Category: Hong Kong

Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記, Nick Cheuk, 2023)

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A dejected teacher is forced to deal with his own unresolved traumatic past when the draft of a suicide note is discovered screwed up in a bin at the school in Nick Cheuk’s poignant drama, Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記). Informed by a recent rise in the number of adolescents taking their own lives, the film takes aim at those who refuse to take depression among children and young people seriously while simultaneously adopting conservative social attitudes which insist that children who don’t conform to their ideas of conventional success are somehow lazy and selfish. 

That’s definitely not a view held by empathetic teacher, Cheng (Lo Chun-Yip), though he is frustrated by the school’s inability to take the note at face value while otherwise trying to keep it under wraps to avoid potential embarrassment or disruption with the exam season approaching. Consequently, the desire to find the student who wrote the note has the potential to develop into a witch hunt that might only make their situation worse, though Cheng tries to go about it as sensitively as possible. In any case, he discovers that many of his students feel lost and hopeless with no one around to turn to. One boy who is being relentlessly bullied eventually fights back but ends up getting the blame while well-meaning as he is even Cheng originally misreads the situation and fails to help him. 

Meanwhile, Cheng is also under a lot of stress following the breakdown of his marriage caused in part by his issues with emotional intimacy. Called back towards the past, he begins re-reading the diary of a young boy who details physical abuse at the hands of his authoritarian father (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) that left him feeling worthless as if the world had no place for him. Eli struggles academically and particularly in comparison with his younger brother Alan while his hardline father views him only as an extension of himself and is embarrassed on a personal level that his son doesn’t measure up. Consequently, he beats him senselessly while insisting that he is simply lazy and doesn’t apply himself rather than accepting that he isn’t academically inclined and is unlikely to ever master the piano. 

Only his piano teacher, Miss Chan, is kind and patient with him though his father soon ruins that relationship too leaving the boy with nothing. Learning from this example, Cheng vows to become a different kind of teacher who doesn’t become angry with children who aren’t reaching their potential but makes a point of talking to them to figure out what’s wrong and how he can help. Unfortunately, he feels as if he’s failing to become the person he wanted to be in part because there are too many problems in the contemporary society which places intense pressure on people to conform to outdated notions of conventional success largely though academic achievement. 

Yet what Cheng discovers to be more dangerous is a growing sense of loneliness and alienation among young people who feel lost and hopeless in the contemporary society. He reflects that Eli’s despair stemmed from feeling as if no one wanted him and he wasn’t really included as a member of his family who looked down on and rejected him because of his lack of academic success. Cheng doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way, but ironically isolates himself, alienating his wife who fears he’ll never really be ready to move on into a more settled adulthood as a father with children of his own. 

In many ways, Cheng’s desire to end the cycle turning away from his father’s authoritarian violence towards care and compassion in looking after his students even as he struggles to come to terms with his own traumatic past and fears of abandonment. Granted, he doesn’t and perhaps can’t do very much to tackle the causes of the teens’ depression and their roots in the status-obsessed, politically turbulent contemporary society, but he can at least learn to open himself up to be of help to others who like him are struggling and feel as if they have nowhere to turn. Poignant and empathetic, Cheuk’s drama makes a plea for a little more compassion and understanding not only for the young but for those carrying a heavy burden in the best way they can. 

Time Still Turns the Pages opens in UK cinemas 24th November courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Elegies (詩, Ann Hui, 2023)

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Many of the poets featured in Ann Hui’s documentary Elegies (詩) are keen to emphasise that poetry is rarely about what it says it’s about and often as much about what doesn’t say. The documentary is much the same, making a point about the power of poetry in an age resistance, an elegy for the disappearing Hong Kong the poets lament two of them no longer living in the city but somehow still defined by it. 

The tables reversed by one of her subjects, Hui explains that the documentary is a labour of love. She admits that it’s not a mainstream movie and that no one would fund it, but she decided to do it anyway despite or perhaps because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic which is itself makes frequent appearances in the film. In any case, Hui splits her time mainly between veteran poet Huang Canran who now lives in Mainland China and his younger disciple Liu Wai Tong who lives in Taiwan. 

As Canran says, the poems prove his love for Hong Kong but he also feels as if it was Hong Kong that forced him to leave. Joking that he’s an economic exile, he explains that he mainly moved after being forced out by the rapid cost of living in the city. He cheerfully explains that being a poet means embracing destitution and is embarrassed about the other kinds of writing such as penning a newspaper column that he did solely for the money. Canran’s main source of income comes from translation though his personal motto is to work hard to not earn money while practicing his art. His daughter doesn’t really get it and is confused about why Ann Hui wants to make a documentary about her father, though as Canran admits prophets are rarely appreciated in their hometowns. The Hong Kong he writes about is another place, perhaps somewhere that never really existed or any rate exists no longer. 

