The Last Time I Saw Macau (再見澳門郎)

My fifth HKIFF film came from Portugal. It's about our close neighbor Macau. According to its director João Pedro Rodrigues, with whom I talked after its sceening at UA Langham Place, its nature changed during the course of its production. Originally, it started out as an idea that the director had about certain vague memories of his happy childhood spent in Macau but as it progressed, he got other ideas and from a documentary, it metamorphosed into a tale of imagination. The actual footages suggested certain other possibilities to him and he wove them together into a tale of mystery and of the imagination.

As the film opens, we see a travestite called Candy singing old jazz songs in the mock styles of the late 1950's, which itself is an imitation of a much earlier time in 1930s America.  In the background we see a tigress and its two cubs, playing behind an iron cage. In a voice off, we hear the narrator talking in Portuguese about his impressions of this former Portuguese colony to which he is returning after an absence of some 40 years: its sights, its sounds, it history, its peculiar mystique etc. In many ways, Candy is the symbol of what Rodrigues is doing: like the transvestite, which is neither purely male or purely female, neither purely Chinese nor purely Portuguese, neither completely contemporary nor completely  dominated by its past, that's the Macau of his false imagination. In the film, the narrator says he has received a message to come back to Macau to help Candy who was in a bit of a fix and that there is nobody else whom he/she could trust to help her. She merely gave directions as to where the narrator would have to go and to wait for further directions as to how they would meet. The narrator went as directed, waited but owing to problems of language and of traffic, missed the first appointment. Not having anything meaningful to do, he wandered around Macau in search of places he frequented as a child including schools, temples, the Military Club, the quayside, some of which existed and some of which had since been demolished, rebuilt etc He also missed the second appointment, and for exactly the same reason, something which proved fatal, for Candy

The film seems to unfurl upon a double path, going in parallel, the search for his own past and the "current" plight of the mysterious Candy and his/her call for assistance involving triads, intrigues and strange rituals of the dragon cult, its use of bird cages as secret language, dark and occult forces and traces and hints of the eventual murder of and the disposal of her body at some remote corner of the Macanese harbour. When the narrator arrived too late to her rescue, he found only a lone red high heel shoe on the dirty concrete floor by the sea  and her wig being washed upon the steps of the pier. He said he later got a letter which told him that by the time he received it, she would already be dead and that he must hire a sampan to go whither the sampan rower would take him and that she would give directions from another world at the appropriate moments. The film ends as its starts, as a rondo, with Candy and her song.

The director agreed with me that what he is trying to do in this film is to document not just the records of his memories of Macau as such but to document the very process of creation of the film itself in respect of which his memories served only as jumping board.:it is a documentary which is not a documentary in the conventional understanding of that term. It is not intended in any way as an objective account of what Macau is nor an objective account of how he actually spent his childhood there. It is a work of his imagination, an imaginative creation/invention or re-creation/re-invention of an entirely fictive Macau. In the film he never succeeded in establishing contact with Candy. All he and through him, we got are hints and traces of her existence. Is she real or is she an object of his mind or his imagination? All that is real are the sights and sounds of Macau. Ultimately, is that not what we have? As Chuangtzu queried long ago: are we butterflies dreaming that we are ourselves or are we ourselves dreaming that we are butterflies? Whatever else Rodrigues may have left us, he certainly leaves us an entirely different view of Macau: the Macau of his imagination.  The film is really about Candy, somebody or something from his past whom he could never quite access again, something real yet unreal, something mysterious, something haunting, something fascinating, an impossible beauty mixed with crime and the darker side of life. But as a whole, I find the structure of the film fairly loose and random and many of the images shown on the screen are not that well integrated into the its main theme, if any. The only thing in the film which is firm the voice of the narrator.