User reviews

The migrant experience from Hong Kong to Australia is delightfully and movingly explored in this truly wonderful Australian film from Asian film maker Clara Law. Others on this site will tell you the story, but my reaction to this carefully presented balanced personal experience is to be entertained in such an informative and visually hilarious and emotional way that I applaud Clara Law's perceptive and heartwarming expertise as a film maker. As an Anglo Australian I am aware of this visually exhilarating and challenging country from my perspective, having generations of my family born here, resulting in me and my brothers and sisters and pals. For elderly Asian migrants and excited teens to encounter the Technicolor landscape, the 1000watt sunshine, the cobalt blue sky, and the wildlife, both city and suburban, furry, flying and even human FLOATING LIFE deliciously and sensitively allows all their astonishment and alarm to take the most remote audience on a familiar but angled journey through displacement and adjustment. This is one of my favorite films from the 90s and it will be one of yours too when you are lucky enough to see it. In the 60s the same theme was hilariously explored for an Italian man entering Blokesworld-Sydney in the raucous farce THEY'RE A WEIRD MOB. However FLOATING LIFE is a sensitive banquet, not a broad comedy. Thankyou Clara!

The migrant experience in Australia is an eye opener with powerful images constructed to tell the tale of human lives that roam the earth in search of a place to call home.

The stunning young and beautiful Claudette truly portrayed her role to the best of her ability, shes a star in the making, the first and hope not last of her remarkable work. Definitely "The Next Best Thing" - truly spectacular. this movie is an accurate and deep look into the hardships faced of Asian migration, something we can all learn from in days of such problems,. hopefully generations to come will be able to witness such a display of story telling and i hope i am not the only one that gained as much social and cultural awareness that was portrayed in the film. well done to the director Clara Law and the rest of the cast and crew, again all the best.

Clara Law's strengths are her provocative mise en scene and her playful seriousness. She also has a tendency to make structural leaps which, by forcing you to think through the story, ironically remove you from the story. This is a weakness, which fades upon repeat viewings of her work.

Floating Life is no different in this regard.

A traditional HK 'migration narrative', Floating Life tells the simplistic story of a family migrating from HK to Sydney. It is structured around a series of tableaux focusing on different family members.

However, Floating Life is a different film for law. It is her most personal.

It oozes emotional truth. Undoubtedly Law drew upon her own migration experience as well as that of her family [which migrated to Australia before she did]. It also draws heavily on pre-hand-over fears for its humanity. Even her typical whimsical humour creates a humanity for her characters.

And in the end, that is Floating LIfe's strength, the story of its characters. It is very moving.

For once (at least in her late period), Law's cinematic mastery has been subdued, or at least equalled by the emotional.

Worth hunting down.