Tag: Cantonese

Sasori (さそり, Joe Ma Wai-Ho, 2008)

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Sasori had been dormant for a decade before being resurrected in this Hong Kong co-production directed by Joe Ma. She is, however, a very different Nami Matsushima (Mizuno Miki) who becomes less a feminist avenger than a sociopathic killer, albeit one fixated on revenge and with ambivalent feelings towards her former lover, Hei Tai (Dylan Kuo Pin-Chao), who evidently did not have enough faith in her to realise that she didn’t murder his entire family just because she felt like it.

Nevertheless, in contrast to other Namis, she did make the decision to do it and went through with stabbing Hei Tai’s sister in the heart right in front of him even if she did it to protect him from the crooks who’d invaded their home. Motives are never explicitly explained, but it’s later suggested that Hei Tai’s professor father may have been knocked off by a rival scholar/gangster researching “inhuman organ treatment”. In any case, the goons that break into her home sexually assault Nami and tell her the only way to save Hei Tai is to help them kill his father and sister. Unfortunately, Hei Tai does not seem to recognise the position she was in nor her transgressive love for him, so is filled with boiling rage and resentment. Curiously, Nami never actually explains either, but is by that point mired in a women’s prison where she contends with the sleazy warden (Lam Suet) and the cellblock’s toughest lady, Dieyou (Natsume Nana), through the medium of cage-based mud wrestling.

This Nami’s transformation is obvious when she rips the loose skull fragment from a woman with learning difficulties she’s befriended and uses it to kill Dieyou. The moment at which she kills Dieyou’s sister, a woman she has no quarrel with, solely to unbalance her rival is presented as a kind of climax in which Nami herself appears to get off on the act of killing. During this earlier stretch of the film, Nami’s victims are largely female and killed for petty reasons. Seemingly cowed and beaten down, she does what the warden says rather than opposing him or like other Nami’s stabbing him in an eye. 

This does, however, eventually allow her to escape if as a corpse rescued by a mysterious “corpse collector” (Simon Yam Tat-Wah) who gifts her a Japanese sword and teaches her kung fu so she can achieve her revenge. It’s at this moment that she becomes a kind of supernaturally powered embodiment of vengeance, but it’s immediately made clear that the only revenge she seeks is personal. Spotting a pimp kicking a sex worker in the street, she strikes him down but only tells the sex worker that she doesn’t plan to kill her too otherwise making no further attempt to help her. Ma then takes the action back to its manga roots, relying on obvious wirework to lend a kind of unreality to the fight scenes even if the hand-to-hand combat is generally more realistic. 

But at the same time, Nami steps into a more arthouse space in a meditation on time and memory that seems to be borrowing a little from Old Boy or perhaps 2046 as she walks into a bar where the barman tells her that he can hypnotise people to erase their memories though he doesn’t they should. Re-encountering Hei Tai who no longer remembers her or his past life as a policeman, she finds herself ambivalent about her revenge, on one level resenting him and on another wondering if she has the right to start over without the problematic fact of her having been responsible for the deaths of Hei Tai’s whole family. 

There are many things that don’t really make all that much sense, from the inhuman organ research to Hei Tai’s possibly selective amnesia. Nevertheless, Ma piles on the style with a particularly 2000s Hong Kong aesthetic with its neon lighting and woozy camera work but also adopts a retro sensibility brought out by the use of mainly post-sync sound in which the Japanese actors are dubbed into Cantonese. By the film’s conclusion, Nami has once again become a legend but this time a much less palatable one not so much avenger for an oppressed minority as a cold-blooded and sadistic vigilante interested in little more than personal revenge.

International trailer

Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明, Leong Po-Chih, 1984)

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“Britain has reassured the people that it will not give up Hong Kong,” according to a radio broadcast at the beginning of Leong Po-Chih’s Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明). The words have a kind of irony to them and not only because Britain did abandon the people following the Japanese invasion, but because the film was released on the eve of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in which it said something quite similar. 

But then again, the opening scenes are themselves quite critical of British rule as they, on the one hand, insist they aren’t going anywhere and, on the other, start evacuating women and children to “safer” areas of the commonwealth such as Australia. Out of work actor Fei (Chow Yun-fat) fled the Japanese incursion on the Mainland and came to Hong Kong, but now tries to stowaway abroad a boat going to Australia. He’s caught by a little British girl who speaks fluent Cantonese yet refers to him as her “slave” and insists that he “kowtow to me, now.” But then the girl suddenly adopts the persona of the Empress Dowager Cixi and demands the same. Fei makes the first of his many jumps into the water around Hong Kong, as if only in this liminal space can he be free. Anticipating the wave of migration occurring before and after the Handover, and also that of the present day, he and his friends Keung (Alexander Man Chi-leung) and Nam (Cecilia Yip Tung) set their sights on leaving to find Gold Mountain in Australia or America.

