Tag: Cantonese

Connected (保持通話, Benny Chan, 2008)

Posted on by

A kidnapped woman’s only hope is a distant stranger in Benny Chan’s intense thriller, Connected (保持通話). Inspired by 2004’s Cellular, Chan shifts the action to contemporary Hong Kong with all of its global anxieties but eventually insists that we are all in a sense connected and have a responsibility to each other in the face of corrupt authorities and an increasingly selfish society. In contrast to other techno thrillers, technology is not threat but cure enabling unlikely alliances and facilitating justice both legal and emotional as the heroes work together yet apart to unscramble the shady threat that follows them. 

Mainlander and top robotics engineer Grace Wong (Barbie Hsu) is having a fairly normal day dropping her daughter Tinker off at school before heading into work only to be blindsided by an oncoming truck and stolen away to a secret location. With no clue what’s going on she realises the landline in the shack where they’re keeping her is still connected but one of the goons smashes it before she can get through to anyone. Using her engineering skills she’s able to rewire the surviving bits but can only make random connections which is how she ends up getting through to conflicted debt collector Bob (Louis Koo) who has problems of his own as his son, raised by his sister after his wife’s death, is supposed to be emigrating to Australia this very day and will forever lose faith in his father for his constant disappointments if he doesn’t make it to the airport by 3pm. 

Bob’s buried goodness is immediately signalled by his discomfort with his job as he watches the more violent members of crew harass and intimidate a lone woman and her crying children in an ironic mirror of his son and Grace’s daughter both also in tears while pulled into the orbit of vicious outside forces. Though originally reluctant, assuming he’s on the receiving hand of a prank call, Bob soon comes to realise that Grace and also her daughter are in real danger and after an early attempt to enlist the police fails he is the only one who can save her. Nevertheless, he is torn between conflicting responsibilities, this one to a stranger and the other to his son who has entirely lost faith in him because of his broken promises and internalised shame over the nature of his job. He finds himself doing quite extraordinary things to keep both promises which further mark him out as a “good person”, such as firing a gun at the floor to get the attention of a bored shop clerk who’d been trolling him but then insisting on paying the full amount for his phone charger and not even stopping for the change. 

Even so, there’s further conflict on the horizon when it turns out the crooks, led by a spooky Mainlander, are carrying Interpol badges leaving a huge question mark about what’s really going on, who the good guys are in this situation and whose side everyone else is on. Unthinkable in the current cinematic climate, the spectre of police corruption raises its ugly head though despite having failed to respond when originally hailed wronged hero cop Fai (Nick Cheung) eventually jumps into action after noticing something suspicious enabling Bob to fulfil his heroic missions and followthrough on his promises. 

Filled dry black humour, Chan’s worldview is tinged with an irony that also makes its way into the extremely elaborate action sequences including a car chase that later plows through an entire truck of Pepsi Max, and a flirtatious boyfriend who swears to protect his lady love for all eternity only to run off at the first sign of danger. Yet there’s also an idealistic faith in human goodness in Bob and Fai’s refusal to back down in the face of injustice, each of them somewhat revitalised in their quests to rescue Grace whose engineering skills made the whole thing possible in the first place along with her determination of save herself and protect her family. It really is all connected, the intricate, slow burn mystery gradually revealing itself thanks to the growing connection between the heroes, each of them strangers but stepping up when needed unable to abandon someone in danger while refusing to allow corrupt authority to treat their homeland with such contempt.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, Chen Shizhong, 2023)

Posted on by

A family tragedy forces a grieving mother to confront the sexism and hypocrisy of mid-90s China in Chen Shizhong’s biting rural drama, Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, xún tā). Quietly simmering with an internal rage her society convinces her she must repress, Fong-tai (Shu Qi) finds herself constrained by the intensely traditional atmosphere of her small-town home and more than that by her husband’s eternally passive attitude in which he resolutely refuses to rock the boat or make any attempt to stand up for himself. 

Fong-tai is warned by her brother, in a nice way, that her personality may make it difficult to live somewhere like this where a woman is clearly intended to know her place and keep her peace. Not that she particularly blames him for it, but Fong-tai is resentful towards her birth family who fostered her out and saved their money to send her brother to university. For this reason she remains an outsider in the village (a sentiment rammed home by the casting of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi whose accent quite clearly stands out in Cantonese-speaking Guangdong) and not least because of her feisty temperament and tendency to speak her mind. 

