Blog From The Bench

The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt
Director: Ann Hui

Though most often known internationally for its stylish action films, Hong Kong New Wave cinema often has an elegant ambiguity, a failure to observe the traditional narrative structure of world cinema and focus instead on cultivating an emotional response from its films. Heavily grounded in social realism, The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt, the new film by critically acclaimed Hong Kong New Wave director Ann Hui (Boat People) is a film where worlds do not so much collide as they do bump into and testily berate one another.

Ye Rutang (Gaowa Siqin) lives alone in Shanghai, a cranky, surly woman who harasses others for failing to be polite and obsessed with appearing proper to her neighbors. She refuses to buy a cell phone, despite the fact that everyone else around her has one. Her young nephew comes to visit him, and she refuses to turn on the air conditioning due to her arthritis. Modern life in Shanghai seems at odds with her very being. She falls victim to scam artists and con men, including the handsome Pan (played amusingly by Chow Yun-Fat), who despite hustling her repeatedly she cannot feel attracted to.

We know little of her past, and we are not meant to. All we are meant to know is this woman in Shanghai who cannot seem to connect to anyone, to adjust to the pace of the modern world. As she ages, she becomes less able to care for herself, and soon is taken back to rural Manchuria by her teenage daughter. In Manchuria, she does chores and runs a dry goods stall with her estranged husband, freezing in the desolate wasteland. Here, the China of old is preserved forever, an unforgiving land where all the young want nothing more than to escape from it and never return. Here, she knows what is expected of her, but it brings her no joy.

A complex and subtle film, The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt is postmodern in the literary sense of the world, suggesting that humanity is perched on the precipice between the modern and the postmodern. A country like China, balanced between the old ways and the new cannot help but alienate those struggling to understand how they belong in the world. For the aunt, the new traditions seem hollow and empty, while the old traditions are irrelevant and pointless, leaving nothing in between for her to embrace. Composed of stark location shots in rundown, ramshackle buildings in Shanghai and Manchuria, The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt illustrates the Chinese life as a constant struggle of identity. As inhospitable and curmudgeonly as the aunt figure is, we cannot help but feel immensely sad for her inability to fit into the world around her.

Elegant and profound, The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt is a film inherently foreign in its pacing, structure and bleak sardonic wit, but immeasurably beautiful and applicable to the Western palate. Feelings of alienation and loneliness transcend cultural borders as effortlessly as a summer breeze. It may be directed by a Hong Kong director, but The Postmodern Life Of My Aunt lives and breathes on the mainland of China, immersed into its locations and its culture, and in the human desire to belong somewhere, and to someone.

Verdict: 77