Debutant director Sasha Chuk tells a very personal story indeed via Fly Me to the Moon (Film review)

  

The principal cast members and producer Stanley Kwan 

at a post-screening photo session and Q&A 

 

Fly Me To the Moon (Hong Kong, 2023)

- Sasha Chuk, director-scriptwriter

- Starring: Sasha Chuk, Wu Kang-ren, Chloe Hui, Yoyo Tse, Natalie Hsu, Angela Yuen

There is an achingly personal feel to this drama by first time feature film director Sasha Chuk who also wrote the screenplay for this cinematic adaptation of her (semi?) autobiographical novel and portrays the female protagonist as an adult.  Spanning two decades, Fly Me to the Moon begins its story in 1997 when the young Yuen (played by child actress Chloe Hui) and her mother arrive in Hong Kong to reunite with her father (portrayed throughout the film by Wu Kang-ren), who illegally immigrated to the then British Crown Colony, while her younger sister, Kuet, stayed behind in Hunan.

 

Able to only speak Hunanese, Yuen doesn't have an easy time at school and in other aspects of life.  And although her father has learnt to speak Cantonese and her mother soon gets a job as a waitress in a dim sum restaurant, life is not easy either for the adults in the family; as can be seen in the family living in a small sub-divided apartment, and her father turning to drugs for solace and ending up getting arrested and convicted shortly after the arrival -- to Yuen's delight -- of Kuet, who Yuen clearly adores.

 

Fast forward to 2007, and the girls are now at secondary school (with Yuen being played by Yoyo Tse) and successfully passing as native Cantonese-speaking Hongkongers; with Kuet (played as a teenager by Natalie Hsu) also being fluent in English and doing well at an elite school.  The sense one gets when watching them though is that they have consciously hidden not only the truth about their having come from Hunan from their schoolmates but, also, about their mother now working in a massage parlour and their father being a convict -- as all of these details would get them to be looked down upon, even ostracised, by even those who were supposed to be their friends.

 

If truth be told, the story of Mainland Chinese people moving to Hong Kong and finding life very hard in this city is one that's been told plenty of times before.  Ditto the notion that childhood experiences, including traumatising ones involving the father, stay with one into adulthood and affect the decisions one makes later in life -- with another recent Hong Kong film, Time Still Turns the Pages, showing that so very movingly and well.  (More than by the way, I do suspect that I would have been far more emotionally affected by Fly Me To the Moon if I hadn't viewed Nick Cheuk's standout offering only a few weeks ago.)  

 

Still, Fly Me to the Moon does undeniably impress at a technical level, with standouts in this regard including: Chan Hok Lun and Ho Yuk Fai's cinematography, whose images could often tell what a thousand words migh not; William Chang Suk-ping's production design which produced interiors that came across as authentic, be they cramped Hong Kong underclass dwellings, a Hunanese grandmother's rustic room or comfortable Tokyo hotel accomodation; and the acting talent on show, some of whom had to act in multiple languages on account of the film having Hunanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese dialogue!

 

The last includes Sasha Chuk -- who, in addition to her behind the camera roles, also appears in front of the camera as the adult Yuen in the scenes set in 2017.  There can be no denying that she is the heart and soul of Fly Me to the Moon -- and that she has laid bare her story as much as Yuen sought to hide her true identity, and often suppress her feelings, for much of her life.  As she told the audience at the film's world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival back in October, "I’m from Hunan and I moved to Hong Kong when I was a child. I spent all my life being treated as an outsider, including the time when I went to university overseas. So wherever I am, I am an outsider. And I really wanted to depict my experience."  And this she has done so, in spades.

My rating for the film: 7.0