Often, however, it does her little good. Pregnant with her second child she begs her mother-in-law to take her to a modern hospital but she insists on doing everything the old fashioned way taking both her and her similarly pregnant friend Lam San to a disused clinic only to be trapped there by an encroaching storm. Both babies are born healthy, but battered by the high winds the dilapidated clinic collapses plunging them into the lake. Fong-tai manages to save one but the other disappears without trace. As she had put a bangle on her newborn child and the rescued baby doesn’t have one, she assumes it’s Lam San’s but later comes to doubt herself. 

Part of the problem is that Fong-tai assumes no one is really looking for her baby because it is a girl and if it had been a son they’d have left no stone unturned. As her desperation mounts, many of those around her imply that the loss of her daughter is a kind a kind of blessing for, as the couple have one daughter already, it frees them up to try again for a son given the restrictions of the One Child Policy which allowed a second child if the first had been a girl. One even tells them that a second daughter kills off the family name given that Fong-tai’s husband Yiu-cho was also an only son, and that they should simply have another child as soon as possible to produce a male heir. 

Ironically this might also be why Kong-yan, Lam San’s husband, is prepared to accept the rescued baby as his own and reluctant to submit to a DNA test given that in that sense it doesn’t matter as much whether or not he is the biological father because this child is not expected to continue his line in the same way a son would be. Yet Kong-yan also embodies another side of a changing China in that he has become rich under the new economic reforms but largely by exploiting local sugar cane farmers. Kong-yan leverages his wealth in insisting Fong-tai pay for the DNA test knowing full well she can’t and then refusing to buy any of her sugarcane out of pettiness thereby destroying her livelihood. 

While looking for her daughter and frightened enough to take note of an urban legend about wild men living in an old banana plantation, Fong-tai is confronted with the borders of her world after venturing to the edge of it and discovering a construction site she had no idea existed because she doesn’t venture out of the village. She begins to wonder what the outside world is like and if she’s been trapped here by outdated notions of filiality and patriarchal social codes that conspire to keep women in their place while becoming sick of Yiu-cho’s complicity and refusal stand up for their family even when it’s their child that is missing. 

When she decides to drain the supposedly sacred lake herself by destroying the dam it’s as if she’s pulling down the borders of that world and removing the source of her oppression in breaking free of “tradition”. The villagers that were hostile to her just minutes before, begin to reflect that it’s just a lake and sympathise with Fong-tai as a bereaved mother rather than a troublemaker who didn’t know her place. Highly critical of ingrained sexism and the hubristic behaviour of the nouveau riche elite in changing 90s China the film’s haunting yet hopeful ending suggests at least that Fong-tai was able to ensure that her older daughter was freer than she had ever been even if she can never escape the wounds of the past or regain what was taken from her.

Good Autumn, Mommy screens in Chicago April 13 as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Simplified Chineses & English subtitles)

WE 12 (12怪盜, Berry Ho Kwok-man, 2023)

Posted on by

Phenomenally popular Cantopop boyband Mirror have been dominating the Hong Kong box office lately with several of the guys playing regular roles in movies not particularly designed as vehicles for their star persona such as Anson Lo’s turn in arty horror It Remains, or Lokman Yeung in Mad Fate. We 12 (12怪盜) is however the first time the band have made a movie altogether as an ensemble star vehicle and is clearly intended for their many devoted fans filled as it is with what seem to be in jokes and references to the guys’ “real” personas or at least those of the “character” they play in terms of their membership of Mirror.

The guys’ solo projects and movie work are perhaps hinted at in the film’s central thesis, if you can call it that, in that the boys have been doing too many solo missions and have lost their team spirit. In the universe of the film, they’re a kind of crime fighting zodiac who do things like save princesses and conduct jewel heists. Each of the band members, who use similar character names, is introduced with a special power which ranges from the ability to converse telepathically with animals to the nebulous “strategic planning” and the downright plain “abseiling” which seems particularly unfair given that any of the other guys could obviously learn to abseil too and then he wouldn’t have a power anymore.

