Floating Life

THE NFSA RESTORES COLLECTION: PART 55

Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996) – about the struggles of a Hong Kong Chinese family dispersed across the globe – is a funny, serious and occasionally sad film that occupies a pivotal place in Australia’s cinema history. Critics and scholars routinely highlight its many firsts: ‘the first Asian-Australian film examining the Asian migrant experience’;^[1]Elena Guest, ‘NFSA Restores: Floating Life: Exploring the Asian Migrant Experience’, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia website, 2021, <https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/nfsa-restores-floating-life>, accessed 24 October 2021. ‘the first feature film in Australia to be made in a language other than English’;^[2]John Sinclair & Stuart Cunningham, ‘Diasporas and the Media’, in Cunningham & Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 2000, p. 1. ‘the first non-English film to be made in Australia with local money’;^[3]Michael Stein, ‘Floating Life [Fu sheng]’, Intersections, no. 8, October 2002, <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue8/stein_review.html>, accessed 24 October 2021. ‘the first Australian film to be [submitted] for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film’ and ‘to deal with migrant Hong Kong Chinese identities “from inside”’.^[4]Tony Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life and Hong Kong–Australian “Flexible Citizenship”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, March 2003, p. 278. I could go on and list many other such variations.

All of these descriptions are accurate, but when taken together they amount to a somewhat self-centred perspective – one that appears to claim Law and her film as Australian when neither are so without qualification. To be fair, Floating Life does fit the bill, insofar as it’s a legitimate Australian production made with domestic funding and a predominantly local crew. Law had also emigrated to Melbourne from Hong Kong in 1995 (with her husband and frequent collaborator, Eddie LC Fong, who co-wrote Floating Life)^[5]Some sources cite her move as having occurred a year earlier. See, for example, Ruth Hessey, ‘Think Global, Film Local’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 1996, p. 8. and had become a naturalised citizen by the film’s release. Unlike other directors who had offered their outsider ­perspectives by making one-off films in the country – some of the best known being Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners, 1960), Michael Powell (They’re a Weird Mob, 1966), Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, 1971), Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, 1971) and Werner Herzog (Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984) – Law came to Australia with the intention of staying.^[6]See Dian Li, ‘Law, Clara’, Senses of Cinema, no. 28, October 2003, <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/law/>, accessed 8 November 2021.

Even so, her identity can’t be conveniently reduced to her citizenship or her country of residence. Law belongs to the so-called ‘Second Wave’ of Hong Kong directors that came to prominence in the mid 1980s,^[7]Notable directors in this movement include Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar Wai, Mabel Cheung and Peter Chan. and was one of many who left the city before the transfer of British sovereignty to China in 1997 – whether out of anxiety over their future, to join family who’d already left, to further their careers abroad or due to some combination thereof. Although emigration was an option only for those who could afford to pack up and leave, it was hardly restricted to the city’s filmmakers. Owing to its vexed relationship with China, Hong Kong has experienced multiple waves of mass emigration coinciding with periods of social and political unrest, with the 1997 handover being just one such example.^[8]Mass emigrations also occurred after the communist-led riots of 1967, the signing of the Sino–British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. The Chinese government’s enactment of the Hong Kong national security law in June 2020 prompted the most recent exodus, with almost 90,000 residents (or 1.2 per cent of the population) leaving the city in the space of a year. See ‘Hong Kong Sees Largest Population Decline Since Record Keeping Began amid Crackdown by Beijing’, ABC News, 13 August 2021, <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-13/hong-kong-population-decline-beijing-national-security-law/100369974>, accessed 8 November 2021. Adding to the transitory composition of the city is that Hong Kong has itself long been a destination: a haven for mainland runaways; a second home for expats and migrant domestic workers; a playground for tourists and the business elite; and a refuge for the thousands who fled to the British colony at the outbreak of the Sino–Japanese War in 1937, and again after the Communist Revolution of 1949.^[9]See Ngai Yeung, ‘Hidden Hong Kong: Hong Kong’s Colourful Legacy of Immigration’, Localiiz, 16 September 2020, <https://www.localiiz.com/post/culture-history-hong-kong-immigration-legacy>, accessed 8 November 2021.

Law’s own complex history reflects that of the city and its inhabitants. She was born in Macau to Chinese parents, moved to Hong Kong when she was ten,^[10]Li, op. cit. has lived in London and New York, and her family members were spread across the world – and all this before Australia even enters the picture.^[11]As Rai Jones suggests, this journey ‘undermines an understanding of Law’s migration to Australia as the primary source of her transnationality’. Jones, ‘Framing Strategies: Floating Life and the Limits of “Australian Cinema”’, in Lisa French (ed.), Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, p. 265. (As Law sees it, ‘I’ve been a migrant all my life.’^[12]Clara Law, quoted in Michel Honegger, ‘Clara’s Worlds: A Profile of Clara Law’, Metro, no. 127/128, 2001, p. 11.) Her filmmaking career, which also predates her move to Australia, is similarly diverse. After a period of producing and directing for Radio Television Hong Kong, Law moved to London in the early 1980s to study film direction and writing at the National Film and Television School.^[13]Li, op. cit. Upon her return, she juggled commercial studio films with independent productions backed by overseas financiers, producing an acclaimed body of work spanning comedy (1988’s The Other Half and the Other Half), melodrama (1990’s Farewell China), art films (1992’s Autumn Moon, her international breakthrough) and a costumed epic (1993’s Temptation of a Monk). A near constant in Law’s filmography, however, was her exploration of the Chinese diaspora, ethnic identity, and the impacts of migration and displacement – to name just a few overlapping themes that relate directly to Floating Life.^[14]Stephen Teo suggests that most of Law’s films from Farewell China onwards form ‘a canon about migration and despondency, geography and ethnicity’. Teo, ‘Temptation of a Monk’, Senses of Cinema, no. 12, February 2001, <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/director-clara-law/monk/>, accessed 10 November 2021. In this respect, her first film in Australia was less a departure than it was a continuation. Dominic Pettman notes that, in Hong Kong, her film was considered by many to be ‘merely an expatriate extension of their industry’.^[15]Dominic Pettman, ‘The Floating Life of Fallen Angels: Unsettled Communities and Hong Kong Cinema’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2000, p. 75. Nevertheless, Tony Mitchell contends that ‘its identity as a Hong Kong film is also disputable’.^[16]Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 288.

Any consideration of Floating Life as an Australian film likewise requires an asterisk. Those who watch the film for the first time expecting a sharp insight into Australian society and culture – as seen through the perspective of migrants – might be struck by how little the country actually factors into the equation. While the narrative unfolds mostly in Australia and includes its fair share of iconic national imagery (beaches, kangaroos, wide-open spaces, unending blue skies), the overriding impression is that the country could have easily been substituted for many others – and probably would have been, had Law chosen to relocate elsewhere. Law has admitted that she and Fong ‘realised we didn’t know very much about Australia’^[17]Clara Law, quoted in Elise McCredie, ‘Clara Law: An Impression of Permanence’, RealTime, no. 43, June–July 2001, p. 13, available at <http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue43/5856>, accessed 18 October 2021. after finishing the film; this would remain to be the case until the couple later visited the outback, an experience that inspired their next Australian film, The Goddess of 1967 (2000).^[18]McCredie, ibid. The dates confirm she wasn’t just being modest: Floating Life was released in 1996, barely a year after they emigrated. How much could these filmmakers, or indeed any other filmmaker, possibly have to say about a country they’d known for only so long?

