Floating City Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Floating City Blu-ray Movie Review

Hong Kong's underbelly.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 17, 2013

Many of us have moments of disbelief when catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror, thinking, “is that really me?” But when Bo Wah-Chun (Aaron Kwok) sees himself in a mirror, he has no doubt that it’s him, but that fact still doesn’t answer the pressing question of who he might be. Floating City details the history of Bo, a “half breed” or “mixed race” (as the film variously refers to him) baby who is adopted by a family of tanka boat people and is raised to follow their long established “business” of fishing. Tanka are definitely the lowest rung on the Hong Kong totem pole, illiterate and usually desperately poor people who manage to scrape by—if only barely at times—through sheer force of will. Floating City opens with Bo, an obviously well established businessman, getting ready to go to some kind of official fête that his wife does not want to attend. When “Auntie” Fion (Annie Liu), an impressively glamorous woman who insists on speaking English, shows up, she ends up accompanying Bo to the party, which turns out to be a gathering of Hong Kong’s “elite” brought together to meet the new colonial governor. Suddenly Bo is awash with an identity crisis as well as a glut of memories. That soon segues into a frightening scene of a violent storm where a tanka boat woman is attempting to pilot an insanely precarious craft—something that almost looks like a seafaring covered wagon—through the perilous waves. The effort causes her to miscarry. Shortly thereafter, when a new mother brings her a newborn to raise, she’s initially put off by his strange appearance, which includes bright blue eyes. But when the baby starts crying, her maternal instinct kicks in, and she begins nursing him. And so we are introduced to Bo’s troubled start in life, something that will continue to haunt him in various ways as he grows up and eventually manages to matriculate into the ruling class of Hong Kong.

Yim Ho is one of the most celebrated directors of the so-called Hong Kong New Wave movement. Yim’s work has often dealt in the tangled relationship between Hong Kong and China, perhaps best exemplified by his lauded 1984 effort Homecoming. Yim’s thesis in Floating City (which he co-wrote as well as directed) seems to be the none too subtle point that the city, much like protagonist Bo himself, is something of a “half breed” or “mixed race”, if not by birth, certainly by attrition after decades of British rule. That would seem to be ripe territory for Yim to explore, personalizing the struggle of Hong Kong to find its own identity after the British ceded control back to the Chinese. Oddly, though, Floating City never quite makes the connections between the political and the personal that it should (at least if that’s one of the points it hopes to make), and instead we’re offered a visually sumptuous poem that only occasionally really connects on any deeply moving level.

Bo’s childhood and young manhood are beset with a number of potentially traumatizing events. His young female cousin playfully taunts him with comparisons to odd looking blue fish (a reference to Bo’s unusually colored eyes), and, later, just comes right out and tells him his mother and father aren’t really his mother and father. His obviously distraught but well meaning mother (played by Josie Ho and Nina Paw at various ages) responds to all of the turmoil by simply cooking chicken, Bo’s favorite food, attempting to soothe over his questions with a good meal. As Bo’s narration reveals, if he dared to continue to ask, he’s face corporal punishment. As Bo grows, he’s obviously more ambitious than his class standing would allow, something that greatly upsets his father (Ben Yuen), who savagely beats the young Bo when Bo doesn’t jump at the opportunity to be a fisherman. Bo ultimately takes off to find greener pastures elsewhere, but not before his father first attempts a halting reconciliation and then is killed in a tragic accident, forcing his destitute mother to send three of her seven children to a Christian orphanage. Bo is consigned back to family life as the new “head of the family” in the wake of his father’s demise.

The eldest of these kids tries to quell the tears of her younger siblings upon this traumatic transition, mimicking her mother’s frequent admonition that “we’re not beggars”, but Bo is obviously motivated now to try to make his life manifestly better, and, perhaps, his family’s as well, if only by default. He manages to get a job with the British East India Company, and further enhances his standing due to the fact that unlike most tanka, he can read and write. Despite openly antagonistic behavior from some of the British staff toward this “half breed” (in one of the film's most hackneyed formulations), Bo endures the humiliation and continues his education, finally getting a lucky break when he has a chance meeting with the company’s taipan (Gregory Rivers), who in turn brings him into contact with Fion, a well schooled and perhaps overly elegant social climber who begins to school Bo in other ways. Meanwhile Bo has married his girlfriend Tai (Charlie Yeung), initially for the less than romantic reason that it will get him free boarding at the East India Company. As the marriage progresses, Tai looks on with sad resignation as Fion begins to be more alluring to Bo, both for the social graces she can impart (which will help Bo climb the social ladder), as well as perhaps romantically.

