Lilting (2014)

Review of Lilting (轻轻摇晃), directed by Hong Khaou

I think a reoccurring theme during my winter break this year from graduate school was that I was simply just vibing. A lot of the movies I ended up watching on the streaming platforms I didn’t really have a reason to picking them out, or as some would say, having a method for the madness.

I often just found myself perusing through the options on my many streaming platforms and deciding to watch essentially whatever tickled my fancy in that moment. On a cold winter day, when it was a once in a century storm in the US, I decided to sit down and watch Lilting on Mubi.

I had never actually seen a Ben Whishaw movie up until this point outside of the terrible adaption of The Tempest, which I would like to say I blocked out of my mind forever until sitting down to watch this. I ended up finishing this movie blown away by the acting throughout it, even if there was a massive language barrier and mundane moments of translation woven in.

Let’s begin the review!

Two very different individuals learn to cope with the grief of losing their connection with each other.

Lilting opens with a scene that sets the tone for the rest of the movie: a woman named Junn, who lives in a nursing home, is having a discussion with her son, Kai. She communicates exclusively with him in Mandarin, which implies that despite being set in England, Junn has been unable to learn English during her time there.

She tells him about how she’s been seeing another man at the nursing home who’s about the same age as her, and that she dances and kisses him in the garden. Kai laughs and gently teases her, but when someone enters the room, it is revealed that Junn has been talking to herself. Kai is dead and she is coping with the grief by acting like he is still there in the room with her.

Kai was gay, but he never revealed this to his mother. This is where Whishaw comes in: he plays Richard, who was Kai’s lover of four years. They lived together, but his mother was never aware of the true nature of their relationship because she has been isolated in the nursing home.

There’s also the language barrier, but Richard, because of how serious his relationship was with Kai, feels an obligation to take care of Junn. He visits her in the nursing home at first while she’s on a walk with the man she’s seeing, Alan, and tries to talk to her in English. That fails, and Richard decides to hire a translator who speaks both English and Mandarin Chinese.

This turns out to be a boon and a bane. Richard decides that to try and make Junn happier, the translator should serve as a point of communication between her and Alan.

Alan, at first, doesn’t seem to know what to say to Junn. He asks the most mundane questions, and eventually works up the courage to ask her out on a dinner. He offers to make lasagna, but then it ends up getting lost and Chinese food is decided upon instead. It seems like their relationship might go somewhere, but Alan ends up getting a little too pushy sexually and Junn decides to end things with him. Richard doesn’t like this, and tries to convince her otherwise, but Junn has a moment of independence—a critical scene—where she is allowed the choice to actually choose her destiny.

There are moments that despite everyone seeming to heal and move on, Kai is remembered and the tears come back out for Junn and Richard. They fight, too. Junn doesn’t know the extent of their relationship and is conservative, so it’s implied at first that even if she knew, she would not accept the situation that was happening.

When Richard offers to let Junn pick through Kai’s belongings to take what she wants, she ends up accusing him of keeping her from her son and being the reason she’s stuck in the nursing home where no one speaks the same language as her. When Alan and her get into it at one point, he decides to pull out some stereotypes by saying she constantly smells like garlic, making her seem even more like an outsider to this British world she lives inside of.

It’s during these fights that Richard gets pretty nasty, too. In one of the movie’s concluding scenes, he ends up pulling some pretty nasty moves by saying she never assimilated and was the reason for part of Kai’s suffering.

Both of these points are valid, but I imagine this woman’s depression and loneliness must be fairly consuming considering her situation, and this must’ve been devastating to hear from someone she now knows was her son’s life partner. While he does have some good moments with the translator and seems to have honest intentions, he does make the translator uncomfortable at some points by yelling at her, especially when she decides to pitch the idea of them living together without his consent.

What I found interesting during that fight is Kai’s spoken for on his behalf, despite being dead. We, the viewer, don’t know if what Richard is saying is the truth or if he’s just frustrated in that moment.

The Kai we see in flashbacks doesn’t really discuss his mother in that way, and when he is seen in his mother’s mind, he is accepting, almost loving. I began to question the validity of this statement and dwell on it, but, at the end of the day, grief and anger dictates a lot of things through a specific prism that bends the truth. It can be both true and false at the same time, if that makes sense.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a movie about grief and what it takes to keep moving on after the death of a loved one. I think there’s a lot to learn from both of the main characters, and the language and cultural barriers keep another element that’s pretty relevant in today’s world.

Maybe Richard coming to help Junn and trying to make her happy is not only an obligation or guilt, but something he simply needs to do in order to move on from the fact that Kai was hit by a car and killed. For Junn, it might’ve been seeing Alan briefly.

When she finds out what he really wants, she backs away, showing the strength she’s hidden all this time, and I found much to admire in her actions and quietness. She isn’t broken by her situation and continues forward despite the circumstances. Lilting might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there is much to learn from it.

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