Tag: 1980s

Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子, Taylor Wong Tai-Loi, 1989)

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“Brother Ho, you’re a kind leader, but not a good triad member,” a underling remarks of his rival, the biological son exiled from the world of crime now returned but struggling to accept his triad inheritance. Though Taylor Wong Tai-Loi’s Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子) is said to have been intended to depict the life inside the triads in a more realistic way, the Chinese title, which translates as something more like “my time in organised crime,” more closely implies that this is a personal story of one man’s attempt to reconcile the two sides of himself.

Aging boss Uncle Kwan (Tien Feng) is challenged by a young upstart and killed during an ambush. With his dying breath, he instructs his right-hand men Shing (Michael Chan Wai-man) and Keung (Shing Fui-On) to tell his son, Ho (Chow Yun-fat), not to join their gang or seek revenge but to continue living his life in America. Kwan evidently sent Ho there with the intention of keeping him out of the world of organised crime, making sure he got an education and can live a nice, middle-class life. Ho indeed seems to have done quite well in the US. He has a large suburban house he lives in with his wife and young son, and has recently got into the real estate business. Nevertheless, he has a close relationship with his father even if he never approved of his triad activities.

Despite Kwan’s request, when Ho and his family return to hold the funeral, Shing and Keung press him to take over as head of the gang. Ho is understandably reluctant and insists he’ll be returning to America when all the formalities have been completed. Nevertheless, he ends up becoming somewhat involved in the gang’s business, using his corporate knowledge from America to suggest they simply sublet some of their territory to other gangs to stave off conflict and turf war, little realising that will lead to just that. Not knowing how the triad world works, he makes some catastrophic mistakes that lead to some of his father’s men being killed or injured.

In many ways Kong (Roy Cheung Yiu-Yeung), one of Kwan’s protégés, is his mirror image. Taken in by Uncle Ping (Lam Kau) and raised in triad society, he is in some ways Kwan’s natural heir but resents both still being treated as a petty foot soldier and that Ho has had all the opportunities not afforded to someone like him. Ho tells him that he’s still young, and could get a “proper job,” but Kong is illiterate and has been in triad society for most of his life. There are no other jobs he could go to, while Ho was sent abroad to study. Ho does not really belong in this society, but is respected as the biological son, while Kong, who cannot live anywhere else, is shunned and ignored.

Ho takes him to task for recruiting other young men to act as foot soldiers and scapegoats, but as Kong points out, this is how his father recruited him and triad society does at least provide a family for those who have no other. In going to America, Ho has lost touch with his culture and become somewhat exiled from his family, but also feels responsible for the empire his father built and the men who followed him. In some ways, his internal conflict may reflect a sense of anxiety that those who go abroad with the Handover looming will lose both their cultural identity and any possibility of influencing the future of the place they’ve left behind.

Yet, on the other hand, there is perhaps the idea that Ho survives abroad, while Kong sacrifices himself to save him in recognition of the fact that Ho has tried to do the same. In torching the Taoist altar along with his father’s photo, Ho sets fire to triad society itself along with the world his father left behind, asking for his father’s forgiveness while leaving to return to his new life in America without looking back. One of the first films to be awarded a Cat III certificate for its depiction of triad ritual which upset the colonial authorities, the film plays out more like a yakuza drama of fragmented paternal legacy and compromised brotherhood while exposing the inherent corruption of a gangster society before reaching a sense of catharsis as Ho prepares to burn it all down.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂, Allan Fung Yi-Ching, 1989)

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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)

Double Fixation (意亂情迷, Yonfan, 1987)

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“The secret behind the secret is too mysterious for me to explain,” according to some kind of priest in Yonfan’s stylish tribute to the Hitchcockian thriller, Double Fixation (意亂情迷). The film does perhaps take the concept of the MacGuffin a little too far in its glowing blue orb which it makes no attempt to explain with no hint as to why the bad guys are so determined to get it back that they’ll even go to great lengths to retrieve a set of photos taken of it by a hapless photographer.

