Screens — No Hard Feelings, Suk Suk, Wet Season (Special MIFF 68½ Edition)
By Adolfo Aranjuez
Welcome to this special Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) edition of Screens! While—full disclosure—I do currently work for the festival as its in-house wordsmith, this month’s column is very much born of Liminal boss Leah Jing McIntosh’s decree that we do our bit to support our local arts ecology. So here I am, presenting what may look like an advertorial that, really, I promise, isn’t. (I’ll also try to avoid rehashing the synopses I wrote for these films on the MIFF 68½ streaming platform!) Catch these films online from 6 to 23 August.
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No Hard Feelings
Faraz Shariat, 2020 // 92 mins // MIFF 68½
When I learned that this film had won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, I knew I just had to watch it. I was on the hunt for my next queer film to obsess over after having my heart torn to shreds by, then later growing weary of, the unapologetically self-indulgent Call Me by Your Name, which I followed with the soul-crushing, trauma-inflected gay-conversion-therapy films Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Sure enough, No Hard Feelings—a stirring semi-autobiographical tale of queer love, family and the migrant experience by writer/director Faraz Shariat—did not disappoint.
We’re introduced to protagonist Parvis, a second-generation Iranian-German, amid the acidic lights and thrumming electro beats of a club. He’s dressed in fashionable normcore (as one would expect from a cool, queer Berliner); we watch as he procures a bottle of wine from the unmanned bar using a five-finger discount, then dances first alone, vertically, then with a stranger, horizontally. In between smooches comes that question dreaded by many a person of colour: ‘So where are you from?’
Through this concise set-up, Shariat establishes what his film sets out to do: capture what it’s like to be not just a young, hot queer person, but a queer person of colour navigating life in a predominantly white, Western country. Indeed, No Hard Feelings quickly shifts gears from this point: it’s revealed that Parvis has been sentenced to 120 hours of community service (his thieving behaviour is clearly a habit), which he is to spend at a refugee centre. There, he encounters, among various groups, some recently arrived Iranian men awaiting resettlement—including the dreamy Amon. Their interactions start off bristly, then become amicable, and… well, this thread of the narrative unfolds how you’d anticipate.
In a stroke of storytelling genius, however, Shariat enriches what is otherwise a straightforward queer romance by inserting Amon’s older sister, Banafshe, integrally into the plot. She and Amon are at different stages of the asylum process, and, through Banafshe’s arc, we gain insights into the torturous process of waiting and worrying that refugees (and, to a lesser extent, other immigrants, as my own experiences attest) are subject to. This thematic intricacy also manifests in the vacillating intensity of Amon, whose feelings for Parvis are corroded by the homophobia his homeland has instilled in him and reinforced by his Iranian pals at the centre. In turn, this hot-and-cold demeanour incites further volatility in Parvis, much to the concern of his well-settled, middle-class expat parents.
I can’t speak more highly of the way this film enacts the ‘sneaky subversion’ approach to activism that I champion: we’re lured in by the hip music, hot actors and sexy premise, then are walloped with an accessible primer on assimilation, mobility, displacement, generational difference and internalised homophobia. (Shariat himself has described the film as ‘activist popcorn cinema’—love it.) No Hard Feelings beautifully, and painfully, depicts how, for immigrants, growth or success or love are never just individual; instead, they’re intrinsically entangled with family, heritage, justice, community. Like in the brief scene that gives the film its English title, we’ve had to learn to wave away yet another racialised interaction because, for us, much as for Parvis, the real issues are so much bigger than just another microaggression.
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Suk Suk
Ray Yeung, 2019 // 92 mins // MIFF 68½
Speaking of multidimensional, masterfully realised queer cinema, there’s also Suk Suk, a poignant Hong Kong film about two elderly men who, after decades of living in heterosexual relationships, meet by chance and develop a quiet spark. The more reticent of the two, taxi driver Pak, still lives with his wife and family; the other, Hoi, is a divorced, retired single father who both attends church and volunteers his time for a grassroots queer organisation.
‘Quiet’ is definitely the word, with the men—shackled by both duty to their families and their society’s heteronormative expectations—forced to nurture their budding romance in secret. Writer/director Ray Yeung invites us into the couple’s relationship through skilfully subtle portrayals (and, sorry, I can’t not quote my synopsis at this juncture!): ‘affectionate glances, mournful pauses, faces conveying the simultaneous pain and hope of yearning’. In fact, Pak and Hoi’s restraint is matched by that of the film overall, which is characterised by an earnest, understated naturalism that lingers on moments and mines profundity from the day-to-day. On top of this, Yeung takes pains to demonstrate how the couple’s clandestine behaviour forms part of the societal fabric, transporting us to Hong Kong haunts that cater for older gay men desiring both connection and confidentiality.
