After This, Our Exile (Fu Zi)


Dan Fainaru in Pusan 19 October 2006

Dir: Patrick Tam. Hong Kong, 2006. 158mins.

Excruciatingly long and exceedingly over-sentimental, Patrick Tam's After This, Our Exile looks like a daytime soap, save for a couple of torrid love scenes which may be its best achievement.

Tam’s tear-jerking drama about a cook whose family is torn apart by his inveterate gambling and unpaid debts displays great technical ability (the director has edited films by Wong Kar wai and Johnny To among others) but the script, which he co-wrote, is less than felicitous, and his direction allows the cast too much of a free hand.

The over-excited and repetitious performance from singer/dancer/heartthrob Aaron Kwok risks irritating audiences outside the region, and the film itself may well have exhausted its festival potential after playing Rome and Pusan this week. Theatrical value should not be ignored, however, if the right audience is correctly targeted. The original Chinese title is translated as Father And Son, a much better fit than the English one used here.

Starting with a title inviting the audience's compassion for the characters in a film is never a good idea: the film itself should do that job. And the first sequence in After This, Our Exile -which shows a boy riding behind his father on a bicycle – indicates that it might be able to evoke such sympathies. The light, the movement, the face of the kid, the spinning of the wheels: everything works.

The same could be said about many of the film's later sequences, which are admirable in themselves. It is only once they are put together, and the storyline emerges, that doubts creep in. The material here has neither the depth, nor the originality or interest to warrant such long treatment – and the more it perseveres, the less appealing it becomes.

Cheong-Shing (Kwok), a cook with a gambling addiction he seems unable to beat, is left by Lin (Charlie Young) the mother of his child, despite his efforts to stop her in clumsy, violent but somehow sincere manner. When he tries to trace her through friends and acquaintances, they all turn a deaf ear, mostly because of his attitude.

For Cheong-Shing is a whiner who can never understand why things are not going his way and always convinced that the world is out to persecute him. He decides he needs to attack others before they attack him – but in the process only alienates those he meets.

Boy (Gow Ian Iskander), his son, has been left in his care - but that is exactly what Cheong-Shing cannot do as he is constantly running away from loan sharks he cannot repay. His schemes to make money, all of them particularly unclever, fall through one after the other, including his attempt to pimp for a girl (Kelly Lin) staying in the hotel room next to them.

At the end of his very limited wits, and having been thoroughly beaten up by his debtors, he turns to his son, whom he adores, and attempts to make a thief out of him. The scene in which Boy enters a strange flat, hides in a closet and witnesses a pair of parents tending to their own very sick son is one of the more cloying moments of the proceedings.

The best sequences in the picture are the two love scenes. The first comes early on, between Cheong-Shing and Lin, and starts with her rejection of him before she gradually melts, despite her sorrow and despair, to hold him for one last time. The second concerns a clinch with the girl next door, which Tam cleverly intercuts with the first love scene to portray the different type of relationship Cheong-Shing entertains with each of these women.

Aaron Kwok, in the lead, needs more relaxed parts to show his best form; Charlie Young seems better focused in the early scenes, but when she returns as a married woman in a luxury home she looks much less confident and interesting. As for Iskander, he is the kind of little cutie who can steal scenes from grown-ups if they don't pay enough attention.

Splendidly shot by Mark Lee and expertly edited by Tam himself, with Tchaikovsky and Scriabin working overtime to add emotion to the soundtrack, After This, Our Exile would gain vastly by losing at least a third of its length, a task that shouldn't be too difficult for a master editor. But what can be done with the filmsy screenplay is another issue altogether.

Production companies/backers
Vision Films

International sales
Focus Films

Executive producer
Leong Lee-Ping

Producer
Chiu Li Kuang

Screenplay
Tian Koi-leong
Patrick Tam

Cinematography
Mark Lee

Editor
Patrick Tam

Production design
Patrick Tam
Cyrus Ho

Music
Robert Jay Ellis-Geiger

Main cast
Aaron Kwok
Charlie Young
Gow Ian Iskander
Kelly Lin
Qin Hailu
Valen Hsu
Faith Yeung
Qin Hao

http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDailyA ... ryID=29214

Notes on the Director's Cut from LMFDean9, one of the mods at LoveHKFilm.com:

http://thegoldenrock.blogspot.com/2007/ ... exile.html

Anyway, this is my first viewing of After This, Our Exile on the big screen and with an audience. I was a little hesitant because of the length of the director's cut (160 minutes!) and a possibly unappreciative audience (i.e. those who don't know HK cinema), but I'm very glad I decided to sit through the film again. As far as I can remember, there aren't any huge changes from the theatrical cut to the director's cut. The extra 40 minutes of footage is spread out pretty evenly throughout the film, and some were cut probably not for length, but for language. There were at least three scenes where the "forbidden" Cantonese swear words were used, which would've landed the film in category III territory (no one under 18 admitted). Some of the notable changes, not in order, include (and I can't be sure all of these were new scenes, nor can I guarantee these are all the changes):

SPOILER WARNING:

Aaron Kwok's character having to break the lock he used to lock in his wife, played by Charlie Yeung, along with him swearing.

We realize Aaron's character isn't much of a cook.

The man that Charlie Yeung's character is seeing is actually a much cleaner-looking and a suit-wearing Aaron Kwok. Yup, the mother is attracted to a version of her husband that can offer her the opposite of what she's going through.

An extension of the scene in which Aaron is threatened by loan sharks. He goes back into the kitchen and gets into an heated argument with his co-worker, which probably led to his firing.

The entire sequence where Aaron's character plays pimp to his prostitute girlfriend, played by Kelly Lin. Turns out the customer is an 80-year-old man on vacation, and Aaron's character says he needs the money to send Kelly Lin's character to study abroad.

Before Aaron Kwok's character decides to abandon Boy for England, they have one last dinner together, where Aaron serves his son beer.

Boy beginning to realize why his mother left him, the argument that ensues between him and his father, and Boy wandering away again. Also, the scene afterwards feature Aaron almost becoming a thief himself.

SPOILER END.

And obviously, there are small moments scattered here and there that I didn't list and can't recall right now. But I'm sure the question is: how is the director's cut? Anyone who felt that the theatrical cut moved too slow is obviously gonna find it even slower, as the film's methodical pacing really shows here. Anyone who felt the epilogue is too short and sudden (like me) is gonna find that the epilogue is exactly the same, except the second viewing and Tam's explanation of the ending really helped me warm up to it. Some of the abrupt breaks in storytelling (like how the father and son decide to leave the house they live in during the first act) are still there, but the addition of the small moments really help to smooth out the story as a whole. There isn't any significant plot point added, but it's amazing none of the scenes added felt like filler. Every scene seems to be where they're supposed to be (except an awkward music cue around the middle, you know which one I mean), and After This, Our Exile remains a great film. It was also interesting to hear how the audience was into it based on their reactions - ranging from disgust for the actions of Aaron Kwok's character to nervous laughter.

Oh, anyone that wanted more of the sex scenes won't get any - they remain the same in the director's cut.

Random trivia about the film:

The idea came from Tam's student, who found an article in the newspaper about a father who forces his son to break into houses to steal for him. He brought the idea to Tam, and they began to craft the screenplay from there.

The screenplay was completed in 1996, and contained 135 scenes. The final product has 77. So the theatrical cut pretty much contains only half the original story.

The English title - "After This, Our Exile," comes from a Catholic prayer.

The music in the film was personally picked by Tam himself, and many of them played very personal roles in his life, from his favorite Malaysian pop songs to his mother's favorite piano piece.

DVD review of the Director's Cut
http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=65155