Jacky (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) is, to that extent, a classic “wrong man” who gets mixed up in a surreal conspiracy after being strong-armed into taking pictures of the orb by a wealthy businessman who wanted to give them to the priest so he could unlock its secrets. When Jacky goes to hand them over, he discovers the businessman has been murdered and laments his lost pay cheque, but, at the same time, is far more interested in some pictures he took of a stunning woman in red rather the mysterious blue orb. Jacky soon becomes the main suspect in a murder and is forced on the run, only to be rescued by the mysterious woman, Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung). Though Jacky falls for her, he can’t be sure she can be trusted. After Cherie disappears from his life, Jacky encounters another woman in San Francisco who looks just like her, but says her name is Jackie and claims to have no memory of him.

A riff on Vertigo, the film plays with identity and obsession as Jacky, abruptly cleared of suspicion as if the crime he was accused of committing may not have happened at all, continues to question his relationships with both Cherie and Jacky. Where Cherie had been a melancholy sophisticate living in a lonely mansion, Jackie is a down to earth aspiring actress whose fashion sense seems far more in the moment. She even seems to have Kim Novak’s hairstyle from the second half of Hitchcock’s movie. As Jacky gets closer to her, he’s honest about the fact that he can’t forget Cherie and the feelings he has for Jackie may be different in nature. Of course, this pains Jackie who can’t find a way to get through to Jacky who is still obsessed with a woman who may not have actually existed.

Jacky eventually comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter who the mysterious woman is as long as she remains “herself” as a means of integrating his love for both Jackie and Cherie who are different but also the same. Yonfan also hints at Jacky’s own duality in often framing him with his reflection, while in a sense his gaze is doubled and refracted by his use of the camera. The film’s Chinese title may be that of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, echoing Jacky’s obsession and doubts about Cherie’s loyalties, but the English title too is reflective suggesting both Jacky’s fixation on a double of his lost love, and the fixation the villains seem to have with retrieving the photos for no clear reason. 

As such, the film has a rather surreal mentality what its unexplained magical orbs, weird priests, and a random comedy character in the form of a strange-looking, effeminate man who carries around a teddy bear and turns up at Jacky’s studio wanting to become a male model but later seems to be connected to the bad guys. Jacky has a naive sense of optimism, sure that all this will be sorted out quickly because he’s an innocent man and never quite taking the situation he’s in very seriously even as he’s chased by a pair of “CID officers” who don’t seem to be obeying police ethics. Yonfan then largely sidesteps the darkness at the centre of the story and dramatises it more as one of improbable adventure and romantic confusion in which Jacky struggles with his conflicted feelings for two women who might be one and the same. The film is just as enthralled by Cherie Chung as its protagonist appears to be as her ghostly presence seems to haunt every frame with her motivations constantly unclear until the very last second. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Immortal Story (海上花, Yonfan, 1986)

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A young woman dreams of romance after meeting a Japanese boy in Macau, but finds that fate has other plans in Yonfan’s romantic melodrama, Immortal Story (海上花). Employing a non-linear narrative, the film opens in the early 1970s and shifts back 10 years as Ling (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) meets Nakamura (Tsurumi Shingo) who is in town for a few days while his school baseball team has a fixture in Hong Kong. Though the pair are smitten with each other, Ling never sends the letters she promised to write him, realising that she is corresponding with a romantic fantasy rather than a real person, while Nakamura apparently continues to think of her after returning to Japan.

Ten years later, Ling is discovered cradling Nakamura’s body in a hotel room in Macau and is presumed to have stabbed him with a fruit knife. The film then explores what led to this tragic ending through a series of flashbacks and witness testimonies through which it becomes apparent that both Ling and Nakamura have become somehow corrupted during their time apart. Even during her youth, however, it seems that Ling did not really believe in the reality of romantic salvation and was too afraid to pursue her relationship with Nakamura. After all, she could easily have sent the letters that she continued to write for the full 10 years, but preferred to maintain the fantasy rather than risk it shattering.

Instead, she drifted into an abusive relationship with a local boy who got her pregnant and then dumped her, after which she was rescued by bar owner/madam, Blanche (Yiu Wai). If Ling is caught in a romantic fantasy, then so in a way Blanche is too as it is clear that she is infatuated with Ling who will never return her affections. In fact, when Ling reveals that she plans to leave with Nakamura, she says that she feels indebted to Blanche but also that she has effectively repaid her kindness through the money she has made working for her as an escort. This is in a way Blanche’s tragedy, that in seeking to trap and possess Ling, she ends up ruining her while Ling feels only gratitude rather than affection. To escape the trauma of her life as a sex worker, she ends up turning to drugs from which neither Blanche nor Nakamura is able to save her.