The resonances between this film and No Hard Feelings are strong: like Parvis and Amon, Suk Suk’s Hoi and Pak are presented with obstacles to love that transcend the simple, individualised questions of attraction, reciprocation and sexual compatibility. That last element does merit attention here, though: in select scenes, we witness the men expressing physical intimacy—a powerful challenge to the tendency of conventional cinema (and queer cinema in particular) to desexualise older people. ‘I didn’t want to eroticize it or sensationalize it,’ Yeung told New Bloom in January. ‘At the same time, I didn’t want to hide it or present it as something shameful.’
Titled ‘Twilight’s Kiss’ in English, Suk Suk is a bittersweet portrait of life for same-sex-attracted men in their twilight years. It reminds us that the struggle for acceptance can prove arduous at any age, more so when cultural demands pit obligation against happiness.
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Wet Season
Anthony Chen, 2019 // 103 mins // MIFF 68½
I still remember how long I had to sit in silent reflection after the credits rolled on Ilo Ilo, Anthony Chen’s Camera d’Or–winning 2013 social drama about a Singaporean couple hamstrung by the late-nineties financial downturn and the Filipina maid they hire who bonds indelibly with their son. The writer/director’s follow-up, Wet Season, also tackles the themes of absent-parenthood, symbolic surrogacy and cultural transplantation, but with a different configuration: we focus, this time, on the outsider, Malaysian-born Ling, and her taxing job as a Mandarin teacher in Singapore.
People, of course, are never just their professions—and Chen has an astute understanding of the interplay between work and home lives; public and private domains; what is seen and said, and what is hidden and stored, to the point that it can no longer be contained. In this instance, Ling isn’t just burdened by stresses at the school: her husband is never around, they’ve had numerous failed conception attempts and she is tasked with taking care of his wheelchair-bound father. It’s in the midst of all this that she finds solace in the flirtatious interest of remedial student Wei Lun, himself battling with loneliness and a sense of not quite belonging or being appreciated. There are echoes here of the 2006 British film Notes on a Scandal (I kept imagining Judi Dench materialising by a window to tut-tut at our cradle-snatcher), but Chen’s careful direction ensures Ling never truly revels in the relationship that blossoms.
While Chen maintains the calibre of his minimalist, muted visual style, compared to Ilo Ilo, the political thrust of Wet Season is slighter—we are given no clarity about, say, the conditions that lead parents like Wei Lun’s to constantly be away, or the reasoning behind Ling’s move to the island nation. Instead, we get a distilled, undidactic depiction of the restraints placed on women in patriarchal cultures: Ling takes on the role of carer for her husband, her father-in-law, Wei Lun and her students (and we can assume she sends money to family back home, too), leaving scarcely any time or energy for her own self. This requirement to efface soon extends to the predictable moment when the affair must end, and the series of events that transpire afterwards. It’s even evident in the construction of the film itself, which shows Ling biting her tongue more often than she speaks.
Admittedly, this film piqued my interest partly because I was already steeped in the topic of female subjugation in Singapore, courtesy of my Melbourne Writers Festival event (also happening this August) on Jing-Jing Lee’s formidable novel How We Disappeared, about a Singaporean comfort woman. But Wet Season is, if not outright commentary, a gateway text for deeper explorations of misogyny, gendered roles, deflected responsibility and the silence of women muzzled into inadvertently preserving that same silencing system, in a cyclical loop. And, as hinted at by Wet Season’s titular meteorological phenomenon, sometimes all it takes is for built-up pressure to break.
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Some other recommendations, if you’d like them: David Osit’s Mayor profiles the mayor of Ramallah, almost deified by locals, in a documentary that offers a view of Palestine beyond the warzones. The Plastic House, by Cambodian-Australian filmmaker Allison Chhorn (who was interviewed by Liminal in June), is a consummate example of slow cinema that uses time and abstraction to dramatise grief. And Pakistani director Saim Sadiq’s short film Darling—reportedly the first ever Venice Film Festival prize-winner to have a trans lead actor—is both a touching love story and a telling encapsulation of ongoing transphobia.