In any case, their group mission is to stop a mad scientist from activating a device which can send mosquitos to other universes because it would destroy our ecosystem. Meanwhile other scientists are working on creating a “right-wing chicken” which turns out to be less political than it sounds and in fact much more absurd, along with a series of other cancer causing foods just in case you weren’t sure if they were really “evil” or not. Even so, the plot isn’t really important more a means of tying the silliness together given that focus is split between the 12 guys who each have their particular moment to shine and personalised gags. When the big job goes wrong because they decided to all do their own thing rather than work as a team, they have to come back together again and rediscover the equilibrium of Kaito (i.e. Mirror). 

Which is all to say, it’s a little impenetrable to the uninitiated but fans of the band will doubtless be in heaven. It’s all in the grand tradition of boyband popstar movies in which the silliness is sort of the point in generating a sense of conspiracy with fans that they’re the ones who get the jokes because of their intimate relationships with the stars. The film also features extended cameos from fellow Cantopop group Error who play their back up team and have a few gags of their own, while Malaysian actress and star of Table for Six Lin Min Chen also has a small cameo as the kidnapped princess. 

The best performance comes however from The Sparring Partner’s Yeung Wai-lun as the slimy security manager Johnny who is obsessed with order and dresses in fascist uniform so obviously out of keeping with the silliness and absurdity the boys represent in a mild kind of rebellion towards anything serious or grown up society in general. There is something quite childish about the way the gags suddenly pop up out of nowhere along with the otherwise nonsensical nature of the film which isn’t so much a nonsense comedy like those of the 80s and 90s as much something totally random perhaps intended to express the essence of Mirror or at least that which its fans believe it to be. For all of these reasons, the film makes very little literal sense and does not hang together very well for anyone not already well versed in the world of the band but presumably plays out just fine for anyone with a 21st-century equivalent of a decoder ring and a silly sense of humour willing to join the boys for whatever crazy adventure they may be embarking on next.

WE 12 is on UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

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

Posted on by

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)

The Enigmatic Case (碧水寒山奪命金, Johnnie To & Andrew Kam, 1980)

Posted on by

Nothing is quite as it seems in Johnnie To’s 1980 debut feature co-directed with Andrew Kam, The Enigmatic Case (碧水寒山奪命金) which it has to be more than said lives up to its otherwise nebulous English-language title. What exactly is the case at hand and why is the hero constantly being tortured for a crime he did not commit and gold he does not and never has had? Scripted by Zhu Yan, To’s debut nevertheless reflects the persistent concerns of his later career in its depiction of a cruel and arbitrary world ruled by chance even if it lacks the sense of lyricism for which he has become known.

Somewhere in feudal China, prisoner Lu (Damian Lau Chung-Yan) is being tortured by the evil magistrate Hsiung Chien who believes he knows the location of a vast amount of stolen gold. Together with another prisoner, he finally manages to escape and heads straight back towards the scene of the crime which he did not commit followed by a large number of former prisoners also hoping he will lead them to the missing treasure but all Lu is interested in is proving his innocence. Pursued by Hsiung, he also picks up another follower in the form of a beautiful young woman, Pei Pei (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung), who has come to the conclusion he must be an OK guy and hopes he will help her get to Stone City where she is supposed to collect the ashes of her recently deceased father only to discover from a wanted poster in a tavern that Lu is the guy convicted of killing him. 

In a repeated motif, the situation is further complicated by people not being quite as dead as they were reputed to be. Lu finds himself at the centre of a paradoxical conspiracy in which a collection of Robin Hoods has attempted to stage a rebellion against corrupt government by reappropriating official gold to return to the people. The only problem with that is that the government is already so corrupt that they don’t think much of torturing prisoners in order to confiscate their ill-gotten gains, while even those staging the rebellion have done so in a fairly cavalier way which involves the murder of the ordinary people they claimed to want to protect. 

