Grief is often a foreign, alienating concept, even to those who’ve previously experienced it. Every loss is unique, and each aftermath is a formerly unexplored terrain. In writer/director Hong Khaou’s quiet, yet confident and instantly affecting debut feature Lilting, the fish-out-of-water state of a grieving person is further amplified and multiplied with its protagonist being a non-English-speaking Cambodian-Chinese immigrant in England, as she tries to cope with the unexpected death of her son. Lilting is as personal a film as can be, exploring love, loss, and the sometimes unspoken language of the delicacies of the human condition.
Lilting demands emotional attention from its first moment, with an unassumingly powerful opening. Junn (a striking Cheng Pei Pei, consistently in command of her character’s complex dramatic nuances) has a motherly conversation with her well-mannered, soft-spoken son Kai (Andrew Leung) in her peculiarly retro-esque one-room residence in England, with her tone shifting between love, longing, and even humorous annoyance that she is stuck in a country with language and customs unknown to her. It becomes clear at once that Kai is burning to break some news, before inviting her to dinner to his place, which he shares with his life partner (or roommate, in Junn’s mind, as she’s unaware that her son is gay). Before he can say anything further , we’re suddenly confronted with the grim fact that Kai is gone and the conversation we just witnessed is scrapes of Junn’s memory. Spending her days in the elderly home her son placed her in, and sharing embraces, kisses but never mutually understood words with Alan (Peter Bowles) –another apparent resident of the same home- Junn one day receives a visit from Kai’s boyfriend Richard (Ben Whishaw), who visibly tries to find some closure in managing his grief and consequent unbearable pain. Perhaps always knowing deep down the true nature of Kai and Richard’s relationship, and feeling inexplicably left out and jealous, Junn first resists Richard’s attempts to connect until he hires a translator named Vann (Naomi Christie) to help verbalize Alan and Junn’s affection for each other through words.
Once Vann enters the picture, we truly see Khaou’s perceptiveness at work. He structures his scenes with a holistic, artistic care, so each translation sequence works as a set piece where someone is left out of the conversation, experiencing first hand what it means to not understand anything at all (especially when Vann takes certain liberties with what she chooses to translate between either Junn and Alan, or Junn and Richard, adding or subtracting things.) The audience is not spared of the challenge and resulting poignancy either, thankfully. There are numerous brief occasions where those in front of the screen – along with Richard and Alan – do not (and are not supposed to) understand what is being said (some scenes are decidedly not accompanied by subtitles). These are the scenes where the audience is forced to up its visceral acuity to grasp what’s on screen. And then there are those occasions when the translator is completely quiet, letting us witness verbal exchanges so tightly packed with powerful, universal resonance that even a foreign language can’t barricade the truthfulness that bursts out of the characters.
Made on a shoestring budget, Lilting doesn’t show any signs of limited means. On the contrary, the interiors all feel lived in, the camera work is perceptively sound and there isn’t an ounce of cheapened excessiveness visible anywhere. There are moments when it’d be better if Khaou wasn’t so concerned with the chronology of Kai’s death, or trying to slowly break the story with repeated flashbacks. Once he unveils the deep mystery of what happened to Kai, the nature of the reveal doesn’t necessarily live up to all the set up . But this minor dysfunction doesn’t falter an otherwise exquisitely founded premise, which celebrates the mutual, boundless language of love; and mourns alongside those who quietly survive their sorrow in graceful solitude.
