Starring: Ryan Kwanten, Jillian Nguyen, Hugo Weaving
Distributor: Other
Runtime: 105 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A puzzling existential drama as a sick man wanders the night in Hong Kong. He is a hitman, visits a sex club and encounters a woman from a Vietnam village. He searches for a doctor to heal him.
This is not an easy cinema experience. There are aspects of science-fiction in a pre-apocalyptic world. There is personal drama and a search for identity. There is a sex club, the Loveland of the title, and one of the performers a refugee from a village in Vietnam. There are also themes of life, genetic engineering, immortality and death.
The film was released in Australia as Loveland. However, at the same time, the Internet Movie Database lists it as Expired with a poster with that name.
While this is a film financed by Screen Queensland, with some of the interiors shot in Queensland, the setting is Hong Kong – generally by night – with the vistas, skyscrapers, neon lights, streets, dingy apartments, corridors and rooms of the club.
And, this is a film of dialogue – philosophical dialogue, self-ruminating dialogue, rhetorical dialogue, and often a succession of monologues by the central characters.
The word that kept coming to mind during the screening was portentous, portentous dialogue, portentous themes and treatment. So, it seemed a good idea before writing the review to check on what was exactly the meaning of portentous. There were some definitions: ‘of or like a portent; of momentous significance’ and ‘done in a pompously or overly solemn manner so as to impress’.
The first definition applies to the central character Jack (Kwanten), a hitman for hire. A man without any sense of conscience, unsure of his origins, a white man in a Chinese environment, often ruminating about the absence of his mother, visiting the sex club but as a voyeur only. All these events were portentous for Jack, momentous significance for his life and his possible death.
However, the second definition pervaded, especially the solemn manner, maybe overly solemn, poetic, rhetorical, scientific, pre-apocalyptic, issues of life and death, outed as voice-over, as monologues, designed to impress.
The setting is exotic, the issues of life and death and genetic engineering are raised, Jack discovering a doctor, played impressively, as always, by Weaving, who has experimented in the past, has his regrets, looks to possibilities for rectifying the situation.
Then there is April (Nguyen), the Vietnamese woman who performs at the club, whom Jack follows, gets to know and forms a relationship with – which is partly good for her but partly disturbing, jolting her in her life in Hong Kong and desire to return home to Vietnam and to her daughter.
There is some explicit explanation towards the end of the film as to why Jack is as he is, his quest to find the doctor, to get an explanation about his mother, and the realisation of powers out to destroy him.
While the release title focuses on the sex club, the alternate, Expired, title focuses on Jack and his quest – and his destination? Expired seems a better choice for title.
(Sen is, perhaps, best known for his films with First Nations themes from Beyond Clouds to Mystery Road and Goldstone. Loveland is a far cry from these themes.)
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