This isn’t to suggest that Floating Life has nothing to impart about the realities of life in Australia, nor is it to downplay its significance. The film’s contribution to Australian cinema – and to Australian culture more generally – can’t be overstated, and its sizeable legacy stretches well beyond the films and filmmakers that followed in its footsteps. But if its achievements as an Australian film are to be acknowledged, it must be equally acknowledged that the film isn’t very Australian at all – at least, not in the ways that an Australian film is typically considered to be one. On both sides of the camera, Floating Life redefined what an Australian film could look and sound like – and, more importantly, how it should behave. 

House and home

Floating Life begins in a crowded noodle shop in Hong Kong, where the Chan family – Mum (Cecilia Lee), Pa (Edwin Pang) and their teenage sons, Yue (Toby Wong) and Chau (Toby Chan) – are preparing to move to Australia to join second daughter Bing (Annie Yip). Mum and the boys scramble off to do some last-minute shopping while Pa rhapsodises about his passion for tea to the owner. The action then shifts without fanfare to a bright, sprawling outer suburb of an unnamed Sydney,^[19]The filming location was Castlereagh, an affluent suburb located approximately 50 kilometres north-west of central Sydney. See Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 281. where Bing resides with her husband, Cheung (Bruce Poon).

Upon their arrival, the Chans quickly discover that Bing is far from settled in her adopted country. Despite having lived in Australia for seven years and forged a successful career – if her large, sterile house and immaculate corporate attire are anything to go by – she’s a neurotic mess. Bing inducts her family to life in the country with a laundry list of its dangers, which includes burglars, skin cancer, red-back spiders, killer wasps and pit bull terriers (which she says are responsible for biting 30,000 Australians every year). As her compliant husband watches on, she swiftly imposes a ban on seemingly anything relating to her family’s past life in Hong Kong. Fatty and oily foods are eliminated from the menu; Mum and Pa are prohibited from burning their traditional incense; Yue and Chau, who cop the brunt of their sister’s austerity, are forbidden from speaking Cantonese in the house. If Bing’s intention is to fast-track her family’s assimilation, it has the opposite effect. It’s not long after their arrival that the Chans’ enthusiasm for their new life in Australia is drained.

The narrative shifts to a house in Munich, which first daughter Yen (Annette Shun Wah) has recently moved into with her German husband, Michael (Julian Pulvermacher), and their three-year-old daughter, Mui Mui (Claudette Chua). Unlike Bing, Yen appears to have assimilated smoothly into her adopted country. She speaks the language well, as does her German-born daughter, and her marriage is a happy one. Yen’s house seems to reflect this harmonious state of affairs: packed with all variety of furniture and decorations, it’s a far cry from her sister’s soulless equivalent. And yet, she doesn’t feel comfortable. After receiving a concerning call from her mother (who wants to move back to Hong Kong) and experiencing a mysterious itch on her neck and back, Yen becomes infatuated with shifting around the furniture to achieve a better feng shui, in a manner that starts as amusing then later borders on pathological. She even gives up the master bedroom to her daughter, but no amount of reconfiguring is able to put her at ease (or, indeed, alleviate her itch). Adding to her troubles is Mui Mui’s fragile connection with her Chinese heritage. She’d rather paint than practise calligraphy, and resists her mother’s efforts to teach her the language after being told by her father that Cantonese (as opposed to Mandarin) ‘isn’t real Chinese’. Yen soon professes a desire to move to Australia and be with her parents, which is promptly deflected by her husband.

Back in Hong Kong, eldest son Gar Ming (Anthony Brandon Wong) waits for his immigration papers so he can join his family in Australia. His career as a stockbroker notwithstanding, he’s the black sheep of the family due to his lack of a university degree (hence the delay in his departure) and his pleasure-driven lifestyle, which consists mainly of hopping from one girlfriend to the next while neglecting his filial duties. Though he hasn’t even left Hong Kong, his sense of home is upturned by his family’s absence. Gar Ming is overcome with nostalgia for the family house that he’s been entrusted to sell, and becomes acutely aware of his and his family’s mortality when he oversees, at Pa’s request, the exhumation of his grandfather’s remains.^[20]To account for land shortages in the city, the remains of the deceased in Hong Kong’s public cemeteries are required by law to be exhumed six years after burial (or seven, according to the film). See Yimou Lee, ‘Grave Shortage: In HK, It Costs More to House the Dead than the Living’, Reuters, 4 June 2014, <https://www.reuters.com/article/hongkong-death-idUSL3N0IC2D020140603>, accessed 8 November 2021. His identity crisis deepens when the young woman with whom he has an affair becomes pregnant, then has an abortion. At the hospital, he insists on keeping the dead fetus of his unborn son and develops a morbid fascination with it.

Yen’s desire to move to Australia doesn’t materialise, but she does visit the country (via a stopover in Hong Kong to visit Gar Ming), where she witnesses Bing’s tyrannical behaviour firsthand; despite her best efforts, her presence only exacerbates the rift within the family. Her return to Germany is followed by a flashback sequence that offers a poignant insight into her sister’s early life in Australia. Living alone for three years in a barren outer suburb, and with no family, friends or even neighbours to call upon, Bing has endured a period of immense isolation and loneliness while waiting for her husband to join her from Hong Kong. By the time he arrives, she’s already turned into the cold,^[21]Incidentally, Bing’s name means ‘ice’ in Chinese. paranoid and implacable woman that she is elsewhere in the film

Back in the present, things take a further turn for the worse when Mum and Pa decide to buy their own house and move out. Yue leaps at the opportunity to leave his sister’s stifling household, but Chau decides to stay behind out of a combination of fear and pity. Gar Ming arrives in Australia soon after, and immediately puts himself to use by quite literally dragging Chau back to his parents’ house. It proves a devastating blow for Bing, who succumbs to a deep depression and seals herself in her room for weeks on end. It’s only when Mum lets herself into the house, burns some incense and tearfully pleads with her ancestors for her daughter’s recovery – a heartbreaking scene that Bing witnesses – that she’s able to start climbing out of her despair. 

The film doesn’t quite deliver a happy ending, but suggests that the Chan family may now be free to pursue their own happiness – wherever they are, or may end up.

The film doesn’t quite deliver a happy ending, but suggests that the Chan family may now be free to pursue their own happiness – wherever they are, or may end up. Having regained his passion for tea, an invigorated Pa strolls through his spacious back garden and mulls over his plan to build a greenhouse and a lotus pond; there’s no need for his sons to buy a future house, he tells them (as they roll their eyes): ‘You can build here.’ Mum escorts Bing as she ventures outside for the first time in weeks. When they encounter the neighbourhood dog, it’s become docile and obedient – no longer the feisty animal that had scared the wits out of the family during their initial outing in the country. A brief coda then reveals an old house somewhere in Germany, on a typically gloomy winter’s day. Mui Mui explains in voiceover that it belongs to her German grandmother, who inherited it from her own grandfather. As a young girl runs into the shot, she announces her hope to one day live in this house with her own family, all under the same roof.

