Film Song of Exile
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The film Song of Exile depicts the diasporic life of a Japanese mother, Aiko, married to a Chinese National soldier, and their daughter, Huiyin, who are able to reconcile, and understand each others as well as their own identities and ethnicities in the “conditions of displacement (and resettlement) in the hostland(8)” after their visit to Japan, the mothers homeland. Through the numerous uses of flashbacks going back and forth between the present and the past, the two characters appear in many different countries they had once lived in, including Japan, China, Britain, Macau, and Hong Kong, showing their long duration of exile. This use of cinematic flashbacks in the film Song of Exile is in relevance to Gilles Deleuzes time image theory, in that while the original notion of time was a linear chronological succession, with the introduction of cinema and its moving images where it provided an object-like nature of images seem actual, time can be now seen as past and future penetrating into the present, where “action subordinates time”(Chow, 92). In other words, this permeability of time that Deleuze explains, allows us to enter into the virtual world of past through memory, cinematically portrayed in flashbacks, while living in the present. It allows time to be permeable. In the film Song of Exile, Through actively incorporating objects, specifically mirrors, these cinematic flashbacks allow for a feminine agency through “multiplicities in motion”(Chow, 95) such as memories to appropriately portray the process of “psychic interiority” as the visual images of the past convey what was going on in the characters ego as seen the flashbacks in which the characters discover who they are.
The film first introduces Huiyins psychic interiority with the presence of a mirror. Zooming up into her resume that indicates her place of birth, Hong Kong, and her Nationality, British, then using a high angle shot to show half of her face in the mirror, a self-reflective tool, while she is writing her resume, this foreshadows the self-exploration that she is about the embark on throughout the movie. Huiyin is seen earlier in the movie that she is subject to discrimination as an ethnic minority and feels that she does not fully belong in Britain, despite the fact that her nationality is Britain as well as the fact that she is fluent in English, as Huiyin is often left alone, for example, at the bar while her friends flirt with other British men. This shows that she is “confronted and constructed by everyday and institutionalized racism”(Yue, 21). Soon after writing a part of the resume, Huiyin soon decides to attend her sisters wedding in Hongkong, a choice that would eventually allow her to truly understand who she is and reconcile with her mother through the flashbacks.
When Huiyin arrives in Hong Kong, she discovers how talkative her mother became, different from the quiet and calm personality that Huiyin remembers. She is then brought to her flashback of her younger self who was raised by her grandparents, separate from her mother in their disliking of Aiko, due to the fact that she was Japanese, distancing the relationship of Huiyin and her mother. She is only able to remember the love she felt from her grandparents as shown through the slow motion of Huiyin on a swing, while she can only recall her distant relationship with her mother. As they are getting ready for Huiyins sisters wedding at the hair salon, Aiko actively tries to emphasize the importance of family and reconnect the disintegrated feeling of family by trying to at least look similar as her daughter by wearing the same hairstyle and red clothing, an ongoing attempt to reconcile with her daughter. This argument, as Huiyin looks at the mirror at the hair salon, allows her to recall why her relationship with Aiko has deteriorated, and triggers a memory of the past when her mother forced her to have her hair cut looking like a Japanese child. The Huiyin that is seen in the hair salon and the younger Huiyin having her hair cut by Aiko resembles in that there is a mirror in presence in front of them. Not only does the mirror serve as a means of self-reflection in that Huiyin thinks about the resemblance of her forced hair cut image of herself in the mirror, and her confusing bicultural Japanese-Chinese identities by self-reflecting in the mirror, but while the inverse shots divide the actual person and the virtual image in the mirror as the camera lens is refracted back to us, this also provides an impression of perception in the