Stuck
But who exactly is Harriet Yeung and why isn’t she a damn movie star?
Finch & Midland
Director: Timothy Yeung • Writer: Timothy Yeung
Starring: Anthony Wong, Patrick Tam, Theresa Lee, Harriet Yeung
Canada • 1hr 51mins
Opens Hong Kong January 15 • IIB
Grade: B+
For the second time in just about as many years, Toronto’s Hong Kong community has been the star of its own semi-miserable show, this time with writer and first time feature director Timothy Yeung Wing-kwong shitting all over what is considered one of the world’s most liveable cities by sources we’re supposed to trust. Named for the intersection at the centre of a suburb (Scarborough) that’s a leisurely three-hour walk from the nearest commuter train station but which has nonetheless become home to a large Hong Kong diaspora in one of the city’s five (!) Chinatowns, Finch & Midland | 今天應該很高興 isn’t actually the misery porn it appears to be on first blush. It would be easy to mistake Yeung’s realism for fatalism, though it never dips into kitchen sink realism, and his portrait of displaced, lonely, awkward and searching souls is one that cuts across age, gender, nationality and location.
If you haven’t noticed, 4:3 or Academy ratio (1.375:1) have become THE chic creative choice over the last few years: Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys and Oz Perkins’s Longlegs are just a few that spring to mind without Duckduckgo-ing (Google can suck it). Those can be intimate, stressful or claustrophobic depending on the end game, and Yeung deploys it cleverly here, using it to reflect both where his characters have come from – tight, constricted Hong Kong – and their equally tight, constricted worldview. It also ups the ante how just how personal we get with the lives of four Hongkongers who relocated in the 1990s and find themselves at various dead ends. No, it’s not all pretty, but it’s not all hopeless, which in the end is Yeung’s humanistic, universal trump card.
Where is her award?
Among Yeung’s group frustrated and emigrés is Tony (Anthony Wong Chau-sang, who earned a Golden Horse Award nomination for supporting actor though this is far from his best work), a factory manager who’s trying really hard to fit in in his new life, whatever that means. A widower, he talks golf with his boss and makes sure to watch the hockey game; it’s Canada after all. His eagerness to keep one foot in both worlds – immigrant outsider and company man – makes him the boss’s choice to deliver redundancy notices to the guys he works with on the factory floor. His crap week is compounded by Young Man (newcomer Jaden Kwan), the budding neighbourhood B&E expert who he finds in his house. Down the street is single mother Fan (Theresa Lee Yee-hung, incredibly warm in her first film in a decade), who’s trying to get a real estate license but has to give handies to old men at a massage parlour to make ends meet. Then there’s washed-up, alcoholic pop star Dan (Patrick Tam Yiu-man in a hilariously meta performance and securing his place as Hong Kong current reigning Sad Sack), reduced to performing on the Chinese immigrant banquet circuit as he tries to forge a relationship with his estranged CBC daughter before she moves away forever. Finally there’s Eva (journeywoman actor Harriet Yeung Sze-man, A Guilty Conscience), the primary caregiver for her mother (Nina Paw Hei-ching, Sons of the Neon Night), who has nothing but fawning words for Eva’s absent brother – though it’s the actually successful Eva that’s footing the bill for her mother’s nursing home. And bailing out said brother when needed. He’s a loser but mom won’t hear it, and now good daughter Eva finds herself 50, sadled with an uncaring parent, alone and lonely.
Finch & Midland is a low-key slice-of-life drama that manages that magic trick of being singular in its voice – Yeung drew on stories from within the Hong Kong expat community for his character amalgams – but undeniably emotionally universal. Tony, Fan, Dan and Eva could be in London, Sydney or Lima; they could be from Seoul, Harare or Bogotá, because the economic realities of 2025 are being felt the same way everywhere. But these are Hongkongers, and Yeung seeds Finch & Midland with little details – home altars, Cantonese insults, a deep cut by Tam (歡天喜地留給你 “Leave Joyful Things For You”) – that make it feel authentically like a Hong Kong story. Fan discovers the hard way that the community that’s supposed to be looking out for her really isn’t, and Dan abjectly refuses to leave the past in the past, even if it may cost him his daughter.
It’s not all doom, however. After an afternoon of underage drinking and entirely legal weed, Tony and Young Man come to an odd sort of opposites attract understanding that may be the kick in the ass both need. Yeung – Harriet – steals the show by turning in a lived-in, relatable, stellar performance as a woman caught at the crossroads of doing what’s right, doing what she’s expected to, and doing what she wants to. In her hands Eva is brave, a little crazy, sort of desperate but never pitiable, and her closing moments suggest a reconciliation with herself that could serve her well. Eva, gurl, 50 is the new 40. Yeung – Timothy – hasn’t reinvented the character study wheel, though he has turned the immigrant story on its head a bit by sidestepping the “hilarious” culture clashes and “woops, this is all new to me” tropes that infect the sub-genre. These Hongkongers aren’t newbies, and they’re not overwhelmed by snow. They’re just kind of lost. Like many of us these days.