A film in Australia

No detailed account of Floating Life will fail to imply the parallels between the journeys of the Law and Chan families, given the former had also emigrated to Australia prior to Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997. Unlike the Chans, however, Law wasn’t exactly a stranger to Australia. She and Fong had been making trips to the country from as early as 1992 – to visit Law’s parents, who had emigrated to Melbourne in 1985,^[22]Honegger, op. cit., p. 11. but also to make use of its post-production facilities, which they considered superior to their Hong Kong counterparts.^[23]Melbourne’s Soundfirm mixed Law’s Temptation of a Monk and Fong’s The Private Eye Blues (1994). The former film in particular led to a rise in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese film productions seeking the company’s services. See Dominic Case, ‘Other People’s Pictures’, Cinema Papers, no. 110, June 1996, pp. 64–6; and Michael Kitson, ‘Hong Kong Hybrid Australia’, Cinema Papers, no. 111, August 1996, p. 21. Some of Law’s earlier productions had also brushed shoulders with Australia in other ways. For example, Temptation of a Monk was co-shot by Australian cinematographer Andrew Lesnie; Fruit Punch (1991) features a group of young men who decide to emigrate to the country after the failure of their business venture; and the protagonist of ‘Wonton Soup’, Law’s contribution to the anthology film Erotique (1994), is a Chinese-Australian man who visits his girlfriend in Hong Kong.

Rarely mentioned is the fact that Law also had a brother and a sister living in Hong Kong and Germany, respectively,^[24]Gina Marchetti, ‘From the Chinese Diaspora to a Global Dream: A Discussion with Filmmakers Clara Law and Eddie Fong’, HKCinemagic.com, 26 August 2010, p. 4, <http://www.hkcinemagic.com/en/page.asp?aid=337&page=4>, accessed 21 October 2021. while Fong had siblings based in Hong Kong and Canada,^[25]See ‘Interview with the Cast and Crew of Floating Life’, The Movie Show, 29 September 1996, available at <https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/watch/11706435638>, accessed 29 October 2021. the latter alluded to several times in Floating Life as a popular destination for Hong Kong immigrants. The migration and dispersal of the Chan family therefore aligns even more closely with Law’s (and Fong’s) than is usually acknowledged. Nevertheless, the filmmakers insist that the screenplay isn’t autobiographical beyond these broad details, apart from two scenes that were directly inspired by Law’s experiences (but don’t pertain specifically to her migration).^[26]The scenes are of the grandfather’s remains being exhumed and the younger brothers peeping at their next-door neighbour through a hole in the fence, the latter being inspired by Law’s younger brother doing the same. See Marchetti, op. cit., p. 4. 

It was during her earlier visits that Law had met Bridget Ikin, a New Zealand producer who had also relocated to Australia, where she subsequently built an impressive career. Ikin had only recently made a successful move into feature films with Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) and Alison Maclean’s Crush (1992) – both of which received great acclaim – and Floating Life would be her first standalone Australian production. She secured the film’s A$2.7 million budget through the Film Finance Corporation (now Screen Australia) and the New South Wales Film and Television Office (now Screen NSW), with additional funding and assistance provided by co-producer SBS Independent and Film Victoria.^[27]Ikin was the general manager of SBS Independent from 1996 to 2000, and a feature film evaluation manager at the Film Finance Corporation from 2005 to 2006. See Kathryn Mcleod, ‘Ikin, Bridget’, The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, <http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0481b.htm>, accessed 9 November 2021.

Several of the key artistic roles were filled with crew of diverse background, befitting the film’s international scope. Production designer Chung Man Yee had worked with luminaries such as Ching Siu-Tung (A Chinese Ghost Story, 1987) and Ann Hui (Song of the Exile, 1990) in his native Hong Kong. Composer Davood A Tabrizi, who won a Golden Horse Award for his score, was an Iranian émigré who came to Australia in 1980 ‘with two instruments and two thousand dollars’, according to his bio in the press book for The Navigator (Vincent Ward, 1988).^[28]Arenafilm & The Film Investment Corporation of New Zealand, The Navigator press book, 1998, p. 8, available at <https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/sites/default/files/2017-11/THE_NAVIGATOR_PRESSBOOK.pdf>, accessed 8 November 2021. Arguably the most important recruit was Dion Beebe, an Australian-born, South African–raised cinematographer who had worked alongside Ikin on Crush, the film that also marked his feature debut. Beebe had already established himself as a cinematographer of rare calibre, to the extent that his name was virtually guaranteed to be raised in any discussion of the films he touched, regardless of their quality. Floating Life would be no exception: Beebe’s distinctive contribution to the film was met with near-unanimous praise by critics, although he was controversially snubbed for a nomination at the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards.^[29]He was, however, nominated for his contribution to What I Have Written (John Hughes, 1996).

Offering further support to the notion that Floating Life is only arbitrarily an Australian film, Law was obliged to assemble her cast from the Chinese community in Australia to qualify for domestic funding.^[30]Marchetti, op. cit., p. 4. Her choices were limited, given the scarcity of roles for Asian actors at the time, not to mention that several of the actors she found either spoke no Chinese or struggled with English, requiring them to be coached before and during the production.^[31]See ‘Interview with the Cast and Crew of Floating Life’, The Movie Show, 3 December 1995, <https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/11679299692/interview-with-the-cast-and-crew-of-floating-life>, accessed 8 November 2021. A Cantonese tutor, interpreter and language centre, as well as an English dialogue tutor, are among those listed in the film’s credits. Fong has openly suggested that this ‘restriction’ was to the film’s detriment. He dislikes the scene of Gar Ming burying the fetus, partly because ‘the actor is not Chinese-speaking’, and describes a ‘totally chaotic’ filming process whereby he and Law had to ‘ask the non Chinese-speaking actors to speak Chinese, and ask the not-really-good-English-speaking Chinese to speak English’.^[32]Eddie LC Fong, quoted in Marchetti, op. cit., p. 4.

While I can’t speak for how well or not the cast deliver their lines in Cantonese (or German), there are indeed a handful of scenes in which the performances feel noticeably stilted. It’s fortunate that most of these false notes are camouflaged by the film’s frequent shifts in tone, which often strays towards comical and almost always keeps a decent arm’s length from realism^[33]In a recent interview, Law describes the film’s tonal inflections as ‘leaning towards the farcical’. Clara Law, quoted in Debbie Zhou, ‘“It was Strange and Seductive”: Film Director Clara Law on Finding Home in Australia’, The Guardian, 3 November 2021, <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/03/it-was-strange-and-seductive-film-director-clara-law-on-finding-home-in-australia>, accessed 8 November 2021. – or are otherwise absorbed by the film’s transnational and multilingual narrative, wherein awkward verbal interactions are not only common but entirely to be expected (similar to those in Autumn Moon between a Hongkonger schoolgirl and a male Japanese tourist, who must resort to broken English to communicate with each other).