A photographer and lecturer in poetry, Liu Wai Tong heads in a more philosophical direction while also living as an exile in Taipei, never quite explaining the reasons he left Hong Kong though perhaps because it would awkward to do so directly. He quotes Brecht and asks what the point of poetry is in an age of protest, how their voices can resonate among a thousand other horrors crying out for speech. Yet as other poets had said, poems about nature are not always about nature just as political poems are not always about politics. By saying one thing and not another they can make a message felt but then there’s nothing really wrong with talking about beauty amid myriad horrors. 

Another poet writes about the everyday, causing others to ask if you can really call it a poem if it’s just about the unexpected appearance of a cockroach. The words should be simple, they insist, their meaning at least clear even if the message is ambiguous. Obscurity for obscurity’s sake is always doomed to failure. Many of the poets write from their direct experience detailing their ordinary lives in the city while others rejoice in wordplay or metaphor, but Hong Kong colours all of their work. Echoing the other poets, Hui too admits that it’s poetry that sustained her in her darkest hours. The poems that she learned as a child gave her strength when she needed it. A woman who has been writing to a friend in prison is moved to tears on recalling his reaction to a poem she had sent him, feeling that poem if can touch someone years after it was written than it must have intrinsic meaning.

Thus poetry in itself becomes an act of resistance if solely in defiance and the determination to endure even the most difficult circumstances from the anxiety of a global pandemic to the spectre of political unrest and lingering oppression. At once an elegy for the Hong Kong the poets speak of and its many rueful exiles, the film makes a passionate defence of poetry as a lifeline thrown by one lonely soul to another across often turbulent seas and carrying with it a message most powerful in its silence. 

Elegies screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

It Remains (釀魂, Kelvin Shum, 2023)

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Grief-stricken souls find themselves trapped in a hazy dreamworld of haunting guilt and vengeful spirits in Kelvin Shum’s eerie supernatural horror, It Remains (釀魂). Shum’s second feature following noirish psychological thriller Deliverance delves into the realms of classic ghost movies but discovers its heroes mainly haunted by the unresolved past. “We’re all afraid of facing reality,” heartbroken waiter Finn (Anson Lo) finally accepts though perhaps still lacking resolve to move on from his tragedy.

That would be the death in a car accident of his girlfriend of five years, Ava (Summer Chan). Finn was supposed to meet her for an anniversary dinner but got busy with work and left her sitting alone at which point she left and had a collision with fate. Unable to forgive himself, Finn has taken to drinking and is in a grief-stricken stupor. In an attempt to cheer him up, his friends from the restaurant where he works, chef Luke (Tommy Chu Pak-Hong), waiter Liam (Ng Siu-Hin), and Cora (Kwok Tsui-Yee) from front of house, are taking him camping only the location Liam has chosen turns out to be a little different than expected. Fetching up on a remote island where the boats only run every few days, the gang find themselves wandering through an eerie, seemingly abandoned village where it seems a wedding was once taking place.

As might be expected, they don’t really want to hang around to find out what happened here and are in any case told to leave in no uncertain terms by a mysterious woman and an angry old man who say this village is closed off to insiders. But with no way off the island they have little choice other than to hole up in an abandoned house and try to make the best of the situation. That becomes admittedly difficult when they start experiencing strange visions and are pulled back towards their own unresolved, internalised grief.

It seems Finn wasn’t the only one struggling to let go of the past and whatever evil lurks here quickly latches on to the buried anxieties of each of the group attempting to manipulate them to unleash a pent up spirit sealed away for good reason. Though clues scattered around the abandoned village point to something further in the past and indeed more ancient, it appears this particular moment of trauma occurred this century even if the darkness that surrounds it is older and apparently imparted by a passing Tibetan monk. Someone here also could not face reality and has been caught in another kind of limbo trapped alone and unable to resolve their pain.

The film’s Chinese title means something like “wine ghost” which is in its way ironic seeing as the main coping mechanism employed not just by Finn is alcohol, while the evil spirit itself is bound in a wine jar. This is however one jar it’s best not to open and a series a ghosts that should not be unleashed, despite the well honed logic that sealing the spirit is not really enough to keep it from ruining your life. Finn and the others are too afraid to face reality in knowledge that it may consume them and so remain trapped in the past though they may have been right to fear that in the end they would not be able to resolve their grief if they opened the jar and attempted to deal with it.

