Bonnie Wong – Windows on Worlds

Ever get that feeling someone is looking at you, but actually they were looking at someone else? The mismatched cops at the centre of Jonnie To’s black comedy love farce Blind Detective (盲探) seem to encounter this phenomenon more often than most as To and screenwriter Wong Ka-Fai delight in waltzing the audience towards an unexpected conclusion filled with ironic symmetries and persistent doubling as the detectives role-play their way towards truths literal and emotional.

Former policeman Johnston (Andrew Lau Tak-wah) lost his sight after ignoring an eye problem in order to solve his case and has been working as a kind of private detective ever since, looking into cold cases with reward money attached. His old buddies, however, have a habit of exploiting him as they do while trying to stop a series of sulphuric acid attacks unfairly denying him his payout by following him and then technically arresting the criminal “first” so his work doesn’t count. That is however how he first meets agile yet clueless heiress/struggling investigator Ho (Sammi Cheng Sau-man) who lives in a palatial flat left to her by her parents. Regarding him as the god of solving crime, Ho asks Johnston to help her solve a mystery which has plagued her since childhood in the disappearance of Minnie (Lang Yueting), an “unsociable” young girl with no friends who confessed to her that she was worried about becoming the kind of person who could kill for love as her mother and grandmother had done. Little Ho was frightened and stopped hanging out with Minnie even though she stood outside her apartment block just staring up at her in loneliness. Adult Ho feels guilty and ashamed, hoping she can make amends by finding out what happened to her friend.

Like the earlier Mad Detective, Johnston has a special gift and unconventional investigational style which involves a lot of method acting and physical role-play even going to far as to force Ho into getting the same tattoo as one of the victims in a case he’s pursuing. His sightlessness at times allows him to see what others do not, but even his gaze is occasionally misdirected. Ironically enough he’d put off asking out his crush until after he finished his case only to then go blind, while she in turn had put off seeking out hers until after her competition only to lose sight of him, Johnston never realising that when he thought she was looking at him she was actually looking at someone else. The same thing happens with Ho and Minnie, Ho unaware of all the facts never realising there might have been another reason for Minnie’s behaviour. Frequently they look for one thing and find something else, accidentally uncovering a prolific cross-dressing cannibal caveman serial killer living alone in the woods surrounded by skeletons which turns out to have little relationship to their original case save for its tangential link in the killer’s preference for brokenhearted women.

Everything is disguised as something else, the killer of the first case setting up the crime scene to look like his victims killed each other with no one else present while two brokenhearted souls stowaway in wardrobes hoping to reunite with lovers who have rejected them, the second later changing their appearance in order to get a second chance. Love does indeed make you do strange things, the sulphuric acid thrower apparently taking some kind of indirect revenge for his wife’s infidelity as he reveals through a manic phone call first berating and then forgiving her while randomly buying a big bottle helpfully marked “sulphuric acid” from a local supermarket. Yet in this screwball comedy throwback it takes a little while for the oblivious Johnston to realise that he’s fallen for his infatuated new partner who can’t quite be sure he hasn’t fallen for her bank balance instead.

Despite the persistent darkness of serial killings and crimes of passions, Blind Detective is at heart a romantic comedy filled with absurdist, slapstick humour in which the heroes literally tango their way to emotional authenticity, a dance which in part at least requires each partner to look away from the other. To’s delightfully arch comical mystery romance is a tale of misdirected glances and buried truths but eventually allows its equally burdened detectives to step away from their personal baggage and embrace a happier future.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Everyone needs an oasis. It might be a mirage, but still you need to believe in it anyway or with the world the way it is you might just go crazy. For the Lo family, that oasis was their tiny harbour view for which they paid handsomely even though their home could be described as modest at best. Relying on the calming vision of the sea to preserve their peace of mind, the family are constantly preoccupied by the rapid increase in high rise apartment buildings which threaten it, but did not bank on a cynical businessman setting up home on the rooftop opposite and putting up a giant advertising billboard to make a few extra pennies.

Adapting the stage play by Cheung Tat-ming, Herman Yau uses the woes of the Lo family to satirise the effects of Hong Kong’s ongoing housing crisis as they find themselves living in a cramped apartment block where everyone seems to have problems but no inclination to mind their own business. Mrs. Lo, Suk-yin (Anita Yuen Wing-yi), is fed up with the butcher (Lam Suet) who lives directly above them and his habit of loudly mincing pork while she’s trying to eat her dinner in peace, while the kids – son Bun-hong (Ng Siu-hin) and daughter Yu-sze (Jocelyn Choi), resent the intrusion of cigarette smoke wafting up from the flat below belonging to an elderly resident whose oasis is presumably tobacco. Meanwhile, Grandpa (Cheung Tat-ming) is in poor health and in the process of losing his marbles all of which makes for a very exciting home environment where chaos rules and there is always something new to bicker about.

Family patriarch, Wai-man (Francis Ng Chun-yu), sunk considerable expense into buying this apartment because of its sea view. In fact he’s still paying off a hefty mortgage which is why the family is engaged in a money saving competition where they challenge each other to come up with the best schemes and bargains, but he is at heart a kindhearted man which is perhaps why he finds himself handing over a huge wad of cash to pay off the overdue rent of the lady next-door who was threatening to commit suicide rather than risk eviction with her husband seemingly having disappeared off somewhere leaving her alone with her young son. He is not, however, above jamming with the system and is himself an estate agent peddling “low cost” subdivided flats with no widows or kitchens and only access to communal bathrooms in disused but not quite redeveloped former industrial buildings.

Desperate to reclaim their access to serenity, the family set about trying to get the cynical businessman opposite, Wong (Louis Koo Tin-lok), to take the billboard down but he proves smug and indifferent to their plight. In fact, his resentment towards those who can afford swanky sea view apartments is one of the reasons he put the billboard up in the first place so he’s not about to take it down just because he’s realised its presence is inconsiderate. Trying to get the authorities, including an old friend with a longstanding crush on Suk-yin, involved proves largely fruitless with the family locked into a bureaucratic nightmare which saps all their energy and only drives them all crazier even as they begin to unite in pooling their efforts to outsmart Wong who insists the billboard is “art” which he made himself and enriches the city.

The intersection between art and advertising, as well as mild motion towards both things as acts of protest, is only one of the film’s meta touches, but its main theme is indeed family and the various ways the modern society both frustrates and cements it. The Los who were always at each other’s throats, became calm sitting together gazing out at the peaceful harbour but later returned to their individual spheres before reuniting in conflict. Meanwhile, we discover that Wong has a sad story of his own which paints him as a lonely man without a family who likes the attention the billboard has brought him because it’s finally forced people to acknowledge his existence. Rather than managing to make friends with him, the Los descend further into their psychotic fury as they try to defeat Wong, ironically rediscovering their family solidarity in the process. “In this terrible world only family can protect us”, Grandpa says, and in this crazy cutthroat society he may be right. Perhaps the best course of action is to all go mad together rather than try to resist the craziness.

A Home with a View was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival. It is also currently available to stream via Netflix in the UK (and possibly other territories).

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Bonnie Wong

Blind Detective (盲探, Johnnie To, 2013)

A Home with a View (家和萬事驚, Herman Yau, 2019)