Floating City ends up being a fitfully engaging enterprise, but rather strangely, it tends to only spring to life when the colorful supporting cast comes into contact with Bo. Bo as a central character is something of a cipher, something that’s only exacerbated by his mantra of “who am I?” when he sees himself. It’s a too “on the nose” formulation that would have been better addressed by just letting Bo’s questions play out as interchanges with various other characters, something that Yim actually does exploit rather well, making this device all the sillier. As “big” or “meta” as Yim tries to make Floating City, utilizing Bo and Hong Kong as mirrored metaphors for each other, it’s actually in the smaller personal moments that Floating City finds its true resonance. Yim seems intent on spelling everything out for the audience, when it probably would have been better to have just set up Bo’s story and then let the correspondences play out without the patent “indicating”. Yim evidently based this film on personal reminiscences he gathered from various tanka, and there is an undeniably fascinating core tale here that deserves to be told. With a less didactic approach, Floating City might have been a minor masterpiece. As it stands, it’s still very good at times, especially in terms of its visual sweep and in its closing moments which really do connect with Bo's realization of what family has always meant to him, but there’s still a nagging feeling that this could have been a more consistently emotionally fulfilling experience.

Floating City Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Floating City is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. This digitally shot feature offers sometimes staggering levels of detail. Check out screenshots 3 and 11 for good examples. The third screenshot is so fully realized that small puffs of old age makeup can be seen in the facial pores. There are other scenes where tiny dust mites are clearly visible as they float slowly around the characters—and these aren't even backlit moments, when such things are more prone to be noticed. Colors are somewhat desaturated, evidently intentionally so. The tanka docks are awash in beiges and browns, with only occasional pieces of fabric or the impressively blue fish that Bo is compared to offering any tonal relief. While fine detail is overall more than admirable, Yim has chosen to really aggressively color grade a couple of sequences, including a recurring segment. The opening sequence, which shows Bo's mother having her miscarriage on her "egg boat" (as she calls it), is saturated in a deep, cobalt blue, though flesh tones are drained of so much color she almost looks like she's in black and white. Later, we repeatedly return to Bo as he reminisces about the strange turns his life has taken, and these moments are also cast in a dark blue. Shadow detail all but disappears in these moments, and fine detail is at least partially downgraded. Yim also indulges in some visual metaphors from time to time, including some dream sequences, and these often have a surreal, and sometimes rather soft, quality to them. On the whole, though, this is an incredibly impressive looking high definition presentation of an often quite visually sumptuous film.

Floating City Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Floating City 's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is fairly subtle most of the time, though a couple of unexpectedly vigorous sequences gives the low end ample workout. The first of these is the opening depiction of Bo's adoptive mother struggling on her boat. Storm noises, including some really visceral sounding rain, washes through the surrounds. Later, when Bo is having a dream that turns out to presage his father's death, a series of weird thumps and bumps, including a lamp smashing to the ground, provides some nice sonic energy. Even relatively quieter moments, like some of the charming scenes with Bo and his cousin as children, provide a wealth of ambient environmental noise spilling through the side channels. The film's dialogue is always easy to hear and is well mixed with the sometimes rather moving score, which also sounds fine. Fidelity is excellent, with no problems of any kind to report, and dynamic range is rather surprisingly wide for a drama of this type.

Floating City Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:05)

Floating City Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Floating City has a lot of elements that work incredibly well. The film manages to weave a fascinating story and connect it to Hong Kong's roiling political upheavals as British rule was ending, but perhaps because Bo doesn't seem to know himself, the audience never really does, either. That's especially strange, since we spend so much time watching his life unfold. The saving grace here is the incredible kaleidoscope of supporting characters, most especially Bo's mother, who is unforgettable and probably the central emotional hook this film has to offer. Yim continues to create incredibly well crafted films, and Floating City is among his most visually spectacular accomplishments. I just wish there had been a bit more emotional content, especially since so many potentially fruitful seeds are sown as Bo's story unfolds. While not a complete success, Floating City is far from a failure, and there's certainly a lot here to admire. This Blu-ray offers spectacular video and impressive if sometimes rather subtle audio. Even without much of anything in the supplements department, Floating City comes Recommended.