Tag: Wong Tsz-Lok

Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記, Nick Cheuk, 2023)

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A dejected teacher is forced to deal with his own unresolved traumatic past when the draft of a suicide note is discovered screwed up in a bin at the school in Nick Cheuk’s poignant drama, Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記). Informed by a recent rise in the number of adolescents taking their own lives, the film takes aim at those who refuse to take depression among children and young people seriously while simultaneously adopting conservative social attitudes which insist that children who don’t conform to their ideas of conventional success are somehow lazy and selfish. 

That’s definitely not a view held by empathetic teacher, Cheng (Lo Chun-Yip), though he is frustrated by the school’s inability to take the note at face value while otherwise trying to keep it under wraps to avoid potential embarrassment or disruption with the exam season approaching. Consequently, the desire to find the student who wrote the note has the potential to develop into a witch hunt that might only make their situation worse, though Cheng tries to go about it as sensitively as possible. In any case, he discovers that many of his students feel lost and hopeless with no one around to turn to. One boy who is being relentlessly bullied eventually fights back but ends up getting the blame while well-meaning as he is even Cheng originally misreads the situation and fails to help him. 

Meanwhile, Cheng is also under a lot of stress following the breakdown of his marriage caused in part by his issues with emotional intimacy. Called back towards the past, he begins re-reading the diary of a young boy who details physical abuse at the hands of his authoritarian father (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) that left him feeling worthless as if the world had no place for him. Eli struggles academically and particularly in comparison with his younger brother Alan while his hardline father views him only as an extension of himself and is embarrassed on a personal level that his son doesn’t measure up. Consequently, he beats him senselessly while insisting that he is simply lazy and doesn’t apply himself rather than accepting that he isn’t academically inclined and is unlikely to ever master the piano. 

Only his piano teacher, Miss Chan, is kind and patient with him though his father soon ruins that relationship too leaving the boy with nothing. Learning from this example, Cheng vows to become a different kind of teacher who doesn’t become angry with children who aren’t reaching their potential but makes a point of talking to them to figure out what’s wrong and how he can help. Unfortunately, he feels as if he’s failing to become the person he wanted to be in part because there are too many problems in the contemporary society which places intense pressure on people to conform to outdated notions of conventional success largely though academic achievement. 

Yet what Cheng discovers to be more dangerous is a growing sense of loneliness and alienation among young people who feel lost and hopeless in the contemporary society. He reflects that Eli’s despair stemmed from feeling as if no one wanted him and he wasn’t really included as a member of his family who looked down on and rejected him because of his lack of academic success. Cheng doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way, but ironically isolates himself, alienating his wife who fears he’ll never really be ready to move on into a more settled adulthood as a father with children of his own. 

In many ways, Cheng’s desire to end the cycle turning away from his father’s authoritarian violence towards care and compassion in looking after his students even as he struggles to come to terms with his own traumatic past and fears of abandonment. Granted, he doesn’t and perhaps can’t do very much to tackle the causes of the teens’ depression and their roots in the status-obsessed, politically turbulent contemporary society, but he can at least learn to open himself up to be of help to others who like him are struggling and feel as if they have nowhere to turn. Poignant and empathetic, Cheuk’s drama makes a plea for a little more compassion and understanding not only for the young but for those carrying a heavy burden in the best way they can. 

Time Still Turns the Pages opens in UK cinemas 24th November courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Lost Love (流水落花, Ka Sing Fung, 2022)

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A grieving mother attempts to redefine her life by caring for the children of others in Ka Sing Fung’s poignant maternal drama, Lost Love (流水落花). Filled with boundless compassion, the film in part explores the sense of otherness felt by lonely children often rejected by the society around them, while allowing the wounded heroine to find a way to love again in the midst of her heartbreak, even if what she’s signed up for amounts to a cycle of perpetual loss. 

Mei (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man) lives an ordinary life working a series of unsatisfying and poorly paid jobs while her husband Bun works as a driver. Gazing at an empty room that might once have belonged to a child, we can feel a sense of loss and absence in the couple’s apartment while another young woman, Miss Mok (Hedwig Tam Sin-Yin), takes a cursory look around and seems to find everything in order pausing only to advise they give up smoking, at least in front of the children. Mei has decided that she wants to become a foster mother, but Bun does not seem entirely onboard complaining that he’s only really been “advised” of her decision rather than actively asked for his opinion. 

As is later revealed, Bun and Mei lost their three year-old son to illness and though Bun would have preferred to continue trying to have another child of their own, Mei is afraid to in case the same thing happens again. Yet the irony is that in becoming a foster mother she has signed herself up for repeated loss. The children who come to her do so temporarily and only until such time as they can be returned to their guardians or adopted by other families. After bonding with one little girl, Mei considers adoption but is told that it is not really permitted within the fostering system and she will have to resign herself to letting the child the go. 

Meanwhile, many of the children have specific needs and are often struggling to deal with the circumstances which led to them needing foster care. The first little boy Mei takes in, Sam, barely says a word and wets himself in stressful situations. When he stands up to a bully in school, he’s the one who gets into trouble with the teacher who makes prejudicial statements about “these kinds of kids” as if he’s already written him off. Sam poignantly reveals that the other kids were making fun of him for not having any parents leaving him additionally isolated and further damaging his already disrupted education. Another little girl, Hana, says something similar unwilling to go to school as the other children reject her because she has cleft palate. Ching, by contrast, is rejected by her own mother who seems to have remarried and had other children, palming her off on a grandmother who is unable to care for her while hospitalised. Two other children stay with Mei while their father is in prison, later describing Bun as the kindest man they’ve ever met while explaining that they were previously pushed from pillar to post bounced around between relatives who grew tired of caring for them. 

Even so, the foster care arrangement places a further strain on the couple’s marriage. Bun is at times resentful of the attention Mei gives to the children while still on the fence about fostering even at one point suggesting they simply get a dog instead. Yet despite everything Mei remains committed to caring for the children who come her way some of whom have no one else to care for them, helping them to gain the strength to keep living in the world and to feel less alone even in the face of unfair social prejudice. Ka tells her tale in elliptical fashion, pushing forward over a number of summers as different children occupy Mei’s spare room while she herself grows old but still determined to continue looking after kids in need. A repeated motif of falling petals hints at the temporality of all things, but also as they fall into the river a poignant sense of generational flow as Mei gently supports the children until they can support themselves and she can give no more leaving love behind her even in her absence.

Lost Love screens in Chicago April 1 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)