What exactly happened to Nakamura in the intervening 10 years is never revealed, but it seems that he has ironically become involved with the drugs trade and is therefore partly responsible for Ling’s fate. He vows that he will get her off the drugs and take her back to Japan with him, but agrees to help her inject not only after they first reconnect but when they meet again in the hotel room before they’re supposed to leave. Blanche isn’t wrong when she accuses him of feeding on the blood of vulnerable people, though one could say she does the same in pressing them into sex work as she does with Ling. Unsurprisingly, Blanche is against Ling reuniting with Nakamura, but also asks why she allows men to hurt her, rather than accept the care and nurture Blanche is giving her if while, at the same time, harming her through her exploitation. 

The 1970s setting maybe crucial to making the timeline work as Nakamura states the reason he can speak Chinese is that he was born in China, though this “immortal story” feels like something that might have happened much earlier. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for a lost time of innocence and possibility, though Ling already seems to think that her future is out of reach even as a teen. When she reunites with Nakamura, it’s in a ruined building where she once used to live that is about to be torn down, hinting both that their romance has no real future and that it belongs to another time or may really never have existed at all outside of a mutual fantasy. In these early scenes, Ling is entirely dressed in a bright white, as she is in the hotel room, while as a tragic nightclub singer later she wears black like the ironically named Blanche. Their outfits often complement each other in a mix of black and white symbolising both the genuineness of their connection and the corruption stemming from Blanche’s line of work. In the end it maybe Blanche who is trapped within an impossible dream of romance, caught by the futility of her desire, while in a way freeing Ling from the torment of the shadow of an illusionary lover.

Love Massacre (愛殺, Patrick Tam Kar-Ming, 1981)

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Is Love Massacre a massacre of love, a massacre for love, or is it love itself that inevitably leads to death? Patrick Tam’s second film draws inspiration from European and Hollywood cinema along with the French New Wave including the films of Godard, most obviously in its screen composition and bold use of reds and blues echoing Pierrot le Fou, while also leaning into Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in focusing on a sensory experience rather than expository dialogue.

Shot mainly in the US on account of star Brigitte Lin’s schedule, the film takes place in an uncanny space of another Hong Kong peopled by overseas students in San Francisco. Ivy (Brigitte Lin) has become good friends with Joy (Tina Lau), an emotionally fragile young woman uncertain in her relationship with boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin) who plans to move to New York. Feeling abandoned, she attempts to take her own life by slashing her wrists, but survives. Not knowing what to do, Ivy calls Joy’s brother Chu Chung (Chang Kuo-chu) for further support, but he insists that his sister is fine and resists their efforts to get Joy to see a doctor. Meanwhile, he and Ivy begin a passionate affair.

Up to this point, Lin had mostly starred in romantic melodramas and Tam plays with this cinematic baggage in beginning the film in the same vein only to later change direction as it descends into madness and violence. Chu Chung appears to be living with a mental health condition of his own which informs his reluctance to get help for Joy. Joy, meanwhile, appears to be worried both about the latent attraction between Louie and Ivy, and Ivy’s relationship with her brother. Joy tells Louie that she doesn’t like Ivy dating Chu Chung, leading Ivy to wonder if Joy may have had an incestuous obsession with her brother, though it may equally have been because she knew of his paranoia and violence and feared for her safety. 

At any rate, Chu Chung did not disclose to Ivy that he was already married to a woman in Hong Kong (Deanie Ip) whom he appears to resent because she tries to constrain him by medicating his mental health condition. He ends up killing her to free himself so that he can pursue his relationship with Ivy, but soon becomes dangerously obsessed with the implication that his madness is caused by an excess of primal emotion that he is unable to control as symbolised by the violent intensity of the Mark Rothko paintings seen frequently throughout the film. 

Ivy had felt herself conflicted on coming to know of Chu Chung’s marriage accidentally and feeling both deceived and abandoned by him. She lived in a kind of fantasy of idealised romance that has now been compromised by her uncertainty after reading about a man with the same name in the paper who has apparently killed his wife in Hong Kong and gone on the run. When Chu Chung returns, his behaviour is strange and obsessive. He insists on marrying Ivy while claiming to have dealt with his wife, later confessing in detail about how he disposed of the body and ominously adding that he’ll have to think of a better way to do it next time because it was altogether too much bother. 

