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Edmund Lee

Starring: Isabella Leong Lok-sze, Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan, Lawrence Ko Yu-luen, Lee Sin-je
Director: Sylvia Chang Ai-chia
Category: IIA (Mandarin)

Sylvia Chang Ai-chia has a genius for staging sentimental urban romances with a distinct feminine sensitivity.
Having taken a change of pace with the father-daughter dramedy  Run Papa Run (2008), her last feature as a director, it comes as less of a surprise that the Taiwan-born, Hong Kong-based actress-turned-filmmaker would return with a most poignant film about family roots and lost dreams.
Also reviewed: thriller Helios
Murmur of the Hearts opens to actress Isabella Leong Lok-sze, her hands adorned with red paint and with scars on her wrists, looking dreamily at the sky from a rooftop.

The film, which is co-scripted by Chang and Taiwan-based Japanese actor Yukihiko Kageyama, then reveals its emotional core when a mother (Lee Sin-je) tells her two children a bedtime story about a mermaid breaking free to see the world.
The trio of damaged souls at the centre of Chang's film are the artist Yu-mei (Leong), her insensible boxer boyfriend Hsiang (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan) and her tour-guide brother Yu-nan (Lawrence Ko Yu-luen), whom Yu-mei hasn't met since her mother (Lee) took her to Taipei, leaving her father and brother behind in their hometown of Lyudao, an island off the eastern coast of Taiwan.
Also reviewed: fashion documentary Dior and I 
There are pressing concerns: Yu-mei finds out that she's pregnant, while Hsiang is diagnosed with a detached retina, which threatens to end his boxing career.
But if these broken human beings struggle to connect with one another now, the film suggests it's more a result of their long-term failure to let go of their remorse and resentment at being abandoned as children.

While Yu-mei channels her neurotic energy into abstract paintings that look like the result of an art therapy session, Yu-nan dreams — in a hypnotically presented drunken reverie — about meeting his mother again and going over her expectations of him. It is with the same craving for approval that Hsiang, an average boxer, fights on in the hope of impressing his long-departed sailor father.
The yearning for parental validation is key to this lyrical film, which dwells on its thirty-something protagonists as they shift between their mundane lives and their imagined reunions with long-lost family members. Leisurely paced and tightly woven in the fabric of memories and fantasies, the film is light on plot but steeped in pain.
There is scant pleasure to be drawn outside of its unusually positive ending — and that's the least these characters deserve.
Murmur of the Hearts is a quiet and sometimes strangely moving story about the search for closure; it is also one of Chang's best directorial efforts to date.
Murmur of the Hearts opens April 30


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Chinese language cinema

Film review: Sylvia Chang's Murmur of the Hearts

Isabella Leong and Joseph Chang in a scene from Murmur of the Hearts.

Lawrence Ko and Lee Sin-je in Murmur of the Hearts.

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Seven years after directing her previous film, the Taiwan-born, Hong Kong-based actress-turned-filmmaker returns with a poignant film about family roots and lost dreams.


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