The further Expats progressed, the clearer it became that it was destined to be a story without resolution. That’s a tough pill to swallow for any viewer and an even tougher target to hit creatively, but the sixth and final entry of Lulu Wang’s limited series wraps up in moving ways by having its lead characters reckon not only with each other but with the lack of closure in their lives. Despite overflowing with overwrought, expository dialogue and voiceover verging on preachy, its images deftly capture the feelings its words often struggle to convey, thanks in no small part to a unique narrative flourish that blurs the line between conversation and wish fulfillment.
The show returns to its central trio this week in an episode titled “Home,†which explores what that word and concept even means to them anymore. It’s also the show’s first episode to feature an opening-credit sequence, one set to a montage of bustling international travel as Hilary heads home to the United States. Had every entry begun this way, the show would’ve had a markedly different energy, but in saving this upbeat montage for the very end, Expats introduces hints of hope and transformation through this and a handful of other aesthetic evolutions, each rooted in the characters’ psychology.
Months have gone by since the late 2014 typhoon rocked Hong Kong. Characters like Essie and Puri have tragically faded into the background once more, and TV screens in the corners of the frame tell stories of the Umbrella Movement protesters — who’ve now set up numerous tents — being raided and displaced by police. Notably, Margaret seems to pay attention to these developments for the first time, just as she finds an old T-shirt belonging to Gus while the family packs up to leave Hong Kong. Her impending departure is marked, perhaps, by a sense of longing for the place she’s decided to leave behind.
Meanwhile, Mercy is happier and much more comfortable with Charly (in one of the aforementioned tents, in fact) than she ever was with David, to the point that her re-introduction takes the form of a pulsating musical montage. It’s a major stylistic departure from the show’s romantic moodiness inspired by Wong Kar-wai, but it speaks to how, for the very first time, Mercy seems to harbor some hint of a positive outlook, even though she hasn’t yet told Charly that she’s been pregnant for several months.
As Margaret departs and Mercy plants her feet, Hilary is in a sort of limbo. She and David have finally separated, but her trip back to the U.S. is temporary since her father, Daleep (Kavi Raz), is about to undergo a risky surgery. As soon as she and her mother, Brinder, enter his hospital room, four previously unseen characters from India come into view — a woman Brinder’s age, a man, and a woman as old as Hilary and the woman’s baby — leading to an awkward non-exchange.
Who are these people? Family members of Hilary’s, with whom she’s had some falling out? The truth turns out to be even more complicated. It soon becomes clear that Daleep lived a double life in India and the United States, and the two middle-aged adults are his other children from the aforementioned older woman. Brinder grins and bears their presence, the way she’s always borne Daleep’s violent indignities, but to Hilary, these innocent strangers are living embodiments of betrayal. Simultaneously, that her half-sister has a baby is a stark reminder of the fact that she does not (something both parents badger her about).
Although she decides not to tell her father about her separation from David, Hilary tells him what he wants to hear just as he’s being wheeled in for surgery: that she’s pregnant and that the baby is a boy. However, this deception for his sake doesn’t feel like a fitting farewell, so she immediately changes her tune, finally giving in to the temptation to confront him about his constant abuse toward her mother, which she bore witness to as a child, and which she promises to tell her own baby about some day.
More time passes, and once she lands back in Hong Kong, David arrives to pick her up at the airport, offering his condolences about her father’s death. In conveying this information so swiftly and with neither pomp nor circumstance, the episode allows Hilary’s guilt-ridden confession — she believes her parting words killed her father — to feel all the more impactful and immediate, as though he had died just moments ago. It’s the closing of a vital loop for Hilary now that she’s finally confronted the cause of her neurotic obsession with outward appearance and façade, though she seems to be all the worse for it.
It’s nice, however, seeing Hilary and David be amicable for once, as though they work better as divorced exes than they ever did as a couple, though when David drops her off and leaves her side, the camera captures her in a wide frame, and she feels utterly alone. Her voiceover doubles down on conveying this, and though it doesn’t feel entirely necessary, it also lays the foundation for an intriguing narrative sleight of hand. In between its various segments, the episode cuts to close-ups of Hilary, Margaret, and Mercy addressing another character off-screen in the second person. Their gaze meets the lens; their eyes are transfixed, though we don’t yet know exactly who they’re talking to.
It brings the show’s prologue full circle since it began with Mercy’s epistolic address (likely to Margaret), though it soon becomes clear that each character’s snippets are intended for both their counterparts. Essentially, three different conversations — between Margaret and Hilary, Margaret and Mercy, and Mercy and Hilary — have been collapsed into one, as they each speak about surviving their circumstances. Mercy, notably, feels like the very act of being pregnant is akin to stealing both women’s babies since she was responsible for losing Gus and catalyzing David and Hilary’s divorce. She feels like she owes them something or like she isn’t worth the motherhood just on the horizon, though both older women eventually soothe her doubts in their own ways.