Yet despite the intensity of Chu Chung’s romantic obsession, Tam depicts his violence with extreme detachment. Chu Chung’s killing is matter of fact and motivated by resentment in that he mistakenly believes they are deliberately preventing him from being with Ivy, who has ironically sought out Louie after running away from Chu Chung in fear. In the earlier stages of their affair, Ivy had often been seen in a vivid red dress given to her by Chu Chung which symbolised her passionate emotion, but on Chu Chung’s return she is mainly seen in white which is a colour more closely associated with death. Chu Chung is also dressed entirely in white, which, on the one hand, is designed for maximum impact as his clothes become stained with blood, but also marks him out as a figure who represents destruction.

To that extent, he comes to embody the violent intensity of romantic obsession suggesting that love itself is a kind of madness that can only result in death just as it does for Joy when her love for Louie is not met with the same degree of passion. In confronting Chu Chung, Ivy is also directly confronting the emotions she was otherwise afraid to face and perhaps conquering them in being forced to make a choice how best to “help” Chu Chung while his obsession threatens to consume her. Using Hitchcockian music cues and conjuring a sense of dread in a city that seems isolated and empty, almost an imaginary backdrop with its de Chirico-inspired murals, Tam subverts genre tropes to spin a tale of love and madness. In the end, the “love killing” of the Chinese title might not be the ones perpetrated by Chu Chung but the final decision taken by Ivy motivated either by mercy or a desire for liberation.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wild Search (伴我闖天涯, Ringo Lam Ling-Tun, 1989)

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Loosely inspired by Peter Weir’s Witness, Ringo Lam’s Wild Search (伴我闖天涯) sees Chow Yun-fat’s melancholy cop falling for Cherie Chung’s isolated village girl while chasing down arms dealers in a changing Hong Kong. Just as Mew-Mew enters the more traditional world of the inland Chinese community, Hong Kong also seems to be facing incursions from the outside while becoming richer and more sophisticated as a burgeoning financial centre.

This clash of cultures can perhaps be seen in the relationship between Elaine (Elaine Jin), an antiques dealer from the inland Chinese village, and Hung (Paul Chun), a Chinese-Vietnamese gangster with friends in high places. Suckered into using her antique shop as a front to smuggle guns in from Vietnam and sell them on to Japanese yakuza, when is Elaine killed by one of her own men during a police raid Hung denies all knowledge of her and refuses to accept paternity of her now orphaned daughter Ka-Ka. He says that he has plenty of mistresses and suggests to Mew-Mew that he is essentially untouchable thanks to his connections. 

Hung appears to be the source of corruption both the inland Chinese community and Hong Kong as a whole. Elaine’s father has disowned her because of her relationship with Hung and having a child out of wedlock. Despite her orphanhood, the grandfather (Ku Feng) rejects Ka-Ka, refusing to speak to her or waving a knife in her face and screaming that he’ll sell her if she doesn’t stop crying. Mew-Mew first bonds with her because she’s the only witness in his arms dealing case, but also adopts a quasi-paternal position over her largely because no one else is willing to do so. He also draws closer to Elaine’s sister Cher (Cherie Chung Chor-hung) who is caring for Ka-ka, even if the implication is that she is the pure-hearted innocent uncorrupted by contemporary capitalism unlike her sister who went to the city.

But there are incursions and corruptions even within the Inland Chinese community as Cher is pressured by her ex-husband who spent a long time in China where he had another woman and a family he kept secret from Cher. Now he’s insistent on moving back into the family home despite being officially divorced, and becomes increasingly paranoid about Cher’s relationship with Mew-Mew. There might then be a minor irony in the fact that Leung had a wife and son in China, while Mew-Mew is also a widower who lost his wife and son and was originally wary of embarking on another romance. 

Nevertheless, there is a kind of healing that takes place through these interconnected relationships that eventually squeezes the Vietnamese gangsters out. Though he resented Ka-ka as a symbol of all the ways his daughter had wronged him, the grandfather eventually comes to love and accept his grandaughter. Leung, meanwhile, ends up going completely crazy when he begins to realise that Cher has chosen Mew-Mew but eventually concedes defeat on witnessing Mew-Mew’s selflessness when he rescues him from the marauding gangsters even though he’d just been trying to kill him with a meat cleaver a few moments ago. Hung, by contrast, is laid low when his men start turning against him in the hope of better treatment.