By and large, the performances in Floating Life are strong and count where they matter most. Despite expressing several misgivings about the film in his review for The Age, Adrian Martin still found room to praise the ‘undeniably, heartbreakingly moving’^[34]Adrian Martin, ‘Floating Life’, The Age, 19 September 1996, available at <http://filmcritic.com.au/reviews/f/floating_life.html>, accessed 8 November 2021. ending earned through the ‘superb’ climactic scene performed by Lee, who was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category at the Golden Horse Awards for her role. Shun Wah, who was a familiar face to many Australians as a TV presenter, but had never acted in a film and was fluent in neither Cantonese nor German^[35]Shun Wah was best known as the host of the long-running short film program Eat Carpet; her sole previous acting credit was a bit role in an episode of the SBS series Under the Skin. – the two main languages spoken by her character – won the equivalent honour at the AFI Awards. It’s a testament to Law’s skills as a director that she was able to coax such affecting performances, particularly from those who couldn’t understand, let alone speak, their characters’ tongues.

Non-cultural encounters

The fact that English is rarely spoken in Floating Life, despite it being set mostly in Australia, offers the clearest indication as to where the film’s priorities lie. Mitchell writes that the Chan family eventually succeed in establishing ‘their own traditionally-based Chinese cultural and spiritual locus’ in Australia, which wouldn’t be an unusual outcome for a migrant narrative, only that they achieve this ‘with little need for any direct negotiation with “Australian core culture”’.^[36]Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 279. While I agree with the observation, I would add that there’s scarcely an opportunity for such a negotiation to occur in the first place. This is because the Australia of Floating Life doesn’t feel like a fully fleshed-out country at all – in fact, it is barely even an idea of one. For the most part, it registers as a vacuous place practically devoid of culture, society and even people. 

The Australia of Floating Life doesn’t feel like a fully fleshed-out country at all – in fact, it is barely even an idea of one. For the most part, it registers as a vacuous place practically devoid of culture, society and even people.

When the Chans set off on foot to explore their neighbourhood, they don’t encounter another living soul besides a yapping Jack Russell terrier; even the bus drives past with robotic indifference when Mum and Pa later try to flag it down for a ride into town. The barrenness of these early scenes isn’t confined to the suburbs, however. When Pa meets a friend visiting from Hong Kong at what is supposedly an inner-city cafe, there’s only one other customer seated in a room full of empty tables, and nobody on the streets outside. After his friend is picked up by a taxi – as with the bus, we don’t get a glimpse as to who’s behind the wheel – Pa is left wandering alone at night in a city that could be under curfew. Some cars can be spotted in the distance when his worried family drive in to find him, but they have the freeway mostly to themselves. For much of the film, it’s as though the Chans have a force field that clears the path wherever they go.

The Australia of Floating Life isn’t a complete wasteland, however, and there are sprinkled signs of other lives beyond the Chans’ family bubble. There are a couple of crowded scenes at Chau and Yue’s school, for example, and a flashback places Bing in a room full of colleagues at a post-work gathering. But these people are merely extras, and, for the most part, literally part of the backdrop. An extra also appears in the Chinese restaurant that Bing frequents during her early years in Australia; it’s here that she forms a short-lived friendship with the owner, a kind Chinese man (Darren Yap) whom she abruptly cuts loose out of concern for her marriage. A middle-aged white man collects his takeaway order and leaves, and it’s the last we see of anybody else for the entire duration of the pair’s friendship. For a few precious scenes, Bing and the owner appear to be the only people left in the world.

One might reasonably expect the Chans to have, at some stage, an instructive encounter or two with the locals to help them get up to speed on how things work around ’ere. These scenes do arrive, but only in a fashion, because it’s highly questionable whether they reveal anything at all about the country or its culture. The scene at the cafe, for example, begins with a brief wide shot of a waiter strutting into the kitchen as a flamenco tune plays on the soundtrack; she whacks her male co-worker’s butt with a tray, then the pair begin dancing in full view of the customers (granted, there are only three of them, and they don’t appear to notice). This odd moment initially registers as a somewhat awkward reminder of the country’s multiculturalism – as if suggesting that both of the staff are white, but may not necessarily be Anglo-Australians – until the waiter arrives at Pa’s table and reveals, lo and behold, the thickest of Australian accents.

Elsewhere, the brothers have three fleeting encounters with Australian girls and women, all of which echo one another. In the first, Yue and Chau finally stumble across a neighbour: a teenage girl sunbathing by a pool, with whom they have a brief conversation after peeping at her through a hole in their fence and then tossing over a shoe to get her attention. Their lack of English proves to be an obstacle, however, as does the fence that separates the two parties, which is too high for the boys to look over (the neighbour, who doesn’t appear to be taller than either of them, somehow manages just fine). The second scene takes place after Gar Ming’s arrival in Australia. Here, he’s napping shirtless in the backyard when he’s interrupted by a couple of girls whose beachball has strayed over the fence. Gar Ming returns the ball to his neighbours, and then – like the diligent son he’s never been until now – strolls over to his father to help with the gardening. In the third scene, which occurs soon after, the three brothers gather for a fraternal bonding session. Having become somewhat more acquainted with life in Australia, they perch themselves on the sand and sip from their VB stubbies (and would perhaps look the part, if they weren’t at a deserted beach on an overcast day). Gar Ming’s sex-tinged, quasi-­spiritual life advice to his younger brothers gives way to a tearful confession about his familial heartache, which is cut short when a young bikini-clad woman walks past and steals their attention. Chau proclaims that he’s going to marry a blonde one day, while Gar Ming dismisses the passer-by as ‘too tall’.

The two scenes with the younger siblings hint at their latent feelings of inferiority towards the locals. Despite being the taller of the two, Yue is compelled to seek a doctor’s advice on how to grow more quickly after Chau jumps the neighbour’s fence and leaves him stranded; at the beach, their doe-eyed response to the woman suggests that sex won’t be happening for either of them anytime soon. In the other scene, Gar Ming’s surprising shift in character suggests an intention to reinvent himself in Australia. Although his pursuit of sexual pleasure has been nothing short of compulsive – even the exhumation of his grandfather’s remains is bookended by sex scenes – he doesn’t bat an eyelid when his first opportunity for sex in Australia seems to arrive on a platter.

The brothers’ behaviours suggest that these encounters with the opposite sex say far more about their sense of belonging in Australia than they do about the country itself, let alone its women. In each instance, the white Australian females are sexualised and exoticised projections that function only in relation to the brothers: they’re ciphers, rather than anything even remotely approaching minor characters. Here, as elsewhere in Floating Life, the rare encounters between the Chans and the locals retain only a tenuous link with the country in which they occur. In fact, most of them can’t really be considered encounters at all; if they are, they’re decidedly non-cultural.

‘I don’t mind eating Chinese’

In September 1996, the same month that Floating Life was released in Australian cinemas, Pauline Hanson revealed her nightmare scenario of ‘being swamped by Asians’ in her infamous maiden speech to the Australian House of Representatives.^[37]For the full transcript, see ‘Pauline Hanson’s 1996 Maiden Speech to Parliament: Full Transcript’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 2016, <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pauline-hansons-1996-maiden-speech-to-parliament-full-transcript-20160915-grgjv3.html>, accessed 8 November 2021. It isn’t surprising that Hanson and her racial politics are occasionally brought up in discussions of the film;^[38]See, for example, Pettman, op. cit., p. 77; Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 291; and Jones, op. cit., p. 259. for one, the picture that Law paints of Asian immigrants couldn’t be further from whatever paranoid fantasies had been driving the fish-and-chip-shop owner–turned–politician’s vile worldview. Despite the historical overlap, the issue of race doesn’t rear its head in the film in ways we might expect, mainly because there are so few social interactions through which it can even be expressed (there’s hardly anyone there for these Asians to swamp). And when it does, it tends to have a generalised, subjective quality that is removed from any particular social or political context. 

