently seeks to make her daughter appear more westernized and/or Japanese since she considered either of these superior to Chinese, which she associated with her in-laws and the sense of alienation pervading her existence in china5. A large part of the conflict it emerged was not so much because her mother had failed as parent but she was dealing with bigger odds due to her racial alienation than the girl could understand although her rejection in the west aught have given her a fairy good idea. In addition while her grandparents were kind to her, they are often seen overstepping the boundaries of parenting and effectively alienating her mother by complaining about her cooking and making her look inadequate because of her different cultural heritage. Hui expertly drives the film in such a way that the focus shifts gradually from Hueyin’s to Aiko’s, this comes about when Aiko’s desire to take her daughter to her homeland in Japan to help her encounter the missing half of her cultural heritage6. When she finally visits rural Japan, Hueyin is finally able to appreciate how life was for her mother in an alien land. She is faced with enormous cultural and language barriers stemming from her almost complete lack of contact with Japanese heritage outside of her interactions with her mother whom she in any case resented. In the same way, Aiko realized that she has travelled a very long distance in pursuit of her home but she does not feel the “homely” comfort she expected since she and her country has grown apart in the many years she has been away. At the end of it all, the film seems to imply that a homecoming is less to do with geographical placement and more with emotional alignment to ones loves ones and forming lasting relationships irrespective of social cultural or racial barriers. The film serves to show that despite the fact that the mother and daughter have gone all over the world looking for a home, the ultimate and only true home they can have is their closeness to each other, which is gracefully realized at the end of the film. Hui has frequently said that she is not a feminist, while this is up for discussion, reading her movies from a feminist perspective give one a radically different picture in comparison to majority of the male directed films. The women in this film are the film and they are not used to support a bigger masculine agenda nor act as props or prices to some “deserving” male hero. Instead we have real women undergoing real problems of racial discrimination, alienation family conflict and other problems that are actually universal to humans not necessarily women. This gives credence to her claim that she is not affiliated to feminism, which is not surprising since one does not need to be a feminist to represent women in an objective and neutral way. She tells the story by focusing on the many themes and challenges and succeeds in portraying women not as victims of the circumstances but mistresses of them, the female characters undergo problems but these are based on their choices and consequences as people rather than as women. Hui evidently contemplates the different statuses and perceptions of women in history and how they view their own identities by juxtaposing the alienation of the mother and growth of the mother. The movie appealed so much to me because it reminded my mother from who I often felt estranged as when I was younger since we appeared to have so little in common in as far as our outlooks in life were concerned. However, we gradually leant to appreciate each other in our own different ways, like the protagonist and her mother, we finally came to a sort of emotional epiphany in which we realized that we were not important to each other because of what we shared but the fact that we were family and no cultural barriers can transcend family love. Watching the film was therefore a very emotional experience for me and in many parts especially when Hueyin and her mother fight I would be reminded of our many confrontations. In addition, I am always pleased to watch a movie where women issues are tacked without the traditional damsel in distress stereotypes; sadly, this is becoming rarely by the day and hopefully directors will grace posterity with Hui’s objectivism and clear headiness. Works Cited Desser, David. "New Kids on the Street: The Pan-Asian Youth Film." 21st Century Film Studies: A Scope Reader, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies 10 (2008). Erens, Patricia Brett. "Crossing borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of identity in Song of the Exile." Cinema journal 39.4 (2000): 43-59. Ferguson, Laura E. "Hong Kong: Communicating 1997 and beyond through Film." eSharp, Special Issue: Communicating Change: Representing Self and Community in a Technological World (2010): 30. Fu, Poshek, and David Desser, eds. The cinema of Hong Kong: History, arts, identity. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. Kang, Kai . “Inside/Outside the Nation-State: Screening Women and History in Song of the Exile and Woman, Demon”. The Human Journal of Literature and Culture. 2013. Yue, Audrey. Ann Huis Song of the Exile. Vol. 1. Hong Kong University Press, 2010. . Read More