Swapping the noirish urbanity of his previous film for the eeriness of nature found in misty forests and forbidding signs of human absence, Shum conjures an atmosphere of spiritual dread in which each of the protagonists is plunged into their own kind of hell and forced to confront the unresolved past. Hoping to deal with at least one ghost, Cora performs a Taoist ritual but ends up summoning more spirits than intended and opening the door to something that none of them are able to control. There’s more than one way to quell a ghost, but the desire not to may be equally strong and for some moving on may not be what they actually want. Facing reality is to accept it, but it’s difficult to say if that represents liberation or constraint or if the only way to deal with a wandering ghost is to join it in eternal suffering.

It Remains opens in UK cinemas on 3rd November courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Three Days of a Blind Girl (盲女72小時, Chan Wing-Chiu, 1993)

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An oblivious housewife undergoes a kind of awakening while confronted with her husband’s transgressions by a vengeful intruder in Chan Wing-Chiu’s home invasion horror, Three Days of a Blind Girl (盲女72小時). Rendered temporarily sightless after an operation designed to save her sight, the implication is that the heroine, referred to only as Mrs Ng (Veronica Yip Yuk Hing), has been living in a fantasy of aspirational domestic success largely dependent on her heart surgeon husband Jack (Anthony Chan Yau) and devoid of her own identity while blind to the patriarchal forces which oppress her. 

Having returned from surgery in the US, Mrs Ng is assured her sight will gradually return in around 72 hours though until then she will be entirely blind. The doctors give her no special instructions, and she and her husband return to their country home where they are cared for by a maid, May (Chan Yuet-Yue). Somewhat insensitively, Jack has to leave for an important heart attack conference in Macao leaving Mrs Ng solely in the custody of May only May has other plans. Her policeman boyfriend has got them concert tickets while she also needs to go out to refill her asthma medication meaning that Ms Ng will be entirely alone at home while attempting to adjust to her sightless existence. 

Mrs Ng is rendered vulnerable in what should be a safe space. The sanctity of the domestic is disrupted firstly by Jack’s absence and then by an uncanny lack of familiarity introduced by her blindness. Though she has a stick, she soon finds herself bumping into things or encountering unexpected obstacles while the design of the home’s staircase appears dangerous even to the sighted and a definite health hazard to anyone else. In a moment of foreshadowing, Jack warns the maid that there’s a problem with the phone while the mobile he left is also low on battery meaning that Mrs Ng could not even call for help if she needed it. 

Unsolicited help is however something she’s offered by an unexpected visitor, Sam (Anthony Wong Chau-sang), who claims to be an old school friend of Jack’s who also treated his wife for her heart condition. Mrs Ng can’t see it, but Sam is dressed in a rather unique outfit of lederhosen and a check shirt appearing something like malicious garden gnome. In an odd moment of comedy, Sam, who soon begins stalking Mrs Ng around the house, pretends to chase off an intruder by running up and down the stairs swapping characters as he goes but otherwise skews increasingly sinister while discussing his relationship with his wife who he claims has rejected him on the grounds of the printer’s ink that stains his hands. 

Sam is Jack’s inversion, an overly solicitous husband now hellbent on avenging his masculinity by raping Mrs Ng to get back at Jack whom he blames for his wife’s death claiming he treated her heart condition with vitamins while abusing his position to take advantage of her sexually. At first, Mrs Ng doesn’t believe him and trusts her husband but her literal awakening occurs in line with the return of her sight. She begins to see the light and the reality of her life with Jack, ironically thanking him for this experience because it’s taught her how to fight back and protect herself in the face of his male failure. “Don’t think women are easily bullied” she claps back after finally taking charge of her life and knocking the forces of patriarchy firmly on the head.

Nevertheless, she begins to resist with regular household items such as using the serrated edge on a box of clingfilm to try and saw through the ropes binding her hands. Despite her blindness, she uses her knowledge of the domestic space against the intruder Sam and tries to frustrate his plans for her through strategy and forward thinking even while beginning to discern the danger which has always surrounded her as evidenced by the unexpected appearance of an entirely different assailant wandering in by chance in the temporary absence of Sam. “Never fight with women,” a much more confident, fully sighted, Mrs Ng later exclaims finally awakened to the realities of the world around her and unafraid to confront its ever present dangers now armed with the stylish briefcase of an independent woman. Surprisingly feminist in its overtones, Chan turns the home invasion thriller inside out as Mrs Ng mounts a successful jailbreak from the confines of a stereotypical housewife life.

Three Days of a Blind Girl screens at the Prince Charles Cinema, London on 19th October as part of Silk and Bullets: The Sisterhoods of Revenge where it will feature a video introduction by producer Alfred Cheung and pre-recorded Q&A with Director Chan Wing-Chiu.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Stand Up Story (說笑之人, Amen Au Cheuk-man, 2023)

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A lost young man tries to turn his grief into laughter while realising he might have more in common with his ageing father than he first assumed in Amen Au Cheuk-man’s poignant drama, Stand Up Story (說笑之人). Partially an exploration of the marginalisation of those with disabilities, the film is also a gentle tale of learning to stand up for one’s self and one’s family while gaining the courage to follow your dreams rather than holding back in fear of failure. 

