Reflecting for 17 years on his family's immigration legacy, the filmmaker confronts the delicate images of a once intact family.Reflecting for 17 years on his family's immigration legacy, the filmmaker confronts the delicate images of a once intact family.Reflecting for 17 years on his family's immigration legacy, the filmmaker confronts the delicate images of a once intact family.
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- TriviaThere were four working titles for the film - "Inner Gaze", "The Split Ends Here", "Sense of Togetherness", and "Handover"
Featured review
The distractions, the forgetfulness, the obligations, the flow of life
A New York City apartment, 2010. A young Asian man with a ponytail in shorts and a T-shirt drags a plastic bin into the frame. He plops down on the couch and opens it up while his cat looks on. Slowly, reflectively, he pulls out its contents and stacks them on the coffee table: video cassette after video cassette, boxes and boxes of them, camera originals with handwritten labels, some of which he pauses to read.
"The distractions, the forgetfulness, the obligations, the flow of life kept these in the closet for so long. The feelings of those years - what a difference. The first tapes in this box were recorded a decade ago. It's only appropriate to begin the film there, if I were to make one."
Of course, the young man does go on to make that film and that is it what we're watching: Reunification, director Alvin Tsang's remarkable first feature-length documentary, shot over a span of 17 years. The film takes the form of a personal essay on the classic American themes of immigration and assimilation. It's at once intensely intimate and almost uncannily universal.
As his story unfolds in nonlinear fashion through a series of loose associations inspired by his films and photographs, Tsang doesn't so much narrate the events as propose his own tentative thoughts about why they occurred and what they might possibly mean.
Why did his parents decide to leave Hong Kong? Was it because of the impending Reunification with mainland China in 1997? And how did his parents come to the decision to come to America separately, years apart, with his mother going to California with his older brother and younger sister, but without him and his father? Why was he the child chosen to be left behind, with a father who worked around the clock and was rarely home?
At one particularly poignant moment after he arrives in Los Angeles, visiting his newborn niece at the hospital on her first day, Alvin watches his brother Andy tenderly touch his wife Michelle and tell her, "My honey is a strong and courageous woman." This prompts our narrator to ask, "Was it like this when Mom and Dad had us? Was the love between them like this?"
This will prove to be a difficult question to answer, in more ways than one. For many if not most of us, our parents are our first great enigma, a puzzle we never quite solve though we might spend a lifetime trying. Many of the interpretations of his parents' behavior that Alvin proposes early on will need to be revised or even turned on their head before the film hits its grace notes at the end. Alvin's sister Mimi adds a woman's perspective and is a great help to him in this regard.
There is so much more to say about this wonderful film and its many subtle twists and turns, but I'm determined to write this review without spoilers. I'd like to point out, however, that while the film's style is immediately accessible to any sensitive and patient adult audience, it's also smart, self-aware and sophisticated. Many of the filmmaker's voiceover comments have multiple meanings that slyly reflect on his own aesthetic.
Take this, for instance: "I remember standing next to Dad while he took these back-up photos (from his wedding album). I remember thinking how strange it was, for someone to take pictures of pictures." Taking pictures of pictures - and commenting on them - turns out to be the whole modus operandi of Reunification.
And then there's this (which is also a terrifically acute and hilarious thumbnail sketch of his father): "If Dad were an artist, he'd be a minimalist. He enjoys simplicity, hates excess. He works at a label making company. He sometimes salvages sheets of unwanted labels and sews together pillow cases and blankets. He uses mint-flavored dental floss. His logic is, it's stronger than regular thread, it smells good, and you can use it to floss your teeth in bed when you wake up.
"I used to hate his cooking: always plain and without much salt or any spices. After my complaint, his answer was, You want the taste of real flavor. Why so salty and oily? Don't spend so much money on unnecessary things, since you don't even have a job.
"I see his point whenever I look at my bank statement. Sometimes, it's very hard to accept his simple ways, but for some reason, I like his cooking now. I don't know if my palette adjusted to his cooking, or if his cooking adjusted to my palette."
