Named not for the Scottish city, but rather the region of Hong Kong; this story of a Hong Kong family: a Taoist priest, long-widowed now with his nightclub-owning girlfriend; their sad, lonely daughter whose life is blighted by memories of her mother’s contempt, and whose doctor husband is having an affair with a nurse; a hyper-competitive son who compulsively collects Star Wars memoriabilia and his aging model wife.
The son, Tao, loves his daugher, but his love is filtered through his ruthless, hyper-competitive view of life in Hong Kong: his casual use of “Fatty” as a nickname contrasts with the tender look at a sleeping daughter, making a game of changing lights with a shoulder ride is undercut by his harsh insistence to her mother that she stop deluding herself about her daughter’s chances of making a good marriage: she must learn to change light bulbs because no-one will do it for her. He encourages her to learn kung fu while wondering if her chubby looks are the result of an affair.
Meanwhile their little girl eats compulsively at nights, and obsesses about the topic of death by day, struggling to understand her grandfather’s role guiding spirits from the underwold to reincarnation; for his part, he hopes his role as a priest will atone for the generations of death he sees his fisherman ancestors as having wreaked on the oceans.
There is the complexity of love and loss and family, with beautifully drawn characters, wonderful direction and staging, sad and gentle and hard by turns, perfectly realised. A wonderful and sometimes difficult movie.