As Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well” opens, the gently moving camera both observes the affectionate routines of a Hong Kong lesbian couple in their 60s, Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin), at the same time it seems to be caressing their life of four decades together like a precious fabric. They walk in the woods, enjoy time with their community of friends, shop the farmers market arm in arm and host big joyful meals with Pat’s extended clan, to whom they’re more than just out. “Aunty” Angie couldn’t be closer to the grown kids of Pat’s brother, Shing (Tai Bo), and his wife, Mei (Hui So Ying): She helped raise them when times for that family were tough.
There’s a big difference, though, between being family and, in the wake of a loss, remaining family. When Pat dies suddenly, a bereft Angie finds herself in a situation that puts her at odds with Shing’s family, whose handling of their grief begins to look a lot like callous discrimination. With patience and emotional intelligence, writer-director Yeung, whose handful of features (“Suk Suk,” “Front Cover”) shine a light on gay lives in Hong Kong, explores another quietly wrenching story of the types of battles for respect and acceptance that gay couples go through.
If one needs a practical takeaway from this ache of a movie, it’s this: Make things official. Almost immediately, there’s a disagreement over a burial that Angie has no legal standing over because she and Pat never married. Mei and Shing casually dismiss Angie’s insistence that Pat wanted to have her ashes scattered at sea, instead heeding the advice of their fortuneteller, arranging for a traditional ritual and internment in a columbarium. The heartbreaking rictus of hurt on Angie’s fallen face at the ceremony, only one of many across Patra’s moving performance, says it all: a combination of disillusionment at the separation she’s feeling from a family she thought she knew and shame for not being able to honor the wishes of her loved one.
Things worsen when Angie learns Pat didn’t make a will, sparking an estate battle for the apartment that was in Pat’s name, which could evict Angie from the home she and her life partner made. Complicating the scenario is the financial hardship of Mei’s and Shing’s family: Their son Victor (Leung Chung Hang) wants to start a family with his girlfriend, while daughter Fanny (an excellent Fish Liew Chi Yu), aggrieved by circumstance, wants something bigger than the cramped space she shares with her two kids and a husband she barely tolerates. That neither of the kids’ romantic relationships (much less their parents’) are as strong as their Aunty’s was with Pat makes the message being sent even colder, as if the economic gain from an oversight naturally trumps doing right by a lasting bond.
As “All Shall Be Well” unfolds, Yeung lets on that he has no use for broad villain strokes, with the performances of Tai Bo and Hui — pinched and distracted — helping establish the sad reality that grief mixed with need doesn’t always concede space for people to feel charitable. The narrative is just understated enough to also let us see that Angie isn’t only fighting people she’s known intimately for years, but an unequal society that allows the increasingly impossible dream of homeownership to come between loved ones.
Angie goes through a lot and with an admirable reserve of strength (you’ll never feel happier that a character has such great friends), but the worst part is how the whole experience leads her to question the very thing that she should be leaning on most: where Pat’s heart stood toward her. It’s a quietly shattering place “All Shall Be Well” goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.
