Meditation Park

The title gives pause. No reference is made to a “Meditation Park.” That could be the greenery through which the Chinese women run their aerobic jog and where Maria watches and is confronted by her husband Bing’s mistress. But in a cafe scene the women discuss a higher reality, the spiritual world before which our mundane existence is just an illusion. That scene roots the title.

The film presents several scenes of daily life advancing into such a higher reality. They usually depict a situation of earnest conflict giving way to a spirit of community, harmony, higher understanding. 

The most obvious involves neighbour Gabriel. At first he is disruptive and selfish, undermining the Chinese women by stealing their parking clients and undercutting their rates. When Maria helps him escape the cops (and a $5k fine, Canadian but still…) she shows him the error of his ways and converts enemy to friend. Their bond deepens when his invalid wife dies. At the end he’s jogging with the Chinese leaders through that park.

The fair-like block party is an image of the neighbourhood transcending its differences to discover an overriding new harmony. The soundless disco is a double metaphor. When the characters dance to a seemingly unheard music they embody the life attuned to a higher reality. Their separate earphones confirm they are separated individuals but bonded by an unseen harmony.  The makes this temporary amusement park a kind of meditation park. 

So, too, the film’s two most moving and revealing scenes: intimate exchanges between separated women. In the first Maria’s banished son’s fiancee drops in for an unexpected visit. The women thaw the ice their men have left stiff between them. 

In the second Maria is visited in the park by her husband’s mistress, who apologizes for having lured him away and explains the loneliness and despair that drove her into that adultery. Maria forgives her — and even asks her to take him back, to make him and her own life less miserable. The girl properly declines. 

Here as in the family reunion at the unseen wedding, an antagonism yields to a new harmony.  

 Bing has himself undergone a process of revelation. He has banished his son in anger at his loss of face when the son missed the community dinner. When his mistress dumps him, Bing explodes in drunken rage. He despairs at the loss of his romantic future. He numbly offers his wife the escape he planned with his mistress. But in ordering Maria to miss their son’s marriage Bing tries to reaffirm his autocratic authority. But she has discovered independence, through higher values than his domestic tyranny. 

The father may not have gone to his son’s wedding, but when he stands alone and humbled before the wall of family photos and he feels the pain at his daughter’s revolt against his dominance the film leaves the promise of possibly his discovery of values higher than his own vanity too. 

This is a superb film. It’s striking for the way its family of mixed marriages reveals a post-racist community. Race is not an issue here, though the clash of petty egos persists. 
     The characters are all finely detailed, flawed but sympathetic, glamour less and real. Director Shum brilliantly realizes their socio-economic milieu in the finely-detailed sets. But the heart of the film is those two scenes between the women — and a powerful, insightful heart it is.