But they’re one day too late because the date of their departure is that the Japanese arrive in Hong Kong. Their haste to leave was in part caused by the fact that Nam’s father, Ha Chung-sun (Shih Kien), was trying to force her to go through with an arranged marriage her prospective groom didn’t want either. Nam is never really free as, as she points out, even after her father relents and allows Keung to marry her after she is raped by a police officer emboldened by the chaos and therefore worthless to him as currency, Keung never actually asked her and she’s in effect forced into a marriage with him instead. In fact, she returns to the shrine Keung lives in two find the two men constructing her marital bed for her with the double helix symbol of happiness already placed above it in an ironic expression of patriarchal oppression.

Indeed, her position is more precarious than either of the men and we see other families roughly cutting their daughters’ long hair to make them look like boys in fear of a rapacious Japanese army. But it largely turns out that it wasn’t so much the Japanese they needed to be worried about as the local population, experiencing a temporary limbo in which the social order has been suspended. Police officer Fa Wing (Paul Chun) who had acted as a lackey for Ha Chung-sun while constantly eying up Nam leads a gang of looters to Ha’s house to take their own revenge against his capitalistic oppression of them. Ha had largely made his money through rice profiteering and exploiting the local workforce. Recent layoffs at the warehouse had led to a labour riot, while Keung and his friends had been running a sideline skimming sacks of rice to sell on the black market. 

Ha and his henchmen anxiously await the arrival of the Japanese hoping that they will protect them from retribution, but the Japanese do not arrive fast enough. When they do, Ha collaborates and attempts to ingratiate himself with the Japanese officer in charge of the colony who once again takes a liking to Nam. General Kanezawa (Stuart Ong) also uses their poverty to starve them into submission, promising rice to anyone who will come and sing with him. The song he chooses is “Shina no Yoru” by Li Hsiang-lan, whom he describes as “their very own”, yet was actually a Japanese woman, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, groomed for stardom in Manchuria and marketed a Chinese star in propaganda films. Another song of hers, Ieraishan, can be heard earlier on the soundtrack as if heralding Japanese arrival. 

Though Nam tries to resist, Fei raises the trio’s arms in a cry of “banzai” in a moment of ostensible collaboration designed to buy them temporary safety. His philosophy and that of many others is to take the rice and deal with the rest later, which Fei does by becoming an enforcement officer with the Japanese to get papers that will allow all of them leave. He uses his position to help a gang of Mainlanders who are resisting the Japanese, and are, in fact, the last ones to stay behind and defend the colony, as well as well as save Keung when his attempt to rescue two friends who have been sold out for forced labour on another Japanese-controlled island by a local gangster backfires and he’s captured himself. 

Ironically enough, Fei had been the first one to try to leave and described himself as “selfish” after jumping back into the water to return to Nam and Keung who didn’t make the boat on time because they were trying to save a local eccentric everyone calls “emperor” played by the director himself. Fei is quite obviously in love with Nam, and she gradually falls for him in return though symbolically wedded to Keung, if not in the legal sense. Again, she has no say over her romantic future which is sorted out between the two men with Fei abiding to a code of honour in continuing to protect the relationship between Keung and Nam. Perhaps this echoes the way in which the Hong Kong people of 1941 or 1984 have little say in their future either as their fate is decided by two distant powers. Nevertheless, it leaves Keung feeling awkward and inadequate, realising that Nam likely prefers the smart and dynamic Fei over his constant failures and inability to protect her, though he is never jealous or resentful towards him only knowing that he is continually indebted. Yet it’s Nam who eventually strikes back for Hong Kong and for her own freedom while Fei looks on as children in the street play at beheadings as if they were Japanese soldiers. She embodies the spirit of Hong and carries it with her, and as the Chinese title of the film suggests, waits for a new dawn while accepting that just like old memories it will be replaced by what is to come. She speaks from a perspective that is both historical and uncertain, mourning the past while fearful of the future, but all the while continuing to live as one new dawn replaces another.