No part of any plot but simply a wandering vagabond, Lu stumbles into a conspiracy and becomes a victim of it. He is consistently depicted as a noble hero, firstly in voluntarily leaving a rain shelter when Pei Pei arrives knowing that his presence may make her uneasy, and then by giving his money away to a widow forced into sex work by lack of other options after her husband died in the plague following lengthy period of “floods and droughts”. Floods and droughts might be a good way of describing a confusing era of generalised chaos provoked by a corrupt and self-serving government yet there is no real indication that the sickness can be cured even through Lu’s personal quest to clear his name. Even once the truth his revealed all he can do is try to ensure the money gets back to the peasants rather falling into the wrong hands. 

On a similar note, his relationship with Pei Pei cycles between suspicion and attraction as she tries to decide whether to believe his side of the story or take revenge against him for her father’s death. The film’s abrupt and unexpectedly tragic conclusion might in a sense hint that doesn’t matter because there is no real justice in the world only arbitrary cruelty, Lu’s certainty that his enemy does not lack basic humanity immediately disproved. Thematically apt if slightly ironic, To & Kam shoot most of the action leading to the final confrontation in near darkness lit only by Pei Pei’s torch as Lu continues his noirish quest for truth while otherwise employing freeze frames and slow motion as if in search of experimentation or a personal take on a contemporary style even while the world that they’ve created seems deliberately disjointed, filled with random (re)appearances and the comic machinations of a pair of Hidden Fortress-style petty crooks. Even the score sometimes echoes Star Wars while the James Bond theme plays over the discovery of the stolen gold as if adding an additional note of uncanniness. Still in this elliptical tale To & Kam have to take us back to where we started with Lu a melancholy wanderer adrift in a confusing world scarred both literally and mentally by its myriad cruelties. 

Theme song video (Traditional Chinese subtitles only)

The Moon Thieves (盜月者, Steve Yuen Kim-Wai, 2024)

Posted on by

If something’s constructed entirely from orphaned parts of others like it, can you really say it’s a “fake”? Watchmaker Vincent (Edan Lui Cheuk-on) might say no, making his living through passing off “period correct” replicas of fancy watches as the “real” thing while trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities and the gangsters who seem to be his prime customers. Then again, The Moon Thieves (盜月者), Steve Yuen Kim-Wai’s return to the big screen in four years since Legally Declared Dead and a vehicle for phenomenally popular boyband Mirror, never really stops to ask just why vintage luxury watches are so desirable that the super wealthy are prepared to expend vast sums on a niche vanity status symbol but perhaps there really is no answer for that one. 

In any case, Vincent’s obsession is with the watch worn by Buzz Aldrin as he stepped onto the moon which seems to have become lost to time with NASA apparently refusing to confirm or deny its existence. His decision to make a period correct watch for a petty gangster in order to retrieve some info on the Moon Watch lands him in hot water when he’s blackmailed by local kingpin Uncle (Keung To), who is actually a youngish guy who’s taken over the name and criminal empire of his late father. Unless he wants the gangster to find out the watch is “fake”, Vincent will have to join his heist team and travel to Japan where he’ll sneakily replace three watches worn by Picasso with his homemade replicas. 

It has to be said that the film’s fatal flaw is the miscasting of Keung To as the mercurial gangster, Uncle. Though his boyish bravado might play into the idea that Uncle is out of his depth, too insecure to even use his own name rather than adopt his father’s, To’s total lack of menace or authority leaves him a rather hollow villain who alternates between super sharp intelligence and dull predictability laced with misplaced smugness. Meanwhile, Vincent is able to stay a few steps ahead of him if only in his canny knowledge of the vintage watch trade and easy power to manipulate the markets though even he probably didn’t plan on incurring the wrath of space-obsessed local yakuza who are very annoyed to have had their luxury watches stolen out from under them. 

This leaves the gang doubly vulnerable while veteran members Chief (Louis Cheung) and Mario (Michael Ning) begin to suspect that Uncle is getting rid of all his father’s previous associates and doesn’t really plan to let them live. Tensions within the group are only further strained by an unexpected hitch in the plan which brings them to the attention of the yakuza despite their incredibly careful preparations. Yuen keeps the tension high through the heist slipping into slick Ocean’s Eleven-style visuals which lend a sense of cool to the gang’s endeavours which are after all a kind of rebellion against Uncle as much as they are a capitulation to his stronghold on the local community. 