There are a couple of scenes where the Chans are seen by others as fetishised or racialised objects. ‘I don’t mind eating Chinese,’ says one of Bing’s male colleagues after she turns down their invitation to dinner; another man plants an unwanted kiss on her lips as she tries to leave. Bing seems to brush the incident aside, but when she later divulges her delusional plan – she’s saving up $2 million to safeguard herself in case the government goes bankrupt, because she fears Asian immigrants would lose out on their pensions – it’s the closest we get to understanding how acutely her isolation and difference are being felt. A scene with more overt racist overtones happens in Munich, when Yen spots a Neo-Nazi skinhead (complete with a swastika tattooed on his forehead) glaring in her direction as she loads her car with groceries. She initially panics and scrambles to leave; buoyed by a sudden sense of courage, however, she strides over to confront her would-be tormentor before he makes himself scarce.

The incident at Bing’s workplace could conceivably happen anywhere in Australia and at any time, yet it doesn’t feel at all specific to the country; it’s easy to imagine her receiving the exact same treatment in many other parts of the world. The scene in Germany, on the other hand, is much more specific to its setting for obvious reasons. But the blatant signifiers of racism (an emblematic skinhead who is introduced by the off-screen sound of a steam train, as if in reference to the Nazi transportation of Jews to concentration camps), together with the dreamlike quality of the scene (it takes place in broad daylight on a rooftop carpark that, again, is oddly empty), suggest Yen’s state of mind more than it does the state of German society. Similar to the scene of Chau and Yue meeting their neighbour, but with far greater stakes, the encounter articulates Yen’s anxieties about her racial difference and perceived Otherness in her adopted country.

Whether it takes a benign or an explicit form, it’s almost to be expected that the protagonists of migrant films will at some point be subjected to the ignorant attitudes of the locals. Floating Life is no different in this regard, but it also shows that the migrants are capable of ignorance – albeit a very innocuous form of it, and rarely involving the locals. As early as the opening scene in Hong Kong, the Chans reveal how clueless they are about their destination. Gar Ming advises Yue to buy a jacket because ‘Australia is cold’, while Mum races off to buy some glasses – despite already owning five pairs – because ‘they may not sell them there’. One of the funniest sequences in the film is when the Chans explore their neighbourhood in Australia. Having been spooked by Bing’s warnings about UV rays and savage dogs, they arm themselves for their ‘first and only great adventure in Australia’ – as Chau puts it sarcastically in voiceover – with sunnies, hats, backpacks and an umbrella. When they’re confronted by the aforementioned Jack Russell a short while later, they flee from it as if it were a grizzly bear. 

The comic nature of these scenes makes it easy not to notice that the Chans have taken Bing’s ridiculous warnings at face value. If we also take the Chans’ response to their new surroundings at face value, it confirms that they haven’t so much as read a brochure before setting foot in the country. Pa’s first instinct upon encountering a kangaroo, after all, is to ‘box’ it by assuming a martial-arts stance (the animal hops way, uninterested), while Chau’s initial impression of Australia as being ‘like a movie’ is filtered exclusively through the lens of Hollywood films – specifically, Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993). The Chans’ knowledge of Australia is next to nil, and their perception of the country is composed only of the broadest cultural brushstrokes. 

‘And now we’re off to somewhere else’

The often odd, sometimes incongruous and mostly superficial representation of Australia in Floating Life can be better understood alongside the other countries in the film. Law implies that the significance of these settings is defined primarily by their relation to – that is, their distance from – one another:

We wanted to create that landscape and show how one family member could be in the Southern hemisphere, and one member would be in Hong Kong still, and then one member would be in Europe or America. It doesn’t really matter [where].^[39]Clara Law, quoted in Marchetti, op. cit., p. 4.

Law and Beebe delineate the three main locations of the film by assigning a distinctive colour scheme to each. The scenes in Australia, which mostly occur outdoors or in the sparse interiors of Bing’s home, are dominated by a ­glaring white that is accentuated through overexposure and an abundance of natural light. Whether indoors or outdoors, and in keeping with its winter setting, the scenes in Germany are conveyed mostly in cold blue hues. Hong Kong is also given a palette that distinguishes it from the other ­countries, but the warm yellow hues that coat the scenes in a nostalgic glow play only a partial role in how the city comes across – because the Hong Kong of Floating Life is otherwise dense with detail, teeming with people and full of colour; it looks and feels like the living and breathing city that it is. It isn’t rendered abstract like Australia (and, to a lesser extent, Germany) because it’s a known quantity to the Chans. This is the beautiful and messy metropolis that they’ve left behind; for them, every other place will now exist in relation to it.

Just as important to the film as colour is the lack thereof. Bing’s house initially creates the impression that it has hardly been lived in: full of bare walls, blandly furnished rooms and a uniform coat of white, it’s more akin to a display home than an actual one. Any expectations that her house will become fuller or more colourful as the narrative progresses – with the rest of the family’s arrival being the first apparent step towards this end – are quickly tempered by the realisation that she has been living in it for years. Her house is a blank canvas that, it seems, will forever remain that way; or, perhaps, it has been left, or even made, blank. In her effort to assimilate at all costs, to start anew, it’s as though Bing has purged her living quarters of any markers of her past: a literal whitewashing of her own identity as a Hong Kong Chinese. Her house comes to represent both a lack and an erasure, a place without life, colour or history – which is to say it remains new.

In Germany, Yen paints the walls of her new house with her family – hardly an unusual activity, if not for the fact that she takes to it obsessively and, eventually, alone and without pleasure. The results of her labour are never shown. Like her endless rearrangement of the furniture, the walls remain a perpetual work in progress because Yen can’t settle on a colour: she paints them yellow before quickly changing her mind and repainting them white. A later scene in a bedding store hints that her daughter’s future sense of identity may also entail a bumpy ride: Mui Mui picks out a new bed because it’s white, and explains to her mum that she plans to paint it yellow, then blue, as she gets older. Incidentally, the ever-­adaptable white is worn by Yen in most of her scenes in Germany; Bing, who is the opposite of her sister in that she has already redefined her identity in Australia with unyielding certainty, owns a wardrobe made up almost exclusively of black suits. After their initial optimism about their life in Australia wanes, Yue’s and Chau’s costumes become mostly reduced to various shades of beige: a colour closer to white than black, but notable for its neither-here-nor-there blandness.

In his laudatory review of the film for The Sunday Age, Keith Connolly writes that what truly disturbs the Chan family is the ‘disruption, even severance, of ties and associations within the family group’.^[40]Keith Connolly, ‘Moving Experiences’, The Sunday Age, 29 September 1996. For the adult siblings, this disruption stems primarily from their physical separation from the rest of the family, which takes its toll regardless of their present location or circumstances. Bing and Gar Ming both suffer emotional breakdowns in their respective periods of isolation in Australia and Hong Kong, and when Yen reveals to Michael the multitude of factors behind her feelings of displacement, she suggests that it ultimately has more to do with her sense of filial guilt arising from her distance from her parents than any sort of dissatisfaction with life in Germany: 

I don’t even know if I should think of myself as Chinese. I was born in Hong Kong. I don’t speak Mandarin. And soon Hong Kong won’t be Hong Kong. The colour of my skin is yellow, not white. I speak German with an accent. I live in Germany, but I’m not really German. Where is my home? I only know my roots are connected to my parents […] They never asked me for anything. Now they’ve grown old […] The happier I am in Germany, the more it hurts.

