📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Nick Cheuk (director), Time Still Turns the Pages 年少日記, 2023. 95 min.

This review contains major spoilers.

With five nominations in the 60^th Golden Horse Awards, Nick Cheuk’s tightly structured realist drama Time Still Turns the Pages wrenches the hearts of Hong Kong audiences with its depiction of the tragic local phenomenon of juvenile suicide. The movie arrived at a grim time for the city, with a new suicide being reported almost daily. It is set at a stressful time in the life of the protagonist, Cheng (Lo Chun-yip), a secondary school teacher in his thirties, recently divorced, who learns about an anonymous student’s suicidal intent in a crumpled-up letter in a rubbish bin.

Reading the diary of a young boy named Eli (Sean Wong Tsz-lok) leads Cheng to recall his own troubled past. At the age of seven or eight, the younger brother in a middle-class family, a gifted pianist, outshines the older brother and monopolises his parents’ attentions. Their elitist father views the older brother as a “cute but good-for-nothing” child lost in an imaginative world of comics. The older brother repeatedly fails to meet his parents’ standards; his father beats him and he feels unloved. In the end, he makes up his mind to release his parents from the burden. This parallel plot starkly depicts how the social pressure to succeed savagely flail the younger generation in a supposedly safe space that is the family home.

At the beginning of the movie, we see a child standing on a rooftop against the city skyline; the suspense breaks when the past and the present are merged in an unexpected plot twist—Cheng turns out to be a survivor of the suicide tragedy in his childhood. The revelation brings the audience to another level of  grief. As the film’s English title Time Still Turns the Pages suggests, time is ruthless and, whether the living choose to escape or not, they have to come up with responses to past mistakes and regret in honest ways. Now a grown-up with responsibilities for a graduating class, Cheng returns to the origin of his frustrated life: can he be a good teacher when he has failed to be a good husband, father, and, further back, brother?

Criticism of Hong Kong’s exam-oriented culture and extreme meritocracy is not new; the movie is insistent about the harm each of these does by bringing to light the often-unheard wishes and despair of young students who have taken their lives and the wounds left behind in the context of family bonds. Time Still Turns the Pages counsels the value of empathy and compassion through a contrast between Cheng and the negative example of his parents, who represent Hong Kong’s results-oriented mindset and are eventually punished by a lasting sense of guilt. As for the task of recovery and prevention, it is rather heavily placed on the shoulders of educators and social workers, the next in line to protect their impressionable charges when the family unit malfunctions. The movie is a poignant appeal to these frontline workers to review their professional priorities, but does not proffer new solutions for decision-makers to revert the trend.

A commercial success in Hong Kong, the movie should at least cultivate an understanding of the importance of accepting and overcoming a sense of failure among young people in society. Idealism without enough believers, the movie seems to say, leads to disillusionment. The key for young people to carry on with the exam called life is to build a stronger community that acknowledges the possibility of failures in life and the possibility of learning from those failures. As Cheng offers to become his students’ non-judgmental listener, the message of “dream on”—against difficulties—reasserts itself and the movie ends on a healing note with the writer of the diary’s dream finding its fulfilment.

How to cite: Mak, Flora. “A Poignant Appeal: Nick Cheuk’s Time Still Turns the Pages.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/04/pages.

Flora Mak obtained her PhD in English (Literary Studies) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with research interest on Romanticism, Modernism, and humanities education. She co-authored The Value of the Humanities in Higher Education: Perspectives from Hong Kong. She is now a happy lecturer of literature and hoping to read more about Hong Kong and Asian literature. She also tries to integrate her support for women’s movement as a daughter, a teacher, and a volunteer. [All contributions by Flora Mak.]

---