From left: Maxim Bessmertny, Mi Lee and Jorge Vale
After months of 20th anniversary fever in Macau, there is a welcome respite in Maxim Bessmertny’s The Handover (2020), which is neither a salute to the 1999 transfer of sovereignty from Portugal to China, nor really has much to do with it.
Best known for his narrative short film Tricycle Thief (2014), the local director’s latest film premiered at Cinematheque Passion on Friday night in what became the arthouse’s first major screening event since the coronavirus struck in late January.
His comedy short is moving day for a Portuguese-Chinese couple, who must get their affairs in order before the landlord of their spacious Coloane apartment arrives for an inspection. Their carefully devised plan falls apart in comedic fashion as everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Despite its name, The Handover doesn’t dwell on the handover.
Instead, as the local director protests to the Times, it is a snapshot of the present. “I am talking [in this film] about right now; the situation today. That’s what cinema should be,” he said.
The well-paced plot peppered with references to millennial Macau lifestyle went down well with Macau’s small audience of art and culture socialites invited to the premiere. Like Bessmertny, this motley crew of freelancer filmmakers, artists and other creative types may identify with Jorge Vale’s character, ‘Miguel’, a struggling musician who notes that if all else fails, he can “always find work with the casino.”
“The character of Miguel is similar to anyone in the arts industry – going through all these jobs, doing one after the other. Doing gigs you don’t want so that you can finally make the album you want,” Bessmertny told the Times on the sidelines of the premiere.
That reality may be changing in Macau. The cultural and creative industries have seen top-down support from a government keen to drive economic diversification in very specific sectors. Still-new Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng wants to restart these efforts, though it remains unclear whether he will be as fond of the arts as his predecessor.
“Why not? Why can’t this be an industry?” asks Bessmertny. “A lot of the filmmakers in Macau were trained outside in film academies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, New York… you have talented people with experience in serious productions. Why not take things a little more seriously and get serious producers to come here with their projects?”
The Handover stars three leading characters of three nationalities. Actors Jorge Vale and Mi Lee play the young couple (“madly in love” as Mi jokes in a post-screening interview), while Fabio Ari Calangi, who makes his acting debut, is the agent-cum-translator on whose shoulders move day is made possible.
Vale and Mi are professional actors, but Vale works as a radio disc jockey and Mi takes jobs as a master of ceremonies. Both talk about the need to branch out into different entertainment sub-genres. Both talk about the importance social media.
In a joint interview with the Times, the duo said their multiple roles were less about money and more about the need to develop an entertainment personality.
“In Macau – and elsewhere in the future – I believe this is the trend,” said Vale. “It’s not about being the best at something, but about being able to adapt and do new things.”
That rings true for Bessmertny as well, who says that “a filmmaker in Macau needs to be the leader, the director, the writer… sometimes the editor too.” It wouldn’t hurt, he adds, to ask for help from the outside once in a while.
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