The
woman, barely out of girlhood, has anxious eyes. She boards the raft awkwardly,
hesitantly. Her fingers, clutching at an old rucksack tightly, whiten from the
effort. She turns her face down, though her eyes still shift listlessly from
beneath her thick fringe. Even as the oarsman navigates to the opposite bank,
her visage remains terse. Even as she alights, the expression stays. She may be
free—she just crossed a border—but when the new world looks so much like the
old, it feels like nothing changed at all.
With
an opening like this, it is no wonder that The
Road to Mandalay, the Taipei-based Burmese filmmaker Midi Z’s fourth
cinematic outing, is fraught with tensions, both psychological and physical, as
the two halves of a young couple struggle to survive themselves in a foreign
land.
First
meeting at the Thai-Burmese border, where he chivalrously chose to give her the
better seat on the Bangkok-bound Jeep that he paid a premium for, Guo (Kai Ko)
and Lianqing (Wu Ke-xi) are two strangers whose fates intertwine via the dogged
romantic pursuits on Guo’s part.
Despite
their shared situation, their differences could not be more pronounced: Guo,
ever the provincial man, finds contentment in hard manual labor, and a dream of
eventually moving back to Burma to open a shop, while Lianqing craves the urban
comforts that a move up the socio-economic ladders can provide, and imagines a
future beyond continental South East Asia.
Raided
and swindled, Lianqing was one whose experiences being victimized only serve to
reinforce her desire to leave a world that she is unfortunately familiar with
behind—we watch as she eventually decamps from Guo, and the
routine-if-hazardous factory job that he set up for her, for the chance of a
more cosmopolitan vocation.
All
these come to a head, as a jilted Guo tracks her down for one climatic
confrontation that is sure to stay on viewers’ minds.
Played
with a reedy tenacity by Z film veteran Wu, it is doubtless that audience will
sympathize with the worldly Lianqing more, but the undeniable fact remains that
Ko’s portrayal of the simple Guo’s descent into a desperate fury is the
performance that steals the show.
Shedding
the puppy-love matinée idol
presence of his prior works for that of a gently benevolent man dubbed by those
who surround him as a ‘simpleton’, Ko evokes a sense of pity and endearments
that tugs at the heartstrings much more effectively than Wu’s anxious
woman—even as viewers understand the realist underpinnings of her pursuits.
Much
has to be said too, of director Z’s progress in filmmaking. With clean visuals
and sparse sounds, Z’s restraint in spatial portrayals has both merit and
fault—while the heavily aestheticized tableau he painted are beautiful and
striking, on occasions they lack the messy, lived-in qualities that would have
added nuances to the gritty realism of its central themes.
However,
with his excision of the long shots that overstayed their welcomes in his early
works and his past tendency for rambling narratives, Midi Z has also hit jackpot with a trim but fit work that will no doubt
become part of the benchmark against which future Asian social dramas will be
judged.
Ultimately,
The Road to Mandalay is a film that
succeeds because it lack—or is at least, less overt in showing—the naked
ambitions that often accompany modern social drama to become the bona fide
historical document of the moment. With its commitment to an accessible
narrative, it takes the time to immerse the audience in an unseen version of
reality that is closer to truth, rather than douse them with an onslaught of
poverty porn.
The
story of Lianqing and Guo may conclude in an hour and fifty minutes, but their
situations run parallel to reality forever, and remain a testament to the
stubborn tenacity of humans in crisis as they cling to hope.
As one
contemplates the film, one would begin to understand: The road to Mandalay is all
washed out, and there is no way home. Where else to call home now but here?