That’s a lovely word,
lilting. It means the pleasing rise and fall of a voice, usually accented, and
so it makes an apt title for “Lilting” the first feature
for writer-director Hong Khaou, which concerns itself with a language barrier.
Junn (Cheng Pei Pei) is an elderly Chinese-Cambonian woman who emigrated to
Britain decades ago but still depends entirely on her son Kai (Andrew Leung).
In the first scene, we see the way she manipulates and guilt trips him; she
wonders why he is visiting her as if she were “a pet.”Junn, it turns out, has been put into