TIFF 2024

▞ Introduction
▞ Mise en abyme: On Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film
▞ A World of Pain: On Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud
▞ The Inheritance: On All Shall Be Well and The Paradise of Thorns

❀ Ray Yeung (director), All Shall Be Well, 2024. 93 min.
❀ Naruebet Kuno (director), The Paradise of Thorns, 2024. 131 min.

In August, at the Mulan Film Festival, during a virtual Q&A for his film All Shall Be Well, Ray Yeung was asked about the state of Hong Kong inheritance laws in regard to LGBTQIA+ people, and proceeded to tell the audience the real-life case of Henry Li.

When his same-sex partner died suddenly, Li, despite having married in London where same-sex marriage is legal, found himself stonewalled by bureaucracy in Hong Kong. First, he wasn’t allowed to identify the corpse at the morgue; then he learned he did not have a legal right to the subsidised flat that he’d shared with his partner; and finally, when he sued, the High Court rejected the government’s appeal of discrimination.

“They were telling me my husband was not my husband,” Li said in an interview with the Hong Kong Free Press, “and that I was a nobody.”

Hong Kong, after all, is a place that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman; the government’s counsel said it had three aims in mind with this decision: “the integrity of traditional marriage, the encouragement of opposite-sex marriage and the coherence of the city’s legislation.”

These three “aims”, designed to be combined and to leave no room for LGBTQIA+ people, like Li, so that, like the repeatedly thwarted protagonist Kafka’s short story “Before the Law”, they are condemned to remain outside the door of an institution, perpetually waiting for a change.

“There’s still long way to go,” Yeung said: “But there’s hope.”

In All Shall Be Well, the main couple is two older women: Pat has short hair—read: butch—and Angie longer hair: femme. Yeung distils the dynamics of their relationship in a mundane yet telling depiction of a ritual: in the morning, when they make tea, Angie puts the leaves in the pot and Pat is the one that pours the water in. Pat is someone who has built a life for them by herself, a business woman who is always drawing up plans and bringing people together, such as their queer friends and Pat’s family, who, benefitting financially from their support, appear to accept their union. When Pat suddenly dies minutes into the film, without having made a will—something that will turn out to be significant—Angie has to heartbreakingly carry out actions of their daily morning tea: she has to make the tea for herself now.

Like Henry Li, Angie is shut out by the legal system: she has no say in whether or not Pat is buried or has her ashes thrown into the sea—on an auspicious day—or in how Pat’s assets are distributed, or regarding what happens to her luxury flat. Suddenly she finds herself being demoted, fading into the background in the wake of her partner’s absence: there seems to be no recourse for her.

^{Pat (Lin-Lin Li) and Angie (Patra Au) are an older lesbian couple living in their lavish Hong Kong apartment.} 

Rather than being a narrative about grief—aside from a few silent shorts of a wide-eyed Angie staring out into the distance, Yeung is not curious about exploring her interior life—All Shall Be Well is about the way that grief expresses itself when faced with invalidation, mostly through symbolic acts of refusal, injustice and pride.

What the film is interested in is being egalitarian: Yeung decides to show you why each member of Pat’s family might benefit from the inheritance: her father works the graveyard shift as a security guard in a parking garage; her mother is a hotel maid whose only pleasures in life are smoking a cigarette when she’s stressed and being devoted to Taoism; Pat’s sister is in a sexless marriage with two kids in a cramped apartment with rats and, in an awkward aside, the “smelly Indian people” downstairs; and her brother is an Uber driver who makes model cars and is planning to move in with his girlfriend.

In comparison, Angie has lived a lavish life: class—despite the marginalisation she herself experiences as a queer person—will, socially speaking, always separate her from them.

All Shall Be Well has built within it a binary thinking that pits people against each other, but it is always in favour of Angie because it has an agenda—to make you realise the injustices faced in countries where same-sex marriage is not legal—despite the seeming receptiveness of its gaze.

Later in the film Angie tells her lawyer friend: “It was never about the money.”

Meaning what exactly, I wondered. Was it about her feelings? Her doubt about whether or not Pat really loved her? If only I could identify with people who can casually rent a private yacht to throw yellow petals into the water, which ends up being one of the most beautiful shots in the film, and which made me feel Yeung should’ve leaned more into his poetic sensibility, also complicating the protagonist rather than fleshing out the supporting characters.

Angie is a victim. But we can’t sympathise with her. We’re not Angie: we are not the rich.

