Louder than Words
Only Ann hui has the stones to make a doc about poets. If only she could go all the way in.
Elegies
Director: Ann Hui
Featuring: Huang Canran, Liu Waitong, Xi Xi
Hong Kong • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong November 23 • I
Grade: B
The most compelling conversations in towering director Ann Hui On-wah’s Elegies | 詩, a documentary about Hong Kong’s contemporary poetry scene of all things, are the ones that go unspoken. At least on screen. Hui’s latest – which she made because, at 76 and as the co-architect of a film art movement, she felt like it and you can’t stop her – is a subject near and dear, and as a one-time literature major it’s been on her bucket list for many years.
Poetry isn’t everyone’s thing. To many of us poetry is either a dirty limerick, a snarky haiku or The Faerie Queene. Most of us can quote something about the dying of the light and miles to go before sleeping or some such, but that’s it. Add to that leaping into another language and it’s game over. But Elegies is remarkably accessible; a treasure trove of technical debate between a scholar and a couple of practising bards, and so something of an education. To Hongkongers with literary tastes (and judging by jam-packed previews and festival screenings, they are myriad), it’s a couple of hours with two of the city’s most thoughtful and engaging writers – even if they don’t live in Hong Kong.
What documentary rules?
Elegies breaks, or more like disregards, the rules of documentary in that Hui is a prominent part of the story. That’s okay here, though. She means to be, and she means to be the one to bring us into the lives and art of Huang Canran, in self-described economic exile from Hong Kong (rent got to be too much for a starving artist), and the anarchic Liu Waitong, who is clearly in expression exile in Taiwan. Liu had a moment a few years back as an activist fighting the demolition of the old Queen’s Pier, so his more confrontational side took him to Taipei. Alter-egos as translators or university lecturers pay the bills.
Even though Elegies isn’t a feature, it has Hui’s fingerprints all over it; few filmmakers have as distinct a vibe as Hui. Her poetical (sorry) style is vivid in the recitations of Huang and Liu’s most evocative work. Perhaps to no one’s surprise she steers away from any truly current thoughts and selects pieces that conjure streetscapes and urban scenes that are long gone. She even includes footage of renowned poet Xi Xi reading a piece she wrote about the old Kai Tak Airport.
The Xi passage comes early in the film and it sets an elegiac (sorry again) tone that demands inference rather than outright statement. Needless to say, what Huang, Liu and Hui don’t talk about is what’s most curious – and most affecting. There’s mention of Hong Kong’s “situation”, and emerging poet Huang Runyu tearily talks about the power words have for her friends “inside”. Huang, a slow-burning bon vivant, is charming in a roll-with-it way, happy to hunker down in the book-lined home office to debate poetry structure. Liu is younger, and so more eager to kick down doors and debate poetry as activism. They make Elegies a study in contrasts. Hui obviously has something on her own mind, and her de facto code-switching makes it clear she’s as focused on the Hong Kong of now as anyone else, mostly because she remembers the Hong Kong of yore as much as anyone else. — DEK