Walking the Walk
Macanese filmmaker Hong Heng-fai hits the ground running in his slow-burning examination of art and desire.
Kissing The Ground You Walked On
Director: Hong Heng-fai • Writer: Hong Heng-fai
Starring: Wong Pak-hou, Lam Sheung
Macau • 1hr 34mins
Opens Hong Kong July 22 • IIB
Grade: B
Director Hong Heng-fai certainly enjoys the classics, or at the very least he’s steeped in them. Drawing from a fairly wide swathe of influences for his debut feature, Kissing The Ground You Walked On | 海鷗來過的房間, there are shades of Death in Venice, Lolita, Tsai Ming-liang’s The River and, of course, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in this slow burning, atmospheric chamber piece about desire, art, looking, performance and obsession. To be brief about it.
Kissing The Ground stars Macanese theatre director and actor Wong Pak-hou as Mr Chao, credited simply as The Writer, once a celebrated novelist and now a real estate agent, slogging away in relative obscurity. One afternoon, his agent (editor? Publisher?) drops in for a visit and gently needles him into writing again. At the same time, Mr Chao’s colleague enquires about the spare room he’s trying to rent out. A young actor, Ah Chong (Lam Sheung, Madalena) is looking for a place, and despite his misgivings about renting to an artist with, probably, strange hours and an irregular income, Chao agrees.
This is the springboard for Hong’s sweaty, suffocating, languid drama that feels as hot and sultry as Chao and Chong look. There’s a first-time, festival feel about the film; it’s artistic in the way first time filmmakers often are, but Hong’s manipulation of the romantic dynamics in what is likely Chekhov’s most renowned play (it should be noted this is not an adaptation of it) and the queer POV make Kissing The Ground feel fresh, but not tokenish. It’s also a nice complement to the almost tactile Macanaese spaces the characters move in, despite the story unfolding largely in one location.
Death in Macau
Perhaps not surprisingly Kissing The Ground has a stagey, theatrical feel to it, both in its construction and its visual composition, and in the way the central characters circle each other, never truly intersecting in reality until the last minute. But the framing keeps the action up close and personal, and nicely signals Chao and Chong’s constricted lives. After Chao agrees to let Chong move in, the two strike up an awkward “relationship” based on discussions of art and writing and acting; Chong is prepping for a performance of The Seagull, in which he plays Nina – the young actress that falls for a novelist. Chao becomes overly interested in Chong’s life, eavesdropping and spying when he can, and though he seems all cool, Chong is every bit as curious about Chao. Eventually the peeping manifests as book material for Chao, with a juicy twist after Chong is devastated by the loss of the Nina role. His director and one-time lover (Chan Fei-lek) doesn’t think he has what it takes to play the part. Golden Horse-nominated cinematographer Sou Wai-kin has a field day with the lines and doors and windows of the flat the two men inhabit, and similarly exploits Macau’s unique cityscape for maximum impact despite spending so little time in it. The images bathed in warm golden light sometimes feel intimate, sometimes they feel repressive. It all depends on what Chao and Chong are feeling in the moment.
Ultimately what makes the story so compelling is the recognisability of both characters. These are men stuck in limbos of their own making professionally and constrained by outside pressures personally. They’re both flawed, but it’s easy to understand where their flaws come from, and Hong’s delicate but astute script keeps them human. It helps that he gets graceful, understated performances from his leads. Lam has the showier part as the young man just coming into his own and from a generation more willing to state their emotional needs – to a point. But it’s Wong that holds the story together, in a stellar, low-key performance as a man so used to keeping within himself and, ironically, playing a part for the world outside his studio he barely clocks it when he’s feeling anything at all – and then obsesses over it when he does.
Hong’s come flying out of the gate with what is essentially a two-hander that can be described with the kind of words that normally signal pretension: poetic, sensual, sensitive. But Kissing The Ground (the English title is a line from The Seagull) is a finely observed, if modest character study that feels personal and lived in, and it’s a welcome voice from queer Macau. Kissing The Ground You Walked On is showing at a handful of cinemas (MCL, Emperor) for a handful of days in August (at least as of right now) so you’ll have to take a minute from Barbenheimer to catch it. — DEK