Manny’s (Ng Siu-Hin) dreams lie in stand up comedy, but he struggles to convince his father, who has learning difficulties due to a childhood illness, that telling jokes can be a real job. Wah (Ben Yuen Foo-Wa) raised him alone after the woman he married left the family once her Hong Kong residency was confirmed leaving them both with a sense of absence and lingering feeling of lonely abandonment. Though his father was very excited his son has graduated university, Manny is working as a delivery driver while floundering for direction half-heartedly pursuing standup but lacking the confidence to jump in and try it full-time while also unwilling to look for a steadier job because it would mean giving up on comedy.

As the former headmaster who employs him at his restaurant after he retires from his job as a high school janitor suggests Wah is also lacking in confidence and afraid to try new things in part because of his insecurity as someone with learning difficulties who may have encountered impatience and anger in the past. Though he manages well enough on his own, Wah has experienced prejudice and discrimination all his life and has made himself smaller because of it. Always cheerful he does his best to be useful and help others where he can even if they sometimes take advantage of him accidentally or otherwise like the thoughtless Fourth Auntie who gets him to do a lot her work for her and place bets on her behalf pledging to chip in with her share of the money if they win. 

Manny is quick to warn him about such people, but as the master suggests may also be guilty of underestimating his father while insensitive to his fear of loneliness. As a teenager, Manny had also been somewhat embarrassed by his father and did little to defend him when the other kids at school made of him. He also doesn’t invite him to his university graduation despite the excitement that has already seen Wah buy a new suit for the occasion. In a moment of anger he expresses his resentment, exclaiming that he feels trapped in their claustrophobic apartment and is fearful that he’ll stuck there forever but of course regrets it realising how much he’s hurt Wah’s feelings in the knowledge of how difficult his life has been raising him as a single father on a janitor’s salary. 

The irony is that Wah had wanted his son to become a teacher, a respectable, steady job he has a particular respect for because of the support he received from the headmaster, but becomes a kind of teacher himself albeit wordlessly. Manny can only progress his comedy career by wrestling with his life even if some of his routines feel as if the may be crossing a line between laughing at and with his father. Wah’s discomfort is evident on watching Manny telling jokes about him on stage, but so is his relief and thankfulness that people seem to be laughing and he might be able to make a career out of it after all. 

One of Manny’s colleagues suggests that stand up might just save Hong Kong, that now more than ever people need to find a way to channel their anxiety into comedy to able to carry on. That anxiety is only deepened by the pandemic in which even the headmaster’s restaurant is threatened by the economic reality and Wah’s world becomes even smaller. Warmhearted though also honest in Manny’s inner conflict and ambivalence towards his relationship with his father the film is essentially about giving things a proper chance while there’s time rather than giving up because it seems difficult or awkward be it in relationships or finding the courage to chase happiness doing something you love.

Stand Up Story screens in Chicago Sept. 16 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema. Pinnacle Career Achievement honoree Ben Yuen and Bright Star Award recipients Ng Siu Hin and Rachel Leung are scheduled to attend the award ceremony before the film and Q&A after

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

In Broad Daylight (白日之下, Lawrence Kan, 2023)

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A jaded investigative reporter rediscovers a sense of purpose even as her industry flounders while exposing systematised abuse and neglect in privately run care homes in Lawrence Kan’s hard-hitting drama, In Broad Daylight (白日之下). The film’s title hints at its pervasive sense of despair, the problem isn’t so much that no one knew the state of affairs but that no one cared enough to do anything about it while the journalists too find themselves at the mercy of a hyper-capitalistic society. 

A whistleblower close to the end of the film reveals that they’d been anonymously sending photos from the care home where they work because they wanted “to feel human again” and “treat others as humans” only until now no one had taken any notice. They weren’t really expecting that anyone ever would. Top investigative reporter Kay (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying) is one of only a handful of reporters left on her paper which is threatening to shut down the investigative department altogether if they can’t bring in a big scoop. Kay’s boss is similarly conflicted, not wanting to crush the idealism of rookie recruit Jess in insisting that their work has value in telling the stories that should be told while privately reminding Kay that the care home scandal might not be “explosive” enough to earn them a reprieve from their boss. 

