Movie review: At the end of daybreak (2009), Yuhang Ho

Drama, that doesn’t reach the heart.

In the beginning of this movie Tuck pours a kettle of boiling hot water over a rat in a cage and wraps the dead body in a newspaper. It is not clear why he does so. Is he sadistic or is he going to sell the rat to a restarant? Later on his mother, who manages a little supermarket, says that their cat doesn’t catch rats. It is not an important fact in this movie, but I wondered why Yuhang ho opened with it. Is everything in life cruel?

Tuck is 23 years old and in love with highschool student Ying, not sixteen years old yet. They are both an only child in Hong Kong and get along quite careless with eachoter. In his movie we usually see them apart, but when they are together they are pretty silent and not really good friends.

Ying is a cute girl who lives with her father and her mother. She is not doing well in school and with her pianolessons. She is in conflict with another girl, Sharon. Ying tells in the school that Sharon is making love with a boy. Sharon and her girlfriends are angry at her, especially when they get punished by the school for beating up Ying. Ying gets contraconception pills from her friend Wan.   

Tuck’s father is living with his aunt. Tuck smokes and rides his motorbike when he is not working. Tucks mother once went to a party with friends and told a riddle about an old Chinese emperor who was blind and famous in the U.S. The answer was Kangxi, pronounced as cannot see in English. 

The most important scene is when the parents of Ying discover that Ying and Tuck are having sex with eachother. They invite Tuck and his mother in their home to talk about the situation. The atmosphere is not friendly at all. Tuck threatens the parents and get hit. The parents want money from them. Otherwise they will sue Tuck for rape. Tucks fears to go to jail en starts to sell his motorbike.

Tucks mother goes to her former husband to ask for more money, but the man is not happy to give it to her and Tuck did not like her to do so.

Even when they pay the requested amount two weeks later, the parents still want to sue Tuck. He asks Ying very seriously to stop her parents, but she says she cannot do something about it. Tuck feels in danger now and tries to find a solution, but it turns out to be not a very good one.  

The funny music - poppylike when Ying steals underwear in a shop - cannot change the fact that the the story is quite superficial and that the pictures don’t reach the heart.

Here the trailer, here another review in English. My review can also be read here, on the site of the IFFR