In Li Zi Shu’s sprawling Malaysian Chinese novel, a family is said to be marked by early death; in Edmund Yeo‘s screen adaptation, in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto Film Festival, that curse becomes the hinge on which five decades of Malaysian history swing, carried by a woman named Du Li An and the two men, one thought dead, who share the same face. Li Zi Shu’s book, which begins on page 513 as a deliberate nod to May 13, 1969, was long considered too structurally slippery for cinema, its timelines folding into one another, its narrators unreliable, its boundary between memory and myth left permanently uncertain. That date refers to race riots that broke out in Kuala Lumpur following a bitterly contested general election, leaving hundreds dead and prompting a state of emergency; the ethnic and political fault lines that hardened in its aftermath still shape Malaysia today.
He told her then that he knew he could not reproduce the novel literally. At the center of the frame story is Kai (Troy Liu), a boy who stumbles onto a novel titled “The Age of Goodbyes” and finds himself drawn into the world of Du Li An (Vivian Sung), whose romance with Lin Sang (Stanley Yau) in Ipoh in 1969 ends when he vanishes after confiding in her about his family’s curse. Years later, a man named Mong Sang, also played by Yau, arrives bearing Lin Sang’s exact face and insisting he is someone else entirely.
The film, a Taiwan-Malaysia co-production shot in Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Thai and English, marks Yeo’s fifth fiction feature, following “River of Exploding Durians,” “We, the Dead,” “Malu” and “Moonlight Shadow.” Yeo made one significant departure from the source material. In the novel, Lin Sang disappears on the day Du Li An marries another man, Steely Bo; in the film, Yeo tied that disappearance directly to the racial violence of May 13 instead. That instinct comes from Yeo’s own family.
He discovered Li Zi Shu’s novel shortly after a trip to China, where he visited his family’s ancestral shrine in Chaoshan and learned new details about his grandfather’s migration to Southeast Asia. His mother once told him that his great-grandfather was a kung fu master who leapt across a moving train while carrying his infant grandson to safety, a story he has no way of confirming. Several songs in the film were written and performed by Yeo’s own parents in the 1970s, decades before their son thought to build a movie around a fictional Ipoh where they might have been playing on the radio.
Playing opposite Yau as both the vanished Lin Sang and his double, Mong Sang, meant sitting inside uncertainty rather than resolving it. Sung recalls filming Du Li An’s first sight of Mong Sang. That confusion is written into the dialogue itself.
Du Li An speaks Cantonese at home, Mandarin with Lin Sang and Cantonese with Mong Sang. Sung, who is Taiwanese, spent five to six months preparing the role, working with two language coaches on a 1960s Malaysian Chinese Cantonese and Hokkien accent and living for a month in Kuala Lumpur before joining the crew for pre-production in Ipoh. The costume department let her keep the qipaos she wore in fittings.
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