For her own part, Kay is already jaded explaining to Jess that nothing really matters and nothing they write makes any difference when wrongdoers generally get off scot-free. Her desire to pursue the care home story is partly personal in that she’s dealing with a degree of guilt and grief over the death of her grandfather who took his own life in a privately run facility. To investigate one she’s been tipped off is particuarly bad, she poses as the granddaughter of a patient with dementia, Kin-tong, explaining that she’s not visited before because her family moved to Canada when she was a child, and thereafter making an offer to volunteer on seeing how bad things really are there witnessing not only a dead rat in Kin-tong’s room but physical abuse of the residents. 

It would be easy enough to assume that the faults are “isolated incidents” as the regulatory body likes to describe them and mostly down to the presence of the head nurse, Mrs Fong, who is clearly not someone who should be working in a care facillity, but the truth is that these are systemic problems largely born of governmental indifference. A government source tells her that the waiting list for a publicly funded homes stands at 15 years leaving many families little choice but to take what they can afford in the private sector. They are often unable to take care of elderly relatives themselves because they cannot take time off work to do so, or are simply not equipped to respond to their loved ones’ needs. 

But neither are the care homes. The manager, Chief Cheung who is blind himself, in part justifies the existence of his facility on the grounds that it is difficiult for people with disabilities to find homes to take them, painting the community as a happy family home doing its best rather than a callous attempt to exploit the vulnerable run by a dodgy businessman who admits that even if they’re exposed they’ll just change their name and start again somewhere else. Kay asks Kin-tong why he stays but he tells her that they’re all the same anyway. Even when she uncovers evidence of sexual abuse of a resident with learning difficulties she discovers that it’s almost impossible to prosecute because no one wants to put a vulnerable person on the stand opposite their abuser which allows them the confidence to think they can do whatever they want because they’ll never face dismissal let alone criminal proceedings. 

Kay begins to wonder what the point is if, as people are fond of telling her, no one really cares, but also is also forced to reflect on the moral difficulties of the situation. If the home is closed down, it will leave many of the residents with nowhere else to go. Mostly likely they will end up on the streets or in another equally bad private care home while she at least might earn herself a temporary reprieve in achieving the kind of scoop her money-minded editor was looking for. Her boss insists that she can’t change the world, the system won’t change overnight even if people are temporarily outraged. The truth is that these are people who’ve been abandoned by their society and often by their families especially with so many younger people emigrating leaving relatives behind with no one to watch over them. Though somewhat jaded, Kay comes to empathise with the people she meets at the care home and rediscovers a sense of purpose in her work that reminds her it’s worth the fight even if in the end nothing really changes. In many ways bleak, Kan’s empathetic drama is otherwise undespairing in its gentle advocation for mutual compassion and world in which we can truly take care of each other.

In Broad Daylight screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screening in Chicago on Sept. 16 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Back Home (七月返歸, Nate Tse Ka-ki, 2023)

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“This place is cursed” according to an exasperated policeman dealing with yet another suicide at a rundown public housing estate in Hong Kong in Nate Tse Ka-Ki’s gripping supernatural thriller, Back Home (七月返歸). It’s true enough that this seems to be a fairly haunted land in which it has become quite difficult to tell the living from the dead, “they seem so real, I can’t tell the difference” a little boy admits while unfairly burdened by the ability to see things that others don’t or at least have become adept in not seeing. 

Wing (Anson Kong Ip-sang) too once had the ability to see ghosts, but apparently grew out of it after moving to Canada to live with his uncle a decade previously. All this place holds for him now is horror, he admits on being called home following his estranged mother’s attempt to take her own life. Now stable but in a coma, a doctor suggests it’s like her soul has gone wandering and they’ll have to wait to see if it ever comes back. Staying in his childhood home, Wing finds himself assaulted by painful memories of the past along with more literal ghosts he can’t really be sure aren’t manifestations of his trauma or symptoms of a fracturing mind. 

Then again, there is something very weird about this particular block. The people who remember Wing remember him as “spooky”, a boy who was rejected by the community around him after claiming to see ghosts. His embarrassed mother regularly railed at him, accusing him of lying and blaming him for his father leaving the family while seemingly suffering from mental health issues that have also seen her reduced to a figure of fun by the local kids. She tries all sorts of Taoist rituals including having him beaten with a burning stick to close his third eye all which understandably results in Wing deciding to remain silent and speak no more of ghosts while otherwise unseeing them in effort that must place extreme strain his own mental health. His plight is essentially one of repression in which he is haunted in more ways than one while forced to deny his authentic self because of a social taboo.

Even so, it’s a taboo others would quite like to break. In some ways we can’t quite tell if it isn’t Wing who’s dead and haunting his childhood home or if everyone else is actually a ghost. The ominous Uncle Chung who sells paper sacrifices hints as much when he unironically offers to make some for Wing while his overly cheerful wife’s constant offers of her special soup seem as if they may have some kind of ulterior motive. Complaining that there’s definitely something rotten in this apartment block, Wing discovers that there have been other victims besides his mother and hears from a little boy, Yu, that anyone who visits the forbidden seventh floor meets a sticky end. What’s waiting for Wing up there is a Lynchian world of repressed memory eager to confront him with his traumatic past and either set him free or trap him there forever. 

