>>REVIEW
EVE AND THE FIRE HORSE
STARRING Phoebe Jo Jo Kut, Hollie Lo and Vivian Wu.
DIRECTED BY Julia Kwan
Opens Friday, May 5
Uptown Screen
The world offers a tasty (if guilt-inducing) smorgasbord of spiritual options – how do you choose which deity will do you right? This is a central question for the two young sisters in Eve and the Fire Horse, a delicately rendered first feature by B.C. filmmaker Julia Kwan. Growing up in a working-class Chinese-Canadian household in suburban Vancouver in the ’70s, nine-year-old Eve (Phoebe Jo Jo Kut) and her more serious-minded 11-year-old sister Karena (Hollie Lo) experience a crisis of faith when their family is wracked by two tragedies: the death of their beloved grandmother (Ping Sun Wong) and a miscarriage by their mother (Vivian Wu). Gossipy relatives wonder whether the family has been cursed.
Since their mom and their overworked father (Lester Chit-Man Chan) are distracted by their hurts, the girls are left to confront the big questions on their own. Not realizing that Christians aren’t allowed to love Buddha, too, mom encourages the girls’ attendance at Sunday school ("Some say it’s better to raise Christian kids," a friend tells her. "They’re easier to control").
While Karena is enthusiastic about the social structure and unambiguous lessons offered by the Catholic nuns, Eve is more troubled and querulous. Since the film is largely depicted from her perspective, we occasionally bear witness to her flights of fancy, like when she sees Buddha dancing with Jesus in her living room one night or, more disturbing, visions of horses drowning as they are swallowed up in the Red Sea along with the Pharaoh’s army, innocent victims of God’s wrath.
Though Eve and the Fire Horse has some uncertainly judged moments, the script’s wry humour and Kwan’s sure touch with her cast save the film from becoming too sombre or too sentimental. In fact, she’s made something rare – a family movie that is actually interested in the dynamics that define what a family is.
While the nature of Kwan’s film is mostly mild-mannered, there are moments that wouldn’t have been out of place in darker, crueller films that confront the terrors of the world from a kid’s sometimes unreliable point of view (Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Leolo certainly come to mind). Eve and the Fire Horse may take a more whimsical tack, yet it still has an unmistakable undercurrent of pain and uncertainty. Ultimately, it’s less about religion than the many different reasons people seek spiritual comforts. Faced with that pantheistic buffet, Eve’s conundrum is that none of the choices can entirely banish her appetite. |
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