For his feature debut, writer-director (and also editor) Nick Cheuk joins the ranks of contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers creating tight, timely commentaries on toxic cultural norms enabled by societal expectations of success and failure. In Time Still Turns the Pages, he takes a magnifying glass to rising suicide rates among Hong Kong youth in light of social pressures, a further indictment of shared ideals across a breadth of Asian social systems. For his film, Time Still Turns the Pages, Cheuk bagged the Best New Director prize and the Audience Choice Award at the 60th Golden Horse Awards last year; the film was also nominated for Best Narrative Feature, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. The film also opened the 18th edition of the Five Flavours Asian Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland, taking a victory lap after its acclaim last year.
In Cheuk’s film, a janitor finds an anonymous suicide note in the clasroom trashcan of kind-hearted high school teacher Mr. Cheng (Lo Chun-Yip), who resolves to find the student who wrote the letter before anything happens. Mr. Cheng’s story serves as a framing device for the bulk of the film’s flashback story, which centres around his reflection of a personal story from his childhood involving two primary school-aged brothers, Eli (Sean Wong Tsz-lok) and Alan (Curtis Ho Pak Lim).
Cheuk pivots back and forth between the two threads, examining Mr. Cheng’s ongoing divorce and his relationship with the so-called “delinquent” student Vincent (Henick Chou) as well as the tale of young Eli, who struggles with deep depression in the face of multifaceted abuse from his father, Ronald (Cheng Chi-Hung), and pressure from his mother, Heidi (Rosa Maria Velasco). While the younger Alan excels at music and school, easily becoming the obvious favourite of their parents, the older Eli falls to the wayside, becoming the go-to target of harrowing emotional and physical violence.
Time Still Turns the Pages was clearly made with a broader commercial audience in mind while still retaining more arthouse stylistic elements, including its muted colour scheme. Relying on heavy narration to carry its story, the film falls prey to some stiff dialogue while falling into a body of films that function as effective melodramas, constructed to be tearjerkers from the start. At the film’s most melodramatic is the sonic usage of Tchaikovsky’s sweeping piano piece “Träumerei,” also known as “Reverie.” While undoubtedly a strikingly beautiful song, its use as a repeated motif within the film borders on clichéd, dropping in to signal yet another somber moment. (Curiously, the exact same song is used in another 2023 Hong Kong film, Sasha Chuk’s Fly Me to the Moon, which also tackles intergenerational trauma).
If Cheuk’s goal is to really hit the nail on the head, he accomplishes this goal with flying colours, even if at the expense of a more nuanced approach. The heavy voiceover narration, which guides the childhood story, also reveals a turn that becomes essential to the film’s impact, further subverting the ingrained narrative that forcing kids during childhood to overperform will ultimately lead to happiness and even conventional “success” later in life. Nonetheless, Time Still Turns the Pages could still certainly dial back on some of the more on-the-nose elements or integrate more gentle thematic symbolism.
In the present-day story, Cheuk splits Mr. Cheng’s attention between the suicide note and Vincent, when the narrative could have perhaps been better served with just a focus on the former. The administration unfairly believes Vincent instigates fights, when in reality, he is merely defending himself against a swath of fierce verbal and physical bullying — a parallel to Eli’s story in which he tries his best to fight against a system stacked against him. Cheuk often shoots his actors with their backs toward the lens, the camera moving away slowly — as if backing away and as if we, too, are simply watching them from a great distance and refusing to intervene when the characters need us most.
At times, the violence depicted onscreen from Ronald toward Eli is not only heartbreaking but sometimes overtly and unnecessarily difficult to watch. The brutality is made more extreme when one of the same sequences of verbal and physical abuse is repeated twice, with Eli fleeing in fear while kicking and screaming. Cheuk toes the line between floating into trauma porn territory and not depicting enough on-screen for an emotional impact to sink in, knowing what affecting strings to pull to get the tears flowing without alienating viewers.
Sean Wong Tsz-lok shines as the embattled, struggling young Eli, whom we follow for the majority of the story. Yet, while Eli and Mr. Cheng are fully formed characters, the brothers’ parents are made out to be a set pair of stock characters: the strict, sickeningly abusive father and his stereotypically demure wife, coerced into defending his violent acts toward their powerless children, who only later develops agency when tragedy strikes. However, these are caricatures that many viewers might recognise in some form, even if Cheuk offers hyper-concentrated and slightly one-dimensional characters for the sake of the film.
Hanging over the film’s many narratives is the pushback against the concept of an innocent bystander: that passiveness plagues contemporary Hong Kong society, used to excuse horrific behaviour and events. The filmmaker most confidently depicts the caution and grief of his young subjects, especially Alan who is occasionally supportive but typically indifferent to his brother’s attempts to improve the skill sets his parents desperately impose upon him. The most powerful aspect of Cheuk’s film is that it lands its didacticism without being too self-important. Granted, the painful lessons and advocacy for change he presents must still be reiterated, time and time again.
