Little Joy
Oliver Chan’s motherhood drama isn’t ‘enjoyable’, but if it doesn’t get you talking you clearly slept through it.
Montages of a Modern MOtherhood
Director: Oliver Chan • Writer: Oliver Chan
Starring: Hedwig Tam, Lo Chun-yip, Janis Pang, Patra Au, Alice Fung
Hong Kong • 1hr 51mins
Opens Hong Kong April 24 • IIB
Grade: A-
In Oliver Chan Siu-kuen’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood | 虎毒不, Jing (Hedwig Tam Sin-yin, Smashing Frank) is a young mother of a three-month old daughter, living in working class New Territories with her delivery driver husband Wai (Lo Chun-yip, Time Still Turns the Pages) and his parents (Janis Pang Hang-ying and Tai Bo). She’s trying to find a way to get back to work at the bakery – she needs to – but the demands of childcare mostly fall to her. When Jing takes the infant for a check-up the doctor says to her face this baby is too small; she’s abnormal. Jing’s boobs get clogged (this is a thing for lactating women), they’re hard and hurt all the time. Wai keeps neglecting to fix the breast pump like she asked him to a hundred times. Without it his mother will sneak formula to the baby, which Jing would rather not do. Wai brings his buddies home for a noisy roof party and makes Jing play waitress when she’d rather get some sleep. She’s dead on her feet and loses her job when the bakery needs to cut costs. She has a husband, after all. Through it all the baby, Qingqing, won’t. Stop. Crying.
The joys of motherhood
That’s just the beginning in what is a clear-eyed and cutting breakdown of what motherhood is actually like in commercially-driven 21st century Hong Kong, loosely based on some of Chan’s experiences from her own life in the years after her hit debut Still Human. Despite ceaselessly piling on Jing, Motherhood isn’t nearly the screed it could be, and Chan uses Jing as an avatar that encompasses all the various ways families, systems and societies fail new mothers in the modern world. And she does it by pointing out just how ridiculous and backwards some of those systems can be while still making room for a layered and empathetic examination of them. Chan doesn’t shit on Jing’s mother-in-law’s traditionalism, she just notes that they can clash with younger parents and can be less than ideal for babies. She doesn’t shit all over Wai’s choice to take more hours at work and leave Jing alone with Qingqing, she acknowledges his genuine belief it’s the best thing to do for his family and the deep-rooted gender roles flashy Hong Kong can’t shake. To Lo’s credit, he never lets Wai slip into villain territory, which the self-involved, clueless husband would be so easy to do.
Chan’s honest and uncomfortable portrait is the latest in a string of films taking the romance out of pregnancy and parenting – Rose Byrne generated massive buzz at Berlin this year for the pitch black If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – and putting the emphasis on how economics and unequal expectations are taking the wind out of the motherhood sails. It’s a finely calibrated script designed to make us understand the machinations that lead Jing to where she ultimately ends up, and demonstration of how in control of her material Chan is.
This is another film (along with Warfare and somehow I feel these are the related?) that comes close to living or dying by its sound mix, here a low-level thrum of wailing that rarely lets up. More reductive descriptions of the film have called it two hours of a squealing baby, and if that’s what you take from it, just imagine what having a newborn in the house is really like. Point to Chan for that one. The sound is complemented by DOP Sou Wai-kin’s unfussy, intimate images capturing Tam’s HKFA-nominated (as of this writing) turn as Jing and the overwhelming isolation, frustration, regret and joy she cycles through as a new mom pushed to a preventable breaking point. She really is alone, with only a sympathetic neighbour, Fanny (Alice Fung So-bo) to offer any kind of support, short lived though it is, and her own mom (Patra Au Ga-man), who provides a safe space for venting and wondering whether or not she made the right choice. Montages of a Modern Motherhood isn’t a film you come out of saying, “That was great fun!” It’s a film you come out of talking about, and debating its more salient points. Chances are high there will be pooh-poohers who insist it’s not really that bad. Sit down, STFU, and yes. For some mothers out there it really is.