Tag: Mike Chuah

Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, James Lee, 2025)

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What does “freedom” actually mean? Will money buy it for you or just result in another kind of prison in which you cannot really say you’re free because you don’t feel like you have the choice to leave? Leaving is really at the centre of James Lee’s sensitive drama Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, biéláiwúyàng) in which the protagonists of parallel stories have both left their homelands not altogether by choice in search of a greater freedom that they nevertheless struggle to find.

Hong Kong actor Huang (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) has left Hong Kong in search of political freedom in the wake of the Umbrella Movement, but is immediately constrained by coronavirus quarantine on his arrival in Taiwan. He is constantly trying to get in contact with a man called James who also seems to be in some political trouble and is not always able to answer, which is a problem because James is supposed to be handling the transfer of his money out of Hong Kong. Huang might be “free” of political oppression, but in reality one is never “free” without money and arguably not even then because of the necessity of acquiring it. That seems to be part of the problem for his maid at the hotel, Xiao Qian (Angel Lee), who feels trapped in a relationship that no longer seems to be working while unable to leave it because neither of them can afford the rent on their own.

Xiao Qian’s relationship is with another woman and perhaps it could be argued that in Taipei she at least has the freedom to live with the person she loved, though on the other hand she pointedly refuses to explain when her girlfriend Bae shows up at the hotel looking for her after she stops answering her calls or messages. Bae also seems to have mental health issues that also perhaps prevent Qian from leaving her, though she continues to treat her coldly and repeatedly refuses her requests for intimacy. It seems that Qian wanted to study abroad in America, but so far has been unable to go. A $100 bill to her represents another kind of freedom, though as she later says to Huang in the end freedom about having the choice to leave.

A $100 bill meant freedom for Kim (Kendra Sow) too, but like Huang she finds herself trapped by the realisation that the note did not represent what she was led to believe it would. Not entirely of her own choice, Kim leaves Vietnam to become the mail order bride of a Malaysian man who claimed to be a wealthy businessman in his 40s but in reality is a market trader quite a bit older than that. Mr Li (Mike Chuah) is totally besotted with his new brides, telling his friends that there were cheaper girls available but his is the prettiest. But in the end he’s trapped by this situation too. It’s clear he hadn’t thought through the reality and was acting out a kind of romantic fantasy. Young and naive, Kim recoils from his touch and building a relationship with her is impossible because she doesn’t speak Mandarin and he doesn’t know Vietnamese. They’re hassled by immigration officials and Mr Li’s irate mother who berates Kim insisting that they only brought her here to have a son and heir so she’s not fulfilling her obligations. For his part, Mr Li is partly sympathetic in that it’s clear he has no desire to force himself on Kim and hurt, if understanding, that she rejects him. When he eventually does try to force her, he can’t go through with it because of the sight of her tears. 

As her mother-in-law feared she might, Kim finds release though a growing relationship with the immigration officer who’s closer to her in age and also an outsider, rejected by Mr Li’s mother on the grounds of his ethnicity. Through love, she finds another kind of “freedom”, but with it constraint and it remains unclear how this situation will play out even as, like Huang, she surrenders the $100 bill to someone who needs it more. To pass time in quarantine, Huang orders a copy of Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a book about a young monk who sets fire to the temple because he can’t bear the existence of something so beautiful in this profane world. Having not yet finished the book after Huang lent it to her, Qian asks him why the boy did it and he replies that perhaps he felt trapped and that only by burning the temple down could he be free. To that extent, for each of them “freedom” means burning the world behind you and never looking back, if only in a purely symbolic sense in finding the courage to leave a dissatisfying situation, no matter how impossible that might seem, along with the willingness to look for happiness somewhere else. 

Next Stop, Somewhere screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

International trailer

Two Sisters (姐妹, James Lee, 2019)

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The family home is supposed to be a place of safety, but what can you do when it’s also a source of trauma? The young women at the centre of James Lee’s psychological horror Two Sisters (姐妹, Jiěmèi) are each trying to put their houses back in order but find that their pasts are full of locked doors, crying women, and things which go bump in the night. In the end the past is the one thing you can’t protect yourself from, but not knowing can also be its own kind of hell, an inescapable puzzle that forever corrupts the image of the self. 

Elegant and successful, Mei Xi (Emily Lim) has just published her first book – a horror novel about a woman with multiple personality disorder which is, she tells her fans at a reading, a metaphor for the dual lives many women are forced to lead because of the pressures of living under the patriarchy. Meanwhile, her home life appears to be chaotic. We see her swallow a selection of pills before a one night stand cheerfully leaves her well-appointed apartment, only for her manager, John, to interrogate her after she’s late for an appointment wondering what she was doing the night before which prevented her from answering any of his calls. She reminds him that that’s none of his business. They may have slept together once but it meant nothing to her and anyway he’s a married man. Xi hopes they can keep their relationship “professional” going forward, attempting damage control on a possibly self-destructive business move. 

The main issue, however, is that her father has recently died and she’d like to sell the family home but needs the consent of her younger sister, Yue (Lim Mei Fen), who has been in a mental institution for over a decade. The doctors tell her that Yue has made good progress and they think it might be time to discharge her from the hospital so that she can start trying to reintegrate into mainstream society. Xi agrees to take custody of her, but there is an understandable distance between the two women. Yue is uncertain that Xi will be there when she needs her, partly because she neglected to visit her in the hospital on her last birthday and had apparently seen her only infrequently, Xi claims because she was busy with her book. Meanwhile, Yue is still unable to recall any of her childhood and is determined to move back into their family home in the hope of finally finding the truth behind whatever it was that happened to her. 

As expected, not everything is quite as it seems. A locked door is never a good sign, especially when there are multiple locks to unpick, but as soon as the women try to open it their shared reality begins to crumble. “What’s the point in knowing the truth?” Yue eventually asks an increasingly confused Xi, “it’s too late to change anything now”. The two women are each haunted, literally and metaphorically, by the ghost of their mother who died when they were small in circumstances neither of them are able to remember. 

The real horror lies in the family home. Badly let down by parental betrayal, the sisters attempt to rescue each other from shared trauma but are each trapped by the inescapability of the house. “I’ll always be by your side” Xi offers as words of protection, but is entirely unable to protect herself from the traumatic past. Yet Lee ends on a note of discomfort which sees Xi apologise to her mother for something that is in no way her fault, as if she had in some way betrayed her when quite the reverse is true. Xi’s words at the book reading prove truer than she knew them to be. She herself has her dualities, as did her mother, as a victim of patriarchal oppression which in this case has a sadly literal quality. The women of the Mei household struggle to free themselves from male violence and are perhaps destroyed by its memory which manifests itself in the ominous spectre of the family home which, rather than a place of love and mutual support, is a kind of prison filled with locked doors and dark secrets. 

Two Sisters screens in Amsterdam on March 6/7 as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)