Hong Kong 1941 screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

Possession Street (邪Mall, Jack Lai, 2024)

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Possession Street is a real street in Hong Kong, but its name doesn’t hint at the supernatural. Rather, it’s located on the former site of Possession Point where the British took possession of Hong Kong in 1841. Nevertheless, there is definitely some body snatching going on in Jack Lai’s claustrophobic zombie-esque horror set in the decidedly purgatorial space of a shopping centre on the brink of demolition. 

Indeed, it’s the vendors themselves that are in someways zombies. Representatives of a generation that is tired of fighting and barely clinging on to what they’ve got, they run their moribund stores stubbornly refusing to move with the times almost as if they were haunting the place. A former stuntman, Sam (Philip Keung Hiu-Man) runs an unprofitable video shop that plays classic Hong Kong wuxia movies of the kind he used to be in. Sam’s wife left him taking their daughter Yan with her when the shop first ran into financial difficulty and Sam refused to do much about it other than swear it would figure itself out in the end.

Which is one way to say young Yan (Candy Wong Ka-Ching) escaped the mall, though she continues to idolise her father and has developed a love of film precisely because of what he taught her. She tells him that she’s dropping out of uni to become a filmmaker because she wants to keep Hong Kong cinema alive in what seems to be a meta comment on the state of the industry in which Hong Kong cinema itself has become a kind of zombie, like the vendors simply treading water while trapped in a constant state of decline in its conflicted necessity to please the Mainland censors. 

In this way, the claustrophobic space of the post-war shopping centre stands in for Hong Kong itself. A place that’s lost its lustre and fallen behind the times, the mall has fallen into a state of disrepair. Many of the stores have already closed and there’s not much footfall. The mall has a serious rat problem, though really that’s about to be the least of its worries. Even so, it’s the rodents who are partially responsible for chewing on the power cables and requiring a trip to the super secret meter room where one of the vendors accidentally damages the seal keeping a not all that ancient evil from bubbling to the surface. 

As the ghost later explains, like the vendors they are those who have been left behind by the new Hong Kong and cannot progress into its future. The mall was built on top of an air raid shelter which was sealed shut by an American bomb leaving all those inside to turn to depraved acts of survival such as cannibalism along with violent outrages like rape before dying horribly inside. Their resentment has awakened another ancient evil that wants to kill everyone in the world, beginning with everyone in the mall which is locked shut until the following morning. Clearly influenced by the the Last of Us with its fungal zombies who spread the curse by coughing up a visible miasma and are covered in pustular growths, the infected echo a particular face of evil such as the fat cat capitalist constant running down his daughter who is the only one who tries to help him. He remarks that he’s glad her brother never showed up, because now the family name will continue. 

Meanwhile, Yan has been a part of this community since she was a child and fond attachments to many of the vendors including the Taoist priest whom she once-called Uncle Con-Man. Master Mak (Alan Yeung Wai-Leun) was entrusted with a mission by his former master who knew about the air raid shelter and was the guardian standing it over it, making the sure the evil didn’t leak out, but Mak has lost the faith and with the imminent demise of the shopping centre come to the conclusion that it’s time to call it quits. There is then something in the fact that this Taoist philosophy actually works and proves the only real way of overcoming the supernatural threat as if calling forth the spirit of Hong Kong. On the other hand, it’s really Yan who is trapped in this place and seeking escape in permission to move on but also to continue fighting for the Hong Kong that’s disappearing in keeping its cinema alive. When Sam tells her “ga you,” he echoes the words of the protestors while ironically telling her not to give up even though life rarely turns out the way you hoped. In effect, she liberates them all including herself from a self-imposed limbo of resigned stagnation while walking into the light of a new day determined to fight for the kind of future she wants for herself rather than what anyone else might have wanted for her.

Possession Street screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

Ah Ying (半邊人, Allen Fong, 1983)

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“I want to make a film that reflects our time. If not, no one will ever know we existed,” frustrated filmmaker Cheung explains but finds himself hamstrung by the fact that he is not quite of this place by virtue of the fact that he is a Mandarin-speaking Mainlander who’s been living in the United States for several years. The old university friend who’s offered him this opportunity says as much, suggesting that in the end he doesn’t really understand Hong Kong while simultaneously failing to get a grip on his protagonist, a Hong Kong student in California.

