Tag: Cantonese

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)

Full Alert (高度戒備, Ringo Lam Ling-Tung, 1997)

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“Neither of us are normal people,” the antagonist of Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (高度戒備) points out to his opposite number, an increasingly compromised cop not so different from the man he is pursuing. Something is poisoning the waters of contemporary Hong Kong, and as it turns out there’s no real cure for this sickness. Neither man can escape the ghosts of his past, nor can he accommodate himself with this new reality of the coming post-Handover society defined by nothing other than nihilistic despair.

When residents of an apartment block begin falling ill, policeman Pao (Sean Lau Ching-wan) is called in only to discover the body of a man in the rooftop water tank. The image of his face floating in the water has a haunting, nightmarish quality that is only deepend by the anxiety of his killer who can’t be sure if he was really dead when they put him there, or ended up drowning all alone in the dark. His fate is ironically echoed in Kwan’s (Francis Ng Chun-yu) use of the sewer network to plot a heist on the Jockey Club on the busiest day of the year, emerging into a rain-drenched city only to be faced by despair and futility in the form of Pao.

Yet at times, Kwan is an oddly sympathetic villain. He comes across as a kind of everyman pushed to the brink by a society he feels is unjust and has treated him poorly. “I’ve come here to get back what I lost,” he explains as if he too were trying to find a way back to the pre-Handover society. He targets the Jockey Club in revenge for having his life ruined by gambling and hopes to make ironic use of his engineering background as an explosives expert fired for abusing his position to illegally sell explosive devices.

Pao, by contrast, is also a haunted man and not least by Kwan who comes to represent his other self. Just as Kwan is plagued by visions of the architect from the water tank, so Pao cannot escape the memory of having killed a man as a serving police officer. “It’s not easy to kill someone,” Kwan laments, reflecting that his transgression has changed him in untold ways that give him an odd kind of affinity for Pao. While chasing Kwan in a crowded marketplace, Pao loses his cool and fires his gun despite the risk to the general public, causing a motorcyclist to crash. When Kwan rings him, it’s less like taunting than a genuine sense of commiseration in which he likens Pao to a boy he knew at school who cried in the toilets after losing out on the number one spot that he had been fixated on taking. “That made me sad too,” he admits bearing out the inherent bond between rivals and the loneliness that exists outside it. Each man is, to an extent, motivated by fear and the desire to free themselves by destroying their other self.

“It’s just that we’re standing on different sides,” Kwan reflects, remarking that Pao is a good cop and he doesn’t mean to go against him, but believes he has no other choice. The Taiwanese gangsters may believe they have no other choice either, plotting either to rescue Kwan or neutralise him before he can expose their plans. Nevertheless, the loss of one of their men is directly contrasted with Pao’s loss of his fellow officer, arguably through his own recklessness and obsession with catching Kwan at all costs. Kwan, meanwhile, is conflicted too, apologising for involving Pao’s family and on some level self-aware that he’s destroying himself. He may not actually expect to survive but does his best to shield those he loves from the consequences of his actions, just as Pao wonders if he should quit the force to be there for his wife and son.

Shooting guerrilla style in the streets of Hong Kong, Lam captures a very real sense of panic and anxiety hanging over the city as the Handover draws closer. With the “reunification” coming, all that matters is peace, according to Pao’s superior officer, though peace is something Pao will never find, just as Kwan will never really find escape, not from himself or from a Hong Kong which seems to be in a state of total collapse. To that extent, they are each ghosts of a rapidly disappearing city fighting to take back what they’ve lost, but in the end finding only despair and loneliness. 

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)

Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1994)

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“He is a decent, respectable man who draws a clear distinction between a lady and a whore,” according to one of the excerpts from Eileen Chang’s novel that pepper the screen in Stanley Kwan’s sumptuous melodrama set in the Shanghai of the 1930s, Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰). Zhen-Bao (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) is though entirely delusional, a man who desires absolute control but has no mastery over himself and at times appears rather pompous, believing himself to have a kind of higher purpose though achieving little of note.

