Year: 2024

Runtime: 93 minutes

Written and directed by: Ray Yeung

Actors: Maggie Li Lin Lin, Patra Au Ga Man, Tai Bo, Hui So Ying, Fish Liew Chi Yu, Leung Ching Hang, Rachel Leung

By Sarah Manvel

It is very hard for anyone to admit that their family doesn’t really love them, but this is unfortunately a common experience for homosexuals, especially those of a certain age. It is also pretty common not to admit this, even to yourself, because who wants to acknowledge that the people you love the most in this world have never truly loved you because of who you really are? And yet of course one must, because nobody lives forever, and whenever there’s money involved the knives really come out. “All Shall Be Well” is a poignant story of the price a lesbian in Hong Kong must pay because of her wife’s failure to acknowledge her family’s limitations, and an important reminder that gay rights worldwide cannot yet be taken for granted. But it is also about one woman’s refusal to betray herself even as her world crumbles. Most pleasingly there’s nothing heavy-handed about “All Shall Be Well.” Instead it’s about one woman’s attempts to maintain the dignity she deserves. 

Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) and Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) are a long-time couple and former factory owners now in comfortable retirement, living an ordinary life in a large apartment in one of the best parts of Hong Kong. Pat has a brother, Shing (Tai Bo) who is married to Mei (Hui So Ying), a hotel housekeeper. Shing has recently started a new cash-in-hand job as a parking garage attendant and he is lucky for the work at his age. Their daughter Fanny (Fish Liew Chi Yu) started her family young and lives in a cramped, rat-infested apartment with her husband and two children, while her brother Victor (Leung Ching Hang) is driving an Uber and still living at home. Victor also has a new girlfriend, Kitty (Rachel Leung), who is used to the finer things, and he tells Angie he’s going to lose her because of how broke he is. Angie has always been a shoulder for them to lean on. Fanny even lived with Pat and Angie for a large part of her teenage years, things were so tense at home. But family resentments fester quietly no matter who you are.

After a joyous holiday family dinner, Pat suddenly dies. And since she and Angie were not married – gay marriage doesn’t exist in Hong Kong, though overseas marriages are recognised – Shing is Pat’s legal next of kin. That would not be such a big deal, except Pat also died intestate, meaning Angie’s entire life is now under Shing and Mei’s control. Pat wanted to be buried at sea, but Shing and Mei insist on buying her a columbarium plot where the entire family can visit her. Angie acquiesces against her better judgement, and says nothing when Mei refers to her as Pat’s best friend, but when the priest calls up Shing as the mourner of honour, she pushes herself to the front. She was a wife and is now a widow, and the entire family knows it. But the gorgeous apartment, Angie’s home for decades, is legally no longer hers. Legally it never was, thanks to Pat’s unwillingness to invite death by writing a will, and Pat’s belief that her family loved Angie as much as she did. But now Pat is gone, leaving behind that lovely apartment and all her lovely money. And Angie is suddenly on her own.

She isn’t, of course, and at the Berlinale screening writer-director Ray Yeung spoke about how his research when writing the script made him realise the importance of found family to Chinese lesbians, who are often bitterly rejected by their families on coming out. Those who have the courage to come out anyway often find themselves with only their chosen family around them, as Angie does here. But her friends are aghast at how little care Pat took for her, especially since Pat was so generous to everybody else, and Angie finds herself in the awful position of repeatedly having to defend her dead wife for her inexcusable lapses of judgement. The entire look and feel of the film is one of restraint, of big feelings politely covered up, and it’s unusual for a movie to achieve such a consistent tone, especially when filming on location someplace as busy as Hong Kong.

And all the meantime the family is circling. Victor tells Angie he loves her like blood but then stops getting out of the car when he drives Shing over. Fanny talks and talks about how hard her children are to cope with, and cruelly implies that Angie doesn’t need her nice living because she never had her own family. And Mei, who Angie had always thought of as a friend, expresses a shocking disappointment in her own family – children who aren’t financially stable, a husband who failed at every business he ever attempted – that’s meant as jealousy for Angie never having this kind of disappointment. But Angie had to give up her chance for children in order to be true to herself, so to hear someone speak so unkindly about the children she also helped raise is a scorching betrayal. Ms Au balances these difficult, painful emotions with a real sense of grace, in that she cannot quite believe all these things are happening to her, and they are all the fault of the person she loved most. But Ms Au also ensures Angie isn’t a figure of pity; she knows exactly who she is and exactly who she was to Pat, and she will do everything in her power to make sure everyone else knows it too. The trouble is how little power she actually has. 

When money is involved change never comes as quickly as you want it to. The death of actor Nigel Hawthorne, whose partner famously had to pay an enormous amount of inheritance tax, was a full thirteen years before same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK. It’s a heavy subject, but Mr Yeung – while always centering Angie – explicitly didn’t want to make Pat’s family into cartoonish villains. His exploration of homophobia and rejection has some, perhaps too much, sympathy for the position Pat’s family is in, and his concern that straight audiences need to find the movie relatable is understandable but also exhausting. There’s a big difference because something legal and something moral, as anyone should be able to tell you, and people who hide behind the law to excuse themselves for not doing the right thing deserve a lot more condemnation than is on display here. But polemics aren’t entertaining to watch, and “All Shall Be Well” is much more interested in the universal human feelings of entitlement and denial. The bitter irony of the title will go missed by many, but those of us who know just how fragile our families truly are won’t miss the subtext. There is so much power in doing the right thing, and a movie this smart and sharp is allowed to pull a few punches if that better enables its points to land. But oh, a world where movies like this weren’t necessary is one we can still only dream of.