In this elegant feature debut about modern alienation, the German writer-director Jonas Bak casts his real-life mother as a retired secretary who travels to Hong Kong to visit her estranged son.
“It’s really sinking in that time is gone, and it won’t return,” says Anke, a widow and retired church secretary, in reference to the life she led while raising a family. Even in her placid hometown in the Black Forest region of Germany, everything feels distant, rendered unrecognizable to her by the forces of modernization. “A sense of home,” Anke continues. “I don’t have that.”
These feelings of alienation — and the kinds of connections that are forged in our increasingly globalized world — are subtly explored in “Wood and Water,” the poignant feature debut by the German writer-director Jonas Bak.
Distressed by the three-year absence of her son, Max — whose most recent justification for not visiting are the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where he lives — Anke takes matters into her own hands. She books a plane ticket, and makes her way to Max’s high-rise apartment. But he’s nowhere to be found.
Casting his own mother (Anke Bak) in the leading role, the filmmaker uses elegant, fixed-camera compositions and melancholic long takes, opting for a contemplative mood that summons meaning from what’s left unsaid. With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.
Vulnerable in her solitude yet clearly drawing from an inner source of great strength and curiosity, Anke explores the city on her own: she lunches with a security guard, gets her fortune told, strikes up a conversation with a disembodied voice sleeping in the top bunk of a shared hostel room. Though seemingly insignificant, these fleeting moments prove nourishing.
Thankfully, this film never succumbs to the fish-out-of-water narrative of so many travel movies that use international settings as catalysts for self-discovery. Anke’s problems with her son aren’t exactly solved by the film’s end, but a change does occur, and it’s prompted not by the unknowns of a strange land, but by the recognition of a common struggle to adapt and find peace in the face of life’s endless upheavals.
Wood and Water
Not rated. In Cantonese, English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
