MCLC: Bends film review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bends film review
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/20/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/movies/21iht-bends21Lives-of-Rich-and-Poo
r-Cross-in-Hong-Kong.html

FILM
Lives of Rich and Poor Cross in Hong Kong ‘Bends’ Marks Filmmaker Flora
Lau’s Big-Screen Debut
By GERRY MULLANY

HONG KONG — For all of Beijing’s political control over Hong Kong, in the
city itself the tables are often turned: Mainland Chinese provide low-cost
labor that propels the booming economy, and pregnant mothers have long
flocked to Hong Kong’s hospitals, where giving birth is a child’s ticket
to permanent residency in the city, with its better doctors and quality
schools.

This tension is at the heart of “Bends,” a film that opens here on
Thursday and in Taiwan on Friday. In it, a wealthy Hong Kong woman finds
herself enmeshed in the complicated life of a poor mainland couple. Her
driver — worried about facing penalties for violating China’s one-child
policy and wishing for a better life for his child — seeks to have his
wife deliver her second baby across the border in Hong Kong.

From her lavish apartment on Victoria Peak, the woman also sees her
affluent lifestyle start to crumble as her businessman husband disappears,
her credit cards are frozen and her daughter’s boarding school tuition is
left unpaid.

The movie, which has echoes of Woody Allen’s recent “Blue Jasmine,” is the
big-screen debut of the Hong Kong filmmaker Flora Lau, who wrote and
directed the film after receiving notice for her short films, one
examining the plight of the tens of thousands of foreign domestic helpers
in the city. The movie was shown at the Cannes International Film Festival
in May, the only Hong Kong work to get that honor this year.

Ms. Lau, 34, a Hong Kong native, was educated at Columbia University,
majoring in economics and working at Morgan Stanley before going to film
school in London. As she returned to Hong Kong, she saw a city constantly
changing, but one increasingly riven by economic inequality fueled by its
growing prosperity. “At first, it was the Filipino domestic helpers’
situation that interested me,” she wrote in an email about the university
graduates who had to leave their country to take up domestic work in Hong
Kong.

“As I found out more,” she added, “it was their stories that touched me
and I felt a need to study film as a language to express what I was
observing. Since film school, I returned to Hong Kong once again and saw
that the class divide — and the Hong Kong versus mainlander divide — was
intensifying.”

Her movie captures the opulent lifestyle of the “tai tai,” the term for a
prosperous married woman who need not work, a figure who is alternately
ridiculed and envied in Hong Kong. In “Bends,” that character, Anna Li,
played by Carina Lau (she is not related to the filmmaker), spends her
days lunching at pricey restaurants with friends, downing wine at midday
and being ferried about by her driver, Fai, played by Chen Kun. Fai has a
permit to work in Hong Kong while his pregnant wife raises their daughter
across the border in Shenzhen.

As Anna’s life falls apart, she keeps up appearances, paying for an
expensive lunch with friends as the money gets harder and harder to find.
She starts selling the house valuables. The Filipino housekeeper one day
announces she is leaving to return to her homeland, and Anna barely raises
her head, showing her emotional distance from the people who share her
home.

But Anna is unwittingly thrust into Fai’s life as he grows increasingly
desperate to come up with the money to get his wife to Hong Kong to
deliver the child. He starts selling parts of her Mercedes to a mechanic
who puts on cheap replacements. When the car’s air-conditioning no longer
works, Anna complains.

While Ms. Lau, the filmmaker, had a familiarity with Anna’s lifestyle in
Hong Kong, capturing life across the border in Shenzhen was more
challenging.

“I started to get to know families who are separated by the border and
people who had to cross the border to get to work every day,” she said. “I
went with a friend to the baby agencies pretending to be pregnant and
wanting to go to Hong Kong to give birth.”

In a sign of how quickly change happens in China, the movie was almost
overtaken by events. Last week, Beijing announced it was relaxing the
one-child rule, but officials later said the overhaul would be carried out
by provincial-level officials, raising doubts about how quickly the policy
would change.

The movie gives a gripping view of the fear held by a family facing the
prospect of having a child in violation of the rule — where families are
subject to ruinous financial penalties. The wife suggests getting an
abortion, and Fai desperately schemes to get the documentation to have her
give birth in Hong Kong as time runs out on her pregnancy.

But it is the portrayal of mainland-Hong Kong relations that may strike a
particular chord. Ms. Lau’s film, which was several years in the making,
is being released as tensions have grown between the locals and the
wealthy mainland Chinese who descend on the city’s malls and draw scorn
for what many view as their crass behavior. Ms. Lau shows another side to
that caricature: The struggling Chinese worker who greases Hong Kong’s
labor-starved economy and brings the mainland’s vexing problems with him,
too.