Bonding with Yu who is after all much like himself, a lonely little boy rejected by his peers while constantly “bothered” by wandering spirits, Wing starts to suspect there’s something more sinister going on. Director Nate Tse Ka-ki drops in repeated visual clues such as the distinctive pairs of scissors that seem to turn up in odd places while otherwise blurring the lines between the world of the living and the dead and alluding to other kinds of exile such as Wing’s life in Canada and estrangement from his family. On his return “back home”, he feels conflicted and resentful almost as if his mother had called him back and was refusing to let him go while grandma Chung ominously offers to look after Wing’s offspring when he eventually has one now that he’s where he’s supposed to be she assumes for good. It’s difficult not to read something sinister in her speeches about engineering a better future to “bring peace to this place” even before it becomes clear that it isn’t so much the lifting of a curse she’s interested in as its fulfilment. Some viewers may also detect something familiar in her delivery. In any case, in embracing a younger version of himself Wing may finally be able to escape his haunting even if it leaves him with a difficult choice between comforting fantasy and an objectively horrific “reality”.

Back Home screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: ©️mm2 Studios Hong Kong

Mad Fate (命案, Soi Cheang, 2023)

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“No one can stray from the path paved by fate.” a policewoman gasps while interrogating The Master (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), a man whose mind was already strained even before he walked in on the murder of a woman he’d been trying to save only to end up losing to destiny. A noticeably lighter affair than his previous film Limbo, Mad Fate (命案) sees Soi Cheang (AKA Cheang Pou-soi) step into the Milky Way orbit directing a screenplay by Yau Nai-hoi produced by Johnnie To and very much bound up with the kinds of cosmic coincidences the studio is known for.

It’s Fate or maybe God that The Master is resisting, though what the difference between the two might be is never quite clear save for the implication that it’s God who is master of Fate which is otherwise without will. The Master insists that “Fate can be changed,” but he resolutely fails to do so. In the opening sequence, he’s in the middle of burying a woman, May, alive as part of a ritual to stave off a forthcoming “calamity” only he’s unable to complete it in part because of the woman’s understandable anxiety that it’s The Master who’s going to end up killing her, and in part because it starts raining which puts out the paper clothing that should have been burnt to change her fate. May runs off and climbs in a taxi home where she is accosted by a serial killer who has been targeting sex workers. The Master follows her but arrives just too late while the police later chase the killer but are unable to catch him. 

The Master sees his attempts frustrated but also does not consider that the rain itself was a manifestation of Fate or sign that in the end nothing can be changed. In an effort to atone for his inability to save May, The Master ends up taking under his wing a strange young man who also stumbled on the murder by coincidence while working as a delivery driver but is fascinated rather than repulsed by the bloody scene. Obsessed with knives and killing, Siu-tung (Lokman Yeung) is already known to the policeman investigating (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) because he arrested him for killing a cat in his teens. According to The Master’s reading of his fate, Siu-tung will eventually kill someone and end up in prison for 20 years. He doesn’t much like the sound of that so he ends up going along with The Master’s zany plans to make him a nicer person and save two lives in the process. 

Ironically most of The Master’s suggestions still involve Siu-tung being imprisoned in some way. To get him out of his “unlucky” flat, he rents him another place that very much feels like a prison cell and later does actually lock him up inside a shed fearing that he’s about to kill. As he explains, it can help to preemptively accept your fate so moving in somewhere that is “like” a prison can stop you going there for real, but it doesn’t do much to alleviate Siu-tung’s desire to kill and most particularly to kill the policeman who has been following him most of his life because he’s “sure” that he’s going to commit a serious crime. Repeatedly describing him as “vermin”, the policeman has no confidence that Siu-tung could “change” and thinks he’s already past redemption while The Master quite reasonably asks if it’s fair to persecute him in this way just because he happened to be born different.

The Master’s question provokes another about free will and responsibility and if anything is really anyone’s fault if it’s all down to Fate in which case the role of the policeman becomes almost moot. He is also resisting his own fate in his intense fear of mental illness which he worries he will inherit from his parents each of whom suffered from some kind of mental distress. This fear has caused him retreat from life and it seems may have contributed another’s suicide while his divination has an otherwise manic quality as he finds himself constantly trying to outwit Fate. The two men soon find themselves in a battle with the skies, remarking that God is striking back every time they make a move to try and change their destiny. 

