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the audience applauded

Fantastic!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I confess to being impressed with Ben Whishaw as an actor. His ability to take on a character fully at his age bodes well for a brilliant career. His role as a grieving gay lover caught between cultures while navigating his loss is delivered with realistic vulnerability.Pei-Pei Cheng manages to portray a character who treads between cultures with unabashed identity. She knows herself. This is her rock despite language barriers and cultural disconnects. The interplay between her and Whishaw's character is subtle and develops throughout the film in a very true way. Watching this can be painful and frustrating, thereby letting the viewer participate in the agony of estrangement that can come with unfinished business when someone dies suddenly.This isn't a thriller or sentimental mush. It is not really a gay film or an ethnic film. It is a film about human experience. It requires some work on the viewer's part and is well worth the effort.

Richard and Kai had been in love and living together for four years. Kai's widowed mother, Juun, although resident in England for many years, had neither assimilated in anyway nor had she acquired any ability to communicate in the English language. At one point, when relating her personal history, she explains somewhat sarcastically that five years after her husband and she had emigrated from Cambodia, "we were English."While she is very much dependent on her son, she is supposedly unaware that he is gay and living with Richard in a relationship that is much more than a Platonic friendship. Kai places his mother in a senior home where she feels very much abandoned, betrayed and isolated. This arrangement is stressful to them all, especially because both his gay relationship and his apparent dumping of his mother in order to stay alone with Richard are at even greater odds in terms of Asian cultural expectations with regards to family. After much hesitation and worry, Kai invites his mother to come to his home to meet Richard and he plans to use this visit to "come out" to her. When he sets off to collect her from the seniors' facility and to bring her back to his home, he is killed in an accident.Richard feels compelled to meet her and to help her find a way to get on with her life without her son to support her. He also feels that she needs to understand that Kai's death meant more to him than just the loss of a friend. Communication between Richard and Juun and between Juun and other residents of the home is virtually impossible, accentuating her isolation and further complicating Richard's desire to help her cope without Kai, as well as his wish that she understand what Kai's loss means to him.A young woman becomes involved as a Cantonese/English translator to facilitate communication both between Richard & Juun and between Juun & Alan,a male resident of the seniors' home who wishes to develop a romantic long-term relationship with her. Obviously the translator's presence is meant to further emphasize the divide that exists between Richard and Juun as well as between Juun and everyone else.While I understand that the difficulties of different cultures and languages between Alan and Juun were meant to even further underscore her isolation while an ever-present translator stands between them and the constantly hovering Richard floats about, it seemed that adding that complication to the mix was a somewhat heavy-handed, distracting and unnecessarily time-consuming addition to the story development.It also seemed that Richard's character was inconsistently hesitant & often irritatingly inept most of the time, but occasionally overly angry and petulant, especially when it appeared the relationship between Juun and Alan was off. I understand that he was, in part, trying to be surrogate son in his effort to settle Juun into a life independent of her now absent son, but there might have been better ways to demonstrate Richard's frustration and despair. It was a moving, calculated attempt to take on the complications of a man trying to juggle both a "modern" gay relationship while maintaining a traditional family relationship made all the more difficult by language & conflicting cultures, but I think it might have been better achieved with more time spent allowing us to see Richard and Kai during their relationship while they tried to come to terms with Juun as a factor in their lives. Alan could easily have been eliminated from the plot by assuming the viewer was capable of understanding Juun's isolation and dependence without having it beaten to death and dragged out to the extent that it was.

