Lost in transition

A leading figure of Hong Kong New Wave cinema, acclaimed director Ann Hui (許鞍華) makes a long-awaited return to local theaters with the tragicomic drama The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (姨媽的後現代生活) starring a first-class cast of great actors from China and Hong Kong. The flick examines the deprived and the outcast, left behind by the fast changing society in China laden with Hui's signature synthesis of humanism and a feministic sensibility.

One of Hui's most appealing female figures, the film's central character Ye Rutang (Siqin Gaowa), is an educated woman in her 60s living alone in Shanghai and struggling to maintain a dignified life in the rapidly modernizing world in which profits have taken the place of social egalitarianism. Alienated and lost, Ye's very existence seems at odds with the life of the metropolis.

Losing her tutoring job because her British English is deemed less desirable than American, Ye encounters a motley of characters in her odyssey through the new world. First comes her 12-year-old nephew Kuan Kuan, who fakes his own kidnapping to scam money from her. Then Ye takes a poverty-stricken woman under her wing but soon expels her from her house after finding out she was being hoodwinked.

It is the handsome con man Pan (charmingly played by Chow Yun-fat) who crushes Ye's last ray of hope in the sunset of her life as he lures her into a relationship and steals her savings with a bogus scheme to buy and resell ceremonial plots. Broken, hurt and feeling guilty over the death of her neighbor (Lisa Lu), Ye is taken back to her ancestral home in rural Manchuria by her uncouth daughter Dafan (Vicky Zhou) who can't forgive her for leaving the family for a better life in Shanghai.

The colorful neon signs and skyscrapers of new China give way to the bleak landscape of an older China that is indifferent to the changing times. Ye, now looking like an aged chuff, lives a meager existence with her estranged family in the desolate wasteland where there is no escape from the drudgery of life.

Masterfully penned by China's leading scriptwriter Li Qiang (李檣) and endowed with expressive cinematography that illuminates the contrast between the sprawling modern metropolis and faded nostalgia, the film arrives at a definitive cultural understanding with the anomic crossing of traditional values and the increasingly materialistic and capitalistic worlds of contemporary China. An archetype of the social misfit who is left behind by changing values and mores, Ye embodies the image of the emerging China as a contested field of identities, a pronounced theme in contemporary Chinese films and illustrated with subtlety and tenderness in Hui's skilled hands.

Following the cinematic tradition of social realism, the film further articulates its sober social commentary throughout the early, comic sequences, offering a grim outlook on the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese who are excluded from the fruits of economic growth. Audiences are left to reflect on what is behind the prosperity and wealth with Hui's tender portraits, such as the teenage girl who lives in a ghetto with her grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, the imprisoned mother who unplugs the respirator of her hospitalized daughter because she is unable to pay the medical bills and Ye's unfortunate family shackled in the rundown village, drained and crushed by life.