Never a great fan of Chinese films, including those of Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), I was very pleasantly surprised by the opening film of the HK International Film Festival 2015: Nian Nian (念念) aka Murmur of the Hearts 2015 by veteran singer, actress turned director Sylvia Chang.
Chang has got together a star studded cast: Angelika Lee Sinje ( 李心潔), Jospeh Chang (張孝全), Isabella Leong (梁洛施),, Lawrence Ko (柯宇綸) in a simple fairy tale of leaving home and growing up. Yet simplicity is never simple: it may hide certain complexities which may resonate in the lives of people on many levels: social, psychological, mind, heart, conventions, freedom, past and present.
As the film opens, we are shown a beautifully shot underwater sequence of a mermaid swimming freely from an undersea cave towards and then through a brightly lit vagina shaped opening towards the ocean and the voice over of Angelika, playing Jen, the mother two kids Yu-Mei and Yu Nan telling them the story of the mermaid leaving the cave towards the open sea far far away to an unknown destination, a ritual which she would perform every night as the two kids lay on her lap listening in rapt attention before their bedtime, something which Jen had to squeeze in time to do between attending to customers of a small noodle shop on Lyudao (綠島) (a tiny island off the east coast of Taiwan used by the Taiwanese government as a penal island for prisoners). Then we got a low angle shot of Yu Mei (Isabella), sitting alone on a rooftop water tank, her
fingers full of red paint, looking up at the sky, thinking, reflecting
about something or other.Then we are shown the two kids with their mother at a rock pool playing
with little fishes and their mother Jen telling them that the
fishes must return to the open ocean where they belong, despite the huge
billows thundering in under a clear blue sky from the Taiwan Straits upon the beach on that tiny island. Then the screen switches back to Yu Mei painting: by throwing red paint on to her canvas with great force to
form a pattern and then working on it, drawing small white spirals here
and there on the blank spaces and then to a red hot love making scene with her boy-friend Hsiang (Joseph Chang) anxious of being caught breaking the rules just before the boxing match the following morning.
