In the Hong Kong of ‘Expats,’ a Mop Puts Its Privileged Characters Into Perspective

Sarah Shachat
·5 min read

If you want to tell a story about expats in Hong Kong or anywhere else, one of the problems you’ll run into is that they necessarily have enough wealth to insulate their lives from a lot of the forces that loom over the locals — like politics and time. The three protagonists of “Expats” are all varying degrees of privileged and enmeshed in varying levels of grief that make them, as we all are, both victims of and perpetrators to the people around them. Director Lulu Wang, though, finds a wonderful cinematic answer to the question of how to connect the Prime Video series’ expatriates to the world around them, even if they can’t quite see it.

Mops.

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Well, not always mops, but a moment at the start of the sixth and final episode is a great example of the canny visual ways Wang and her team make everything surrounding the characters matter — to us, if not always to them. We watch Margaret Woo (Nicole Kidman) pack up a studio where she secretly goes for alone time in the aftermath of her son’s disappearance. It’s vastly different from the luxe apartment she shares with her family, in what feels like a different part of town and with the kind of bare walls (and a painfully purple plastic bathtub) that look like a cry of despair. 

She’s done this at the start of Episode 1, too. In an inversion of the shot of Margaret walking into the studio, now Margaret closes the gates to the building, puts down the cleaning supplies she borrowed to tidy the place up, and then walks past two crossed mops drying in the back hall. She doesn’t notice them, but the camera does. It lets them become the star of the shot — because unlike in Episode 1, now the audience knows who put those mops there: Wen (Maggie Lee), the worried mother of local activist Tony (Will Orr), who in Episode 5 left off cleaning the convenience store where she worked to avoid a tropical storm and ended up trying to bail her son out of jail. Kidman and Lee don’t share a scene, but we see something that lets us connect them, which makes it feel all the more powerful.

That connective tissue helps give “Expats” its dramatic power across the limited series’ leaps in time and between leads. For better and for worse, no one is alone, even when wealth makes it possible for them to seem untouchable. “How do you both show that [what’s happening in Hong Kong] doesn’t affect them that much but then also show it and show the importance of it and center it in many ways?” Wang asked on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “The mops were something that we came up with in the writers’ room, and that was the fun of it. We would come up with things and we’d be like, ‘I love the mops; that’s a character now!’”

Part of Wong and the writers’ approach to “Expats” was a strong focus on characters of all stripes. The show keeps at least one eye on the domestic helpers who make Margaret’s and Hilary’s (Sarayu Blue) lives possible and the Hong Kong locals whom Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) meets but can, with her American passport, ultimately leave behind; then Episode 5, “Central,” stands on its own (at feature length) by following locals Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Essie (Ruby Ruiz), and Flora (Olivia Chu). There’s almost a rhythmic flow to how these characters come in and out of each others’ lives, refracting different pieces of each back to them.

But perhaps that’s not too surprising, given Wang’s background as a classically trained musician. “There’s something in rhythm and in the way rests work within the music,” Wang said. “In the same way that a song is made of verses and choruses, there’s a bridge or there’s a verse that’s quite lyrical, but then you bring people into a chorus that they recognize. And there’s something really familiar about it and you give them that high and then you can take them back into another verse.”

Wang traveled around Hong Kong with a zoom (not the video conferencing software, but a standard-issue field recorder) while scouting for “Expats” and found specific sounds that would accurately reflect the setting and become active parts of specific scenes. “There’s a moment in Episode 3 that was inspired by a moment in real life that happened while we were scouting. We went to the flower market and we couldn’t hear each other talk,” Wang said. But the cacophony of truck noise and jackhammers, “‘has to be in the scene. Like, this is the scene. [Hilary is] just trying to order flowers, and she’s dealing with what’s happening in this moment to her, this text message she gets, and then meanwhile, this construction noise and this truck comes through, and we’re barely going to be able to hear what she’s saying.”

Margaret (Nicole Kidman)
“Expats”Jupiter Wong/Prime Video

“Expats” keeps finding creative sonic and visual ways for each scene to convey character emotions and also hint at a wider world beyond, varying the emphasis at different points. It’s this work of repetition and variation that is at the heart of the show’s structure and the direction of individual scenes; Wong and cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano often gaze at the main characters through windows that can’t help but reflect Hong Kong back to them.

“There’s Hillary, there’s Mercy, and there’s Margaret. And then there’s all of the relationships to each other and then there’s all of these domestic workers as well and their relationship to the city as a character. And so [we had to] try to balance all of those threads.”

All episodes of “Expats” are now available to stream on Prime Video.

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