The title of Wood and Water reflects the apparent desire of its writer and director, Jonas Bak, to tell a story through the tactile settings that surround its protagonist. She is a woman living on the outskirts of the Black Forest region of rural Germany, where the film’s series of events begins, and eventually, we will see her milling about in Hong Kong – shifting from a place of quiet reflection to a politically charged atmosphere (amid the protests of 2019 and 2020 and just before the start of the ongoing global pandemic). Bak is blurring the line between fiction and reality, by the way, casting his own mother, Anke Bak, in the role of this woman, who wishes to reconnect with her son.
Early in the film, in fact, Bak inserts a montage of photographs that may well be unaltered glimpses into his own childhood. Those lived experiences, for both the director and his mother/star, inform this observant work, which is in the tradition of the Slow Cinema movement – unencumbered by a narrative of any traditional kind and deliberately developed to alter the mood and temperament of its viewer to match what they are watching. None of its characters have names. Indeed, they may as well share the names of the actors playing them, for all we know. What happens to them matters a little less – sometimes to a fault – than how we respond to these scenes and conversations.
In one striking moment, the woman has determined to leave her life of comfort to be closer to her son – only to find he has gone on a business trip by the time she arrives at his flat in Hong Kong – and drives the lonely and winding streets toward the airport. Somewhere along the way, there is a tunnel, and after an extended shot passing through the tunnel and facing its ceiling, we emerge, seemingly without having changed locations, into the Hong Kong skyline. Through the collaboration of Bak and cinematographer Alex Grigoras, the neon-lit region elicits an air of newness and welcome for the woman.
Initially, she shares a hostel with a much younger woman (Alexandra Batten) preparing to depart Hong Kong forever and wondering when or how she might come back. Her other encounters, in increasing level of significance, include a fortune teller (Edward Chan) with some frighteningly accurate observations, a social activist (Ricky Leung) caught up in the politics of the region who can translate those observations, a psychiatrist (Patrick Shum) with words of warning and advice about issues of anxiety, and a doorman (Patrick Lo) with whom the woman shares a lovely lunch. These scenes play with an emphasis on the faces of the actors, the compositions and symmetry of the shots, and a flat refusal to complicate any of this with conflicts of any kind.
As sometimes happens with movies of this sort and told with this rhythm, the result can come across as sort of shapeless. That is by design, though, meaning that Wood and Water is deliberate in its intentions and rather sneaky in the way it works itself into the viewer’s graces. The performances are all on the same wavelength of understanding the assignment given to them, but of course, this show belongs to Bak (the actress), quite good at communicating a lot within a fairly compressed and unshowy frame. What really shines through, however, is the way Bak (the director) has designed the film to reflect the perspective of its protagonist and, in even sneakier ways, its audience.
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