Us and The Night
Audrey Lam's film set in a library invites inspection and introspection
Recently, as part of their Rest & Relax programme, Asian Film Archive screened Audrey Lam's 2024 feature debut, Us and The Night. It has a charming film school vibe, with 16mm cinematography and a fairly flat sound mix, an association I make with entirely positive connotations. This is a film about the purity of observation, in lingual and visual elements, and the exploration of a relationship between two girls that feels metaphysical across time and dimension. The film was made over a period of ten years, with most of the footage of the two actresses being captured 10 years ago. It feels experimentally cobbled together and yet deliberately considered, like a wistful dream made concrete with the nostalgic splendour of 16mm film and the emotional dimension of diaristic voiceover.
The film concerns Umi and Xiao (played by Umi Ishihara and Xiao Deng) who are librarians working in a small and largely deserted university library. Most of the film is set at night after opening hours as Xiao puts books back on shelves and Umi vacuums. Or rather, that's how I'd most plainly describe it on its surface because this is actually a film about visual and linguistic rhyme and recurrence. Umi and Xiao narrate the going-ons within the library and the wandering thoughts in their minds as the film glides and cuts across the library and its contents; aisles and carrels and shelves and books and pages and words.
The film is constantly delightful as it plays with language and image in meandering fashion. Early on in the film, there is a fun sequence where Umi talks about the criss-crossing in the letter X in Xiao's name, followed by a montage of rhythmically cut criss-crossing aisles in the library from her point of view, and then glancing upwards towards the the diagonal patterns of the overhead fluorescent lights. There’s a gently pleasant surprise to the film’s explorations of visual and aural recurrences and rhyme, constantly provoking with tiny diversions, and having fun in the elements of the library amidst the tedium of bookkeeping and cleaning. There are visual jokes here that remind me of How to with John Wilson, where lines of narration are punctuated with little punchlines delivered by a sudden cut to a word, or a book, or a thing, or an action: like a tiny gust of wind (blew) moving a strip of paper, rhyming with the word “blue”.
For this film, the library is its chief world, a world that contains worlds. Even in its network of aisles and carrels and shelves, Lam’s chief focus is the relationship between Xiao and Umi, two people who have found themselves orbiting each other in the library’s Dewey Decimal system. As Lam plays with words and develops the ways in which these two women think and feel about each other, she builds to the climactic reveal of Xiao's gift to Umi when she finally turns 21. It's simple, precious, and joyful, I hope you can find a way to experience it.
There are sequences where Lam will cut rapidly through pictures in books, like a sequence on the universe quickly cutting through many pictorial references of planets from textbooks and encyclopaedias. The rapid cuts barely give you enough time to process the series of images, except to know the subjects presented, like flipping quickly through interleaved pages from different books. There are many such sequences, suggesting the vast amount of knowledge, and the extent of other worlds that are contained in these books, but Lam does not linger on them. She does not give you a chance to focus on these tangents. The library is the universe. Umi and Xiao are its planets, and the books are their moons.
On the linguistic front, Lam delights in the voiceovers where Umi and Xiao turn words over in their voices, realising their multiple meanings. In fact, “turn” is one of those words, where they dance around the many ways we may turn a corner, or turn a page, or turn an age, before we are hit with the non-sequitur visual punchline of images of Saturn and book return slips.
Which in turn, reminds me of the concept of a “Saturn return”. If you have at least a vague interest in astrology, you may have learnt that the year of your Saturn return is a pivotal moment of change in your personal timeline. It is the year Saturn makes a full orbit around the Sun since your birth, which takes 29 years. Of course, even without any bearing from astrology, the year on the cusp of your 30s is definitely one of major significance. A temporal site ripe for major life changes or reinvention. I'm guessing that moment has passed for both actresses and their director during the 10-year long gestation of this film, which means it has somehow also become a marker of their personal histories, a time capsule of their befores in contrast to the nows they currently live.
What fascinates me about the film and the meta narrative around its making is that it is a film made by three people seeking clarity about their future, and now those same three people look on the finality of its completion as a piece of the past. It’s a film that is wistful about the future instead of the past, embellished with the nostalgia for personal history, and the yearning for physical spaces, physical books, physical film. I guess, invariably, all art ends up being about the past, no matter their subject matter. Actors age, ideas evolve, circumstances change, the universe keeps expanding. Art about the future can only be made by elements of the past. Films are time machines that only go backwards.
During the Q&A, Umi talks about how the film captured her boredom in her youth, a feeling she now misses as an adult. There’s a sort of precociousness to the speech in the voiceovers, of playful thinking, of aimlessness. There are moments of elongated time and restlessness in this film that translate to the viewing experience, forcing you to shift and stir in your seat, wondering where Lam and co are going with it all. I imagine it can be a difficult movie for some to sit through. In recent months, I have been thinking a lot about how drastic the world has shifted in the last decade, both personally and globally; how we can no longer afford the time for stillness and boredom.
Lam laments a little the digitalisation of physical libraries in this interview, and I also personally feel a nostalgia for the analogue nature of both books and the libraries themselves. I have found myself leaning towards e-books for their convenience, but there is some charm in the wear and tear of a book that has passed through dozens of pairs of hands. Even better still, a book that needs to be stamped and checked out by a librarian, a process that increases friction in transaction, but induces the static of pleasant interpersonal interaction. What do we lose when we digitalise every single process? Is a library merely a way to check out books? Is it not also a way to check out people?
Watching the film also reminded me of the grand Olin Library at Wesleyan University, full of aisles no one frequents, and books many are not going to read, mostly used as a place to do homework and read lecture notes. Nearly 10 years out, I can’t imagine those aisles have seen much other action (although probably still the site of a certain other kind of action). I miss it also because I shot a little film myself on 8mm reversal film during our sight and sound class. It’s not incredible by any means, but if you’re interested, I have embedded it below. In many ways I am thankful for Lam's film that serendipitously has met me in this moment, similarly yearning to reacquaint myself with the sensations of boredom and restlessness which I never knew I would miss.
Notes
AFA’s Rest and Relax programme also screened Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour on the big screen which was a real treat! Still my favourite Hamaguchi film. I wrote a long review on Letterboxd way back when.v
I never got around to scanning this sight and sound project, so the video is just me recording the film running on a Steenbeck which explains the poor quality! Editing by hand on a Steenbeck is probably the best thing the film department at Wesleyan let us do.