Somehow, this world that had seemed broken beyond repair in the opening scenes in which the Christmas lights and neon signs are juxtaposed with scenes of women escaping violent men and bloodied corpses in the street, has been made whole again and not least through the repeated refrains of Teresa Teng’s The Moon Represents My Heart along with shots of the moon above Hong Kong that echo the innocence of the romance that arises between Mew-Mew and Cher. To that extent, the action scenes may play second fiddle to the drama but are also themselves visceral and kinetic from the high-speed car chases to the final showdown in which the gangsters make it all the way to the village as Mew-Mew’s romantic and professional lives collide in a bloody fight to the death with the twin forces of their corruption. While the gangsters might be willing to unleash terror in public places little caring for the lives of ordinary people, Mew-Mew and friends will seemingly counter that with compassion and solidarity while protecting all that they hold dear.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Full Moon in New York (人在紐約, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1989)

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“We’re all Chinese, why argue?” asks one exasperated woman in Stanley Kwan’s tale of displacement and reunification, Full Moon in New York (人在紐約). While the three heroines hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China respectively may stand in for a pan-Chinese identity along with an attempt to preserve cultural identity in a third place, they also discover a sense of solidarity in being young women cast adrift in a sometimes hostile city and changing times.

As if to ram home the themes of reunion, the film opens with a wedding but one filled with awkwardness and contradictions. Chinese-American businessman Thomas makes a few off-colour jokes about his new bride, a woman he met while travelling to Shanghai, to the effect that it’s very funny he’s married a woman from the Mainland while praising the pastry chef who made their wedding cake for bothering to make the bride and groom like Chinese people. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) is confused and doesn’t get his jokes while struggling with the foreignness of an American-style wedding, uncertain as to how to cut the cake while Taiwanese guest Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) quips that she will teach her how to cut up men.

Hsiung-ping is an actress in the middle of a breakup with an obnoxious American boyfriend who has defaulted on the rent for their apartment which is owned by no-nonsense Hong Konger Jiau (Maggie Cheung). Jiau has fallen headlong into the capitalistic abyss of the 1980s in which she chases business success at all costs and is determined to make serious money. “I like taking risks,” she tells the boring the businessman she’s set up with while, despite having been in relationships only with women, apparently falling for his business savvy friend. She’s intermittently stalked by Stella, seemingly an ex that she struggles to move on from.

Though originally at odds with each other, the three women develop a sense of friendship and solidarity not least by being outsiders finding solace in their culture. After getting drunk at Jiau’s father’s Chinese restaurant, Hsiung-ping abruptly breaks into a rendition of a Taiwanese song, while Zhao Hong joins her with a folksong from northern China. Jiau looks on with confusion. She cannot think of what to sing as a woman from Hong Kong, signalling her difficulty in expressing her national identity, before settling on a Sally Yeh Cantopop track. She seems to be one of many choosing to seek their futures overseas with the Handover looming and the shadow of Tiananmen Square in the background. 

Hsiung-Ping, meanwhile, represents a second wave of migration as her father was a nationalist solider who went to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war. With the White Terror now over, men like him aren’t so welcome anymore, though as Hsiung-Ping points out who exactly has he been representing for all these years in America? “Once can save one’s country from abroad,” he answers as if singing the song of an exile and echoing each of the women’s attempts to preserve their culture, though what she comes to discover about him through his relationship with a Mainland Chinese woman who suffered in the Cultural Revolution disturbs her sense of righteousness and legacy.

The legacy of the Cultural Revolution is also what Zhao Hong is trying to escape, but finds herself frustrated by life in America while Thomas constantly brushes off her desire to bring her mother to live with them in New York. Thomas’ family are almost entirely Westernised while he seems to almost fetishise Zhao Hong’s Chineseness with quips about his Mainland wife. She tries to ask him about her mother and he changes the subject by remarking that what drew her to him was her black hair. When they visit his family for dinner, Thomas’ mother cooks a pot roast while his father asks him to dispose of an ancestral tablet that he can’t bring himself to throw away. To Thomas it’s just an antique that he jokes is probably worth something to the right kind of collector and would look “cool” in their apartment. Thomas’ Cantonese-speaking father asks if it’s true that ancestral tablets were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution and smashed, making this one yet another example of culture surviving in another place, but seems to be uninterested in the answer when Zhao Hong sadly recalls her mother carving her late father’s name into the back of a chair in defiance of the regulations.

