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Zany rom-com meets serial killer thriller in Allan Fung Yi-Ching’s decidedly odd horror comedy, In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂). Though the title may hint at romantic melodrama, the film is filled with unexpectedly edgy humour and references to the real life “Jars Killer” case that also inspired the film Dr. Lamb in which a taxi driver murdered several of his female passengers and kept their body parts in Tupperware boxes at his home where he lived with his apparently oblivious family members.
Lung (Alfred Cheung Kin-Ting) is the head of a small band of late night taxi drivers who entertain each other with various party tricks over the radio, Lung’s being the ability to tell Christmas cracker-style jokes. They seem to have a long-standing vendetta against another gang of taxi drivers who challenge them to drinking contests and other tests of strength. Lung, meanwhile, has a fixation with beautiful TV reporter Jenny (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) who once said something nice to him getting out of his cab, and makes a point of watching the news whenever she’s on. His taxi driver friends mostly seem to support his crush and are keen to help him in his romantic quest which is why they all agree to pass on tips about newsworthy goings on that Lung can send to Jenny in the hope of making himself useful to her.
Jenny, meanwhile, is sort of grateful for the tips because she feels undervalued at the station where she works. She clearly wants to be a crusading reporter exposing things like political corruption and injustice, but as her boss tells her, the people of Hong Kong prefer soap operas to news and in any case, they don’t have the budget for serious investigative reporting. There is a mild criticism here of the mass media landscape which is increasingly compromised by its commercial concerns in world in which the line between factual reporting and entertainment is beginning to blur. The press are desperate for salacious content to keep viewers hooked, feeding on human misery and almost willing it into being.
Thus it’s not a stretch when it first appears that Lung has gone off the deep end after being insulted by Jenny’s terrible elitist boyfriend John (Lawrence Ng Kai-Wah) and actually become a serial killer just so that Jenny can have something exciting to report on followed by a scoop on his confession. It turns out that Lung is not the real killer and only wanted to give Jenny a real confession wrapped up in a false one, but this still bears out the depths of his problematic, one-sided romantic obsession with a public figure. In some ways, Lung is presented as an underdog whose pure-hearted love just hasn’t been properly noticed, yet. He picks up another man with flowers for Jenny who is more obviously deranged, but is irritated rather than noticing that he is really no different. He is also irritated to see John pick Jenny up, but, at the same time, perhaps thinks it’s fair enough if she has a boyfriend already.
The problem is that John might actually be the worst person in a film about a cannibalistic serial killer without needing to actually kill anyone. He is possessive of Jenny and has an unpleasant, elitist world view in which he is violent towards Lung and point-blank tells him that a lowly taxi driver who didn’t even finish high school has no business dating an educated, upper-middle-class woman like Jenny. Though this originally presented as an unpleasant point of view and a symbol of the kind of classist oppression faced by men like Lung, the film eventually embraces it with Lung coming to the conclusion that John is right, he’s not good enough for Jenny and ought to date someone from his own social class such as fellow taxi driver Ti (Sandra Ng Kwan-yue). As such, it adopts a rather conservative attitude that supports class divisions and negates the idea of social mobility in insisting that love across the class divide not only will not work but is in some way improper.
Lung may realise both that his infatuation is not “love” but “worship” and that his behaviour has been dangerously obsessive bordering on madness, but this is not the reason that he finally decides to give Jenny up so much as a sense of inferiority in returning to his own working-class world. Meanwhile, the film treats Ti as something of a joke, firstly mocking her for being a tomboyish woman in a man’s occupation, then half-hinting that she maybe transgender. Despite its offbeat humour, the film goes to a fairly grisly place in its final stretches, transitioning into slasher territory as Lung and Jenny are stalked by the real killer upset by Lung’s attempts to claim responsibility for their crimes. Order may have been restored, but this Hong Kong remains a fairly bleak place overshadowed by violence and anxiety in which romantic fantasy may be the only means of escape.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 