Edmund Yeo and Vivian Sung Chase Malaysia’s Buried Past in Toronto Title ‘The Age of Goodbyes’: ‘Ordinary People Living Inside History’

“The Age of Goodbyes” begins, in more ways than one, with a curse.

In Li Zi Shu’s sprawling Malaysian Chinese novel, a family is said to be marked by early death; in Edmund Yeo‘s screen adaptation, in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto Film Festival, that curse becomes the hinge on which five decades of Malaysian history swing, carried by a woman named Du Li An and the two men, one thought dead, who share the same face.

Li Zi Shu’s book, which begins on page 513 as a deliberate nod to May 13, 1969, was long considered too structurally slippery for cinema, its timelines folding into one another, its narrators unreliable, its boundary between memory and myth left permanently uncertain. That date refers to race riots that broke out in Kuala Lumpur following a bitterly contested general election, leaving hundreds dead and prompting a state of emergency; the ethnic and political fault lines that hardened in its aftermath still shape Malaysia today.

“I wasn’t interested in taking this very labyrinthine novel and making everything neat and chronological for the audience,” Yeo tells Variety. “I wanted to find a cinematic equivalent for the experience of reading it.”

Even the novelist had her doubts. “In fact, when I first met Li Zi Shu to discuss the project, her first question to me was, ‘Are you sure it is adaptable?'” Yeo recalls. He told her then that he knew he could not reproduce the novel literally.

At the center of the frame story is Kai (Troy Liu), a boy who stumbles onto a novel titled “The Age of Goodbyes” and finds himself drawn into the world of Du Li An (Vivian Sung), whose romance with Lin Sang (Stanley Yau) in Ipoh in 1969 ends when he vanishes after confiding in her about his family’s curse. Years later, a man named Mong Sang, also played by Yau, arrives bearing Lin Sang’s exact face and insisting he is someone else entirely. The film, a Taiwan-Malaysia co-production shot in Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Thai and English, marks Yeo’s fifth fiction feature, following “River of Exploding Durians,” “We, the Dead,” “Malu” and “Moonlight Shadow.”

Yeo made one significant departure from the source material. In the novel, Lin Sang disappears on the day Du Li An marries another man, Steely Bo; in the film, Yeo tied that disappearance directly to the racial violence of May 13 instead.

“They are ordinary people living inside history, and its consequences are felt through fear, absence, separation, rumors, memories and things people don’t say,” he says.

That instinct comes from Yeo’s own family. He discovered Li Zi Shu’s novel shortly after a trip to China, where he visited his family’s ancestral shrine in Chaoshan and learned new details about his grandfather’s migration to Southeast Asia. His mother once told him that his great-grandfather was a kung fu master who leapt across a moving train while carrying his infant grandson to safety, a story he has no way of confirming.

“I think families are full of stories like this,” he says. “Someone tells a story, someone else remembers it slightly differently, certain details disappear while others become more dramatic, and eventually nobody is around anymore who can tell you what actually happened.”

That inheritance runs through the soundtrack, too. Several songs in the film were written and performed by Yeo’s own parents in the 1970s, decades before their son thought to build a movie around a fictional Ipoh where they might have been playing on the radio.

“The whole film is about things being transmitted from one generation to another: stories, memories, trauma, myths, even gestures,” Yeo says. “And suddenly my mother’s actual voice, singing a song composed by my father and recorded when they were young, was being transmitted through a film I was making decades later.”

For Sung, the challenge was finding continuity in a character who ages from a lovestruck young woman into a wife, mother and stepmother across shifting timelines and an uncertain grip on her own past.

“When I first spoke with the director about the script, he told me that Du Li An was a ‘survivor.’ That word stayed with me and became the key to understanding her,” Sung says.

Playing opposite Yau as both the vanished Lin Sang and his double, Mong Sang, meant sitting inside uncertainty rather than resolving it. Sung recalls filming Du Li An’s first sight of Mong Sang.

“My mind was telling me very clearly, ‘This isn’t him.’ But my body and my memories believed something else,” she says.

That confusion is written into the dialogue itself. Du Li An speaks Cantonese at home, Mandarin with Lin Sang and Cantonese with Mong Sang.

“Sometimes, when she speaks Mandarin with Mong Sang, it actually reveals that the person she is really trying to speak to is Lin Sang,” Sung says.

Sung, who is Taiwanese, spent five to six months preparing the role, working with two language coaches on a 1960s Malaysian Chinese Cantonese and Hokkien accent and living for a month in Kuala Lumpur before joining the crew for pre-production in Ipoh. The costume department let her keep the qipaos she wore in fittings.

“There was this strong feeling that I wasn’t simply wearing a costume. It felt like my body had somehow stepped into another era,” she says.

Yeo built the film’s structure around a delayed reveal: the title card does not appear until 40 minutes in, marking the point where the novel itself begins. Everything before it, he says, is his own expansion of material only briefly suggested on the page, an approach he traces back to adapting Banana Yoshimoto’s novella “Moonlight Shadow.”

“What ‘Moonlight Shadow’ gave me was confidence that adaptation is ultimately a conversation with the original work,” Yeo says. “You have to identify its soul rather than protect every incident.”

Sung, who relocated from Taiwan to Los Angeles two years ago, isn’t chasing a specific type of role next. She’s drawn to a story about modern love.

“Two people who really like each other, but both come with their own problems, fears, and maybe a little bit of craziness,” she says.

Yeo is already developing several new projects, among them a century-spanning vampire story set between Borneo, Macau and Kaohsiung, and a multigenerational drama connecting Malaysia and Japan through a family of filmmakers.

“Apparently, after making a film about people being haunted by stories from the past, I responded by developing several more films about people being haunted by stories from the past,” he says.