It may be this sense of dislocation that Allen Fong’s Ah Ying is hinting at. Fong himself studied at UN Berkley before returning to Hong Kong and based the character of Cheung on a friend of his who died suddenly in the middle of working on a project. But the film is really about its title character, a young woman who longs to transcend the world she was born into and find a more independent destiny while held back by her needy mother and drunken father who run a fishmongers at the market where Ah Ying is expected to help out. We her clumsily gutting fish, ripping off half the meat while stripping the skin and inelegantly tearing out its viscera, only to leave abruptly in response to a slightly rude customer and the fact she can’t get through to her increasingly distant boyfriend, Hung, on the telephone.

Later we see Ying try to scrub the fish smell off her hands after running off to her part-time job at the Hong Kong Film Centre in which she does menial work in return for free acting classes taught by Cheung. She tells him that she doesn’t really know why she’s there, but she wants to try it out and maybe it will lead to a career. Cheung is a little insensitive in mentioning a girl he knew who wanted to be an actress in California, but she spends 11th months of the year working in a cocktail bar. Nevertheless, acting quite literally gives Ying the opportunity to be someone else and helps her to imagine a different future outside of her family’s lack of aspiration for her. 

Ying’s family are comparatively lucky in that they have two adjacent apartments, but Ying and her four siblings all live in one with her parents too, while her taxi-driver brother and his wife live next-door though Ying likes to hang out there and listen to records. Western music is another means of escape as she demonstrates by singing an a cappella version of Time in Bottle as part of Cheung’s acting class, though he hasn’t heard of any of the musicians she mentions like Brian Eno or David Bowie further marking him as out of touch with “our times”. They do, however, bond over Simon & Garfunkel’s version of Scarborough Fair with Cheung noting that it sounds just like Chinese opera. 

In order to further research his screenplay, Cheung talks Ying into arranging an interview with her by then ex-boyfriend Hung who breaks up with her for being too nice to him which he finds clingy and unpleasant even when she tells him she’s fine with him continuing to sleep with other girls. Though she continues to look back on her relationship with Hung, Ying has already signalled her desire to move on by getting rid of her perm as if marking a new transition into adulthood. Her mother is not, however, particularly happy about it as Ying is currently the only one of her several children prepared to help out at the fish stand. Ying’s mother clings to her like life raft as a means of sustaining herself in what is in many ways a dissatisfying of existence filled with constant toil to provide for her ungrateful family who look down on her occupation while her husband sleeps in a chair all day after drinking too much and barely helps at all.

Ying’s mother tells Cheung that she’ll be lost without her when she marries, but otherwise suggests she’d prefer her not to because she’d be left to cope with everything on her own. Cheung asks Ying why she doesn’t move out and she replies that it’s it the rent, her father only pays her pocket money for helping on the stand and she doesn’t earn anything at the film centre, though it’s unlikely a young woman on her own would be able to afford to rent in Hong Kong anyway. Cheung becomes a kind of lifeline to her, a mentor figure guiding her towards another kind of life but equally lost himself and a stranger in the contemporary city. Though she may develop feelings for him, his interest in her remains paternal and like the characters they play on stage any union between them will have to wait until the next life. Nevertheless, through her connection with him, she may have begun to discover her true self and become at last a whole person even if seemingly tethered to the fish stand. In the busy streets and cramped apartments, Fong may have succeeded in recording his times after all but also an unexpected sense of optimism and possibility in discovering new paths even if they ultimately lead to a parting.

The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師, Dayo Wong, 2020)

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Are you actually “the grandmaster” or just a bit “grand”, the hero of The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師) is eventually forced to ask himself after being confronted with the various levels of his self-delusion. Legend has it that comedian Dayo Wong sold an apartment to finance his second directorial feature in order to produce a purely local film without having to submit himself to the strictures of the Mainland censors’ board or accept funding from the greater PRC, a move which endeared him to the young protestors then still out in the streets campaigning for democracy. The Grand Grandmaster was one of the few New Year films to make into cinemas before they shut down because of the pandemic but aside from Wong’s grand gesture is perhaps light on political content, save for a mild satire on the commercialisation of kung fu. 