Eventually The Master rationalises that a plant must wither before it fruits, allowing himself to slip into “madness” as means of rejecting his fate. His strategies become wilder and finally seem as if they might lead him to kill which would certainly be one way of altering Siu-tung’s destiny if ironically, while conversely something does indeed seem to change for Siu-tung who is understandably concerned by The Master’s increasingly erratic behaviour but has escaped his desire to kill. Then again, could this all not be Fate too, how would you know if you’d overcome it? As The Master comes to accept, the path maybe set but the way you walk it is up to you. Only by accepting his Fate can he free himself from it. There may be a more subversive reading to found in Cheang’s depiction of Hong Kong as a rain-soaked prison in which lives are largely defined by forces outside of their control, but he does at least suggest that his heroes have more power than they think even if it relies on a contradiction in the active choice to embrace one’s fate. 

Mad Fate screens July 22 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © MakerVille Company Limited and Noble Castle Asia Limited

Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話, Amos Why, 2023)

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Have we become too dependent on our phones, allowing them to divide rather than connect us? For those at the centre of Amos Why’s zeitgeisty comedy Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話), they do seem to have become a double-edged sword. Yet in the end, it’s a series of handsets that reconnect them with their youth if only to remind them of the disappointed hopes of a defeated middle-age given additional an weight by subtle hints of post-Handover despair. 

Asked why he’s decided to move to the UK, Raymond (Peter Chan Charm-Man) replies that everybody’s doing it even if he resented being sent away to study in Aberdeen, Scotland as a teenager in the wake of the Handover. The real reason is that he’s got himself involved in a lot of shady stuff and has just had his phone hacked so he fears blackmail or arrest. He’s organised a farewell dinner with old high school friends Chit (Endy Chow Kwok-Yin) and An (Rosa Maria Velasco), but nothing quite goes to plan in the curious ways the lives of three former friends remain entwined even if they’ve all been in some sense corrupted by the changes in their society. “All is well as long as we never change” reads a teenage message to a future self, but of course it’s a promise that can’t be kept even if in the end, “life must go on anyway.”

Still, the society itself is fairly corrupt given the prevalence of scams many of them connected to our phones. Raymond failed to get his hacked phone fixed and opted for a new number instead, but Ana in particular keeps getting weird calls from him she later realises must be an attempt to scam her out of money by someone posing as Raymond and explaining that he needs money desperately. But Ana is also the victim of another “scam” in the form of Chit’s new business strategy of getting a “monthly fee” from clients rather than be reliant on work for hire arrangements. Even the restaurant itself along with its “Japanese” chef seems to be fraudulent, while An remains preoccupied with her husband’s womanising and Raymond ironically with his series of bad decisions that culminate in tax fraud. Meanwhile Raymond’s daughter Yanki (Amy Tang Lai-Ying) is also indulging in a kind of scamming selling intimate pictures to nerdy guys via telegram and smartphone apps and ironically remarking that she doesn’t want to get scammed again when discussing ever increasing payment options with her hapless targets.

Yet as Chit discovers when he leaves his phone at home, everything seems inconvenient when you’re phoneless. In a running gag, he repeatedly tries to borrow someone’s landline but is refused leaving him wandering around the city looking for a “restaurant” in one of three very similarly named redeveloped blocks. His wife’s is the only number he remembers by heart, but she remains resentful of his meeting up with Ana, his first love, whom he previously described as a “gullible” auntie and is on some level “scamming” by convincing her to keep him on a monthly retainer. Raymond’s phone threatens to expose him, Ana uses hers to spy on her husband and stepson, and Chit’s in a sense incapacitates him, leaving him alone and disorientated in his own city no longer certain how to travel around it amid the rapidly changing landscape and seemingly identical redevelopment projects.

Life hasn’t turned out the way any of them thought it would, recalling their carefree days 25 years previously in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Banners advertise a “New Era”, but the trio are trapped in the past with which they are eventually reconnected thanks to the retro handsets that unlike the technology of today still work and contain a series of time capsule messages to their future selves. History in a sense repeats itself as Raymond prepares to leave, but each is able to come to terms with their unfinished business and begin making concrete decisions about their futures. Suddenly “can we meet on Saturday?” takes on a new sense of poignancy when everyone seems to be leaving but then again, perhaps our phones really do connect us even if they sometimes connect us to scammers or people we don’t really want to talk to. Subtly hinting a sense of disappointment which runs a little deeper than middle-age malaise, Why looks back to the carefree days of 1997 allying the broken dreams of youth with the “New Era” of today but nevertheless grants his heroes a sense of new sense of possibility even the face of their despair. 