Zhao Hong’s fatherlessness is also a reflection of her sense of dislocation. As she points out, both Jiau and Hsiung-ping have their fathers with them in New York while she has no one other than Thomas. She looks on in consternation as he chats with a white male employee about arranging visits to Chinatown as a collection of mainly elderly Chinese women get on with the actual work of sorting fabric behind them. He finally tells her she should learn to be more American and likens missing her mother to a mental illness, explaining that American people don’t want to live with their parents all their lives, entirely missing the point that the issue is not cultural notions of filial piety that he has now, to some extent, abandoned, but that the close bond between Zhao Hong and her mother forged during the Cultural Revolution has been disrupted by this migration and must now be resolved through reunion. 

Nevertheless, Jiau swears that one can only prosper here by embracing the qi of New York, on the one hand opening all her windows at night as advised by her feng shui practitioner, while, on the other hand, her Hong Konger father runs a Hunnan-style restaurant that serves Peking Duck to cater to American tastes and expectations with the staff and treasured guests eating the heads in the back. Hsiung-Ping is rudely asked by a white male theatre director why a Chinese woman thinks she can play Lady Macbeth, and Jiau loses her temper when a man deliberately bumps into her in the street chasing after him and then hitting him with her shoe. In various ways, this new environment can be hostile towards them, asking them to discard the culture they have come to save or otherwise to bastardise it, but nevertheless the three women discover a sense of community and solidarity even amid their own conflicts and contradictions.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Chusei Sone, 1981)

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In the mid-1950s, a moral panic erupted as the wartime generation found themselves horrified by the world of post-war youth. They resented a generation of bright young things who listened to jazz music in cafes they saw as living hedonistic lives filled with sex and drugs. The irony is that the so-called “Sun Tribe” movement was crystallised in the writings of Shintaro Ishihara, a conservative who later became a very right-wing governor of Tokyo. His brother Yujiro, one of the biggest stars of the post-war entertainment industry, was the face of the Sun Tribe onscreen starring in several of the short-lived genre’s key titles including Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit.

Chusei Sone’s Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Taiyo no Kizuato) is a reinterpretation of the Sun Tribe movie for the era of high prosperity. Almost an adaptation of Nakahira’s film, it co-opts its central love triangle and ends with a similar sequence in which the hero, Shuhei (Kenichi Kaneda), uses his speedboat to attack a former associate who has stolen his younger brother’s girlfriend and humiliated him by exposing his impotence, both literal and figural. This time, however, Shuhei’s rival isn’t his biological brother but his best friend. Shuhei thinks that this is his gang, but in reality Karasawa (Satoshi Sadanaga) is running it. They just let Shuhei play the gang boss to make use of his wealth and status. 

There is also, however, a degree of homoerotic tension between Karasawa and Shuhei with the implication that Shuhei’s impotence with women is due to homosexuality. When Shuhei arranges for his father’s bar hostess lover (Yuko Katagiri) to be gang raped, Karasawa declines to participate. He says that he does this out of sympathy for Shuhei, sitting on the sofa with him and turning down the attentions of the gang’s moll Kanako. The pair later put a record on and slow dance around the room. Karasawa’s decision to take up with Kaori (Mirai Hayashi), the apparent girlfriend of Shuhei’s estranged brother Koji (Koji Tanaka), is then a triple betrayal. Not only does he defy the longstanding rule of the group that women be shared, but ignores Shuhei’s authority and deliberately wounds him to assert his own superiority.

In a way, Shuhei did something similar in having Mayumi raped, only it doesn’t really bother his father from whom he may have learned his lack of respect for women. Mogi (Ken Ogata) is an Ishihara-esque award-winning novelist who has written screeds about the youth of the day and claims to have a special educational method for raising his son while secretly using his money to cover up all of Shuhei’s indiscretions. Shuhei’s actions are then in some part rebellions against his hypocritical father whom he resents. His unexpected reunion with Koji, his younger brother whom he hasn’t seen for 11 years since his parents’ divorce, reawakens his desire to lead a more conventional family life, though he can’t resist the urge to sabotage it by bringing Koji into his seedy gang boss life as a means of pushing him away.

