Chinese traditionalism meets English modernism in Lilting, a movie exploring death and homosexuality in the face of conservative elders with traditional beliefs.
Junn, the matriarchal figure of Lilting recently lost her son Kai. In the opening scene, she fantasizes that she’s having an ideal joyous conversation with Kai in the nursing home. She wishes she could live with Kai, except that she hates his “best friend,” Richard. She doesn’t understand why Kai would want to live with Richard instead of living with her. Junn’s desire to live with Richard is rooted as much in control and love as in old world traditions where you lived with multiple generations under one roof.
The complication of Lilting is that Junn never learned English. She speaks 6 separate dialects of Chinese-based language, but never picked up English despite living in England. When Richard comes to visit Junn at the nursing home for the first time ever, they can’t communicate across the language barrier. Junn’s barrier is so complete that she can’t verbally communicate with her new boyfriend, though they find comfort in common intimacies. To help Junn overcome this barrier, Richard hires a girl named Vann to translate between Junn and the English-speaking world.
Complicating matters further is that Kai had never come out to Junn. She was under the understanding that Richard was just a “friend” and not Kai’s long-term boyfriend. Richard and Kai had lived together for years in a small but trendy loft, but Junn never pieced it all together, leaving Richard to clean up the mess of the closet in the wake of Kai’s death.
Lilting is complicated, original, and tragic enough to move the heartstrings. Richard struggles with Kai’s loss, but constantly has to mask the depth of his loss to Kai’s mother while also trying to reach her across the void. This polite re-closeting provides the movie with genuinely moving emotions that aren’t played for the rafters. The understatement of the entire movie provides a refreshing allowance to let the audience feel the emotions without being told how to feel.
Director Hong Khaou relies a bit heavily on shoegazing cinematic techniques, as it has an overuse of a bland color palette, soft focus, lens flares, and blurry imagery (just to name a few of its borrowed techniques). However, the tender subject matter of debating whether or not to posthumously out your dead lover to his mother while also struggling with the desire to not leave her behind overcomes the overused techniques and the whole film works.
Ben Wishaw (Richard), Pei-Pei Cheng (Junn) and Naomi Christie (Vann) have a chemistry that emphasizes the complicated emotions and simmering tensions between the characters. Their work together fills the screen with complexity and raw emotion. The other triangle between Peter Bowles (Alan), Pei-Pei, and Naomi doesn’t work nearly as well, and it also doesn’t resolve as neatly. This secondary triangle feels almost as an emphasis for Junn’s stubbornness and the difficulty that she has even with people she likes. Alan and Junn’s story is weightless and provides a respite from the earnest weightiness the rest of the film possesses.
The tragedy and sadness that permeates Lilting is what separates Lilting from most of the current LGBTQ films which seem to be celebrations of the lifestyle. Lilting is barely about the gay lifestyle, but instead about dealing with the closet as an adult. Lilting examines the damage of a conservative belief system without demonizing the Other or resorting to hysterics. Lilting confronts the nature of the need for an adult closet, and how it obscures everything in life. Lilting is about marrying into family, even if they don’t like it. Lilting is about all of these different topics, and it hits all of these marks.
A version of this review was originally posted at The Other Films.