According to the narrator, this is an age in which most men have two women, though Zhen-Bao does indeed seem to draw a line between them as evidenced in the opening sequence comparing his time as a student in Paris and Edinburgh. We see him meet a Parisian sex worker, and then his “first love” in Scotland, Rose, whom the narrator describes as a simple and open girl that Zhen-Bao found “innocently attractive”. Nevertheless, Zhen-Bao abruptly dropped her when he left the city demonstrating his determination not to be romantically entangled or allow a woman to alter the course of his life.

This seeming dichotomy is reflected in Zhen-Bao’s two roses, though there may be some debate about who occupies which role. “Red Rose” Jiao-Rui (Joan Chen) is the wife of a friend with whom he eventually embarks on a passionate affair, while “White Rose” Yen Li (Veronica Yip Yuk Hing) is the simple and innocent girl he marries as an “ideal wife” to please his mother and fulfil his image of himself as a “decent, respectable man”. Despite insisting on his independence, Zhen-Bao is blind to the influence his mother wields over his life and perhaps also what it actually means to be “decent and respectable” on anything other than a superficial level. His colleagues find him to be old-fashioned, but admire him for his attitude to work and life. “No one is more attentive to his mother than he,” they add, praising his diligence and reliability before describing him as a “practical man” who does not believe in something as unscientific as reincarnation. Chang’s description of him as the archetypal Chinese man of his era may be ironic, but also echoes Zhen-bao’s conception of himself as an idealised figure of patriarchal authority.

It’s this vision of properness along with his need for control that eventually leads Zhen-Bao to abandon Jiao-Rui after she falls in love with him and writes to her husband to ask for a divorce. Furious that she did this without consulting him or “considering [his] future”, Zhen-Bao strides out into traffic and is hit by a car. After this he is sort reborn as once again “decent and respectable”, resolving to break with Jiao-Rui on the grounds that their relationship was always improper because she was his friend’s wife and the scandal would destroy them both.

The world of Red Rose is one of opulent decadence, filled with colour and passion. The exposed brickwork of her apartment is broken by stretches patterned with rough shards of stone that echo the chaotic destructiveness of their affair. The world of White Rose, by contrast, is entirely sterile. Everything is white save for a pattern of pink roses the occasional cherub echoing the frieze on their wedding cake. This may be the world of absolute control that Zhen-bao was trying to create. For a while after the wedding he wears traditional Chinese dress and plays the part of a “decent, respectable” husband, yet his old habits soon resurface in his irresponsible womanising.

Meanwhile, he treats Yen Li with nothing but contempt. He regards her as stupid and avoids introducing her to his social circle lest she embarrass herself and show him up. Zhen-bao advises her to listen to the radio in order to educate herself and often flies into violent rages. When he sleeps with her, he merely uses her body as an object and does so only with the intention of conceiving a child, never considering her pleasure, consent, or even subjectivity. Despite the pressure to have a son, this seems to stop when the couple have a daughter whom Zhen-bao later enrols in boarding school seemingly out of spite.

Yen Li enters a depressive state in which she locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, even taking her meals in there. Yet as she becomes used to her mistreatment by Zhen-bao, she is eventually able to overcome it to the extent that she no longer cares what he does or says. She has taken control of her world, embarking on a clandestine affair with her tailor and caring for her daughter, otherwise ignoring Zhen-bao’s existence. He vows to himself that he will once again start over as a “decent, respectable man” but seems to have come to the realisation that he is not and never will be while clinging to this delusional image of himself.