The implication is also that all of Shuhei’s problems are due to a lack of maternal input and his father’s many failures as a man and a parent. He doesn’t know how to deal with a corrupted parental legacy and is essentially looking for a way back to his mother (Kyoko Enami). When he finally decides to see her, he tidies himself up and puts on a smart suit, making a point of telling his mother not to worry about him because he’s doing okay and will visit again soon, though all the evidence suggests he may be planning to go somewhere from which there is no return. He says that he has erased his other self, in one sense meaning Karasawa as an embodiment of his dark side while seemingly wanting to escape his father’s hypocrisy and corrupted morals to return to a more wholesome domesticity represented by his absent mother. With a lack of parental boundaries or guidance from his father, Shuhei is ultimately thrown into the arms of another authority figure in the form of the police force, signalling the futility of his rebellion. Sone seems to set Shuhei apart in this world, creating vistas of emptiness around him that he childishly tries to fill with violence and transgression amid the vacuity of an age of excess only to discover nothing but loneliness and desperation. 

Scars of the Sun is available as part of the Chusei Sone Double Feature box set.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Eight Taels of Gold (八兩金, Mabel Cheung, 1989)

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A man is not a man without eight taels of gold, according to returning taxi driver slim arriving home after long years of absence only to discover that no one is there. They’ve all been moved on too, ironically pushed further back into the past by China’s rapid demand for progress. A continually displaced person, he begins to find love, but this too like all things is destined to flow away from him.

Slim (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) fled the Cultural Revolution as a teenager without a word to his family vowing never to return. He has sent them only one letter since, he tells childhood friend “Odds-and-Ends” (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) because he didn’t want to lie and the truth would only have upset them. While in the village, he straddles an awkward line presenting these two visions of his life in New York, the one aspirational as symbolised by the “eight taels of gold” that mark him out as a successful man, and the other the painful reality that his life has been hard and lonely and that he has far less to show for it than he would like. 

Yet paradoxically, it’s this “reality” that begins to share with Odds-and-Ends who initial excitement about a new life abroad is tempered by her growing attraction to Slim and fear of marriage to a man she barely knows in a place where she knows no one. To her America represents modernity, sophistication, and consumerist comfort. But Slim has been there already and he knows that her life will most likely be confined to Chinatown where she will wash dishes in her husband’s restaurant and live in a poky flat for the rest of her life. The gifts Slim takes back with him as evidence of his wealth are largely emblems of American capitalism like Nike trainers along with trinkets such as Statue of Liberty cigarette lighters (that ironically have “made in China” stamped on the bottom) and oversize paper replicas of American dollars. Due to various incidents along the way he seems to shed his supply as he goes as if moving closer to the old China by dropping the trappings of his new life in the land of consumerism. Nevertheless, even his gold and the watch he gives to his father were borrowed to bolster an illusionary sense of success.

Meanwhile, the village itself has changed and he finds himself displaced once again. His parents have taken his heavily pregnant sister Siu Mei back to their own home village in an attempt to circumvent the One Child Policy. She has one child already, but it’s a girl and Slim’s father thinks she ought to have a boy, exposing the ways in which these new policies interfere with traditionally held cultural beliefs that nevertheless refuse to die. Slim’s father’s desire for a grandson coupled with the One Child Policy quite literally endanger his daughter’s life. It turns out the baby is breech, but they’re reluctant to take her to a proper hospital in case the authorities find out they’ve cheated the regulations to have an unauthorised second child. Instead they have to make do with a bossy midwife who refuses to wash her hands and crassly asks if they want to save the baby or mother without making any effort at all to try saving both.

It’s Odds-and-Ends who finally saves the day by pitching in to help, acting as if she knows what she’s doing but in reality battling a fear of blood and total inexperience with childbirth and pregnancy. This in some ways signals her readiness to deal with the unknown, but also the misogyny inherent in the society in which Siu Mei’s life is a secondary consideration, essentially disposable in the quest to produce a male heir. Odds-and-Ends is to some extent a sacrificial victim too. Though she begins to dread the return of her fiancé, she is powerless to resist marriage despite her growing affection for Slim. When they go to a dance together, Odds-and Ends dances in this strange style, like a country girl aspiring to an unseen urbanity, but is shouted at by the guard who tells her to keep her hands below her head. We don’t have your American freedoms here, she tells Slim, little knowing that they don’t necessarily have them in America, either. 

