Lilting (2014)

A mother tries to come to terms with sudden loss, and attempt to understand who her son was, after his untimely death. Her world is suddenly changed in more ways than one by the presence of his (unknown to her) lover. Together, they attempt to overcome their grief whilst struggling against not having a shared language........Although it's not the most cinematic experience you'll ever come across, Lilting is one of those movies where we have just a few characters in the film, but they hold you in awe for the duration. If I were to some up the film in one word, it would simply be, Natural. There are times when you feel like your not watching a drama, you feel like you are there with Whishaw and Cheng, almost like some chaperone, but not knowing who for, as each are as equally grief stricken and strong at the same time.There performances here are brilliant, and even though they communicate through a third party, the emotional connection is evident, and gets stronger and stronger as the film progresses. Peter Bowles adds some much needed Comic Relief to the movie, but it's only subtle, and doesn't deter you away from the main narrative. Flashbacks flesh out the emotional depth of the characters, and there's one scene involving chopsticks and bacon, that had tears streaming down my face.It's beautifully written, touching, romantic, funny, and heart-warming, but the clever thing is that it holds this air of tension as to how Cheng will react to the films fundamental revelation.A hidden gem from 2014, really worth seeing.

I confess to being impressed with Ben Whishaw as an actor. His ability to take on a character fully at his age bodes well for a brilliant career. His role as a grieving gay lover caught between cultures while navigating his loss is delivered with realistic vulnerability.Pei-Pei Cheng manages to portray a character who treads between cultures with unabashed identity. She knows herself. This is her rock despite language barriers and cultural disconnects. The interplay between her and Whishaw's character is subtle and develops throughout the film in a very true way. Watching this can be painful and frustrating, thereby letting the viewer participate in the agony of estrangement that can come with unfinished business when someone dies suddenly.This isn't a thriller or sentimental mush. It is not really a gay film or an ethnic film. It is a film about human experience. It requires some work on the viewer's part and is well worth the effort.

Richard and Kai had been in love and living together for four years. Kai's widowed mother, Juun, although resident in England for many years, had neither assimilated in anyway nor had she acquired any ability to communicate in the English language. At one point, when relating her personal history, she explains somewhat sarcastically that five years after her husband and she had emigrated from Cambodia, "we were English."While she is very much dependent on her son, she is supposedly unaware that he is gay and living with Richard in a relationship that is much more than a Platonic friendship. Kai places his mother in a senior home where she feels very much abandoned, betrayed and isolated. This arrangement is stressful to them all, especially because both his gay relationship and his apparent dumping of his mother in order to stay alone with Richard are at even greater odds in terms of Asian cultural expectations with regards to family. After much hesitation and worry, Kai invites his mother to come to his home to meet Richard and he plans to use this visit to "come out" to her. When he sets off to collect her from the seniors' facility and to bring her back to his home, he is killed in an accident.Richard feels compelled to meet her and to help her find a way to get on with her life without her son to support her. He also feels that she needs to understand that Kai's death meant more to him than just the loss of a friend. Communication between Richard and Juun and between Juun and other residents of the home is virtually impossible, accentuating her isolation and further complicating Richard's desire to help her cope without Kai, as well as his wish that she understand what Kai's loss means to him.A young woman becomes involved as a Cantonese/English translator to facilitate communication both between Richard & Juun and between Juun & Alan,a male resident of the seniors' home who wishes to develop a romantic long-term relationship with her. Obviously the translator's presence is meant to further emphasize the divide that exists between Richard and Juun as well as between Juun and everyone else.While I understand that the difficulties of different cultures and languages between Alan and Juun were meant to even further underscore her isolation while an ever-present translator stands between them and the constantly hovering Richard floats about, it seemed that adding that complication to the mix was a somewhat heavy-handed, distracting and unnecessarily time-consuming addition to the story development.It also seemed that Richard's character was inconsistently hesitant & often irritatingly inept most of the time, but occasionally overly angry and petulant, especially when it appeared the relationship between Juun and Alan was off. I understand that he was, in part, trying to be surrogate son in his effort to settle Juun into a life independent of her now absent son, but there might have been better ways to demonstrate Richard's frustration and despair. It was a moving, calculated attempt to take on the complications of a man trying to juggle both a "modern" gay relationship while maintaining a traditional family relationship made all the more difficult by language & conflicting cultures, but I think it might have been better achieved with more time spent allowing us to see Richard and Kai during their relationship while they tried to come to terms with Juun as a factor in their lives. Alan could easily have been eliminated from the plot by assuming the viewer was capable of understanding Juun's isolation and dependence without having it beaten to death and dragged out to the extent that it was.

Lilting has gotten such great reviews, from professional critics and from viewers, that I couldn't wait for its release in the US and ordered it from the UK. When it arrived this afternoon I dropped everything I was doing to watch it.I can't remember ever being as disappointed in a movie as I was in this one. It's not because my expectations were too high, because that's happened with other movies and I've adapted to reduced expectations as I watched them. But Lilting is SO bad - in every way except for the cinematography and, occasionally, Ben Whishaw - that the only way I could even get all the way through it to the end was by trying to think of ways it could have been even worse.Lilting's insurmountable problem is its screenplay, which is heavyhanded and depressingly stupid; the greatest director and actors on earth couldn't have made it work.Kai's mother is so hard and cruel and selfish that she needs somebody to slap her. Instead, everybody bows and scrapes and lies and grovels before her, trying to avert her displeasure, as if she's some blind, squat, pitiless, demonic, all-devouring swamp goddess. Their neurotic, masochistic toadying is even more disgusting than her monstrous selfishness is.Whishaw's Richard is sweet and gentle and kind, and to watch as he debases himself trying to please that self-centered old b!tch made me physically sick. And Kai? What did Richard ever see in that jerk? He and his horrible mother are perfect for each other.The story is infuriatingly stupid, every word of dialog is stilted, ponderous and unbelievable, the direction is jerky, all the characters are revolting, with mediocre actors playing them (except Whishaw), and I wish I'd never even heard of this awful movie.I feel like the only fool in the wildly cheering crowd who can see that the emperor is naked. I'm sure the throngs around me who are ecstatic about this movie will vote my review into the abyss of uselessness, but there's nothing I can do about that. I don't understand them any better than they understand me. All I can do is tell the truth as I see it.I adore Ben Whishaw; he's beautiful, enormously intelligent, enormously sexy and enormously talented, and I'd watch him in ANYTHING. He has the most beautiful voice God ever gave to a human being. But I hope he never, ever, EVER gets involved in another movie like this one. It's just about as bad as a movie can be.