Alvin Tsang is not his father's son for nothing. He too is an iconoclastic minimalist. Reunification suggests at least something of the deceptive simplicity of an Ozu or a Bresson or a Kiarostami or a Hou. It has the ability to sneak up on you and overwhelm you when you least expect it. Tsang understands the power of understatement.
Joanna Karselis's music is the perfect accompaniment to Tsang's images and narration.
"The distractions, the forgetfulness, the obligations, the flow of life kept these in the closet for so long. The feelings of those years - what a difference. The first tapes in this box were recorded a decade ago. It's only appropriate to begin the film there, if I were to make one."
Of course, the young man does go on to make that film and that is it what we're watching: Reunification, director Alvin Tsang's remarkable first feature-length documentary, shot over a span of 17 years. The film takes the form of a personal essay on the classic American themes of immigration and assimilation. It's at once intensely intimate and almost uncannily universal.
As his story unfolds in nonlinear fashion through a series of loose associations inspired by his films and photographs, Tsang doesn't so much narrate the events as propose his own tentative thoughts about why they occurred and what they might possibly mean.
Why did his parents decide to leave Hong Kong? Was it because of the impending Reunification with mainland China in 1997? And how did his parents come to the decision to come to America separately, years apart, with his mother going to California with his older brother and younger sister, but without him and his father? Why was he the child chosen to be left behind, with a father who worked around the clock and was rarely home?
At one particularly poignant moment after he arrives in Los Angeles, visiting his newborn niece at the hospital on her first day, Alvin watches his brother Andy tenderly touch his wife Michelle and tell her, "My honey is a strong and courageous woman." This prompts our narrator to ask, "Was it like this when Mom and Dad had us? Was the love between them like this?"
This will prove to be a difficult question to answer, in more ways than one. For many if not most of us, our parents are our first great enigma, a puzzle we never quite solve though we might spend a lifetime trying. Many of the interpretations of his parents' behavior that Alvin proposes early on will need to be revised or even turned on their head before the film hits its grace notes at the end. Alvin's sister Mimi adds a woman's perspective and is a great help to him in this regard.
There is so much more to say about this wonderful film and its many subtle twists and turns, but I'm determined to write this review without spoilers. I'd like to point out, however, that while the film's style is immediately accessible to any sensitive and patient adult audience, it's also smart, self-aware and sophisticated. Many of the filmmaker's voiceover comments have multiple meanings that slyly reflect on his own aesthetic.
Take this, for instance: "I remember standing next to Dad while he took these back-up photos (from his wedding album). I remember thinking how strange it was, for someone to take pictures of pictures." Taking pictures of pictures - and commenting on them - turns out to be the whole modus operandi of Reunification.
And then there's this (which is also a terrifically acute and hilarious thumbnail sketch of his father): "If Dad were an artist, he'd be a minimalist. He enjoys simplicity, hates excess. He works at a label making company. He sometimes salvages sheets of unwanted labels and sews together pillow cases and blankets. He uses mint-flavored dental floss. His logic is, it's stronger than regular thread, it smells good, and you can use it to floss your teeth in bed when you wake up.
"I used to hate his cooking: always plain and without much salt or any spices. After my complaint, his answer was, You want the taste of real flavor. Why so salty and oily? Don't spend so much money on unnecessary things, since you don't even have a job.
"I see his point whenever I look at my bank statement. Sometimes, it's very hard to accept his simple ways, but for some reason, I like his cooking now. I don't know if my palette adjusted to his cooking, or if his cooking adjusted to my palette."
Alvin Tsang is not his father's son for nothing. He too is an iconoclastic minimalist. Reunification suggests at least something of the deceptive simplicity of an Ozu or a Bresson or a Kiarostami or a Hou. It has the ability to sneak up on you and overwhelm you when you least expect it. Tsang understands the power of understatement.
Joanna Karselis's music is the perfect accompaniment to Tsang's images and narration.
helpful•10
- rkopp-12065
- Jan 1, 2018
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- Runtime1 hour 26 minutes
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