To that extent, Odds-and-Ends comes to represent a fleeting, elusive vision of China that eventually slips through Slim’s fingers in part because he is too diffident to claim it. Despite herself, she becomes “Jenny” bound away to a foreign land while Slim can only watch as she disappears over the horizon. He seems to travel back further into the past, discovering one of the legendary dragon boats that bears out the legend that once this place was all under water. In the end, he has given away all his eight taels the last of them to Odds-and-Ends who is left with worthless riches in place of love. In the end, Slim is left all alone caught between one place and another and perhaps realising that he no longer has a homeland to return to.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦, Tsui Hark, 1986)

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“There aren’t enough heroes,” the leader of an opera troupe shouts, “quick, those of you who were villains change your clothes.” Only the names change in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦). Politics and history are mere performance in the revolving doors of power. Set in 1913 at the beginning of the warlord era that followed the end of the Qing dynasty, the film is also speaking to a nascent sense of Handover anxiety. As one warlord falls, another rises to take his place. When he too is defeated, the first warlord returns. Meanwhile, our heroes stand still as history happens around them without their consent, longing for an age of democracy which even now has not yet arrived.

As the film opens, warlord Tun (Huang Ha) is carousing with courtesans and boasting about his 28 wives when his soldiers begin to revolt because they’ve not been paid. Tun has lost all his money gambling and decides to flee while the soldiers loot the palace. His downfall both satirises the innate corruption of power and its anonymous nature as he is soon replaced by the governor who can’t believe his luck. The governor is accompanied by his androgynous daughter, Tsao (Brigitte Lin), who has short hair and dresses in military uniforms, and has recently returned after studying abroad. 

Unbeknownst to her father, Tsao is secretly working for the democratic resistance. President Yuan Shi Kai has been borrowing money from foreign banks to finance a bid to restore the monarchy. Tsao knows her father is the broker and plans to steal secret documents to expose Yuan’s corruption and thereby usher in a democratic revolution. Yet she also finds herself conflicted in the necessity of betraying her father knowing that she is the only person in whom she has absolute trust. In the absence of a son, he plans to hand his empire to her, only she doesn’t really want it. To find her new democratic future, she will have to let the old world die and that means letting men like Tun and her father go with it.

Her mission is contrasted with that of Bai Niu (Sally Yeh), the daughter of a Peking Opera troupe manager. Bai Niu’s greatest desire is to be on stage, but women are barred from performing. All female roles are played by men who are also sexuality exploited, essentially pimped out to important people and supporters to ensure the troupe’s survival. Though Tun and Tsao may openly vie for power, the real source of power lies with corrupt police chief, Liu (Ku Feng), who insists on sleeping with the troupe’s biggest star. When he flees, he gives Bai Niu his spot and permission to perform despite her father’s objections, but what she perhaps doesn’t realise is that this “freedom” also traps her with the threat of sexual exploitation, something she is later subject to while assisting with Tsao’s plan to knock her father out so she can steal the key to his safe.

Wandering musician Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), meanwhile, is much more accustomed to using her sexuality to get by and seeks freedom through riches. She wants the money so that she can flee abroad, which is both an expression of a desire for broader horizons and that to escape the chaos of the warlord era. It also, of course, speaks to the present day and those planning to get rich quick and leave Hong Kong before the Mainland takes over. The three women in ways reflect different reactions to the looming anxieties of the Handover, Tsao the revolutionary staying to fight for democracy, Bai-niu holding fast to her family and culture and trying to live through it as best she can, and Sheung Hung who is planning to leave.

They are all, however, at the mercy of circumstance and there’s an essential irony in the film’s conclusion which leaves them all scattered, vowing to reunite when the chaos is over and democracy has been restored, given that this likely means they will never meet again as the promised age of democratic freedom has not yet come to pass. Yuan is exposed, but it makes no difference. As if signalling the absurdity, Tsui flashes back to the laughing face of the Peking Opera performer with which the film opened. Rocketing between farcical humour, the subversive homoeroticism between the women, the grim reality of authoritarianism as Tsao finds herself tortured by the resurgent Tun, and the kinetic energy of the finely crafted action scenes, Tsui finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the futility of of the heroes’ quest. Finally, the best weapon they have is friendship and solidarity in which they protect and save each other while otherwise at the mercy of history being made all around them that they are otherwise powerless to influence.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

Trailer (no subtitles)