Lilting
A wonderful feat by the BFI means that Lilting is available to rent through its online film player. If it isn’t showing near you, then I highly recommend giving that a go because this film, a story of grief made with a minuscule £120,000, is tender without being mawkish. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Ben Whishaw is Richard, whose Chinese-Cambodian boyfriend of four years, Kai (Andrew Leung), has recently died. How is not important – we find out towards the end, and briefly – for the focus is on the grief of those left behind, namely Richard, and Kai’s widowed mother, Junn (Cheng Pei-pei), who lives in a retirement home, oblivious to Kai’s sexuality.
Despite years as a UK resident, she has refused to learn English. Her budding romance with Alan (Peter Bowles), an Englishman from the home, is based on dancing, kissing and blissful ignorance, until Richard visits her, and hires a translator, Vann (Naomie Christie) to help her and Alan converse.
Junn only knows Richard grudgingly as Kai’s ‘best friend’ and is bewildered by the grief that she feels he has no right to.
Understanding between the pair is slow, and it’s testament to superb acting, and the skill of first-time writer-director Hong Khaou, that you wouldn’t want it to proceed any faster. There are no EastEnders histrionics. Junn and Richard’s grief is separate but total, both running through the last time they spoke to him, and succumbing to new grief when they’re wrenched out of their memories. When Junn speaks to Alan, it’s about her life and past, rather than being in his arms.
Translation removes the fantasy and reveals the truth that both are set in their ways. You wonder if their romance would have been better left without the gaps filled in by Richard and the well-meaning Vann, who becomes hooked on the mini soap opera and accidentally joins in. Stuart Earl’s score underpins the action as elegantly as an extra character.
Lilting is filled with small moments that say more than any grand gesture, such as when Junn’s face lights up on seeing Richard cook bacon with chopsticks. Subtle ironies trip up the characters: Junn knows six languages but no English, the one that could ease her isolation. She blames Richard for not moving out so she can live with Kai. Richard would have welcomed Junn moving in, it’s Kai who won’t come out to his mother. On the day that he plans to do so, he is killed.
Whishaw and Cheng – a martial arts film star known as the Queen of Swords in Hong Kong – are electric together. Despite its subject matter, this isn’t a sad film, but rather one of strength, and above all, love.