However, for Mum and Pa – who are doubly displaced after moving to Australia, having also migrated to Hong Kong as refugees after the Communist Party took control of China in 1949 – the separation of loved ones is merely a fact of life. Pa, for instance, can no longer even keep track of who has gone where. After being informed about the death of an acquaintance who emigrated to Toronto, he tells his friend that ‘Cheng in Seattle [also] hasn’t sent a Christmas card’, to which his friend replies: ‘Seattle? Isn’t he in Canada?’ The parents’ sense of disruption thus takes on an altogether different inflection, and is set in motion when Bing forbids them from lighting incense as an ancestral offering (for fear of burning down her house). Mum and Pa’s inability to partake in traditional customs erodes their spiritual connection with their homeland – a connection that would help counteract their physical displacement, and one that isn’t felt by any of their children. It’s only when Mum takes it upon herself to discard her daughter’s rules that the process is able to be reversed.^[41]The film’s notion of home, which gradually shifts from a physical to an intangible one, is also reflected in the progression of its title cards; these initially introduce the settings in a literal manner (‘A house in Australia’; ‘A house in Germany’) but are later used to create poetic effects through their lack of specificity (‘A house without a tree’; ‘A house in turmoil’). 

Law also emphasises the disruption by concealing the process of travelling from one country to another. The trip from Hong Kong to Sydney is long, and Munich to Hong Kong is even longer, but you wouldn’t know it. Just as a momentary dip to black is the only device used to mark the transition from Hong Kong to Sydney in the film’s opening, Yen is making love with her husband in Munich when she’s transported – with a sudden cut – to Hong Kong, where she gently fans her daughter as she sleeps. These ellipses suggest that the act of travel itself is unimportant, at the same time that they convey the characters’ sense of displacement as they find themselves whisked from one corner of the globe to another. ‘We’ve just been warming our arses here, and now we’re off to somewhere else,’ quips the shop owner in Hong Kong, who is planning his own emigration to Vancouver, where his son lives. A few seconds later, we are, indeed, somewhere else.

In her director’s statement, Law poses the ­question: ‘Aren’t we all transient beings passing through this place called Earth?’^[42]Clara Law, quoted in Tony Mitchell, ‘Hong Kong–Australian Imaginaries: Three Australian Films by Clara Law’, in Gina Marchetti & Tan See Kam (eds), Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island, Routledge, London, 2006, p. 93. Her film reminds us of the fact in no uncertain terms. By downplaying the significance of the very country in which the film is (mostly) set – and which, for all intents and purposes, the film appears to be about – Floating Life forces us to consider instead how migrants might think and feel in any new place. This is the film’s most empathetic gesture, and quite a radical one if viewed within the context of Australia’s national cinema: Australia itself isn’t really important in Floating Life; it just happens to be that place. And like any other new place, it will be loved and hated, embraced and rejected; a stopover for some and a final destination for others.

A beautiful film that nobody watched

Floating Life had a healthy reputation by the time it arrived in Australian cinemas in September 1996. The unusual nature of the production had ensured it a reasonable amount of press, and both the film and the filmmakers were profiled in various outlets leading up to the release. The film had also recently been awarded the prestigious Silver Leopard in Locarno,^[43]Floating Life shared the award with Petr Václav’s Marian (1996). although news of this fresh success probably meant less to most local filmgoers than the glowing reception it had already received at the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals a few months earlier.

The majority of Australian critics who covered the film upon its release also responded with enthusiasm, as reflected by its subsequent nomination in three categories (Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress in a Supporting Role) at the AFI Awards. The most important endorsement, as far as the domestic market was concerned, was offered by David Stratton, a longstanding gatekeeper of the nation’s film culture whose opinion in those days could make or break an Australian film’s commercial prospects. Stratton had praised the film in Variety after its festival premiere in Sydney,^[44]David Stratton, ‘Floating Life’, Variety, vol. 369, no. 9, July 1996, p. 35. then followed up with a gushing 4.5-star review on The Movie Show at the onset of its theatrical release.^[45]Stratton’s co-host, Margaret Pomeranz, awarded the film the same rating. ‘Floating Life’, The Movie Show, 29 September 1996, available at <https://www.sbs.com.au/movies/video/11700291769/Floating-Life>, accessed 15 October 2021. Later introducing its screening on SBS, he would go on to declare Law’s film ‘one of the most beautiful Australian films of the last few years’.^[46]David Stratton, quoted in Pettman, op. cit., p. 75.

Despite such praise, Floating Life was a commercial flop by any measure. It ran for a little over a fortnight in the major cities and raked in a paltry A$141,398,^[47]Film Victoria, ‘Australian Films at the Australian Box Office’, 2011, p. 12, archived at <https://web.archive.org/web/20140209075310/http://www.film.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/967/AA4_Aust_Box_office_report.pdf>, accessed 14 October 2021. failing to come close to recouping its budget and becoming one of the lowest earners among a crop of Australian films that year, which – bar a handful of notable exceptions – have mostly been forgotten since. There are a variety of factors that might explain why such an acclaimed film struggled to fill seats. For starters, it was customary then, as it is now, for Australian films to imitate Hollywood’s reliance on star power to draw ticket sales;^[48]Australian films released in 1996 featured a roll call of staple domestic actors, such as Judy Davis (in Peter Duncan’s Children of the Revolution), Guy Pearce (in Megan Simpson Huberman’s Dating the Enemy), Bryan Brown (in Nick Parsons’ Dead Heart), Anthony LaPaglia (in Richard Franklin’s Brilliant Lies), Toni Collette (in Mark Joffe’s Cosi) and Miranda Otto (in Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade). All of these films outperformed Floating Life at the box office, most by a considerable margin. and with the exception of Shun Wah, Floating Life boasted no recognisable faces to make it easier for curious viewers to take the plunge.

It may also have been difficult for audiences to tell what kind of film it was, exactly. Martin opens his review of John Hughes’ What I Have Written (1996) – an Australian art film released the same year as Floating Life, and that fared only marginally better at the box office^[49]The film earned A$182,064 at the Australian box office. See Film Victoria, op. cit., p. 23. – by describing a period that was particularly hostile to films of its kind:

By the mid 1990s, it was not much of an advantage for a movie, in many parts of the world, if it looked, sounded or moved or anything like a so-called ‘typical arthouse film’. It was inevitable, in such a climate, that some ambitious, intriguing movies would suffer, and sometimes die, from this brutal designation.^[50]Adrian Martin, ‘What I Have Written’, July 1996, available at <http://www.filmcritic.com.au/reviews/w/what_i_have_written.html>, accessed 19 October 2021.

