Over the ‘Moon’
Hong Kong author-turned-filmmaker Sasha Chuk starts her cinema career with an intimate portrait of immigration and belonging. Or not.
Fly Me to the Moon
Director: Sasha Chuk • Writer: Sasha Chuk, based on her novel
Starring: Sasha Chuk, Wu Kang-ren, Yoyo Tse, Chloe Hui, Natalie Hsu, Skylar Pang, Chu Pak-hong, Angela Yuen
Hong Kong • 1hr 52mins
Opens Hong Kong April 11 • IIB
Grade: B+
I will admit there is something of an aesthetic and thematic uniformity to the (usually) intensely personal films that have been birthed by the FFFI in the last few years. The relatively small budgets and content, let’s call them restrictions, have made the slew of first features to come down the pipe of a piece. On the one hand, Huh? But on the other hand it’s giving filmmakers like Oliver Chan, Norris Wong, Nick Cheuk and Sasha Chuk Tsz-yin, making her debut with Fly Me to the Moon | 但願人長久, a chance to be heard. Before the FFFI intimate dramas about suicide, depression, addiction, social anxiety, mental health, displacement and the unequal treatment of domestic workers would likely have gotten steamrolled by big budget, big action, broadly appealing cops-and-robbers thrillers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; a truly great thriller is a thing of beauty. But cops are out of style, and if you’re a filmmaker not willing to throw away their shot, looking inward is the best road to some measure of success. Whether or not any of these filmmakers (18 so far) can get a second film off the ground remains to be seen (though Chan is currently in pre-production and Wong’s sophomore effort landed in theatres last month) but most deserve a chance. Chuk’s two-decade spanning family drama, based on her own semi-autobiographical novel, is one of the programme’s strongest to date.
Fly Me to the Moon begins with nine-year-old Yuen relocating from Hunan to Hong Kong in 1997 and reuniting with her father, Lam Kok-man (Taiwanese actor Wu Kang-ren, Abang Adik). We first meet Yuen (played by Chloe Hui Ho-yi at her youngest) at knee level, when she’s sitting on the street and boggling at the pace and glitter of her new home. From this vantage point it looks like a lot, and cinematographers Hok-Lun Chan and Yuk Fai Ho do a great job of maximising the spaces Yuen and her family move through. Her mother (Carmen Zhou), works long hours in a restaurant while Kok-man is off doing who knows what. Eventually, Yuen’s little sister Kuet (Skylar Pang) joins the family, and all four cram into a tiny flat, the best they can afford given Kok-man’s increasingly overwhelming drug addiction. It becomes clear that Hong Kong isn’t the promised land they all thought it would be.
By the time Yuen and Kuet hit adolescence in 2007 (and are played by Golden Horse-winner Yoyo Tse Wing-yan and Natalie Hsu En-yi) the girls’ early eagerness to make their dad happy has started to evaporate, as have his efforts to be a father. Above all the sisters are having drastically diverse reactions to the tight quarters, their troubled dad and culture clash. Yuen has a bit of “Fuck this” to her, while Kuet does her best to blend, and never tip her hand as to her Hunan roots. When 2017 rolls around, Yuen (Chuk herself) is working as a travel agent and guide and putting down as few roots as is humanly possible, and Kuet (Angela Yuen Lai-lam, The Narrow Road) has, essentially, given up any pretense at fitting in.
Fly Me to the Moon is tactile in how it builds a recognisable kind of micro-indignity in the Lam family. They’re on top of each other, and so their individual disillusionments, disappointments and fault lines are clear as day; we know those faults are going to result in disaster of some kind one day. But Chuk also paints an authentic-feeling portrait of a relationship between sisters that are growing in opposite directions, but will always be tethered to each other by that invisible elastic band that snaps them back. There’s a quiet tension at play in Moon, and the stresses of poverty, disconnection and fluid identities – fluid as a survival mechanism – linger beneath the surface without ever rising (sinking?) to the obvious. The closest Chuk comes to spelling things out comes near the end, when she visits her family’s ancestral village in China where she’s “that girl from Hong Kong,” despite how she may feel. As stated, this is a family drama, and among the many currents running through it is the one examining how, ultimately, for better or worse, we’re shaped by our family and can do very little to avoid that.
Despite appearances, Fly Me to the Moon isn’t a tragic tearjerker; Yuen and Kuet aren’t anyone to pity. There’s a clear-eyed matter-of-factness about the story that makes it as observational as it is reflective. After all, these sisters could have moved from Hawaii to Tokyo, from Damascus to Toronto, or from Durban to Adelaide and many of the same issues would rear their ugly heads. Chuk’s film is universal in that aspect, but it’s the personal touch that gives the film its emotional heft – that and a strong cast that makes everyone empathetically real rather than archetypical. Not bad for a first time. Let’s hope there’s a second. — DEK