His failure is rammed home when he unexpectedly runs into Jiao-Rui on a street car. Despite his brother having said that he had seen her looking old and worn out with too much makeup, she still radiates beauty and allure. Zhen-bao behaves as if he’s encountered a saviour, but she has long since moved on. Jiao-Rui is happy and has found a steadier kind of relationship with her second husband, remarking that Zhen-bao taught her how, but also who, to love. Realising his desire to return to her will not be fulfilled, he lies that he is happy and talks about his career success rather than his marriage before breaking down in tears. As he ironically remarks to himself that it ought to be the woman crying in this sort of situation, Jiao-Rui appears a little embarrassed and abruptly disembarks this particular train. In the end, Zhen-Bao is reduced to an empty figure of patriarchal authority who appears almost as a ghost in his own home, continuing to delude himself that he is “a decent and respectable man” in the height of his impotence. 

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

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.

Gamer Girls (電競女孩, Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto, 2025)

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Losers never win again, according to some in Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto’s e-sports dramedy Gamer Girls (電競女孩). Now in her mid-20s, Summer (Angela Yuen Lai-Lam) gave up her e-sports career after a defeat, disbanding her team, and going back to school to get a regular corporate job instead. But somehow she can’t quite settle into the conventional life her boyfriend and family want for her. Still seeing the world like a video game, she dreams of winning e-sports glory once again but faces several barriers from ingrained societal misogyny to ageism and workplace exploitation.

Indeed, it seems that part of the reason the team broke up was the unreasonable expectations of their manager, Ms. Chiu (Cheuk Wan-chi), who now works for the Hong Kong e-Sports Chamber of Commerce. Another reason seems to have been conflict between team captain Summer and fellow player Lilith (Alma Kwok) who became frustrated with what she saw as Summer’s unilateral decision making and inability to take her teammates’ thoughts and feelings into account. Raven (Sabrina Cheung), meanwhile, still resents Summer for abruptly selling out by abandoning them to take a more conventional path despite having promised to carry on playing games together forever.

To that extent, the film seems to be another in a recent line exploring young people’s sense of dissatisfaction with the working environments their parents have railroaded them towards all their lives. Given the economic pressures of the contemporary society in which things like buying a flat and starting a family are out of reach for most, many feel that it’s no longer worth the sacrifice of long hours spent in an office doing a job that probably doesn’t interest them for so little reward. Instead they favour less conventional lifestyles that offer more freedom even if it comes at the cost of economic stability. Summer feels embarrassed around her family having insisted that e-sports could be “a real job” only to end up working in an office anyway, but still isn’t really ready to commit fully to the conventionality being imposed on her not least by her handsome and kind boyfriend who nevertheless can’t understand any other way of living and thinks her decision to quit her job is an act of madness.

But at the same time, it’s clear that she’s fighting an uphill battle in the e-sports world where male players refuse to accept that girls could be real gamers, instead branding them “gamer whores” who are are only there as eye candy to trick men into buying things they don’t need. Ms. Chiu makes it clear that Summer blew her chance and she doesn’t want to work with her as a gamer because losers never win again, but would be willing to collaborate with her in business terms which aren’t so much different from her own job. Summer’s escape from the corporate life is in that way also being swallowed by it as big business seeks to control the world e-sports through things like licensing and sponsorships.

The fact that the Gamer Girls rebel by setting up their own local community tournament in Lilith’s family-run cha chaan teng could also be seen as their desire to defend traditional Hong Kong culture against oppressive external forces. Whatever else happens, the cha chaan teng will still be here, one says as they root themselves more firmly in a local community filled with people who just want to play and not have to deal with any of the corporate rubbish that stands in the way. There is a kind of naivety involved in Summer’s certainty that it’ll be alright despite being warned several times that they don’t have licences to use the games in this way and the only reason they haven’t been shut down yet is because the companies are turning a blind eye. When Ms. Chiu feels threatened and decides to act, the swift deletion of everyone’s accounts, along with years of gaming history, reminds them that their world could be taken away from them just like that.

