Review | Elegies movie review: Ann Hui documentary is a dual portrait of Hong Kong poets Huang Canran and Liu Waitong – and a subtle lament for the city they once called home
- Ann Hui is the director behind Elegies, a feature-length documentary about Hong Kong’s contemporary poetry scene, and the city that has been described in poems
- The film assumes viewers already have knowledge of the city’s literary scene, but the references to a Hong Kong long gone are not difficult to understand
3.5/5 stars
Who else has the professional pedigree and charisma to sit down with poets and turn that interview footage into a film that has not only become one of the cultural events of the year, but sold out its festival screenings and secured a commercial cinema release?
Elegies then trains its focus on Huang Canran, who self-deprecatingly labels his move to Shenzhen “economic exile” – he just found Hong Kong too expensive. A chain-smoker in a pair of patched-up jeans, the proud starving artist is as ready to dismiss his revered career as a translator as he is to talk up his life’s goal of creating poetry.
Far more pragmatic is self-proclaimed “anarchist” Liu Waitong, who packs his schedule with “side gigs” outside his university teaching job in Taiwan. While Hui indulges us with excerpts from Liu’s lectures on poetry, it is their reminiscence about his photojournalist days – including a brush with activism during the demonstrations over demolishing Queen’s Pier in Central in 2006 – that most intrigues.
For viewers unfamiliar with the Hong Kong literary scene, Elegies may come across as an opaque and borderline esoteric introduction to it. Hui gives only a brief overview before diving headlong into conversations with her two highlighted poets on matters both personal and highly technical.
Hui’s concern for her home city is, at times, more pronounced by comparison. Apart from obliquely bringing up Hong Kong’s “situation” in the interviews, the poems she has chosen to visualise – beautifully nostalgic montages of street scenes – are all essentially about Hong Kong.
It says much about Hui’s view that both “Hong Kong poets” she features have left the city in the past decade. A quote from young poet Huang Runyu late in the documentary, where she recalls the emotional impact that poetry has on her “friend inside” prison, gives a lucid snapshot of the historical moment that the city is going through.
In that sense, Hui’s film is as much an elegy for Huang and Liu’s personal pasts in Hong Kong as it is for a city that has since become unrecognisable even for some of its most intimate observers.
