Wood and Water

As the film opens, the unnamed sixtyish mother (widowed long ago) has just retired from her job as a church secretary. As a sort of celebration she plans a reunion with her two daughters and a son in the family's summer house on the Baltic coast. Daughters show up but not son. He has been living in Hong Kong for years, estranged from the family. The demonstrations against the government, he alleges on the phone, have caused disruptions, among them the closure of airports.

Mother decides to visit her son in Hong Kong, and arranges with him access to his apartment. Things don't work exactly as expected, her son is not there and she has no choice but to wait for him to appear. She visits a therapist he has seen, following a paper she finds in the apartment. In the course of her visit to Hong Kong she realizes she has a facility to communicate with people not in her comfort zone; a young woman in a shared hotel room, the manager of his son's apartment building, an astrologer/card reader that informs her that, from the five elements she excels in water but lacks in wood, a questionable statement since she lives in the Black Forest.

This is it. Not much happens on screen and the telling of the tale becomes slow at times, but the movie has some notable moments. One is the depiction of Hong Kong, the titanic but somewhat oppressive architecture where wast apartment towers sit close to each other competing for natural light and crowds throng the streets at every hour of the day and night, demonstrations or not. Worth a watch.

With only one other review so far as a benchmark, I can't let that highly positive rating go unchallenged. This film bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lost in Translation, is sooooooooo painfully slow and repetitive, and though it touches on the 2019-2020 protests, these have nothing at all to do with the story.

It's interesting to know that the star and several characters were related or known to the director, but this also added nothing. The lady's son never shows up, her encounters with the supporting actors are superficial, and at no time apart from not being able to enter her son's flat at first is she ever in any apparent distress, or for that matter show any emotion at all.

The first 30 minutes, in Germany, were punctuated by long, moody shots of nature, and if reminiscing about her old house was meant to set some sort of tone, I missed the point altogether.

Let me not be uniformly negative: I live in the district where this was filmed, and many of the location shots were realistic. But these didn't save the film. For intuitive reasons we haven't had any mainstream films zeroing in on the protest period here yet -- and they will never appear here even if they are made -- but this film unfortunately doesn't come close.