Twists and double-crosses abound as the gang try to stay ahead of him with not everything quite as it seems. Like the watches, they take everything apart to put it back together again in a way that better suits them, freeing themselves from Uncle’s thumb which might in itself stand in for another distant and corrupt authority. Ironically, the yakuza remarked that no one remembers who came second yet everyone is desperate to get their hands on the famed Moon Watch worn by the second man to walk on the moon as a kind of holy grail among horologists that they would maim or kill for though of course even if they had it they could never show it to anyone fearing they’d caught out by the authorities including NASA who apparently have a lot of say over this particular relic of the moon landing. The heist isn’t quite as daring as actually stealing the moon, though it is definitely a sticky situation for all involved which eventually requires them to hide their quarry in plain sight while doing their best to outsmart Uncle and avoid turning on each other. Smart and slick, the broadly comic overtones lend an endearing quality to Vincent’s quest for survival while targeted by a ruthlessly corrupt and infinitely implacable authority.                                                                                                                                                                  

The Moon Thieves opens in UK cinemas 23rd February courtesy of Central City Media.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Table for Six 2 (飯戲攻心2, Sunny Chan Wing-Sun, 2024)

Posted on by

“It’s okay to be screwed, we’ll unscrew you later,” youngest brother Lung (Peter Chan Charm Man) comforts his dejected brother in an accidental advocation of what means to be a family in Sunny Chan’s followup to the phenomenally successful comedy  Table for Six. Like the previous film and in true Lunar New Year fashion, Table For Six 2 (飯戲攻心2) explores the concept of family in a wider sense along with contemporary attitudes to marriage and traditional gender roles.

Even so, it has to be said this table is now uneven as oldest brother Steve has literally run away from his romantic dilemmas taking off for Africa leaving new girlfriend Miaow (Lin Min-Chen) behind claiming she’s too far out of his league and it’s not fair of him to waste her youth. Ironically enough, Bernard (Louis Cheung) has now started a wedding business helping people pull off extravagant public proposals such as the sort of fake one he prepares for Monica (Stephy Tang Lai-yan) as a publicity stunt featuring him dancing in a 90s-style music video. As part of the campaign, they’ve set up Lung and Miaow as a fake couple hoping to build a following for their romance online much to unexpected chagrin of Josephine (Ivana Wong) who has begun to embrace her dreams by becoming a well-known quirky chef who makes food disguised as other food. Though they had agreed to separate so the could both follow three dreams at the end of the previous film, Josephine suddenly proposes leading Bernard to put on an extravagant wedding as promotion for his business. 

In a way, Bernard’s company symbolises the performative qualities of marriage as couples put themselves through a stressful and expensive ritual more out of obligation than real desire. When Lung is prevented from reaching the ceremony on time, Bernard ends up impersonating him in a full body costume making plain that the spectacle is more for show than sentiment and it could really be anyone up there simply fulfilling a role. In fact, no one even checks the certificates were properly signed. Then again, just as in Josephine’s cooking sometimes the “fake” and can actually contain the “real” just in a different way than expected. She may say that once a relationship has cooled the spark can’t be regained, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a new, different, spark couldn’t be found. 

Perhaps that’s what happened for Bernard and Monica who’ve now overcome the awkwardness of Monica having been in a longterm relationship with oldest brother Steve. Ironically enough, they’d more or less decided not to get married only to be blindsided by their reactions to the “fake” proposal but as it turns out more because of the emotional baggage from their parents’ failed relationships that have left them too afraid to get married. Monica is still traumatised by her father’s extra marital affair which resulted in a half-brother she’s never met but has since become a Cantopop star, while Bernard still has bad memories of being treated as a “red-headed” child and like Steve is preoccupied with a desire to keep the family together while worried that he isn’t really up to it. 

The lesson Bernard learns is that family is a burden that’s carried together so he didn’t need to save it on his own and that it’s alright to mess things up because his family will be there to take care of him. Miaow meanwhile is left in the same place as Steve had been in the first film, wondering how long she should wait for love or if Steve is ever coming back, trying to decide whether to accept a promising job offer in Japan or stay in Hong Kong. Part of her reluctance to move on is that she’s become wedded to the family and fears losing her place within it but as Monica says her status wasn’t dependent on blood or relationships and that she’s already been accepted into the family just for being herself. 

