Anywhere the Wind Blows: Carrying On, Or Ways to Honour What Was Lost

Jay Liu’s Anywhere the Wind Blows overlaps the political with the personal to illustrate that, yes, the personal is as political as the political is personal. As we follow an evening in the life of a HongKonger in the US haunted by the memory of home, we begin to see the overlaps within the collapsing boundaries of time. The past and the future come roiling in to blend with the present in little flashes of lightning and Alex only hopes to steady himself enough to make it here and even, make it for his homeland. 

Alex (Glen Wong) is a student and an activist for Hong Kong, and with equal importance, he is a lonely immigrant who cannot escape the ghosts of home. The future beckons with its possibilities—a beautiful, luminescent man who is as potent for happiness as for heartbreak, given that he is a stranger and Alex is just looking and longing—but the past maintains its by turns affectionate and nightmarish grip. This takes on a literal form in the figure of his ex, Brandon (Ray Kam, with hints of Harry Golding), who is spending the last night of his trip to the US with Alex. 

It is a compelling dynamic between the two, if only for the sorrow and mess it portends. Alex, lost and hapless; Brandon; cool, even cocky. But the movie star persona is, as all movie star personas on screen, brittle. And so it cracks, revealing an Alex who was strong enough to leave behind the known world, and is strong enough to push away what is bad for him. Suddenly it clicks why the restaurant they meet at is named Le Mepris. 

Someone edited footage of Hong Kong’s suppression of anti-extradition protests to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”. The gravelly voice purrs through every drawn out syllable with the same languor that extends the sure movement of the police against the protestors. Undercutting both is overwhelming emotion. An insurmountable grief pervades the frames. 

The imagery of Anywhere the Wind Blows brings back the footage and the song and the grief  with violent detail. It becomes a keen substitute for actual experience with enough force that Alex’s trauma, longing, and guilt do not need explaining; memory—his and ours—is enough. 

Besides the Past Lives-ness of the story, Guadagnino’s Queer also makes its way into the film, in the characterisation, the transience of living elsewhere, and in the drug induced snatches of imagination mixed with lived experience. The film is at its best in these moments as end after end and beginning after beginning come ceaselessly in tangles as the only way to ensure you are still living, to ensure that the cost of living was worth the price.

Watch Anywhere the Wind Blows Short Film Trailer