The Grand Grandmaster, Ma Fe-lung (Dayo Wong Chi-Wah), is the latest guardian of the Ma Ka Thunder Style martial art apparently carried by one of his ancestors to Hong Kong from the Mainland during the Song dynasty. Ma Ka Thunder has since become something of a brand with its own dedicated merchandising line and video ads playing on giant billboards featuring Fei-lung himself as the face of the organisation. His hopes for US expansion along with his general business plan are disrupted when he gets into a public altercation with an old man who tries to steal his taxi and then makes a scene claiming that Fei-lung hit him leading Chan Tsang (Annie Liu Xin-You), the “boxing goddess”, to emerge from the shadows and give Fei-lung a public beating. Filmed by everyone in the surrounding area, the event becomes a viral phenomenon that leaves Fei-lung humiliated but while his minions urge him towards a public rematch to regain his reputation, Fei-lung is consumed with despair on realising there is no way he could ever hope to defeat the feisty young woman. 

Wong has fun satirising the lore of kung fu as Fei-lung outlines the strange tenets of the Ma Ka Thunder Style which turns out to make more sense that it first seems only generations of practitioners have it seems forgotten something quite fundamental. Fei-lung and his associates have to ask themselves if the art of Ma Ka is really just “fake fighting”, something suggested to Fei-lung by his loyal assistant who makes a point of overdoing his defeat and admits he only stays with the school because living outside is hard and here he gets room and board. Urged to show his full strength, he effortlessly defeats his master but only by abandoning Thunder Style for a selection of moves from other martial arts. 

The remainder of the film sees Fei-lung trying to “dodge” Tsang, firstly by trying to bribe her to throw the fight for him and then by convincing her to get more “comfortable” with the idea of losing. Events take a rather strange turn when Tsang’s dad gets involved and starts training Fei-lung for real in an effort to get back at his daughter for quitting boxing after a single defeat apparently humiliating him in another nod to the film’s strangely sexist worldview. Tsang bizarrely falls for Fei-lung after witnessing the depths of his self-delusion in his complex relationship with his ex-wife, building to a crisis which accidentally makes a case for domestic violence in insisting that Tsang will only believe that Fei-lung really loves her if he defeats her in the ring. 

Nevertheless, the conclusion is an oddly egalitarian one in which there is no win, no lose, no draw. Fei-lung realises the various ways in which he’s been deluding himself and presumably emerges with a little more clarity, awakened to the true meaning of the “virtue like water” motto of Ma Ka Thunder Style which apparently lies in generosity of spirit, giving without expecting in return and like water trickling down. Which is to say, Fei-lung learns to stop dodging life’s blows, to give up on tricks and fakery, and to be a little more authentic, which is perhaps how he wins Tsang’s heart and respect. A committed performance from Liu helps to mitigate some otherwise flat comedy though the saga of the kung fu con man rediscovering his sense of social responsibility through a true appreciation of martial arts never quite hits home, while a strange mid-credits diversion perhaps proves one move too far.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Peg O’ My Heart (贖夢, Nick Cheung Ka-Fai, 2024)

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An insomniac taxi driver says he can’t sleep but he can’t wake up either. He finds himself plagued by bad dreams in an increasingly surreal Hong Kong that seems to exist more within the mind than the physical reality and populated by the orphaned ghosts of another era. Clearly inspired by the films of David Lynch with overt visual references to Lost Highway and Twin Peaks, Nick Cheung’s Peg O My Heart (贖夢) follows a maverick psychiatrist intent on actually treating his patients as he chases the taxi driver while in flight from his own trauma.

Dr. Man (Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai) is already in trouble for prying into the lives of his patients when his superiors, men in slick suits bickering in English, would rather he just get on with his job of prescribing pills. The first patient we see him treat is a teenage girl whose surreal dream sequence finds her on a swing in a room of blood while a giant baby doll looks on. Man notices an upturned doll’s head being used as a cup by one of her friends and begins to get a picture of what’s been going on. The apartment the girl lives in with her grandmother is cramped and grimy in the extreme despite the happiness banner on the door. The girl and her friends have taken to drugs to escape their own dissatisfying reality, but it led them to a dark place in which the boy abused the girl and left her with lasting trauma that blossomed into psychosis in much the same way’s Man’s own has. Nevertheless, in contrast to his bosses, he’s careful to remind her that she still has choices and it might not be the right time for her to have a child though he’ll help her whatever she decides.

In a strange way, it might be the taxi driver who’s responsible for her plight. In another life, Choi (Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai) was a high-flying financial analyst who could afford to give his wife a Mayfair flat on a whim, though you’d never guess it now. In those days, his hair was slicked back rather than long and wavy and his suit was finely buttoned rather than hanging loose. He wore glasses too, which he alarmingly no longer seems to do while driving. His eyes are red and puffy, his face pale like a ghost. On his return home, he and his wife have a number of strange rituals which make no kind of sense but hint at the extent that they have descended into a dream world, locked in by their guilt and the feeling that they are being tormented by a vengeful ghost. 

