Devastating Hong Kong drama ‘All Shall Be Well’ captures the need for marriage equality

When the movie begins, the bespectacled, tomboyish Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) and her more traditionally feminine partner Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) live a straightforward domestic life of relatively mundane contentment. Silent shots of them walking hand-in-hand, or preparing breakfast together in their apartment without a single word exchanged, exude both comfort and routine, but the muted ambience leaves room for a ominousness to seep in through the corners of the frame.

Rare are the times when people watch a movie without knowing anything about its premise, but even if one does so with All Shall Be Well, it's hard to avoid the sense that death could be lurking around any corner. As the couple celebrates the Mid-Autumn Festival with Pat's family, the camera moves slowly through spaces and lingers on seemingly mundane objects and verbal exchanges, imbuing them with a sense of heft and occasion despite how humdrum they seem, as though they might take on a greater meaning in retrospect. The film, in this way, feels like a dreamlike memory, recalled from some morose future vantage while reminiscing about the last words people ever exchanged with each other. Casual chatter about health and cholesterol—fleeting, repetitive topics of conversation for people of a certain age—similarly take on a dramatic irony once Pat dies in her sleep, leaving Angie and her family to mourn, and to sort through her estate.

Pat and Angie celebrating the Mid-Autumn festival with Pat's family.

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Although the movie's subdued soundtrack runs throughout its 93 minutes, there's a clear visual demarcation between this plot's "before" and "after." It's simple, but effective: when Pat and Angie spend time together, or entertain Pat's family, the film's palette is defined by a casual warmth. However, this turns immediately dim and frigid after Pat's unexpected passing, as though she took all the light with her. In the days and weeks hence, the characters feel immersed in a shattering sense of loss as they try to get on with their daily lives—Angie especially, who has no one else. Her friends are mostly happily married lesbian couples, who remind her of what she's lost. Her own family isn't accepting of her queerness, the way Pat's family is, so they become her only respite, until the question of inheritance and funeral proceedings drives a wedge between them.

After Pat's passing, Angie has to navigate the distribution of assets with Pat's family.

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As much as Pat's family might love Angie, death can bring out the worst in people when there's money and property involved, which puts Angie's claim on their shared apartment at risk, since Pat was its legal owner. This aspect of queerness and its indignities was similarly tackled by a Thai-language drama at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, Boss Kuno's more ostentatious and melodramatic The Paradise of Thorns, making for an intriguing double-feature. However, while these twin movies deal with the subject matter of property, and the legal protections same-sex couples are denied, they make for fascinating opposites. Kuno's film deals in caricatures, and ends up with villainous figures. Yeung's, on the other hand, opts for a more nuanced approach even to its supposed family vultures, painting them with empathetic brush strokes that make the story all the more tragic. Even as they slowly force Angie out of her own home, it's hard not to at least understand them, if not empathize with their financial predicaments.

Just as agonizing as these legal proceedings are Pat's funeral rites, drawn from ancient traditions in which there's no acceptable place or language for a same-sex partner. And, just as devastating as the loss of Pat is the loss of Angie's identity as her wife in all but paperwork, as she's slowly reduced to Pat's "best friend" for the purposes of wills and burials.

"All Shall Be Well" premiered at Berlin Film Festival this year.

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Through his withheld aesthetic flourishes, Yeung crafts a movie that is simply bursting at the seams with emotions yearning to be recognized. Few films have so lucidly portrayed why ongoing fights for marriage equality the world over matter as much as they do. It's because in lieu of these legal protections, the existing status quo all but erases queer love when it ought to matter most: in silent moments of shared loss that demand community and understanding, and at times when the fabric of love itself, as something that exists beyond the confines of life, death and even words, is so inhumanely challenged.