Small Talk (Ri Chang Dui Hua)
(Taiwan, 80
min.)
Dir.
Hui-chen Huang
How much better is silence? It’s not better at all if one
were to ask director Hui-chen Huang. Huang, after spending years in an
impersonal and distant relationship with her mother, Anu, finally decides to
speak. She turns the camera on herself in Small
Talk, a profoundly intimate documentary and Taiwan’s no-frills submission
in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. Huang describes the relationship
she has when the film begins—and maintains arguably throughout most of the
production—in which she and her mother share an apartment, but experience none
of the love or closeness that a parent and child might feel after living
together for so long. Anu gets up every morning, goes to work, stays out late,
comes home, and goes to bed. They define their relationship by silence.
When Huang breaks the silence and asks her mother a few questions about her personal life, this quiet, sullen, and tomboyish matriarch reveals a side of herself that her daughter never knew. Anu is a lesbian. Huang learns more about her mother’s secret life through forced conversations that reveal that Anu is actually quite the womanizer. She’s also a gambler and very bad with money, and Huang’s deep dive into her mother’s history of relationships uncovers a web of past lovers who’ve been touched by Anu and, in many cases, cheated or burned.
The uncomfortable silence of Small Talk marinates in the dangers of the unsaid. Huang learns
about love denied as she interviews Anu’s past lovers who express a range of surprise
and disbelief that Anu has children, while others recall the director’s abusive
father and describe an awful, violent relationship from which Anu escaped with
her child. At the same time, Anu’s family embodies the suffocating society in
which the mother could not come out and express or celebrate the love she felt
for these women. Huang’s aunts and uncles talk about Anu’s sexuality in a
roundabout way, skirting the issue and answering questions by allusion. It’s
very sad to see so many relationships strained by conservatism.
Huang mostly restricts her focus to confined interiors. The
stories speak of concealment and confinement, so the drab visuals offer
something thematically even if they do little aesthetically. (The low-key
televisual style leaves something to be desired.) Tension and repression are
palpable forces in the film as the documentary builds to some overwhelming
catharsis when the director finally offers a secret of her own to her mother
and the pair are both united, pained, and, perhaps, divided again by the news
Huang shares with Anu. Huang asks her mother what life would be like if Taiwan
recognized same-sex marriage, and the mother, who is a fairly difficult interviewee
by any measure, finally breaks down. That Taiwan only made steps to recognize
same-sex marriage after the film’s release earlier this year speaks volumes
about the delicacy and significance of this conversation.
