Review | Adieu: a sentimental drama about how families cope with looming death – film review
Hong Kong filmmaker Kenneth Lau’s best movie, and possibly his last, Adieu is a well-meaning, well acted take on dealing with terminal cancer
3/5 stars
The spectre of death hovers over the three interwoven stories in Adieu, an unabashedly sentimental, and apparently well-meaning, Hong Kong drama about coping with a terminal cancer patient in the family.
One story follows the efforts of an old woman who is dying (Helena Law Lan) to reconnect with her estranged adult children; another charts the struggles of the parents (Louis Cheung Kai-chung and Michelle Wai Sze-nga) of a leukaemia-stricken daughter; the third shows the doomed romance between a young journalist (Hedwig Tam Sin-yin) and her boyfriend (Jason Chan Pak-yu).
The film doesn’t have the depth or intelligence to derive any greater meaning from its protagonists’ life-and-death situations, and the way it connects the three stories through the involvement of a social worker (Gladys Li Ching-kwan, Big Brother) smacks of lazy scriptwriting.
The first story gives Law, the grande dame of Hong Kong horror films for the past two decades, a rare opportunity to impress. The story of the distressed couple, played by Cheung and Wai, is the most intricate of the three, as the deterioration in their five-year-old child’s health tests their marriage and their faith.