^{Nominated for a Golden Horse Award, Patra Au gives a fierce performance of a widow fighting for her rights.} 

In The Paradise of Thorns, the star of the film, rather than love or marriage, is durian. From the outset we are privy to the growth process of this profitable fruit, known for the particularly sulphurous tangy odour it emits and for those who can bring themselves to eat it, claim it is delicious. We watch as two men—one a Lover and the other, the Beloved—look for a durian flower in the night with flashlights on their heads, and when they find it what they do is not pick or feed it but sensually caress it with a bouquet of feathers, to stimulate it.

The men in question are Sek—a striver, like Pat in All Shall Be Well, who will soon suddenly die, like Pat, and in doing so change the lives of everyone around him, which includes his mother, Mo, a symbolically adopted daughter, and our protagonist, Thongkam (a stellar Jeff Satur), a somewhat wealthy lover boy whose grief is followed by legal injustice and interpersonal cruelty, all of which collide to cause him to want to seek redemption.

When Sek dies, Thongkam, too, faces a series of exclusions: from the doctors who say that though they are married (since it’s not legal in Thailand, they mean this in a symbolic sense) all he is to him is just a friend. Then it happens at the funeral, where the ring that he bought for him, is taken off Sek’s corpse by Mo, Sek’s non-blood “sister,” a woman who was born into poverty and stayed impoverished, thus is unable to pity with anyone around her.

^{Actress Srida Puapimol and pop stars Engfa Waraha and Jeff Satur headline in this campy, Thai thriller.} 

When Thongkam holds the hand of Sek’s corpse he says: “You didn’t get to live comfortably.” Sek’s mother, sleeping on the bed the men shared, before she marks her territory like a dog and pisses on it, says: “You said you spent five years building this place, but I’ve spent more than 30 years caring for Sek. But he had to die this way. Have you ever thought how much I’d be in pain and loss? I’ve never spent a day in my life in comfort.” And then there’s Mo (played by a brilliantly savage Engfa Waraha) speaking to her younger brother who ends up becoming Thongkam’s paramour, says: “Whenever you were jobless, I always shared Sek’s money with you. I brought you here to live comfortably.”

“Comfort” is the refrain that each of the characters sing of: it’s comfort that they all lack, the comfort that only money can assuage, the discomfort of living in a society where it is difficult to escape poverty. But is it possible—in our supremacist capitalist patriarchal society—to be comfortable without causing the discomfort of others?

What powers Thongkam is his determination not to succeed, but to make sure that Mo is not bequeathed the land deed. He doesn’t really have a plan, but when you’re quick on your feet, it doesn’t matter. Unlike All Shall Be Well, The Paradise of Thorns, is not concerned with creating a spare, heart-breaking portrait of empathy; what Kuno is invested in is these characters’ motivations, their behaviour, of what happens when the Id comes to the fore and the libido is activated.

^{Things start to heat up later in Kuno’s  film, when Thongkam (Satur) seduces Mo’s brother Jingna (Harit Buayoi).} 

For all of its theatrics, The Paradise of Thorns is an effective variation on the theme of inheritance rights as it pertains to sexual minorities. It ignores the law (which never rules in their favour) and takes matters into its own hands. That Thongkam doesn’t succeed is no surprise (the fate Angie is dealt as well) but that he receives closure (like Angie does) is the conclusion of his narrative. Did Sek love him? Yes. Was it initially based on deception? Yes. Can he deal with the discomfort of it; can the purity of his love override the despair? Yes. Can he move on? Perhaps.

The premises, intentions of a film can be the same; but the executions will inevitably be vastly different, productively so. All Shall Be Well is a film that creates a restrained tender portrait of empathy; and The Paradise of Thorns does that too, before it decides turning the knob all the way to the other side and lean in to genre clichés to heighten up the tension, to exaggerated their feelings in increasingly vile—and highly entertaining—ways.

In the final shot of The Paradise of Thorns, we see the orchard on the cusp of blooming again, full of potential for the future. The inheritance plot, which is, at the root of it, a narrative about property and ownership, has not been exhausted yet: there is still room for it to grow. A fruit is only as sweet as it’s flesh: and there’s plenty to chew on here, for now.

How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “The Inheritance: On All Shall Be Well and The Paradise of Thorns.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 22 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/22/inheritance.

Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in paloma, Polyester, Fête Chinoise, In the Mood Magazine, Tamil Culture, in addition to Substack. He is currently at work on a novel about waiting. [All contributions by Nirris Nagendrarajah.]