Then again, families can also be annoying as Bernard remembers after inviting his gangsterish uncles to one of the weddings only for them to muscle in as a major sponsor for another own insisting on designs the dress themselves complete with a par of shark fin wings to promote their business none of which meshes well with Monica’s passion for conservation. In any case, as Monica reflects family means you can embarrass yourselves together so maybe wearing a stupid dress for a few minutes isn’t such a big deal. Heartfelt and zany, Chan’s farcical drama shifts past the performative aspects of marriage and family to what lies beneath which, like Josephine’s cooking, may not always be what it first appears.

Table for Six 2 is in UK cinemas from 9th February courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Moscow Mission (93国际列车大劫案：莫斯科行动, Herman Yau, 2023)

Posted on by

In the early 1990s, China and Russia were each struggling to accommodate new political and economic realities. This is at least one reason offered in explanation for the nexus of crime that overtook the long distance train connecting the two capitals in Herman Yau’s action drama Moscow Mission (93国际列车大劫案：莫斯科行动, guójì lièchē dà jié àn Mòsīkē xíngdòng). Inspired by a real life train heist in 1993, the film suggests that China was pulling ahead free of the labour protests which appear frequently in Moscow amid the collapsing Russian economy but equally insists that the bandits must be stopped because they not only endanger China’s international reputation but its trading relations with the former Soviet Union.

In truth there’s no real reason given for the mysterious D’s (Huang Xuan) heinous crime spree save a later allusion to a troubled childhood and the sudden death of his sensitive musician father when he was only 13 (which would put it shortly before the end of the Cultural Revolution). In any case, those around him have more complex motivations such as those of Zhenzhen (Janice Man Wing-San), a former sex worker employed by the gang to identify wealthy passengers and inform the rest of the crew by note, who needs the money for a sick relative. In any case, nearly everyone on this train is concealing vast amounts of hard cash, mostly in their underwear. Not content with the money, D also stops to rape a woman who had resisted but was found with a large amount of money stuffed in her bra. 

In short, there’s nothing noble about D’s gang or any implication they’re rebellious outlaws just thuggish crooks taking advantage of a geopolitical vulnerability. Local fixer Vasily (Andy Lau Tak-Wah), however, is otherwise depicted as a victim of circumstance cruelly separated from a then newborn daughter for whom he is continually searching. He made his money digging a tunnel from Shenzhen to Hong Kong and using it to smuggle luxury goods in much the same way many now use the train as is evident by the scenes at Russian station when passengers suddenly start leaning out windows flogging pairs of jeans. Vasily’s in on that trade too, as well attempting to broker a deal for a wealthy man to buy a former Soviet fighter jet, but seems unhappy with his life of petty crime selling fake passports to dodgy people and also has an ongoing non-romance with Zhenzhen who is trapped in an abusive relationship with D’s brother-in-arms Zhiwen (Jason Gu Jiacheng). 

Intense police captain Cui (Zhang Hanyu) is dispatched to catch the train robbers and avenge China’s international reputation by bringing order to the train but also stumbles on another crime in progress in the Russian capital. He has an opposite number in Sergey (Andrey Lazarev), a former KGB now FSB officer who hints at a new world order if also at a society very much in flux. In some ways the film suggests Cui’s inevitable victory is aided D’s hubristic overreach and the cooperation of the Russians rather than his own powers as a Chinese policeman, but also that China will clean up after itself taking down a Chinese gang while technically on foreign soil and making sure they return to China for justice. 

Yau opens strong with the high impact sequence of the original heist as the camera first pans along the inside of the train before finding Zhenzhen and then rest of the gang, while otherwise continuing to escalate the action with a climax at an abandoned rocket base and then a final shootout at the train depot where the carriages must quite literally change the gauge to shift from the old Soviet railways to the modern China. The gang members may implicitly be among those who’ve lost out in the face of new economic realities, though aside from D’s possibly duplicitous musing on the life he might have led if his father had not died leaves them little justification for the cruelty of their crimes. Meanwhile, Cui’s justice is not implacable, taking pity on both Zhenzhen and Vasily and promising to treat them fairly in acknowledgement of their cooperation as opposed to D who had problematic gang members bumped off by the possibly the worst hitman in Moscow and has been using Vasily’s daughter to manipulate him for last few years with no certainly that he actually knows where she is. Making a minor point about empty consumerism in the constant references to stolen watches, Yau goes big on spectacle but also homes in on the smaller stories of trauma and displacement that eventually provoke it.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Love Never Ends (我爱你!, Han Yan, 2023)

