Near the hour point of Ann Hui’s devastating drama July Rhapsody, we see high school teacher Lam (Jacky Cheung) taking an elevator up to his apartment. The point of view shifts for a moment to the four-screen panel of a surveillance camera, and though we can’t make out the teacher’s face, we have an idea what he’s feeling, yet it’s so shameful — or so the viewer imagines — that we are embarrassed even to observe it.
That’s one of the brilliant touches in Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody, written by Ivy Ho (Comrades: A Love Story) and originally released in 2002, and now making the theatrical rounds in a new restoration. It’s a graceful, awkward coming-of-age story, with a plot that’s potentially controversial yet handled with great gentleness and compassion.
The central relationship, treated delicately enough as it is, is exploitive: smart but troubled female student Choy-Lam (Karena Lam) has a crush on Mr. Lam, who’s married with kids older than this precocious girl. Lam is an adult having a modest midlife crisis, while his adolescent student seems confident in who she is. The person coming of age here is the 40-year-old, who has dedicated his life to education and is suddenly conflicted about, well, his entire adult deal. (Spoiler alert: it’s hard to talk about a crucial plot structure without revealing a startling plot point.) Lam resists his student’s advances at first, his conflict that much more acute because he well knows that his wife (Anita Mui) was in a similar situation when she was a student.
The parallel relationship is vaguely prefigured in the lyrical way Hui sets up Lam’s reluctant acquiescence to Choy-Lam’s charms. In an early scene, we watch Lam’s ordinary home life with his wife and two boys: the older one thriving in school and off to a promising college career, the younger one a struggling party guy. Lam has found himself at a mid-career crossroads. As we watch him teaching Chinese literature, we see him losing his grip, on his students’ attention and on his own enthusiasm for a subject that has defined his life. But as he’s grading uninspiring homework in the middle of his quotidian home life, he gets to Choy-Lam’s assignment and the steady camera work turns to a swoon, panning from side to side as if this young person’s language had for this disillusioned adult opened up new ways to see the world.
Yet that lateral camera movement, which at first seems to be the stuff of daydreams, has another meaning: The gentle panning from left to right and back again beautifully and ingeniously indicates, as we eventually learn, that this May-December dynamic is simply the latest iteration of a terrible cycle. When cinematographer Kwan Pun-Leung’s compositions grow baroque and agitated as Lam and his (now former) student take in the Shenzen night life amid a bevy of sex workers, the parallel exploitation becomes skewered, and as layers of glass and reflections turn more disorienting, the camera again comments on the narrative in a way that the script itself does not.
Kwan’s handiwork comes into play in more mundane sequences that reveal something about Hui’s varied influences and vivid restlessness. The cameras that swirl around a dinner table and a school board meeting both echo, all at once, scenes from Woody Allen (Hannah and her Sisters, not Manhattan), Quentin Tarantino and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, which is a neat way of laying out the layers of theme and genre going on in even a simple scene. And while Hui’s compassion for her male transgressors may seem outrageous at times, there’s a political undercurrent to these broken characters, who, like the protagonists of Hui’s masterful 1982 Boat People, have suffered under governmental as well as personal oppression. That may make Hui’s cinema of forgiveness all the more galling to some, but it’s a measure of her boldness and generosity as a filmmaker, and a measure of her growth. If the military villains in Boat People were more cartoonish, the bad guys in July Rhapsody, even at their worst, are more sympathetic.
Hui deploys Kwan like a master, and viewers like this critic who may just be getting to know her work are in for a revelation. If the Hong Kong new wave seemed much like a highly combustible cinema of the street, Hui’s work, on the basis of Boat People and July Rhapsody alone, is that of a versatile visionary who finds grace notes in the horrors of war and sympathy in the worst complications of domestic life.
Like Lam, Hui herself was in mid-career in 2002, 20 years after her breakthrough Boat People, the one Hui film the dedicated arthouse moviegoer is most likely to have seen (it’s currently streaming on the Criterion Channel). In the heyday of the new Hong Kong cinema, Hui’s brutal war drama is just as powerful (and violent) as anything from John Woo, and more sensitive, its volatile emotions ready at any moment to turn on a land mine. Yet her work is less familiar than Woo and the other new wave of Hong Kong directors, and recent restorations and revivals like this hope to correct that oversight. July Rhapsody depicts a series of uncomfortable situations, none of which is resolved cleanly. But its dramatic vision is as tender as it is dazzlingly seductive.
Photo courtesy of Cheng Cheng Films
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