High Wire – BFI London Film Festival Review
Go-Wing (Isabella Wei) works in her dad’s (Dominic Lam Kah-Wah) Chinese takeaway in the middle of a Yorkshire village. He thinks she’s going off to university to train to be a lawyer; in fact, every day she goes to a circus in the neighbouring village to train for a high wire act. Her mother, who died when she was small, used to be a gold-medal winning figure skater. Go-Wing has inherited that love of skating, and intends to take things one step further – she wants to skate on the high wire. As she trains, she has to contend with the village’s racism, and her own fear about what it would mean to be honest with her father.
There’s something of the fairy tale to Calif Chong’s debut feature, High Wire. At least when we first meet her, Go-Wing is like the movie’s Cinderella, slaving away at the takeaway while she dreams of bigger things. Pretty much everyone in her life in the equivalent of the ugly stepsisters, reminding her of her place, telling her she’s too small of a person to deserve any more than what she’s got.
But then one night, the takeaway gets a huge order that Go-Wing delivers to Circus Starz. The tent is empty when she first gets there, and so while she waits for someone to take the order off her, she skates (she skates everywhere) around the empty stage, thinking she’s performing only to please herself. Little did she know, handsome prince Sean (Nino Fernandez) had been watching her in the shadows. He suggests she audition for the troupe, and soon a magical world has opened up for her.
Although there is an element of that fairytale unreality underlining everything, High Wire is also firmly grounded in the lived reality of the children of immigrants. Everywhere she goes, Go-Wing is subject to racial hatred – even when people initially seem kind, it’s often in the service of a long, cruel game. She has one friend, Melissa (Kelsey Cooke), but though she’s well-intentioned, she can’t be trusted to stand up for her when the going gets tough. Her father is oblivious to the difficulties of her day-to-day existence, just concerned that she be at the restaurant to do her (unpaid) work, and that she continue down the path he envisioned for her as a high-flying lawyer. It’s a lonely, unhappy life – until she meets her new family at the circus.
While there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or unusual about High Wire’s depiction of Go-Wing’s struggles, the familiar beats are hit with an engaging, affecting earnestness. Isabella Wei plays her inner turmoil convincingly, making both her claustrophobic frustration and the relief at finding Circus Starz feel authentic; her climatic fight with her father, where both are finally honest with each other, is a particularly strong scene.
If the effects during the grand finale are a little bit ropey (at no point does it seem that she is actually up there, performing her death-defying act), by that point High Wire has built up enough emotional goodwill that it doesn’t really matter. Embrace the fairytale.
★★★★
