One of the more overlooked but essential works of post-handover Hong Kong, Nelson Yu Lik-wai's Love Will Tear Us Apart is a somber portrait of the city purveyed through the experiences of mainland emigrants who arrive in Hong Kong seeking a better life. Immersed in a spatial environment that is both familiar yet foreign, Love Will Tear Us Apart's primary focus is on the diasporic working class populace, detailing over the course of its narrative the impermanence of mythmaking when juxtaposed against individualistic experience and intangible tenets of identity. The operatic lens of this film remains grounded literally and figuratively in the way it exhibits the city of Hong Kong - back alleyways, dingy apartments, and the streets themselves take centerstage, with the steel and glass structures of transnational commerce associated with the cityscape of Hong Kong being largely unseen, regulated to the background, beautifully illustrating the city in a way which it is seen by so many who migrate there. Love Will Tear Us Apart through the course of its narrative is not so much a political film - though one can certainly assert their ideology across its narrative - it is one of survival, with the character themselves all sharing moments of both community and conflict. Against the multinational forces of geopolitics and commerce, Love Will Tear Us Apart reminded me of a quote from Ann Hui when she was asked about her characters, Hui replied "It is about survival, that is all". Love Will Tear Us Apart first-and-foremost, encapsulates that sentiment in the treatment of its characters and their journey across its narrative. Sovereignty is a nationalistic concept - an abstraction, one which ultimately does not congeal with the populace, or the human condition itself
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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