Wo ai chu fang, 1997
[Kitchen]
Kitchen opens
to the wistful narration of an eccentric and irresponsible, but
affable young Hong Kong hairdresser named Louie (Jordan Chan)
who, as the film begins, has traveled to a quaint Chinese province
in the rain to attend the funeral of a friend and former client.
Concerned over the plight and well-being of the elderly woman's
beautiful and reticent granddaughter Aggie (Yasuko Tomita) whose
dilapidated apartment building is in the process of being evacuated
for demolition, Louie begins to make periodic visits to her empty
apartment. Finding the emotionally fragile and enigmatic young woman
invariably asleep on the bare floor of the kitchen adjacent to a
partially opened refrigerator door (and on one occasion, oddly
cocooned inside the hull of the appliance), Louie attempts to help
her overcome her crippling depression by inviting her to the home
of his sole remaining family - his 'mother' Wah (Law Kar-Ying) -
a gregarious, kind, and nurturing bar owner who, he later reveals,
was once his father. Years earlier, devastated by the unexpected
loss of his soulmate, Wah underwent a sexual reassignment operation,
perhaps in a desperate attempt to sublimate his late wife's spirit
within his own body and in a way, give his life to her. Similarly,
Aggie's attachment to the aromas and textures of the kitchen seems
rooted in her profound sense of grief, attempting to recapture
memories of home and her beloved grandmother through the familiar
and comforting fragrance of her cooking. However, as Aggie returns
to the routines, goals, and everyday distractions of a normal life,
Louie becomes increasingly restless and withdrawn, and soon, their
seemingly fated connection becomes a transient realization of
lost opportunity.
Adapted from Banana Yoshimoto's contemporary novel, Kitchen is
a languid, sublimely textural, and evocative film on grief, guilt of
survival, healing, and connection. Stylistically recalling a sparer
Wong Kar-Wai
film infused with a more sedated whimsy of Pedro
Almodovar's outré cinema, Yim Ho
creates a suffusive sensuality, voluptuousness, and melancholia
that reflect the characters' innate sentiment of loss and longing:
the lugubrious image of translucent curtains caressing the wind in
Aggie's empty apartment (that is later paralleled in the entrancing
sight of morphing lava lamps in Wah's kitchen); the pervasiveness of
blue lighting against the darkness as she mourns in silence (slightly
reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue,
a film that similarly explores themes of fate, chance, and grief);
the saturation of metaphoric red decoration in Wah's bar where
she entertains the inscrutably resigned middle-aged businessman,
Mr. Chiu (Lau Siu-Ming). Yim further incorporates parallel imagery
to expound on the theme of interconnected destiny through repeated
episodes of torrential rain that bookend the film, mirrored
relationships through the adoptive lovers Wah and his late wife and
between Louie and Aggie (whom Wah describes as her goddaughter),
and even as a comic device involving shears as Louie's neglected girlfriend
Jenny (Karen Mok) strikes Aggie and subsequently Louie in a jealous
rage after finding the young woman in Wah's apartment. By tracing the
romantic evolution of two adrift souls through the human cycle of love
and loss, renewal and death, Kitchen indelibly
and exquisitely articulates the ephemeral essence of fate, connection,
and synchronicity.
© Acquarello 2003. All rights reserved.
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In
1938, a beautiful and imaginative aspiring writer, Shen Shao-Hua
(Brigitte Lin) leaves home following the death of her father to
start a new life, as Japanese soldiers march into town to reinforce
the occupation of China. Having spent her early years of adulthood
imprisoned by her embittered father in the attic, Shao-Hua created
a fictional young peasant heroine named Jade Orchid, an orphaned,
adolescent bond servant girl whose difficult passage to maturity
and chronicled personal travails of everyday existence is an
autobiographical projection of the author's emotional struggle
towards her own ambivalence and uncertain future. Striving to
establish a career as a freelance writer for a modest periodical,
her thoughtful and evocative articles capture the attention of
Chang Neng-Tsai (Han Chin), a pensive and genial cultural attaché
for the occupying provisional government who obtained his
prominent job by currying favor through a Japanese relative.
Through mutual acquaintances, Neng-Tsai contacts Shao-Hua's editor
and friend (Josephine Koo) in order to arrange a meeting with the
promising writer. However, despite facilitating their introduction,
the editor cautions Shao-Hua against becoming romantically involved
with Neng-Tsai, reasoning that his privileged post is inevitably
looked upon with resentment and disdain by the native Chinese
who regard him as a traitor, a strongly harbored contempt that
is manifested when Shao-Hua's neighbor brazenly assaults Neng-Tsai
in broad daylight within the gated courtyard of her apartment
building as he stops by for a visit. Nevertheless, the
relationship between Shao-Hua and Neng-Tsai perseveres until one
day, in the days preceding the commencement of World War II,
when Shao-Hua's best friend, a idealistic resistance activist
named Yueh-Feng (Maggie Cheung) pays an extended visit and
learns of Neng-Tsai's reprehensible and opportunistic employment.
A
somber and methodical young man named Guan Jian (Tuo Zhong Hua)
enters a bustling metropolitan police station and, without a scheduled
appointment, asks for a personal meeting with the chief inspector
(Hu Li) in order to file a formal complaint against a "village
housewife" named Pu Fengying (Siqin Gowa) who, he unsentimentally
admits, is his mother. As a clerk systematically collects the required
procedural information to determine if the pursuit of a formal
investigation is warranted, Jian produces his handwritten personal
account of her suspicious behavior around the time of the incident
and also a set of books that describes a case involving a Frenchwoman
who had poisoned her husband by lacing the milk with arsenic and
concealing her actions by claiming to be adding sugar: a modus
operandi that triggers a memory surrounding the circumstances
behind his father, Guan Shichang's (Ma Jing Wu) unexpected death
from cerebritis ten years earlier. Nevertheless, without incontrovertible
proof or an eyewitness to the alleged crime, the official re-examination
of a rural village school teacher's death after a long, debilitating
illness was unlikely and, when a police emergency arises, the chief
inspector uses the convenient opportunity to summarily dismiss
the inscrutable and dispassionate young man from the precinct.
However, after conducting an inconclusive, cursory background investigation
on the persistent, but diligent and socially upstanding Jian's
possible ulterior motives for his decision to inform on his mother,
the chief inspector agrees to meet with him and listen to his childhood
recollections of the events preceding his father's death. The film
then proceeds in flashback as Jian recounts a sad but familiar
tale of a humble and austere existence in the small provincial
town, reflecting on his parents' passionless marriage, his uneducated
mother's modest vocation as a tofu peddler, his rescue (along with
Fengying) after falling through the ice by an affable, well-intentioned
woodsman named Liu Da-gui (Wai Zhi), and his father's sudden, violent
illness after rumors of an immodest, overly familiar relationship
between Fengying and Da-gui begin to surface in the bucolic town.