The debut film from Cambodian director Hong Khaou, which is indeed a UK production, pairs the outed actor Ben Whishaw with Chinese actress Pei-Pei Cheng, who is the Kungfu heroine in her prime and has launched a strong comeback in Ang Lee's masterful CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000, 10/10) as the villainous Jade Fox. And the story is rather plain-speaking, Whishaw is Richard, a young gay man loses his boyfriend Kai (Leung) in a car accident, and he has to take care of Kai's mother Junn (Pei-Pei), who has been put in an elderly house since Kai never comes out to her. Firstly, it might strike that the after-trauma coming-out story is the main dramatic task Khaou tries to transpire here, not simply because Kai was just going to come out to her finally before the darning accident. However, it comes off rather unoriginal in year 2014, instead, the film puts a lot of thoughts in joggling with the deeply rooted cultural differences here and with a touch of humor. Junn is a Cambodian-Chinese, although has been staying in UK for more than half of her lifetime, she has been (inexplicably) refusing to learn English, so the communication mostly relies on a translator Vann (Naomi Christie), whose genial presence is imperative regarding the situation but also a harsh intruder in their privacy. Structurally speaking, the film is a tiny-budgeted chamber piece, with occasional scenic shots in bleak hue to adjust the right sentiment. Whishaw sends off a whiff of empathetic poignancy as the bereaved boyfriend, alternatively immersed himself into the intimate memories of Kai, and puts on a strong facade to face Junn, who never ease up towards him. Pei-Pei, fires up in a more moderate range of grief (also due to the memory loss set-up of Junn), is much more presented as confused and dissatisfied in her plight, and the telling jealousy which she finally acknowledged in the dialog, it is a well-modulated performance, but as a native mandarin speaker, Pei-Pei's utterance is too formal and rigid, more like a theatrical rendition than a lifelike talk, especially the scenes with Leung, who clearly is not Chinese and his mandarin is jarringly bad, one might find it is plausible because he is basically assimilated by the western culture (since his English is pretty British), but when it comes to the main language he has been communicated with his mother ever since his birth, it is disappointing to the fact that Khaou has failed to find a real mandarin-speaker for the role instead (besides that Leung is quite an eye-candy in this film), surely, for a foreign ear, it hardly matters. Naomi Christie, a débutante in acting, grants Vann a fresh air of pertinence not only as a Good Samaritan whose good offices always allow her to change the literal translation, moreover, she surprisingly prompts herself from an unattached bystander to a blunt participator during her own involvement of the matter. Among the cast there is the Veteran Peter Bowles, plays Alan, the suitor of Junn in the elderly home, it is through his courtship to Junn, viewers can resort to a diverting corner of laughters. Before Vann's presence, everyone goes well although they cannot share any common language, but as soon as they can get through each other through a third person, the distinctive discrepancy of their lifestyles is too much for Junn to handle, the singular part when they try to frankly disclose each other's bad habits, Junn feels uncomfortable with Alan's cop-a-feel conducts but is offended when he accuses her of bad breathe due to constantly eating garlic and instinctively gets even with his equally smelly body odor as a Caucasian. These are stock cultural biases which one can always generate some chuckling from, in here, it hits squarely on the nose. Odour is also romantically linked here between Richard and Kai, "smell my armpit" is not a common line we get from movies, and the sensitive characterization of the abiding smell of the deceased is a genuine tear-jerker.Hong Khaou's debut film is a welcoming gem in the queer cinema, quite an emotional grinder which sends many positive messages such as mutual understandings, braving oneself to face the hard times and grief, then most importantly, one maxim to remember "all children will feel guilty when their parents are old". PS: news arrived, the film has just grabbed 3 BIFA nominations (short for British Independent Film Awards), including BEST DEBUT DIRECTOR and BEST ACTRESS, congratulations!

A British guy trying to make a connection with the conservative Chinese mother of his deceased partner; the theme and the gloomy cinematography make you sad even before the story begins to unfold. Communication is the main problem over here. They somehow manage with the help of a translator, and I like how they sometimes say things and then tell the translator not to translate it (because they realise how it would sound). This leads to few funny moments occasionally.The movie has a really good start, but after halfway through, the Director/Writer loses his way; it seemed as if he's not sure as to where to take the story. By the time it ended, I felt dissatisfied; the story should have been longer or the characters should have been explored and developed a little more.The two leads, Ben Whishaw and Pei-pei Cheng, give quite strong and incredible performances; they have a few immensely moving scenes. And it doesn't hurt that Andrew Leung, the actor playing the deceased partner, is quite handsome; he and Ben looked quite good together, which makes his death even more painful.The conversations the two lead characters share are quite moving and thought-provoking, and the monologue Junn has towards the end on the essence of grief and crying is really beautiful. Let me quote the most effective lines from it: "These memories are all I have; I need to keep them vivid, or they'll fade like the face of my husband. I want to dwell on these memories and cry over them because they comfort me. Through plenty of crying, I've learnt to be content that I won't always be happy, secure in my loneliness, hopeful that I'll be able to cope."The movie is depressing, yet uplifting, but somehow I feel, it failed to reach its true potential.