The Butterfly Lovers – A Winter Storm
LOVELAND (aka “Expired”) – a film by Ivan Sen – (SPOILERS) ⁓
Jack
In a version of Hong Kong that hasn’t happened yet, a hitman named Jack (Ryan Kwanten) follows a cop into an alleyway and in exchange for a wad of cash learns that his next target will (most probably) be at the West Side Laundromat. After his kill, Jack rents a “humanoid masseuse” (Maria Corpetti). At home in bed with her, he looks into her eyes and utters a series of questions: “Mother, if I saw you again, would you remember me? Would you know your own eyes looking back at you? Do you still think of me? Was it you? Does this mystery belong to you?”
The humanoid masseuse
Jack grew up on the streets. As a boy, he traveled for a while with a man he called his father until one morning the man was gone and Jack knew he was never coming back. Jack’s mother sold him before he was born, and he never knew her. “I don’t blame her, though,” he says. “It happens all the time.” It is the middle of winter and a typhoon is approaching. On television, a weather reporter (Genevieve Wong) remarks on the approaching storm. “These are crazy times,” she says.
That night, what remains of his childhood, mainly butterflies and rain, comes to him in a dream.
The next morning he sees a girl on the subway and is drawn to her, and this may or may not be because she has a butterfly tattoo on her left wrist. Jack follows the girl to the Karaoke club where she works. The club is very much like the place where he rented the humanoid masseuse, except that the women are entirely human and give private karaoke performances through one-way glass. He chooses number 398, the girl from the subway (played by Jillian Nguyen), whose stage name is April, and is from a small village in the south of Vietnam. “There is no money there,” she explains, “but it’s quiet and you can still see the moon at night.” He asks her to eat with him. She accepts and they meet at midnight.
April
After this encounter, Jack isn’t feeling well so he sees a doctor who explains that Jack’s blood cells are overloading and he’s losing aerobic ability but other than that Jack is very healthy and his DNA shows no signs of decay.
He spots a man following him and gives chase until the man is struck by a bus, which knocks the activation chip out of his head revealing him to be a humanoid. Jack traces the chip from the dead humanoid to a biotech corporation called Matsuka Industries and learns that its head scientist, Dr. J Bergman (Hugo Weaving), disappeared some time ago. Jack finds Bergman, whose name might be an homage to Ingmar Bergman, who loved noir and would have enjoyed this film.
“The machines were meant to replace us, but it’s cheaper to buy your soul than a quantum chip.”
The girls at the Karaoke Club.
April calls. Over lunch she tells him: “That first night after we spoke I dreamed about you. We were sitting on a mountain. in a desert it was sunset we were watching these balls of light flying across the horizon. You said they were lost souls looking for their place in the world. When i woke i was lying in my bed missing you…I never missed anyone before. Not like that.” She invites him to spend the night with her, then goes to work. Jack does not see Bergman watching him from the street outside. He does spot a pair of shoes he has seen before and figures he’s being followed again. Outside he confronts the man. “You killed my brother,” the man tells him. Jack tries to shoot him but has a seizure and the man gets away. Bergman is watching all this.
Bergman’s specialty is life-extension and his research seems to involve gene splicing and the “Mourning Cloak” butterfly. Bergman keeps one of those as a pet. When he was a young man his lover died and Bergman has him cryogenically preserved until whatever killed him can be cured. The man, played by Isaac McClymont) is referred to in the credits as “cryogenic lover”, but otherwise the relationship is not specified.
The Zambian man (Franck Latour)
At their next meeting, Bergman scans Jack and finds high concentrations of hormones in his blood. The doctor asks if he has encountered anything unusual and when Jack is not forthcoming, says “How about the girl in the restaurant?” Jack says the symptoms began about the same time that he met April, then asks “Why are they following me?” and Bergman says he can’t answer that yet, but takes some blood along with Jack’s contact information.
Jack and April go skating and discuss their mutual fear of intimacy. We learn that April once had a daughter and lost her. Just how isn’t explained, but the girl must still be alive because April hopes she’s all right.
Bergman
Bergman meets Jack for coffee and tells him that as a child, he was part of an experimental program at the Masuka Corporation that restricted production of hormones responsible for deep enotion, and that Matsuka wants to “take him in” to conclude its life-extension experiments. Jack’s body, it seems, has adapted to function without these hormones to the extent that when they’re reintroduced, they become toxic.
The doctor further explains that if Jack remains in good health he might “live long enough to have a chance to live forever” but because he is hormone intolerant, to be cured he must stop seeing April. “What if I can’t stay away from her?” Jack asks and Bergman tells him: “Then you will die.”
“The future is the future. It is not my business.”
Rhamsy in his film debut as the Zambian man’s brother.
The weather reporter on TV says that the winter typhoon has changed direction and is now heading northeast. Jack and April spend another night together. “All my life I’ve felt i didn’t belong anywhere,” Jack tells April. “When I’m with you that feeling’s gone.” Next morning when he wakes, April is gone.
Outside, the brother of the man Jack killed at the start of things pulls a gun on Jack but two humanoids appear and shoot the man and are in turn shot by him. It is not clear who sent the humanoids, but Jack escapes unscathed. He tries to see April at the club but is told she has gone back to Vietnam. This might not be entirely true, because we next see her casually toss a handgun into a trash bin on the street. “That gorgeous display of brilliant sweet illusion,” she says to herself. “The city too will lie.”
April communes with her reflection. On the wall behind is a photo from her past.
A TV report says that the acid rain index is medium and another winter typhoon is forming off the coast.
April stares at a young flower girl in the street and thinks to herself: “No reason can sustain until dawn. Do not say you feel guilty for me. Please do not comfort me. I know how to go this road alone.”
Jack, who seems to have recovered from his malady because he comforts the dying man who tried to kill him, stares at a television with no picture and thinks: “Why should I be afraid? Mother, why should you, for my eyes to look back at me and yours back at you. I’ll wait for you. For your warmth, your beauty, your truth. I’ll wait for you.”
Commentary
Genevieve Wong as the recurring weather reporter – Wong is Field Producer for the History Channel series THE PROOF IS OUT THERE
The Mourning Cloak butterfly (nymphalis antiopa) is known in the UK as the Camberwell Beauty and is almost never found in the southern hemisphere, but several other varieties of nymphalidae are found in Zambia. The man Jack kills at the start of things, played by Franck Matour, is referred to in the credits as “Zambian man”.
Jillian Nguyen explained to Beth Shiller of Fandomize how she prepared for the role of April: “I watched a lot of videos on YouTube of that kind of environment, you know, girls who are nightclub singers, hostesses in, you know, like, the darker part of the industry, or whatever you call it. I would just watch interviews of real live women who, for some reason, this is their livelihood. I’d watch just to see and to empathize with them.”
The cat that lives in the alley behind Bergman’s building.
Ryan Kwanten told Matthew Eeles of Cinema Australia: “…this had something to say politically as much as it did intimately, and very much a calling card as to where we are headed as a species? Are we headed towards a more loveless technologically connected society? Or are we going to revert back to a more indigenous mindset where we sit down and we have conversations, we look each other in the eye and we’re not afraid to get deep? We’re not afraid to feel things again. I think this is Ivan’s way of warning us in a way as to where we’re headed.”
The “lost souls” Jack mentions in April’s dream might connect to butterflies via an Aboriginal Dreamtime story “The Birth of the Butterflies” (though the story is not referenced in the film).