Posted on by

The generational tensions in the contemporary society are gradually exposed when a retired mechanic begins to fall for a feisty widow in Han Yan’s quietly affecting romantic dramedy, Love Never Ends (我爱你!, wǒ ài nǐ). Based on a Korean webtoon by Kang Full the Chinese title “I Love You!” hints at its true intentions along with the potential for incongruity when exploring romantic courtship among the older population even as the film hints at the destructive cycles of repression and lost love in a still conservative culture. 

Something of a rebel, widower Wenjie (Ni Dahong) walks around with a chain whip clipped to his belt that should probably be illegal. He likes to get it out every now and then to whirl around while talking like the hero of a martial arts serial, claiming that his whip exists for truth and justice so he’s going to use it to punish unfilial children and heartless bullies. Quite frankly, it’s ridiculous and on this particular occasion he chooses the wrong side coming to the defence of a park manager who’s trying to move a pair of elderly scrap collectors on because inspectors will soon be arriving and he’s worried their presence will make him look bad. Wenjie mock slaps the woman, Ru (Kara Hui Ying-Hung), stopping his hand just before connecting with her face and then shatters her jade bracelet with the whip. It’s fair to say they don’t get off on the best foot, which is unfortunate as Wenjie soon discovers she is the carer for a former Cantonese opera star, Mrs Qiu (Lu Qiuping), his daughter desperately wants to take on her son, Sai, as a pupil. 

In one sense, the scene makes plain the battle for the use of space in urban environment, Wenjie insisting the park is for “everyone” to exercise, but simultaneously suggesting that Ru and her friend Dingshan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) have no right to use it. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that Wenjie is also rebelling against a kind of infantilisation at the hands of his well-meaning children who have put up a surveillance camera in his home to make sure he isn’t drinking alcohol while his doctor also breaks medical ethics by immediately calling to tell them that the security system hasn’t worked because whatever he says Wenjie has obviously been continuing to drink. It may be for his own good, but a role reversal has taken place as his children exercise all the power not just over his life but their own chidren’s too. Wenjie’s teenage granddaughter wants to study abroad to reunite with her boyfriend, but her parents don’t approve echoing the sad story of Ru who once came from a moderately wealthy village family and eloped with a painter when her parents pressured her to accept an arranged marriage to the headman’s son only for the painter to die not long afterwards leaving her all alone in an unfamiliar city. 

Mrs Qiu too has her own sad romance in having been prevented from marrying her childhood sweetheart because of parental opposition. Despite her illustrious career, she eventually became a heartbroken recluse while her lover, Chen (Bao Yinglin), was driven out of his mind and has spent his whole life in a psychiatric hospital pushing a wooden mannequin around believing it to be Qiu save for the heartbreaking moments of lucidity in which he realises the truth. Dingshan, meanwhile, is lovingly caring for his wife who has advanced dementia and cannot bear the thought of being parted from her while she continues to dwell on a sense of guilt that her older children felt neglected that they had to spend what little they had trying to cure their youngest daughter’s illness though it eventually resulted in the loss of her hearing because they could not treat it fast enough. 

The children are, however, largely ungrateful. The sons barely visit them and are each a little repulsed by their parents’ humbleness, more or less ignoring them at their 45th anniversary celebration while one of the daughters-in-law sprays disinfectant everywhere as if she thinks this place is dirty and a danger to her children. Wenjie can barely contain himself on witnessing such unfiliality and perhaps comes to reflect that his children’s micromanaging is at least better than the total indifference of Dingshan’s sons and daughters though they suffered so much more to raise them. He blames himself for his wife’s death worried that she didn’t tell him she was in pain until it was too late or worse that she did and he didn’t listen, while uncertain how to pursue a new romance with Ru just as she wonders if Chen and Qiu are really the lucky ones living in an endless fantasy of romantic love. Conversely, she’s afraid of romance because it will inevitably lead to the pain of separation and she isn’t sure it’s worth it in the time she has left. 

