Displaced brothers find themselves trapped on the margins of a prosperous city in Jin Ong’s gritty drama, Abang Adik (富都青年). Essentially a story of brotherhood, Ong explores the fates of those largely cast out from mainstream society who must as one character later says be forever watchful, keeping a place to hide and to which escape while denied the most ordinary of things such as home and family for no reasons other than bureaucracy and prejudice.
Both Abang (Chris Wu Kang-ren) and Adi (Jack Tan) were born in Malaysia but are technically undocumented and finding it difficult to replace their identification without things like birth certificates or access to other family members to help replace them. While Abang, who is deaf, is earnest and determined to do everything properly, Adi is sick of waiting for things to work out in his favour and has begun working as a middleman for traffickers to earn enough money to pay for a fake ID while supplementing his income with sex work. The pair are aided by social worker who tries to do her best to help get their documentation in order but finds herself with an uphill battle against implacable bureaucracy and governmental indifference.
Ong spends most time with the brothers but makes clear the oppressive quality of the world inhabited by those trapped on the margins such as the undocumented migrants who become victims of a police raid following a tip from a broker taking kickbacks. As Adi later remarks they ask for workers to come and then they want them to go, irritated to see a policeman carrying a watch he appears to have just accepted as a bribe. With no other family members around them, the brothers have been cared for by a neighbour, transgender sex worker Money, who is like them locked out of mainstream society just for being who she is while Abang finds himself further disadvantaged by his disability and the difficulties involved in finding employment.
Abang falls in love with a refugee from Myanmar but her family will soon be moved on to another country, while Ali develops feelings for one of his clients though she soon tells him she’s planning to move to another area to get married and enjoy a more stable if perhaps less financially comfortable life outside of the city. He offers to marry her instead, but really has nothing to give her other than his body. When a tragic accident sends the brothers on the run, they realise they have no one to rely on but each other and no real place to go. In a poignant monologue in the film’s closing scenes, Abang complains to a well-meaning monk that he is incapable of understanding his life or how difficult it has been for him to simply go on existing. He wishes that he could speak, that he had a family, that he had a safe space to call home and was not forever looking over his shoulder in case he had to leave in a hurry but instead all he gets is cosmic irony sacrificing himself to save Adi in the belief that he still has a chance at a better life if only he can swallow his pride, meet his father, and get an ID card.
In the end they are both displaced, forcibly separated and pushed in opposing directions. Abang revisits their childhood, making paper aeroplanes as he once had with Adi and saying a final farewell with their ritualistic practice of cracking hardboiled heads on each other’s heads finding for a moment an identity as brothers reflected in each other. Ong shoots their marginalised existence in vibrant colour but also captures a sense of the city as oppressive and unwelcoming, as if it were actively ejecting them with its ubiquitous police patrols and constant danger while authority figures are largely corrupt and uncaring save the earnest social worker who ironically pays a heavy price just for wanting to help those who need it most. Melancholy if not exactly bleak, the film positions the brotherhood between the two men as a course of salvation allowing them to overcome a sense of despair in a society that seems all but closed to them.
Abang Adik screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)