All Shall Be Well opens with a leisurely, near-fantastical tour through what appears to be a typical 24 hours for Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Li Lin-Lin), the middle-aged lesbian couple at the center of Ray Yeung’s latest film. Not only are they excellent hosts with a perfect home, their way of spending time together is a seemingly effortless exchange of sensitivity, from quiet mornings to encounters with neighbors and, in the culmination of this sequence, their presiding over a glowing, rich evening meal for the Mid-Autumn Festival, to which Pat’s extended family is invited. As might be suggested by the vaguely encouraging title of the film, this domestic paradise comes to an abrupt end, with a sudden offscreen death; what’s more surprising about this development though is how Yeung discards many of the options normally taken by grief narratives.
The once-pervasive idea undergirding queer romantic tragedy was the freighted assumption that queer romance by its nature carried tragedy with it, either as a symptom or a diagnosis. Yeung’s film doesn’t exploit or transmute that idea, nor does it borrow its frame for revisionist or melodramatic purposes. Instead, the film uses death as a way of turning a self-sustaining relationship into an objective case for examination.
Objective might sound like a strong descriptor, but Yeung introduces the key details of Pat’s death that we learn after the film’s opening as legal matters, a life flattened into the hard residual on-paper details left behind. No scene, whether a meeting with a burial advisor, an appointment with a will executor, or a gathering at the funeral itself, admits any but the barest sentimentality. These collisions with familial and marital definitions directly bear out the way the full rights of a lesbian couple in the seemingly open Hong Kong of the film’s opening can be, with minimal effort, treated disposably, but neither does Yeung freight his thesis in the manner of a filmmaker like Ken Loach, for whom illustrative societal conflicts serve as dramatic machinations.
Rather than a central conflict, scenes are treated as occasions for casual interactions, as relatives strategize how to deliver news (callous requests build upon one another, to the point of eviction), and friends wonder how to act around a grieving Angie. It’s a treatment that results in little connective tissue between successive scenes, with the emphasis instead placed on the way every possible encounter contains the possibility for aggression, a reversal of the potential warmth in every step of the film’s opening.
This slippage of the film’s gravitational center is compelling enough to sustain the film, even if there’s little interest in the film’s gentle, unobtrusive mix of establishing shots and drifting medium close-ups. If anything, All Shall Be Well, especially in its final scenes, is about what can’t be easily observed, for Angie’s narrative is a free-fall experience of constant doubt where nothing can any longer be taken on trust, or at face value. Because of the legal ramifications of Pat’s death, this is an experience that seems to stretch on for months, if not longer, and the film, despite a fleet running time, studies this state long enough that it becomes etched into Angie’s face.
Not only is she forced to face the idea that, to the legal powers that be, she is a non-entity, but that the only possible way of keeping Pat’s memory alive is through invention outside of the closed circuit of the immediate family. When she meets friends in one late scene to mark and remember Pat’s life, there are no ashes, no official ceremonies, and no solid tokens of her existence as Angie knew her.
Yeung might not be a director who can take this kind of moment and render it completely transformative, but he does know how to conceive a film motivated not by emotional appeals common to the pop-psychology narrative of the grieving process, but rather the flux of everyday volatility. One wonders if an evenly-paced, clearly mapped-out approach limits what Yeung is able to accomplish within these parameters. But this register seems to be one of the most intentional parts of the film: it seems important to Yeung that All Shall Be Well is able to hint at a nightmare scenario, without fully exploiting that plot. While Angie is constrained by her circumstances, the film has a surprising amount of freedom in how it navigates those constraints, which is no small thing in an otherwise often deterministic genre.
Originally published as part of NYAFF 2024.