Martin is quick to note that the lack of interest in What I Have Written can’t be attributed solely to its designation as an art film; in a mostly unenthusiastic review, he argues that its flaws lie elsewhere. But it makes sense that Floating Life, which is very much an ambitious and intriguing movie, also struggled in the climate he alludes to – particularly in a country that has long lacked a robust art-film tradition,^[51]Martin later expanded on his misgivings about the Australian art-cinema scene – or, rather, the lack thereof – in a polemical essay. See Adrian Martin, ‘Wanted: Art Cinema’, Cinema Papers, no. 136, December 2000 / January 2001, pp. 30–5. and especially because there was never a clear consensus as to whether it was even an art film at all.

Floating perceptions

Floating Life can be classified comfortably as an art film and certainly looks like one, but is only occasionally afforded this label. The curator notes for the Ozmoviesdatabase listing suggest that it works best ‘in full arthouse mode’ and that Law’s ‘lingering style […] is typically approved arthouse’.^[52]‘Floating Life’, Ozmovies, <https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/floating-life>, accessed 19 October 2021. Martin is much more specific in placing the film within the tradition when he proposes that it ‘reimagines the themes, moods and pictorial sensibility of Antonioni for the disconnected, postmodern world’.^[53]See Martin, ‘Wanted: Art Cinema’, op. cit., p. 32. Emphasis removed. Other critics, without labelling the film explicitly as such, nevertheless flag Law’s arthouse credentials, thereby also flagging it as an art film by extension. 

Others, however, suggest a different kind of work by emphasising its humour over its arthouse leanings^[54]Reviewer Desmond Ryan, for example, stresses the film’s ‘wry, fish-out-of-water comedy’, while a pre-production listing in Cinema Papers describes it as a ‘comedy in which an Asian family migrates from Hong Kong to Australia and finds it is caught between two cultures’. See Ryan, ‘Call It a Wrap’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 May 1997; and ‘Inproduction: Production Survey’, Cinema Papers, no. 106, October 1995, p. 60. – much like the film’s theatrical poster, which signalled a straight-up comedy with its bright pastel colours, an inverted portrait of the Chan family and an image of Pa in a fighting stance with the kangaroo made prominent. What’s more, some critics split the difference. Stratton merely hinted at the possibility that Floating Life ‘could cross over into arthouses’ after its Sydney premiere,^[55]Stratton, ‘Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 35. while Shelly Kraicer was steadfast in her Toronto festival review that it was a bona fide crossover work to begin with – in her words, ‘a totally accessible art/entertainment film’.^[56]Shelly Kraicer, ‘Floating Life’, 1996, <http://www.chinesecinemas.org/floating.html>, accessed 19 October 2021.

As these scattered descriptions suggest, Floating Life was too entertaining and comedic to be broadly defined as an art film, and too artful to be construed outright as entertainment or comedy. For better or for worse, it hovered in an awkward space somewhere in between. This is not the film’s fault, of course – it’s simply the case that Floating Life could be considered a serious-minded art film and an entertaining comedy in equal measure; and besides, the art/entertainment binary exists mainly for convenience and fails to hold as often as it does. (For what it’s worth, one of Law’s two filmmaking heroes is Yasujirō Ozu, a director who also straddled the arthouse/mainstream divide; the other, Andrei Tarkovsky, belonged firmly in the arthouse camp.^[57]See Chris Berry, ‘Floating Life’, Cinema Papers, no. 110, June 1996, pp. 10–1) Nevertheless, distinctions such as these remain important in how any given film is packaged and perceived – which is to say, how it is marketed – because its identity can be communicated to audiences much more coherently when seemingly opposing cinematic traditions are kept separate.

But Floating Life’s ambiguous identity also extended to its status as an Australian film, which was perhaps its biggest roadblock to reaching domestic audiences in the short term. It was always going to be a tough sell for viewers to seek out an Australian film that appeared to be so only in name – one in which barely a word of English is spoken, and that shows scant interest in latching on to tried-and-true markers of national identity as so many other films had done (and continue to do still). Though acknowledged even at the time as one of the more culturally significant films to be produced in the country, Floating Life probably couldn’t have seemed more foreign to most viewers. One can’t help but think that this perception would have been given further validation when the film was later submitted as Australia’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Stratton wasn’t entirely wrong when he wrote that Floating Life would be ‘embraced by the Chinese diaspora worldwide’,^[58]See Stratton, ‘Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 35. though this didn’t happen nearly as quickly or universally as he seems to have envisioned. Other than on the festival circuit or during limited theatrical runs in a couple of countries,^[59]Floating Life had short theatrical runs in Canada and the Netherlands. See Rochelle Siemienowicz, ‘Australian Cinema, Autonomy and Globalisation’, PhD thesis, Swinburne University of Technology, 2002, p. 523, <https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/8041b5ef-ca5b-4dee-9031-ae3d6677edf3/1/Rochelle%20Siemienowicz%20Thesis.pdf>, accessed 8 November 2021. overseas audiences had little chance to see the film at all. In significant markets such as the United States, there were migrant filmmakers who had already covered similar ground, and in contexts more specific to their adopted country.^[60]Notable filmmakers include Christine Choy (Who Killed Vincent Chin?, 1987), Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994) and Wayne Wang(The Joy Luck Club,1993). Wang’s film in particular is considered a seminal work of Asian-American cinema. Moreover, it was naive to think that Chinese or Asian viewers, diasporic or otherwise, would respond to the film with uniform enthusiasm, and they in fact did not.^[61]Mitchell notes how, for example, reviewers in Taiwan were ‘sharply critical of its portrayal of the migrant experience’, while the committee of the Golden Horse Film Festival criticised the way the film ‘confronts its viewers with its overstated sadness and homesickness.’ See Mitchell, ‘Hong Kong–Australian Imaginaries’, op. cit., p. 96. As for Chinese-Australian audiences, long accustomed to being represented as Orientalist fodder (or worse), who could blame them for not rushing out to see the first Australian film that purported to do otherwise?

A major cultural legacy

Time heals all wounds, however, just as it has Floating Life’s lacklustre reception at the box office. Over the years, the film steadily built a following through TV broadcasts, retrospective screenings^[62]Floating Life was duly included in the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival’s ‘Pioneering Women’ sidebar program, which featured works by Australian women filmmakers from the 1980s and 1990s. The curators were then–artistic director Michelle Carey and film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. and a (long-out-of-print) DVD release, and as a mainstay in university syllabuses around the country. The recent digital restoration by the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia only partly attests to the fact that Floating Life is recognised today as a major Australian film – or a ‘major cultural text’, as it has been called in the academic arena,^[63]Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life’, op. cit., p. 259. where it became one of the most widely discussed and debated films ever to be made in the country. The subject of countless articles, book chapters and theses, and with an edited collection named in its honour,^[64]Cunningham & Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas, op. cit. Floating Life has held an enduring appeal to scholars from around the world who have dissected the film through the scopes of globalisation,^[65]Rochelle Siemienowicz, ‘Globalisation and Home Values in New Australian Cinema’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 23, no. 63, 1999, pp. 49–55. diaspora,^[66]Wenche Ommundsen, ‘Floating Lives: Cultural Citizenship and the Limits of Diaspora’, Life Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 2004, pp. 101–21. ethnicity,^[67]Audrey Yue, ‘Asian-Australian Cinema, Asian-Australian Modernity’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 24, no. 65, 2000, pp. 189–99. food,^[68]Jean Duruz, ‘Floating Food: Eating “Asia” in Kitchens of the Diaspora’, Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 2010, pp. 45–9. memory and nostalgia,^[69]Kam Louie, ‘Floating Life: Nostalgia for the Confucian Way in Suburban Sydney’, in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, British Film Institute, London, 2003, pp. 97–103. national and transnational cinema,^[70]Jones, op. cit., pp. 253–65. and Freudian melancholia,^[71]David L Eng, ‘Melancholia/Postcoloniality: Loss in The Floating Life’, Qui Parle, vol. 11, no. 2, Fall/Winter 1999, pp. 137–50. to name just a few examples.

