Cinevue

One generation later and the Hong Kong New Wave has come full circle. One of its original members, Patrick Tam, has now confirmed what was not so clear thirty years ago—that he is the undisputed master filmmaker of that New Wave, and the one filmmaker apart from Allen Fong who has remained true to the vision, concept, and philosophy of that singularly important and innovative moment in Hong Kong cinema. Like Fong, Tam has only been sporadically active in recent years. Instead he has been overshadowed by filmmakers on whom he was a seminal influence, and who have compromised (if not insulted) the legacy of the Hong Kong New Wave as some innocuous and inoffensive moment of internationalism.

Now, after some seventeen years' absence, Tam has happily returned with a new film. AFTER THIS OUR EXILE is the first masterpiece of Hong Kong cinema of the 21st century and reminds us that Tam is probably the most important Hong Kong filmmaker of the last twenty-five years.

Set in 1990s Malaysia, the film follows the troubled relationship between a loser father who cooks in a cheap restaurant, and his son, who has the instincts of survival that his father has lost. When the man's wife—and son's mother—desserts them, their lives drifts across the thin line that divides survival and collapse, evoking a dialectical discourse of manipulation, morality, and class tension. Escaping loan sharks, the father takes the son to live in a seedy, small-town hotel, and eventually pimps the woman next door. When that ends in recrimination, the father encourages his son to sneak into bourgeois homes and steal whatever valuables he can find.

Inevitably this too ends badly—especially in contrast to the life of the mother, who is now married, pregnant, and living a comfortable, middle class, urban life. Just as Fong's FATHER AND SON ends in the present day (the son has graduated from film school in the US), so too with AFTER THIS OUR EXILE. The son is now grown and returns to the place of his youth, the place where he lost his innocence and where his future was intertwined, for better or worse, with the fate of his father.

Tam captures the seedy and oppressive atmosphere of small-town Malaysia; the setting reflects the dead end of the father's tragic trajectory, revealing a social condition that one either accepts out of frustration or resists out of instinct. AFTER THIS OUR EXILE reads as Tam the filmmaker's passage from the former to the latter, his resistance to authority giving him strength and liberation. With a deft touch, Tam constantly shifts the narrative’s point of view from son to father and vice versa. In doing so, the film becomes a profound reflection on the process not exactly of aging, but of maturing and wisdom. And in its profundity it transmits not only the energy of the image, but also a dialectical current—a melancholic treatise on the author’s control (or otherwise) of his creation.

It is a process that was nascent in the Hong Kong New Wave as filmmakers inflected the identity of a new Hong Kong and its relationship to a patriarchal mainland China. In Tam’s hands it now becomes something of a dialogue with power, and a reflection on morality and beliefs. This consciousness—indeed, this responsibility—has been vapidly absent from much of recent Hong Kong cinema whose compromises pale against the rigor and honesty of Tam’s vision.

The fact that Tam shot this film in Malaysia and not Hong Kong deserves some comment. He is no stranger to shooting outside Hong Kong, having set his first feature, LOVE MASSACRE, in San Francisco and BURNING SNOW in Taiwan. But Malaysia represents not only a place of exile (Tam taught there for a few years after his last feature) but also a place that is both familiar and strange: it is Chinese but not the Chinese that we would associate with China or Hong Kong. It is in fact like a childhood memory—lived from the inside but also seen from the outside. This spaltung is fundamental to Tam's cinema and sharply defined from the outset in films like his early costume actioner THE SWORD, whose hero embodies the dialectics that have constantly informed his work.

Thank you, Patrick Tam, for reminding us what the Hong Kong New Wave was meant to be, and for showing what Hong Kong cinema can truly achieve.

Roger Garcia was director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival at the time of the Hong Kong New Wave. Since then he has produced films in Hollywood and Asia, and published books on cinema including Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, and programmed film festivals in the U.S. and Europe