Aaron Chow – Windows on Worlds

Sometimes a dream might have come true only we never really noticed. In Norris Wong’s autobiographically inspired drama The Wannabe Lyricist (填詞L), a young woman battles her way towards becoming a Cantopop songwriter yet perhaps she already is one by virtue of her constant act of lyric writing. What she craves is the validation of having a song published, yet experiences setbacks at every step of the way that encourage her to doubt her talent or the right to continue chasing her dreams.

At a particularly low point after being taken on by a music producer to work with a spoilt influencer who’s getting studio time as some kind of favour, Sze (Chung Suet Ying) is told that her lyrics are no good and that after struggling so hard for six years perhaps she ought to take the hint and accept she isn’t suited to this line of work. It’s an act of intense cruelty, though one in part motivated by a well-meaning faux pas. In her excitement, she told the influencer she’d write lyrics for her album for free just to be published, but the palpable sense of desperation seems to have put the influencer off unable to have confidence in the work that Sze herself has devalued.

She encounters something similar during a partnership with an aspiring pop star who says he likes her lyrics but then drops the bombshell that he plans to sing in Mandarin because it’s a bigger audience. Ironically, on a trip to Taipei to sell his album she’s told that his accent is no good for the local market and while they like the song she worked on she later realises that they hired another lyricist for “real” release without even telling her. What’s more, tones don’t matter while singing in Mandarin whereas lyric writing in Cantonese is a painstaking process of trying to ensure that the tone of the word fits the melody. Aside from its political implications, not only does the pop star’s arbitrary decision to just sing it Mandarin ruin the lyrical flow she spent so long perfecting but entirely disrespects her work.

After deciding to take a break from trying to make it in music, Sze gets a job working at a ridesharing app startup where she’s roped in to create a jingle but once again her hopes are dashed when the business strays into a legal grey area and several of the drivers are arrested. While the app’s creator silently cries in his office, his female colleague ponders going somewhere else, “anywhere that doesn’t punish dreamers” which seems like a nod not only towards an oppressive capitalism that values only marketability but equally the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the nation’s political realities. In a way this is what Sze ends up doing too, putting geographical distance between herself and the failure of her dreams by returning to the land which as the farmer says never lies to you, you reap what sow.

Yet for all her drive and perseverance there are others who view Sze’s obsession with her dreams as selfish and self-involved complaining that she rarely considers the feelings of others and neither notices nor cares if she may have hurt or inconvenienced them. She’s told that her lyrics are hollow because she lacks life experience but also is incapable of empathising and cannot see anything outside of her quest to become a lyricist. She watches other people move on, her brother getting married, friends enjoying career success etc while she’s still stuck looking for her big break only for something to go wrong just as everything was about to go right.

Wong signals the playful qualities of her fantasies though use of onscreen illustrations and even a karaoke-style video along with the nostalgic quality of the early 2000s setting of Sze’s schooldays with its MSN messenger and ICQ. Sze may be “dragged along by the melody” in more ways than one as she tries to make peace with her dreams and her future and find some way of living in harmony with the rhythms of the world around her but eventually comes to realise that she was a lyricist all along no matter what anyone else might have tried to convince her she was.

The Lyricist Wannabe screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas 15th March courtesy of Cine Asia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

A former serviceman turned triad middleman bonds with a similarly oppressed South Asian petty criminal in Chan Kin-long’s noirish crime drama Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙). An unexpected awards contender, the first directorial effort from actor Chan aligns its disparate heroes as two men in a sense betrayed by the world in which they live, one longing for a way out and the other too convinced he no longer deserves one to continue looking.

“Let’s start over” Chiu (Gordon Lam Ka-tung) philosophically muses over a cigarette contemplating the coming handover. As a brief title card explains, when the British Army pulled out of Hong Kong, it hung its local recruits out to dry, disbanding their units and leaving them entirely without support. 25 years later, Chiu has become a dejected triad middleman, as we first meet him setting up a dubious deal for smuggled turtles between Taiwanese mobster Pickle (To Yin-gor) and local top dog Boss Tai (Ben Yuen). On his way back to his flat in Chungking Mansions, Chiu literally runs into a South Asian man apparently in the middle of a drug deal. Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan) dreams of bigger prizes, listening to the stock market report on the morning news and musing about robbing a bank. His cousin Mani (Bipin Karma), more conflicted in their criminal activities, cautions him against it reminding him that they already face discrimination and don’t need to add to their precarious position by giving their ethnicity a bad name. “If we have money people can’t look down on us” Kapil counters, seemingly desperate to escape his difficult circumstances by any means possible which eventually leads him to make the incredibly bad decision to cheat local triads out of their drug supply. Leaving Mani and his schoolboy brother Mansu (Anees) alone to carry the can (literally), Kapil takes off while Mani finds himself crawling into Chiu’s flat for refuge when chased by Boss Tai’s chief goon Chook (Michael Ning). Unwilling at first, Chiu agrees to let Mani stay, for a price, only to find himself falling ever deeper into a grim nexus of underworld drama.

Chiu’s plight as a former British serviceman makes him in a sense an exile in his own land, a displaced soul free floating without clear direction unable to move on from the colonial past. We later learn that he is in a sense attempting to atone for a karmic debt relating to the death of a friend during the Asian financial crisis, also beginning in 1997, of which he was a double victim. Most of his old army buddies have moved on and found new ways of living, some of them rejecting him for his role in their friend’s death and tendency to get himself into trouble while Chiu can only descend further into nihilistic self-loathing in his self-destructive triad-adjacent lifestyle.

Mani, by contrast, did not approve of his cousin’s criminality, particularly resenting him for using Mansu’s schoolbag as a means of shifting drugs. He dreams of a better life but sees few other options for himself, hoping at least to send Mansu to university and ensure he doesn’t share the same fate. Chiu continues to refer to him solely by a racial slur, but simultaneously intervenes in the marketplace when Chook and his guys hassle another South Asian guy insisting that they’re all locals and therefore all his “homies”, despite himself warming to the young man and even going so far as to sort out child care for Mansu otherwise left on his own. “Harmony brings wealth” Boss Tai ironically exclaims, but harmony is it seems hard to come by, Chiu’s sometime Mainland girlfriend expressing a desire to return because the city is not as she assumed it would be while little Mansu is constantly getting in fights because the other kids won’t play with him.

“There’s always a way out. I’ll start over” Chiu again tells Mani, though he seems unconvinced. Clearing his debts karmic and otherwise, Chiu discovers only more emptiness and futility while perhaps redeeming himself in rebelling against the world of infinite corruption that proved so difficult to escape. A moody social drama with noir flourishes, Chan’s fatalistic crime story is one of national betrayals culminating in a highly stylised, unusually brutal action finale partially set in the green-tinted hellscape of a gangster’s illegal operating theatre. Men like Chiu, it seems, may not be able to survive in the new Hong Kong but then perhaps few can.

Hand Rolled Cigarette streams in Europe until 2nd July as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Tag: Aaron Chow

The Lyricist Wannabe (填詞L, Norris Wong, 2023)

Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙, Chan Kin-long, 2020)