But their response is one of mutual solidarity, committing to rebuilding and defending the community they have created in the cha chaan teng and competing on their own terms. Even Summer’s online friend Login (Chase Chan Chung Chak) who was “banned for life” after protesting exploitative employment practices in professional e-sports begins to realise that nothing actually prevents him from just playing the game aside from his own sense of disappointment. Which is to say, they took their world back, if only to an extent in that they are still at the mercy of those who own the games and their in-game successes are only ever fantasy projections of battles unwon in their offline lives. Nevertheless, have at least decided to play on their own terms valuing sportsmanship and community over corporate success.

Gamer Girls screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Once a Thief (縱橫四海, John Woo, 1991)

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A trio of orphans raised to be international art thieves rebel against their mentor when a job goes wrong in John Woo’s throwback to his early comedies, Once a Thief (縱橫四海). A breezy, Lupin III-esque adventure, the film on one level seems to be satirising the vacuity of extreme wealth as the rich spend huge amounts of money to buy stolen paintings they can’t show to anyone while painting our heroes as anti-capitalist rebels for whom the money is but a secondary concern.

They are, after all, having quite a lot of fun with their complicated heists. Though the robberies are finely tuned affairs, we also see that the team are not infallible and often riding on bravado such as Rice Pudding (Chow Yun-fat) failing to land smoothly in the getaway car and being left trailing behind alone. The trio take it in good humour and have a real sense of camaraderie in which they’re forever playing tricks on each other. Not even the intrusion of romantic rivalry can disrupt their friendship as it becomes clear that both Jim (Leslie Cheung) and Rice Pudding are in love with Red Bean (Cherie Chung), with Rice Pudding originally having the upper hand.

There is something quite funny about the fact that the other two are called “Rice Pudding” and “Red Bean” but “Jim” is just “Jim”. Despite the romantic rivalry, there’s also a sense of homoerotic tension that exists between the two men, with Jim cheekily flirting with a portrait artist while boasting of the gang’s success. The European setting adds a sense of sophistication and international glamour that recalls classic Hollywood cinema, while hinting a new globalised society. The gang are wanted by “Interpol”, and the Zenigata-like figure of a Hong Kong policeman (Paul Chu) who acts as a kind of alternate father figure watching over the trio since they were children and trying to get them to give up their life crime.

The man who raised them, Boss Chow (Kenneth Tsang), meanwhile, was cruel and mainly sees them as tools to be used to enrich himself. When Rice Pudding loses the use of his legs and uses a wheelchair to get around, he is more or less disowned as no longer useful, only to be rescued by their Godfather. Rice Pudding, however, is surprisingly adept and able to perform some killer dance moves in his chair not to mention fighting bad guys in much the same way he did before. But despite the cartoonish fun, there is an unexpectedly violent aspect to the gang’s final heist as Jim strangles guards and Rice Pudding throws plastic explosives at their heads which he then detonates remotely. 

Read Bean, meanwhile, is largely relegated to making travel arrangements and hanging around at airports to waiting to find out if her friends have survived or not. She also acts as a kind of interpreter, speaking French to facilitate their deals which suggests Chow trained them in specific ways, though she does not always translate accurately, trying to put the guys off accepting a risky job from a wealthy Frenchman because she wants to get out of their life of crime and settle down even while Rice Pudding and Jim still seem to be addicted to the thrill of the chase. Their mission sees them sneak into a chateau and steal a painting from a hidden cellar they can only access through a secret door while avoiding booby traps like electrified floors and laser fields they cheekily dance the limbo through. 

For them, it was never really about the artwork nor the money, but the sense of achievement in stealing without being caught while running rings around law enforcement. This sense of rebellion which extends in a way towards the capitalist system in which the super wealthy squabble over trinkets while elderly women starve, is eventually turned back on Chow whom they end up defying in order to break free of his control. Chow got greedy, double-crossing just about everyone in order to make his stolen painting more valuable when he sells it and then steals it back again. Filled with zany humour and expertly crafted action sequences, the film never takes itself all that seriously while revealing in the roguish antics of the three gentlemen thieves living their best lives rebelling against a world ruled by wealth and privilege through ingenious crime.