The most measurable contribution that Floating Life made is that it opened the door for subsequent Asian-Australian filmmakers to get their stories told. A number of acclaimed directors emerged in its wake – Khoa Do (Footy Legends, 2006), Tony Ayres (The Home Song Stories, 2007), Matthew Victor Pastor (Melodrama/Random/Melbourne, 2018), Allison Chhorn (The Plastic House, 2019) – and explored their heritage in a suitably diverse range of genres and forms. One could also list Asian-centric TV shows – such as the comedy series The Family Law and Ronny Chieng: International Student – that have benefited from Law taking the lead decades earlier.

Floating Life put up on screen, front and centre, the names and faces of a hitherto-underrepresented group, and gave others the confidence to do likewise. The film ‘represents some kind of turning point in Australian cinema’, writes Stephen Teo, ‘in that it establishes a signpost towards a still nascent movement in this country, which is the creation of an Asian-Australian cinema’.^[72]Stephen Teo, ‘Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving’, Senses of Cinema, no. 83, July 2017, <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/pioneering-australian-women/floating-life-heaviness-moving/>, accessed 24 October 2021. Taiwan-born director Corrie Chen, whose SBS miniseries New Gold Mountain concerns the history of Chinese gold miners in Australia, describes seeing Law’s film as a ‘light bulb moment’ and suggests that she might not have become a filmmaker had she not.^[73]Corrie Chen, quoted in Guest, op. cit.

As I write this article, Floating Life is once again doing the festival rounds. Fittingly, the restored version of the film premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April 2021 and screened in Australia at the Brisbane and Sydney film festivals in October and November, respectively.^[74]The Sydney program also featured Law’s latest feature, Drifting Petals (2021). Twenty-five years after its initial release, some lucky audiences will again have an opportunity to see themselves – or their friends, family, colleagues or neighbours – in the floating lives of the Chan family, and on the big screen. 

A new perspective

As someone who also moved to Australia (from Japan) with my family in the early 1990s, Floating Life rings true for me in many ways. Bing’s incessant list of dangers and Beebe’s vivid images both remind me of the strange variations on familiar things that had jumped out at me in those initial days and weeks: parks with no people; shoppers with bare feet; spiders with red arses; hats with ugly neck flaps; street signs with alien symbols; roads with cars that drove unusually fast, because there was no traffic to speak of. The scene of a distressed Bing making a long-distance call to her husband, which she cuts short upon realising the cost, could’ve been of my mum doing the same. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, I can vividly recall how she also struggled with the language, the food, the fading customs and English gradually displacing Japanese as the preferred tongue of her kids. 

Despite these many overlaps and cultural differences, I still can’t claim that Floating Life speaks of my own experience of moving to Australia. It’s a film that feels as odd as it is familiar, and took me several viewings to appreciate. Being conscious of its significance as a ‘migrant film’ above all else, perhaps I was looking too hard for things that aligned with my own memories. Every encounter I had with a local back then felt loaded with significance, and I questioned why there were so few such interactions in the film. The fact that money is of no real concern for the Chan family – it wasn’t for mine, either – initially seemed to be a further means of sidestepping issues that many migrants, new and old, face on a day-to-day basis.

But it’s worth reminding ourselves that Law’s film isn’t a representative for the migrant experience, and never claimed to be: it’s one unique story among countless others. A reader of The Age puts it best in a letter published in the paper on 25 September 1996, one week into Floating Life’s theatrical release. Andrew Hanos of Middle Park, Victoria, had taken issue with Martin’s review of the film and wrote a strongly worded rebuttal. It’s well worth a read in full, but I’ll skip through it and jump straight to the final paragraph:

If Clara Law believes Floating Life is about Australian life and every immigrant’s story, she is mistaken. It isn’t. It is about Law’s experience of Australia, and some shared universal dilemmas.

Like the rest of his letter, the tone is one of righteous indignation. He then signs off:

However, because Clara is an artist, her vision opens up a new perspective on this country, and enriches the rest of us.^[75]Andrew Hanos, ‘Floating Life Beats the Dud Torpedoes’, letter to the editor, The Age, 25 September 1996, available at <https://www.ozmovies.com.au/files/floating_life_Age_Wed_Sep_25_1996.jpg>, accessed 24 October 2021.

Select bibliography

Chris Berry, ‘Floating Life’, Cinema Papers, no. 110, June 1996, pp. 10–1.

Elena Guest, ‘NFSA Restores: Floating Life: Exploring the Asian Migrant Experience’, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia website, 2021, <https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/nfsa-restores-floating-life>.

Michel Honegger, ‘Clara’s Worlds: A Profile of Clara Law’, Metro, no. 127/128, 2001, pp. 10–3.

Rai Jones, ‘Framing Strategies: Floating Life and the Limits of “Australian Cinema”’, in Lisa French (ed.), Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 253–65.

Dian Li, ‘Law, Clara’, Senses of Cinema, no. 28, October 2003, <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/law/>.

Tony Mitchell, ‘Clara Law’s Floating Life and Hong Kong–Australian “Flexible Citizenship”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, March 2003, pp. 278–300.

Tony Mitchell, ‘Hong Kong–Australian Imaginaries: Three Australian Films by Clara Law’, in Gina Marchetti & Tan See Kam (eds), Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island, Routledge, London, 2006, pp. 91–106.

Wenche Ommundsen, ‘Floating Lives: Cultural Citizenship and the Limits of Diaspora’, Life Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, 2004, pp. 101–21.

Michael Stein, ‘Floating Life [Fu sheng]’, Intersections, no. 8, October 2002, <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue8/stein_review.html>. 

Stephen Teo, ‘Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving’, Senses of Cinema, no. 83, July 2017, <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/pioneering-australian-women/floating-life-heaviness-moving/>.

Debbie Zhou, ‘“It was Strange and Seductive”: Film Director Clara Law on Finding Home in Australia’, The Guardian, 3 November 2021, <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/03/it-was-strange-and-seductive-film-director-clara-law-on-finding-home-in-australia>.

MAIN CAST

Yen Annette Shun Wah Bing Annie Yip Gar Ming Anthony Brandon Wong Pa Edwin Pang Mum Cecilia Lee Yue Toby Wong Chau Toby Chan Michael Julian Pulvermacher Cheung Bruce Poon Mui Mui Claudette Chua

PRINCIPAL CREDITS

Year of Release 1996 Length 92 minutes Director Clara Law Production Company Hibiscus Films Producer Bridget Ikin Cinematographer Dion Beebe Editor Suresh Ayyar Production Designer Chung Man Yee Art Director Luigi Pittorino Music Davood A Tabrizi