An aging Hong Kong couple move to Australia with their two youngest sons. They stay with a daughter who has already begun a successful career. Meanwhile their eldest daughter lives in Germany and their eldest son remains in Hong Kong. The film explores the different ways the family members cope with isolation and alienation.
Fu Sheng
Australia
Australia
I watched a restored version of this film with the support by National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. I wonder whether the BFI (British Film Institute) will restore more HK films in the future by following the footstep of its Oz counterpart.
I personally feel very indifferent or remotely sympathetic with the "saddening Chinese diasporic stories" a la Comrades, Almost a Love Story. First, only the better-off middleclass back then were able to immigrate. Second, Chinese "diaspora" is unlike the Jews', who dodged Nazis' persecution. They want a better lives, think Chloe Zhao, whose parents are thoroughly "red" (CCP) to enable her to be a "dissident" Chinese-American filmmaker. Also, there's an idiom in Cantonese - "if you eat the…
The very idea of floating, not being stationary or ground bound, may seem odd as a way to describe life. It could imply a sense of restlessness, an inability to cope with being sedentary, but it can also be peaceful, a feeling of alleviation from the pressures on the ground. Perhaps it’s only from a stationary position that one can appreciate the idea of floating, and vice versa perhaps the stability of things that are ground bound only looks appealing from the sky. In the case of the characters in Floating Life, we find this expressed in individuals who can cope neither with floating nor sitting, perhaps a floating life is more stationary than one might suspect. Consider how the…
“You don’t know when, which day, it’ll all be gone.” As with Farewell China, Clara Law is uncommonly honest about the realities of the immigrant experience, its disappointments and disenchantments, the nagging feeling that none of the upheavals ended up being much worth it. “You’re here as migrants, not to enjoy life! It’s the Chinese diaspora, okay?” A prismatic portrait of a family in drift-fueled breakdown as a tour through so many individual houses, from the eerily soulless new construction in the Australian suburbs to the German apartment suffering from bad feng shui to the remaining piece of Hong Kong about to be abandoned to the free market. Just as soon as one family member begins to seem like a…
There's inevitability in how attempting to find one's own roots entangles itself with the nature of the family tree, something which Law traces to the result of relatively tepid intergenerational drama in which the distance of identity becomes the antagonism between those who are closest to each other; consider it the pitfall of familiarity, expression and repression waging an internal conflict between personal heritage and immigrant adaptation. Law's greatest insights however are visible through her ability to displace space to the making of a suburban sprawl harnessing the interiority of a chamber piece, utilising doorways, windows and all manner of passages to alienate one from their surrounds as they're standing on the periphery of cultural assimilation - the essence of…
one of the greatest australian films made, searching for place, family and identity in a liminal diasporic space that may seem never really this country, but is completely.
Floating Life presents a series of intergenerational vignettes of members of one family from Hong Kong stretched across multiple countries. It is also notable for being the first Asian-Australian film, and I am surprised (and slightly dismayed) at how this film has faded into relative obscurity given the resurgence in interest in representation of Asian diasporic communities in the West. If you have access to Kanopy, you should definitely give this a watch.
The film is divided into multiple chapters, all with their own narrative and thematic undercurrents. In its opening chapter, "A house in Australia", it presents a time capsule of Australia in the 90s, the novel antics of Australia as "the country where everything can kill you" and…
tag yourself! i'm the toe sucking freak acting like he's in a Wong Kar-wai film!
There was a character named Apple. What, did GWENYTH PALTROW WRITE THIS?!?
AHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHA!
Got ‘Em!
Fractured Life
A once close family are now fractured and dotted around various countries and continents. The distance between them has contributed to mixed emotions regarding: cultural identity, traditions and struggling to adapt. The family reconnect in Australia but their varying attitudes lead to a boiling point and a situation where no one is happy. I liked 'Fruit Punch' so I was definitely looking forward to this one but I'm a little disappointed that I didn't like it more. A quiet melancholy floats throughout the film and that's something I'm not currently in the mood for but regardless of my personal feelings, the melancholy is handled well and never feels too overbearing. I'd definitely like to see more of Clara Law's work but I might have to take a small break from her if the rest of her filmography is more melancholic than it is funny.
Seen as part of the Clara Law season at ACMI.
A fond portrait of both an immigrant family and Australia in the 90s, at its best when it was showing the two cultures in conflict. The shot of all of them looking out the window in their sunglasses ruled. Loved how shit this made Germany look in comparison to Australia, thanks Clara!
wow... 🥺
i cant believe how amazing this movie was... clara law captured something extremely nuanced poignant, universal and special in this movie and i kind of find it amusing to realise that in three second intervals
i cant wait to continue to watch her films and i’m so glad to have had this experience.