Then again, Wenjie has a youthful quality, shifting from the wuxia speak of his mission for justice to embrace the new internet lingo of his grandchildren along with its meme culture before following his granddaughter’s lead in deciding to please himself rather than those around him by saying how he really feels even if it’s a bit awkward or embarrassing. A minor subplot about the inheritance of traditional culture echoes the intergenerational themes as little Sai resolves to learn from the previous generation in order to pass it on to the next, while Ru and Wenjie finally come to an acceptance of living in the moment that even if it eventually leads to heartbreak there’s no point being unhappy now too. 

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (掃毒3︰人在天涯, Herman Yau, 2023)

Posted on by

Who is the most foolish, the arch criminal who didn’t realise his two best buddies were undercover cops, or the cops that killed or took bullets for him? The latest in the White Storm series of standalone action thrillers with starry casts thematically dealing with drugs and organised crime, White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (掃毒3︰人在天涯) like its immediate predecessor casts the net a little wider than just Hong Kong and is keen to stress the real victims of the international drug trade are the economically disadvantaged farmers who are left with no other option than to turn their fields to poppies. 

Back in Hong Kong, meanwhile, the film opens with local drug lord Suchat (Sean Lau Ching-Wan) retrieving a huge haul of drugs dropped in the ocean by helicopter only to be interrupted by the police who were watching all along. Suchat’s righthand man Yuen (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) blows his cover by pulling a gun to convince him to surrender, but Suchat chooses not to and in the firefight that ensues his other buddy, Hang (Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing), who is also an undercover cop and in fact very good friends with Yuen, is seriously wounded. In a show of loyalty, Suchat rescues Hang and manages to flee to Thailand where he sets up in his home village soon coming to the attention of the warlord who controls the local drug trade.

Describing the gang as the “rising stars of the Golden Triangle”, Suchat eventually cuts a deal with the general to provide security for his logistical operation in which drugs, mostly ice but also heroin, are transported inside fruit and other foodstuffs to be moved through the local market. Suchat had originally tried to set up his own operation only to fall foul of the general but also concedes that the margins in this game are fairly thin, no one in this area has any money to spend on drugs and there’s no point trying to produce them with the general in town so his only option is to provide a different service at another point in the chain. Hang becomes fond of the young woman who nurses him back to health, Noon, who explains that the only crop anyone is interested in is opium so aside from the food they grow for themselves it’s all they can produce to support themselves. There may a particular implication in her reply when Hang asks her if she’s ever considered moving that this even if this place is not a “home” because she has no remaining family members (her grandfather in fact seems to die of opium poisoning) it is still her hometown and why should she have to leave it. 

Before being taken to Thailand, Hang’s boss had worried that he might have spent too long undercover to successfully come back and it’s true enough that he seems to have become conflicted not only in his feelings for Noon but reflecting on the genuine brotherhood that exists between himself and Suchat whom he will eventually have to betray. Hang almost died for him, and Suchat repaid the favour by refusing to leave him behind. But on the other hand, there’s also a degree of homoerotic tension between himself and Yuen who rushes straight over to Thailand to rescue him once he’s able to make contact only to be frustrated when Hang tells him he has to go back to the village to save Noon who, as she’s already told him, does not actually want to leave despite the danger of constant violence from drug gangs and army raids. 

The film ends with the razing of the village of the Thai authorities who evidently decide the loss of life is justified in the necessity of stopping the general though it’s the ordinary farmers who lose their lives, families, homes and livelihoods because of their proximity to the trade in drugs. “I miss Hong Kong” Hang finally exclaims as if longing to shake off his undercover persona and recommitting himself to his role as a policeman but also perhaps hinting at a more subversive meaning as Yau ends on the clouds parting to reveal the famous city skyline amid picturesque terrain. Filled with a series of incredibly elaborate action sequences culminating in the all out warfare of the village raid, Yau’s heroic bloodshed subversion has its share of absurdity in the complicated relationships between its central trio and the ambivalent justice of its final resolution.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)