Unwell
Ray Yeung examines Hong Kong’s dinosaur inheritance laws, among other things, in his follow-up to ‘Suk Suk’.
All shall Be Well
Director: Ray Yeung • Writer: Ray Yeung
Starring: Patra Au, Tai Bo, Maggie Li, Leung Chung-hang, Fish Liew, Hui So-ying, Rachel Leung
Hong Kong • 1hr 33mins
Opens Hong Kong May 1 • IIB
Grade: B+
Ray Yeung Yiu-hoi’s All Shall Be Well | 從今以後 begins on a Mid-Autumn Festival weekend, with Angie Wang (an equally vulnerable and steely Patra Au Ka-man, The Narrow Road) and her partner Pat Wu (veteran Maggie Li Lin-lin) getting up and going about their morning routine. Pat boils water and collects some breakfast foods and dim sum, putting them on a tray to take out to the dining room. Angie glides around the kitchen, deftly avoiding Pat as she prepares their tea. Cinematographer Leung Ming-kai’s steady, soothing camera work allows us to bask in how comfortable and practised the women are in this space, one they’ve shared for 30-odd years. Later, they hit up the florist and the fish market and get their home ready to welcome guests for the holiday, all of whom are Pat’s family. Among the visitors are Pat’s older brother Shing (Tai Bo) and his wife Mei (Hui So-ying); their kids Victor and Fanny (Leung Chung-hang and Fish Liew); and the kids’ partners, his girlfriend Kitty (Rachel Leung Yung-ting) and her husband Sum (Ming Lai-chai). It’s a nice evening, Angie slips Victor some cash for car repairs and Fanny’s kids have a grand time with both aunties. After everyone’s gone Angie is alone in the kitchen again, yelling random shit to Pat in another room the way marrieds do. The thing is, Pat has suddenly died.
Only well on the surface
What follows for Angie is an endless stream of indignities, micro- (and macro) aggressions, disappointments and betrayals because Hong Kong’s inheritance laws, lingering traditions and outdated marriage rules conspire to strip her of any rights and see her tossed out on the street – or humiliatingly declared a dependent of Pat’s estate. Writer-director Yeung’s follow-up to Suk Suk is far more nuanced than that, and it won a Teddy at Berlin for it; it’s his best film so far. All Shall Be Well interrogates fragile masculinity in Hong Kong, the fair-weather bonds of family, and most importantly how homophobia rears its ugly head and manifests even in so-called allies when the opportunity for a better life in an ultra-competitive (and expensive) society at someone else’s expense arises. Shing allows Mei to sway him into going old school and exerting familial rights over Pat’s estate – which includes a large flat on Waterloo Road – as well as brushing off Angie’s demands to honour Pat’s final wishes. No matter how hard Angie tries to exert her rights, such as they are, the Wus, the bank, the law and even funeral directors all line up against her. She’s not allowed to lay her wife to rest they way they’d agreed to. And for all intents and purposes, they were married, another failing of the law.
If that makes All Shall Be Well sound like a depressing slog, it’s not. It won’t make you stand up and fist-pump, but the wonderful complexity to a moral and legal issue of right and wrong and why some of us are stuck in a quagmire makes ASBW more thought-provoking than weepy. Yeung tells the story through little details and small moments that add up to a bigger picture that avoids easy villains and reductive solutions. When the wrangling over Pat’s estate separates Angie from the rest of the Wus – financially, emotionally, and ultimately physically – the gut instinct is to hate them. But Yeung makes their motivations at least understandable, and paints Angie’s struggle as universal. Shing, Victor and Sum’s self-images as failures, on some level colour the allegiance to Angie they thought they had – that she thought they had too – in ways that are as tragic as they are infuriating. Each simply wants what’s best for their families. Shing himself is prevented from mourning his sister, and Yeung and Leung visualise those feelings of inadequacy and isolation gracefully.
This is assured filmmaking, with a keen understanding that the subject matter doesn’t need flash-and-dash, and that the strong cast can handle the nuance that makes Angie’s fight simultaneously gutting and draconian. Why does she need to fight for the home she shared with her life partner in 2024 because they both had vaginas? Yeung doesn’t overtly agitate for change, but he does ask each of us watching to consider where their own line in the same-sex rights sand is – and what, if anything, would make us jump over to the wrong side. — DEK