What We Say

Thanks to astonishingly mature performances by two children making their acting debuts, this sweet comedy-drama by Vancouver director Julia Kwan has become a film-fest and critical favourite.

It has been invited to Sundance this year, won the People's Choice award at the 2005 Vancouver fest, and recently made the cut as a finalist in the Best British Columbia Film category for the upcoming Vancouver Film Critics Awards.

Phoebe Jo Jo Kut plays the title character, nine-year-old Eve Eng, and Hollie Lo plays her 11-year-old sister, Karena. Eve and Karena are a great pair: they're soul mates and best friends and congenial playmates, although Eve can be something of an independent thinker.

She was born in 1966, the Year of the Fire Horse, which occurs every 60 years and is supposed to produce troublesome children. Eve isn’t so much troublesome as wildly imaginative, and no one knows what she's going to think of next.

The movie is set in the mid-1970s. The Engs live in working-class New Westminster, B.C., and the story arc, which Eve narrates, covers a sequence of life-changing events in the Eng family. Julia Kwan's script deftly captures the vividness with which children imagine things to be true, and the odd but perfectly logical leaps of faith that the innocent mind can make.

Turns out that Karena is the one who brings the biggest change to the household. The Eng family is Buddhist, but one day a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door and give Karena a volume of Bible stories. This triggers in the young girl a fascination with Jesus, then an interest in the Roman Catholicism practiced by her schoolmates, and then a fierce desire to achieve sainthood. ("I was fascinated by the idealism of children and their simplistic notion of kindness," says Kwan in the press notes. "It's interesting to me how many women I know who had wanted to be a saint as a child.")

Ever loyal to her sister, Eve assumes a less pious view of religion, although she has some odd notions about reincarnation.

Charming, funny, thoughtful, Eve and the Fire Horse is a terrific first feature for Kwan, who had only directed short films before this. She could scarcely have believed her good fortune when Phoebe Kut and Hollie Lo came in to audition, because these two little girls take the film to a level Kwan wouldn’t have dared to hope for.

The actors playing their parents are no slouches, either: Vivian Wu, who starred in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic The Last Emperor and Lester Chit Man Chan, who played Raymond in the Oscar-winning Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.

If you see one Canadian movie this year, make it this one.

Review by John TD Keyes
telus.net