The Narrow Road – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Nar­row Road – first-look review

19 Aug 2022

Words by Xuanlin Tham

Two people, a man and a woman, talking in a dimly lit room with overhead lights and a wooden ceiling.
Two people, a man and a woman, talking in a dimly lit room with overhead lights and a wooden ceiling.
Lam Sum’s Hong Kong-set Covid dra­ma is ten­der but lacks inci­sive­ness when it comes to the pandemic.

We may decry the idea of pan­dem­ic movies, but it’s per­haps unavoid­able that cin­e­ma is being used to attempt some kind of great pro­cess­ing’ of the last few years – and who knows? Even­tu­al­ly, one of these attempts might just cut through our skep­ti­cism, no mat­ter how well-founded.

The open­ing shot of Lam Sum’s The Nar­row Road seems to promise just that. As a man in full pro­tec­tive gear sprays a cloud of dis­in­fec­tant above his head, the act of sani­tis­ing a room is ren­dered dance-like: he moves with a slow grace, and the fog of clean­ing solu­tion thick­ens into an oth­er­world­ly haze. How qui­et the city around him feels in these hours of the morn­ing when almost no one is awake – we are, though, and we bear wit­ness to the sur­re­al beau­ty of his work, as it sus­tains the rest of the sleep­ing city with­out ever being seen.

Set in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic in Hong Kong, The Nar­row Road’ fol­lows Chak (actor and Can­topop star Louis Che­ung, whose phys­i­cal­i­ty brims with rugged, tat­tooed charm) and his one-man clean­ing oper­a­tion. He’s so lone­ly that he talks to his van, and answers his mother’s inquiry into his slow­ly fail­ing busi­ness – maybe God is telling you to quit?” – with a wry, I’m small­er than a speck of dust. Why would God care?” So when a bright-eyed young woman knocks on his door, eager for employ­ment at his com­pa­ny, we know what we’re in for. The for­mu­la­ic jux­ta­po­si­tion of world-weary Chak with free-spir­it­ed sin­gle moth­er Can­dy (a per­pet­u­al­ly quirk­i­ly-dressed Angela Yuen) is tem­pered by just how like­able they are; the two non-kin­dred spir­its forge a com­pan­ion­ship that’s as much about the mate­r­i­al ways they help each oth­er sur­vive con­stant pre­car­i­ty as it is about the solace of con­nec­tion between two specks of dust, for­got­ten by God.

Yet while the film’s ten­der­ness is ini­tial­ly a wel­come, charm­ing approach, it fal­ters in locat­ing any sub­stan­tial social cri­tique. With the excep­tion of one extra­or­di­nary, tonal­ly shock­ing scene where Chak and Can­dy clean up the human-shaped residue left by a decom­pos­ing corpse in someone’s apart­ment, The Nar­row Road’ pro­vides lit­tle in way of help­ing us under­stand the incal­cu­la­ble loss rav­aged by a glob­al pan­dem­ic. Its ear­li­er visu­al poet­ry, which imbued even the squeegee­ing of a win­dow with a rit­u­al­is­tic dig­ni­ty, van­ish­es in its sec­ond half – and the expect­ed inter­ro­ga­tion of the labour of clean­ing (and to whom that bur­den falls) nev­er manifests.

The film’s com­men­tary, frus­trat­ing­ly, comes to set­tle on the lev­el of the indi­vid­ual. Can­dy decides to stop shoplift­ing, and Chak gives her his life sav­ings so she and her daugh­ter can start over on more steady ground. Con­clud­ing that self­less­ness and inde­fati­ga­bil­i­ty are what save us, the film relieves itself of the much more dif­fi­cult task of cri­tiquing why we must be self­less and inde­fati­ga­ble in the first place. Too gen­tle and too hes­i­tant, The Nar­row Road’ fails to tell a sto­ry of incred­i­ble socioe­co­nom­ic vio­lence with the con­vic­tion it requires.

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