Matar + Cheung

I have managed not to want a different life most of the time

Hisham Matar interviewed by Christiane Amanpour, March 1, 2024.

My Friends, Hisham Matar [Random House]
Mabel Cheung, An Autumn’s Tale [D&B Films]

My greatest desire is for a novel I can slip into with ease. A complex plot rendered in sharp, measured prose. Hisham Matar’s My Friends is my ideal sort of novel. I love Matar’s own description of his fifth book: “30-plus years, told across a two-hour walk.”

Matar began with the two pages that open the novel. “About ten years before I sat down to write the book, I had written a page that I thought was … I just thought it  had everything I thought a novel needs to have,” Matar told Christiane Amanpour.

The novel recounts the life of Khaled Abd al Hady and his network of friends in the years after he moves from Libya to the UK—first, briefly in Edinburgh, and lastingly in London. Khaled and his friends “improvise a life, as many exiles do.” It’s a novel about growing up. About exile, and home, and reading.

But what has stayed with me in the weeks since I finished it is how honest it is about friendship. True friendship waxes and wanes. We turn our most critical lens on those we love as friends. We get annoyed by them, pick at them, and let them disappear out of our lives for years. And yet time, distance, age, all fall away when we share a true accord.

There is a lovely description of an exchange between Khaled and his friend Hosam soon after they first meet. Khaled has just recounted his involvement in a 1984 protest outside the Libyan embassy that made his exile to London permanent:

I had never told anyone this before and, as I spoke, I felt I had come upon something I was saying for the very first time, certain that he understood me perfectly.

“Certain that he understood me perfectly,” is what we all hope for in a friendship.

—

There is a beautiful shot of the Brooklyn Bridge in Mabel Cheung’s 1987 film An Autumn’s Tale. We’ve heard traffic rattle past, watched the characters joke about how a boarded up window denies them a view of its majesty, but it is always out of frame. Cheung opens the scene with the shadow of the bridge slinking down the buildings opposite, almost appearing to disembark at street level.

Cherie Chung as Jennifer Lee

An Autumn’s Tale, like My Friends, is a coming of age tale set in exile. Jenny moves to New York to follow a boyfriend, only to find she’s been replaced in his heart. Her cousin several times removed, nicknamed “Figurehead” or Figgy, has found her a place to live, and steps in as her friend and protector. His introduction to the film is a perfect airport pickup—in a busted car, late, with two friends in tow.

The film is up now on Criterion as part of their series “Hong Kong in New York,” which highlights the films that came out of the 80s Hong Kong film boom that take the Big Apple as their setting. (Criterion—please start crediting your curators! I want to know who put together this collection.)

An Autumn Tale was Cheung’s first feature film (The Illegal Immigrant from 1985 was her thesis) and was shot on a budget of roughly half a million dollars. Stacilee Ford has a breakdown of its making:

Predominantly New York-based, with the exception of a production assistant from Hong Kong, the crew was comprised largely of NYU graduate students or Cheung and Law's Chinatown friends. Cheung had only two months to make An Autumn's Tale. While the majority of the filming took place in New York City, the scenes with Jenny and Figgy inside their apartment building were filmed in Kowloon Tong, in Hong Kong.

A pause for fashion. It’s bothered me for a while that most of the current preppy/80s fashion discourse traffics almost exclusively in white celebs. I can’t remember the last time I was this inspired by the sartorial possibilities suggested by a film.

Figgy’s olive Windsor check suit paired with an orange plaid shirt, red tie, and a 2” pin-back fuchsia-yellow button on his lapel? Perfection. Jenny’s effortlessly cool mix of creams, blacks and browns begs to be mood boarded by Simplicity yesterday.

Bring back this baseball cap silhouette!

I went back to Matar’s novel the day after I watched Cheung’s film. Khaled has a phone conversation with his father after the protest that will keep him in London:

It was at once important and impossible to know what my father knew and what he did not know about what had befallen me. Were we speaking in code, or as honestly as those morning conversations when sometimes he and I woke up before Mother and Souad, and would sit side by side speaking softly?

Early in the film, Jenny records a tape for her mother that is embroidered with lies—she gives an update on her now-ex boyfriend, describes an upcoming date they are going on, and assures her mother she has enough money.

As the tape continues, the shot cuts to Jenny walking around the city, and ends with her entering a restaurant where she orders the cheapest egg sandwich. Figgy walks in, spots her and her sad sandwich, and promptly orders an extravagant double meal. There is so much that is lovely about this film, but someone quietly ensuring you get a proper meal is the height of friendship for me.

Friendship is the relationship that most marks and shapes our lives. Both Matar and Cheung give us characters surrounded by a constellation of friends who bisect and shape the central relationships. I thought when I went to bed after watching Cheung’s film that it was a romantic comedy, but I think it’s actually the portrait of two friends who find each other at exactly the right time.