After This Our Exile 父子(aka The Complete Idiot's Guide to Child Abuse)

After This Our Exile is a piece of junk. I hate to be a wet blanket, but the geyserlike bursts of enthusiasm for this film, exemplified by the local media, makes my stomach turn. Those who laud this movie as a successful "comeback" of director Patrick Tam are either in awe of his fame as one of the progenitors of HK's new wave movement (which was a long time ago and why do people still care and talk about it leave me cold, especially when the HK film industry is having trouble drawing its next breath) or simply trying to identify with the mainstream critics. I guess it's still considered unfashionable to criticize a so-called cinematic maestro.

Aaron Kwok plays a gormless person and a compulsive gambler at once, who gives little regard for his family. He is such a loser that he doesn't bond with anyone, not his wife, his lover or his son. In other words, he doesn't care about anyone but himself. The same goes for Kwok's wife (Charlie Young), who leaves the scum for reasons good enough but has no intention to care for her son. Even though she's full of remorse, the only thing in her mind, when she's not self-pitying, is to sever all ties with the boy. That leaves the little boy - an extremely underdeveloped character - the only victim of this dysfunctional family. However, the director seemingly doesn't sympathize with him either, for he spent the better part of the movie describing how the boy's ill-treated and betrayed by his father, who, to my terrified eyes, has the last laugh! There's in fact little love lost between the three of them! So tell me, as an audience, how am I supposed to feel for a non-existent father-son relation when you're selling me one?

The script is so prosaic and unfocused that whatever emotional resonance it has comes out muffled, proving an egregious lack of originality. The boy reminds me of the kid in Truffaut’s 400 Blows. Maybe Tam is still living in the past. Technically, it has little to write home about as well. The sex scenes are absolutely gratuitous, out of place and distastefully put together. The direction and cinematography are as old fashion as it gets, e.g. showing Aaron Kwok face down on top of Charlie Young, who is looking sad (or trying to be sad), staring at the ceiling, tears brewing, while the camera outside the window pulls sideway from the scene on a dolly is way beyond pathetic. And all the time, there's plaintive music in the background, which brings me to the score: it is abysmal! When it's not trying too hard to be melancholy, it goes too heavy-handed on its ethnic tracks - to serve what purposes I have no bloody idea. The same story can happen in HK for all I care. Does it make any real difference it takes place in Southern Asia?

A horrid film disguised as art. I heard people praising the film for its editing (again, I bet it's because Tam is an acclaimed editor), naming all sorts of tricks, e.g. montage, parallel cutting and whatnot, as if the success of a film hinges on how many rabbits our figurative conjurer can pull out of his hat! And the funny part is that they always end their comments with a caution: the script is a bit lacking. Now, isn't that hilarious! Aren't films, first and foremost, there to tell us a story? But to many critics, they think films are boxes of assorted candies with wafer bars, cholocate kisses, jelly beans and so on, the more the merrier. When you stand up from your theatre seat and have nothing better to say or reflect than the editing techniques, regardless of whether they work for or against the story, something must be wrong. It leads me to think that movie-going, being an act of consumption, can take many forms, one of which will be a chance for one to make pompous comments using jargons that one doesn't really understand but lends the users a certain degree of authority. It's actually comparable to psychics and fortune-tellers talking about "energy" or "magnetic field". Sometimes, I find these folks quite charming, seeing them enjoying themselves this way.