Everyphone Everywhere screens July 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © 2023 Dot 2 Dot Creation Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Nomad (烈火青春, Patrick Tam, 1982)

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In his 1982 New Wave classic Nomad (烈火青春), director Patrick Tam had intended to reflect on Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom along with the concept of the wanderer, a heroic ideal of the emancipated mind which necessitates permanent exile in which it is no longer possible to call any place “home”. It was also he claims a critique of the “mindless embrace of foreign culture” by Hong Kong youth then obsessed with David Bowie and Japan. 

The film’s English title refers to the boat owned by the hero’s father which becomes a symbol of the yearning for escape and for the foreign among the young, but is also imbued with an essential irony thanks to its design which recalls the “black ships” that sailed into the bay of Edo and forced Japan to reopen its doors to the world after 200 years of isolation. The original Chinese title, meanwhile, translates as something like “Burning Youth” and strongly recalls Japan’s Sun Tribe movies of the late 1950s which similarly critiqued aimless post-war youth and the corruptions of pervasive American pop culture as embodied by Coca-Cola and jazz music. Tam makes frequent visual reference to Japanese New Wave youth movies such as Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth while the shocking ending (which was not shot by Tam who had envisioned a bloodier showdown aboard the Nomad) also has shades of Ko Nakahira’s seminal chronicle of post-war ennui, Crazed Fruit. 

Nomad similarly focusses on a collection of aimless youngsters struggling to find direction in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Louis (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) continues to long for his absent mother and often listens to recordings she once made introducing classical music on the radio while a model of the Nomad sits prominently on a shelf in his room. He has posters of David Bowie on the wall, while his cousin Kathy (Pat Ha Man-Jik) puts on the robes of a Japanese Miko and performs a traditional fan dance. Louis is one of the few young people who does not speak the language, but is later fascinated by the work of a Japanese fashion designer featuring swords and samurai armour that he says, in a moment of foreshadowing, only make him think of ritual suicide. 

His life is directly contrasted with that of Pong (Kent Tong Chun-Yip), a young man from a poor family who works as a lifeguard at the local pool which is how he ends up meeting Kathy who in turn fascinates him with her rich girl sense of confidence and invincibility. The desire to find a place of their own is emphasised by the constant frustration their repeated attempts to make love in Pong’s family apartment which everyone has generously agreed to vacate so he can bring a girl home only for his younger brother to prank him and his dad to come home early inviting half the neighbourhood over for mahjong. The couple eventually have sex on the empty top deck of a tram, another symbol of transience, and then repeatedly in several other public locations until the relationship is disrupted by the return of Kathy’s former boyfriend, Shinsuke (Yung Sai-Kit), who has deserted the Japanese Red Army and is now a fugitive ironically looking for safe harbour while on the run.

The Japanese Red Army was a far-left terrorist organisation most active in the Middle East though Shinsuke’s decision to leave it seems to be less to do with a disillusionment with communism than a reawakening of his humanity in which he has decided he can no longer be a part of its bloodiness and violence. Nevertheless, while holed up aboard the Nomad, he explains that he cannot join the other youngsters in their romantic dream of sailing to Arabia because he has rejected exile and is determined to return home and meet his certain death in Japan. The destructive forces have however followed him in the form of an assassin posing as an assistant to a fashion designer, which seems to be allusion a little too on the nose even if it quickly descends into a strange pastiche of samurai ideology otherwise at odds with that of the JRA in which they track Shinsuke down and then instruct him to commit seppuku with the sword he has been carrying all along. 

In an earlier fight that led Pong and Louis becoming friends, some young women had needled him that he should try to protect Kathy though she needed no protection in this situation and he was unable to provide it anyway. Something similar happens on the beach though he turns out to be surprisingly adept with a samurai sword when he’s unexpectedly rescued by Tomato (Cecilia Yip Tung), a young woman he met in a cafe after he overheard her desperately trying to dump one boyfriend and not be be dumped by another over two different telephones, who suddenly reemerges with a harpoon gun. It’s Tomato, who had kept a copy of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist given to her by a boyfriend but apparently not read it, that finally remarks on their aimlessness, “we do nothing for society”, only to be countered by Louis who answers, “what society? We are society.”

Briefly at the beach they may find the kind of utopia they’re looking for, lighting the cottage with lanterns and sleeping piled one on top of another under a communal mosquito net in the open air, but just as quickly find that dream shattered by the intrusion of a political reality. This nomadic youth finds itself exiled from its home, dreaming of an impossible escape, caught between the colonial present and a colonial future with half an eye on an old coloniser and fast losing sight of its own identity. Abandoned on a blood-soaked shore, all youth can do is look out in shock and confusion bereft even of hope in a liminal space at once transient and permanent. 

Nomad screens at the BFI Southbank on 15th July in its new 4K Director’s Cut as part of Focus Hong Kong.