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

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)

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish (我未許願先吹蠟燭, Chao Koi Wang & Hu Chin-Yen, 2025)

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“Money can’t solve everything,” according to Jojo’s teacher, but life without it is certainly very difficult in Chao Koi-Wang and Hu Chin-Yen’s heartwarming drama I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish. The film’s title perhaps bears out the sense of disappointment and futility among those trapped on the margins of contemporary Macanese society where life is one great crap shoot and the only way out of their straitened circumstances is to win big at one of the area’s famous casinos. 

But as recently released ex-offender Hua points out, there are wins and losses in gambling and more often than not they lost. Jojo is living with her elderly grandmother following her parents’ divorce and father’s disappearance after fleeing to avoid loan sharks who now pester them for their money. Jojo’s father told her he was scammed by his business partner, but her grandmother suggests it was down to a gambling problem. It’s ironic then that Jojo’s proposed solution is to use an insanely large number of “dead chips”, those that can’t be cashed in but can be used to place bets, to get rich quick and pay off her father’s debts so he can come and the family can live in a comfortable environment. The only snag is that, thankfully, they don’t yet let small children enter casinos.

While it’s clear that everyone seems to be feeling a sense of desperation, there are also those who help others such as the landlord that lets Jojo’s grandmother rent a makeshift rooftop apartment cheaply while even the evil loan shark turns out to have a compassionate side. Nevertheless, Jojo’s attempts to lean on adults for help largely fail, beginning with her hypocritical teacher who criticises gambling but agrees to help her then pockets the money for himself telling her he lost it all. He’s later seen looking in an estate agent’s window with his girlfriend, implying he wanted the money to buy a flat because, realistically speaking, there’s no way he could do that on a teacher’s salary and without the means to own property things like marriage and a domestic life also become more difficult. 

Hua, who came to Macau from Taiwan for love, also believes his economic situation caused the breakdown of his marriage and is desperate to win his wife back. Fearful she’d leave him, he committed a scam to buy a flat she moved out of when he went to jail. He’s now renting it out to a collection of migrant workers like himself to cover the mortgage while working as a debt collector. Yet he too is touched by Jojo’s plight and agrees to help her, though even he is tempted by the idea of scamming her out of her all money. Perhaps he sympathises with her because they are both in effect waiting for someone who likely won’t return, he his wife and she her father. As such, they form a kind of familial bond with Hua trying to take care of Jojo and her grandmother while keeping half an eye on the prospect of paying off his mortgage. 

On the other hand, it says something about societal indifference that Jojo goes on living on her own while her grandmother’s in hospital and their electricity has been cut off because she’s not around to pay the bill. They need someone to sign a consent form so her grandmother can have surgery, but there don’t appear to be any other responsible adults in Jojo’s life. An attempt to ask her mother, who has remarried and has a new family, proves more traumatic than anything else. No one except the loan sharks appears to check in her at all. She is resourceful and proactive, but also still a child and largely unable to understand the long-term implications of her plan or that gambling is a dangerous habit that, as Hua says, can ruin lives.

In that way the film is subtly critical of Macau’s economic dependence on the casino industry and the wealthy inequality that comes along with it. Jojo is only a little bit worried about the owner of the chips coming back for them, while Hua suggests they have belonged to someone so rich they probably just forgot about it. Gambling is something rich people do he says, and after all you can only really do it responsibly by playing with money you can afford to lose which neither of them have. Still, they keep rolling the dice anyway, hoping that their numbers will come up. Grandma may try to caution them, revealing a mistake she made in her own youth born of fear and desperation, that greed will always come back to bit you, but there is at least a sense of tempered optimism in their mantra of “lose today, win tomorrow,” that keeps hope alive when all else seems bleak.

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Tradition Chinese / English 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)