imutsusemi Mother separates from father. Father loses job. Son couldn't afford school. Father tells son to steal. He does. Son gets caught. He cries. Son has a mad with father. Father remarries. Son grow up like everyone else.Nothing out of the ordinary. No touching moments except when the actors are trying really hard to genuinely show some emotion, signaling to the audience that they should feel the same. Film direction is all over the place, literally (see the final scene when, Boy, all grown up, spots his dad across the river). It's like the Vaseline covered hands of a cameraman repeatedly drops the camera and successfully snatching it mid air, repeat that 10 times. Mediocre acting is apparent except when Aaron Kwok and Charlie Yeung overtly tries to sneak in some Indonesian/Malaysian lingo with conversational Cantonese. Even the swearing was unbelievably abysmal. How can you screw up saying "Pook Guy" in Cantonese? The title of this movie is "Father & Son" in Chinese. It somehow translates to "After This Our Exile" when it translates to English. Let's take a moment to make sense of that.Don't waste your valuable time on this movie and reading extremely inaccurate reviews about this movie. Life is short. The only way to make your life long is to live it with regret forever by watching this movie. The only reason I gave this 1 instead of 2 is that the actor who played Boy did an OK job. Good job mate.

Howard Schumann As eagerly awaited as a new Terence Malick film, After This Our Exile, the latest work by idiosyncratic Hong Kong director Patrick Tam more than lives up to expectations. Known as a teacher of Wong-Kar-wai, Tam's first feature in seventeen years is a compelling and moving film about the complex interaction between an irresponsible father and his loyal and devoted son who would do anything for him, even steal. Winner of major Hong Kong awards as well as Taiwan's Golden Horse Award for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, the film carries on the gritty tradition of the Hong Kong New Wave of the 70s and 80s while defying patriarchal genre conventions and probing greater emotional depths than much of the mainstream cinema of the time.Set in Malaysia but spoken in Cantonese, the film uses flashbacks, crosscutting, and ellipsis to tell a riveting and often-melodramatic story. After Lee Yuk-lin (Charlie Yeung) walks out on her abusive husband Chow Cheung-sheng, (Aaron Kwok), a compulsive gambler, their nine-year old son Boy (Gouw Ian Iskandar) runs to his father's place of work to tell him of her escape. The overwrought Sheng drags Lin home and physically and verbally abuses her, but eventually shows his loving, almost childlike side and they end up having sex.After taking Boy on a cruise, Sheng returns to discover than Lin has left again, this time with another man, and father and son are left to struggle alone. Sheng has lost his job, owes gambling debts, and Boy is without the money to pay the bus driver to go to school. Forced to move to a seedy small town hotel, Sheng is driven to pimping a girl (Kelly Lin) to make money but their life soon begin to spiral further downward. Sheng teaches Boy to sneak into people's home to steal jewelry, but the child is caught and sent to a detention center in a sequence that leads to a startling and unexpected conclusion.While After This Our Exile sounds depressing and there are some truly heartbreaking moments, the film has touches of kindness and humanity that are enhanced by the caliber of the acting and the rich cinematography of Ping Bin-lee. Iskandar, also known as Ng King-to, is sympathetic and moving as the appealing but not cloying child who loves his dad but is slow to realize how he is guiding him into self-destructive behavior. Pop singer Aaron Kwok gives a masterfully nuanced performance as the deadbeat husband who manages to evoke sympathy as a suffering human being in spite of his failings. We know that Sheng is doing what he does because he loves his son, never grasping the extent to which he has endangered the boy until a furious coda suggests that pain heals very slowly and sometimes not at all.

kevbee First things first. This is not so much a dramatic heart-wrenching film, more a self-indulgent melodrama. I have just had the misfortune to sit through the director's DVD cut of this movie. 159 minutes of self indulgent twaddle. One thing's for sure - the distributors sure got it right when they axed nearly 30 minutes from the running time for the cinema release.Why is this so bad? 2 major factors - the writing and directing. Please put your hand up Patrick Tam. If you're going to make a film that centers on a father/son relationship, please make the father 3-dimentional and believable. Here we had a total loser from the first minute; one who railed at his own (self-inflicted) misfortune and had an on/off loving relationship with his 8 year old son.Can I quickly say that this little boy was by far the best thing in the film and acted everyone else off the screen and is the ONLY reason to watch this film.The great mystery is why this nonsense garnered so many awards? Somebody called Roger Garcia is quoted on the back of my DVD copy as saying that "After This Our Exile is the first masterpiece of Hong Kong cinema of the 21st century ..." I think he's wrong. And if he's right - then God help HK cinema.

samuelding85 The above title explains it all: when vengeance binds a father and a son. That was a Chinese idiom to describe the the fate that binds a father and son together. And this best describes the movie, After This Our Exile.After migrated to Malaysia, Hong Kong director/scriptwriter Patrick Tam decided to tell a tale of gambling-addicted father (Aaron Kwok, which earns him a Golden Horse Award from Taiwan for Best Actor) and a son (the 9 year old newcomer Gouw Ian Iskandar) who was torn between his father and his mother (Charlie Yeung).Set in Ipoh, Perak, the story begins with the boy sensing something is amiss when his mother was exceptionally nice to him in a morning before school. He found out that she was preparing to leave the home. He informs his father, and the couple had a quarrel in their neighborhood. She fails to run away.When the mother told the father that she is leaving him due to his bad temper and gambling addiction, he decided to change. He brought the whole family for a cruise, and yet he goes gambling in the cruise. She left the family this time round, leaving the son and the father to face the problem.Facing with harassment from the loan sharks and tonnes of unpaid bills, the father seek another alternative to get the money by go gambling in Genting Highlands. (Note: Genting Highlands is a tour/leisure resort in Pahang, Malaysia, where it consist of theme parks, shopping malls and casinos. Popular among Malaysians and Singaporeans.) He lost the money, leaving them with larger debts. To get the money, the father gets the son to steal valuables from their neighbors.After This Our Exile is a simple yet sad tale about the struggles between a father and the son. The father was struggling from the loss of his wife, constant debts and his gambling addiction. The son was struggling with the life without his mother, which ends up being ripped off from the privilege of continuing his elementary education. This, somehow, truly reflects on what is happening in our society today.Kwok takes a new exploration on the role of the father, who was short tempered, selfish, and more often, cried over spilled milk. Compared to his previous roles in other features, Kwok has given his fans and audience a new look on his skills for the past decade. Yeung's role as the mother can be added more, for there are rooms in theatrical version, which can explores more on the pains she has been through.The 9 year old Iskandar was something new for the film. Without any acting backgrounds, he amazes the audience with his fine and innocent acting skills.While the director's cut gives the audience a fuller view on the story, the theatrical version seems disappointing, for it left the audience with too much space to guess. This has somehow unable to brought up the 'vengence' that binds the father and son together, leaving a bittersweet aftertaste.After This Our Exile sounds common to some, but it left the audience to re-examine the strained relationship between a father and the son.