This collapsed trinity of scenes plays, at first, like a work of imagination or wish fulfillment, as though we were being presented with all the things they’d pictured saying to one another. However, a handful of literal and objective shots — of Mercy arriving to meet Margaret at a restaurant and of David asking Hilary if he could give Mercy her number — place this abstract structure firmly in the literal ground, perhaps to its slight detriment. Watching it does, to some degree, become about fitting the logistical pieces together (the “who said what, and to whom†of it all) rather than simply feeling these confessions and confrontations as though they existed in a wholly abstract emotional realm, like the show’s Magnolia-inspired prologue.
Mercy’s story initially suffers in similar ways. Her confrontation with David and eventual admission to Charly about her pregnancy are too reliant on words and not nearly enough on mood or on silence that holds tension. She speaks, yet again, about the curse she believes to be looming over her (after which Charly admonishes her about ignoring her various privileges as an American outsider), but at no point does she feel cursed, as though the camera were capturing her paranoia through her own point of view. Ji-young Yoo and Bonde Sham do the best with what they’re given, but the wordiness of it all largely overwhelms them, despite the occasionally incisive or economical shot, like Mercy’s admission and Charly’s reaction in a mirror being revealed in the same frame. The onus of telling the entire story rests on their shoulders when so much of Expats has been conveyed, thus far, through sensations alone.
That being said, the moment Mercy’s mother finally arrives to visit, much of their relationship snaps quickly into view. Given what little we’ve heard of her over the phone, it would be easy to expect some kind of caricatured monster, though we’ve only ever seen her through Mercy’s eyes (or rather, heard her through Mercy’s ears) and the real story is much more simple. They have the snappy, slightly confrontational, but ultimately loving dynamic of any young daughter and her mother, made all the more amusing because Mercy springs pregnancy on her as a surprise and copes with the fallout through humor. After her mother admonishes her in all the ways she expects, their subplot ends in tear-jerking fashion when Mercy finally accepts all the love and help offered to her and breaks down crying in her mother’s arms. Whether or not she still believes she’s cursed, this gentle-but-volatile moment is her acceptance that she doesn’t deserve to be.
However, the episode’s major highlight is yet another difficult and committed performance by Nicole Kidman, who spends most of “Home†engaged in these seemingly abstract conversations straight to the camera. Although she’s come to a more peaceful acceptance of Gus’s disappearance, what this really means is she no longer harbors the grudges she once did, whether against Mercy or David (which also leads to her subsequent apology to Hilary).
Kidman plays a mother who’s been rattled for ages to the point that it’s become a part of her identity, a predicament Mercy aptly describes in one of her voiceovers: “The pain becomes a part of you, and soon you can’t recognize yourself without it.†When her family eventually leaves for the U.S. with Essie in tow, she seems ready to leave Hong Kong behind, leading to a moment of childish bickering between Philip and Daisy at the airport, to which Margaret responds sternly, but as any usually frustrated mother might amid international travel. For a brief moment, and for the first time since Gus disappeared, everything feels normal. And yet, that momentary normalcy feels eerie the moment Margaret takes stock of it, leading to her last-minute decision to stay behind.
Daisy hates her for this. Philip and Clarke understand. And while it seems like the reversal of some linear character arc — woman learns to move on from missing son, only to take two steps back — it plays harmoniously in the episode’s context, during which each conversation thus far has been not about moving on from the past but about staying rooted as you deal with the present. The pain she feels is an intrinsic part of her; being Gus’s mother is a vital part of her identity, baked deep into her bones, and though this departure may cause a further rift with her family, it’s the “normal†she desires more than anything in the world.
Hilary learns to be happy, while Mercy finds the strength to accept other people’s love. But for Margaret, closure is impossible when she still has no answers about her son. In fact, she may never find them. But clenching her jaw and humming while moving forward is the closest she can feel to being alive. As tragic as the show’s conclusion may be, her destiny is learning to live with the most painful part of herself rather than leaving it behind.
Visual Expressions
• At the airport, a lateral shot of Margaret’s family advancing quickly toward their departure gate is soon matched by Margaret in a similar frame. However, she can’t seem to move forward with as much momentum — that is, until she’s back out on the street, searching for Gus.
• As Daleep is wheeled away to surgery, Hilary and Brinder stand in the hospital hallway with his other family, leading to a bizarre family portrait in a wide shot before they each exit the frame, leaving only an empty space and a sense of mystery.
• Not long after, when Margaret, Clarke, and the kids leave their apartment for good, the camera lingers behind, pushing in slowly on packed boxes and blowing curtains as though it were yearning for memories of a life once lived, now left behind.
• In a mirror to Mercy’s introduction in the show, “Home†ends with Margaret’s voiceover scoring a shot of her disappearing into a Hong Kong crowd, after which people quickly whiz by the camera in close proximity. This quick series of flashes enhances the episode’s sense of emotional crescendo; it feels entirely rousing, even if the words don’t fully click.
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