Then again, Choi’s heartless former colleagues describe him as being too sensitive for this line of work. They joke, a little misogynistically, that his wife was always the go-getter. Fiona (Fala Chen) was into stocks too, the pair of them playing a game of untold riches without any awareness of what it meant to gamble with other people’s money. His colleagues may have told him that’s exactly why it didn’t matter and it was silly to worry about it, but it seems Choi did worry, though the money distracted him from his moral quandary until the lack of it convinced him to betray an old friend with tragic and unforeseen consequences. 

Choi and Fiona are plagued by echoes of a single afternoon, one of sunlight and happiness that they unwittingly ruined with their insatiable greed. Dr. Man, meanwhile, says he has the same dream every night but can’t remember anything about it in the morning. That’s a contradictory statement in itself, though his loyal nurse Donna (Rebecca Zhu) doesn’t seem to have picked up on the holes in his story. In any case she introduces him to his previous boss, Vincent (Andy Lau Tak-wah), a former psychiatrist with an unexplained prosthetic arm, who has the power to enter other people’s dreams and seems to exist in more than one place at once, like the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. Exploring his dreamscape allows Man to reckon with his own trauma and subsequently learn to forgive and accept his father, though he may not, in fact, have faced himself fully or released his guilt even as he and Choi eventually share a similar fate. Are either of them awake, or still asleep? Did Man go through the mirror, or merely deeper inside it? The melancholy streets of contemporary Hong Kong take on a deathly hue trapping its traumatised denizens in an inescapable hell of guilt and regret from which they can never awake.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Dumpling Queen (水饺皇后, Andrew Lau, 2025)

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There are a lot of ironies and contradictions at the heart of Andrew Lau’s Dumpling Queen (水饺皇后, shuǐjiǎo huánghòu) inspired by the life of Zang Jianhe who founded the international dumpling empire Wanchai Ferry, but there’s no getting away from the celebratory joy it finds in the heroine’s hard-won transition from jilted spouse to successful entrepreneur. Then again, there might be something uncomfortable in the film’s framing and the repeated claim that Jianhe’s dumplings are about the warmth of familial bonds and reunion. Zong’s desire to kick back at American imperialism as manifested in the ubiquity of hamburgers and US-style delivery pizza by making Chinese dumplings accessible across the world is also an advocation for the One China philosophy in which the greater Chinese diaspora is connected as a family through “the taste of home.”

Beginning in 1977, the film is noticeably quiet about why anyone would be risking their lives to escape from Mainland China to Hong Kong, though this is what Jianhe is doing in her quest to be reunited with her husband, Hanzhou, who has been away for four years. Unfortunately, when she reaches the station at the border, Hanzhou’s mother (Nina Paw Hee-ching) rudely explains that she had him marry another woman in Thailand who has since borne him a son. Branding Jianhe a failure for giving birth to only daughters, she tells her that she can come with them but that she will be the second wife subservient to the mother of the family heir. She repeatedly claims this does not make Hanzhou a bigamist because Thai law supposedly gives him the right to marry more than one woman, though it seems the mother-in-law may not be aware that the pair were legally married in Mainland China as Jianhe’s traditional wedding photos would otherwise suggest. 

The fact that Jianhe is discarded for giving birth to daughters contributes to the film’s feminist undertones and sense of female solidarity as Jianhe strives to pass on the dumpling recipe she learnt from her own mother to the next generation of women and beyond. Jianhe must now find a way to fend for herself, which she eventually does through a combination of hard work, excellent business sense, and the supportive community around her. Though Jianhe and her children face some instances of prejudice against Mainlanders when they first arrive, they are helped by various people including enigmatic landlady Hong Jie (Kara Wai Ying-hung) who makes her a part of her boarding house community and tries not to pressure her about the rent out of consideration for the children,

But times are sometimes hard and Jianhe is directly contrasted with the woman across the way whose husband has a gambling problem and beats her. Having been injured in a workplace accident that leaves her unable to work as she had been before, Jianhe begins to feel hopeless and considers taking her own life only to be saved by her children and a neighbour who sells dessert soups, but the other woman is not as lucky and eventually makes a fateful decision, blaming herself for the man her husband has become. Jianhe is also given another shot at romance with a sympathetic policeman (Zhu Yawen) who comes from the same area of Mainland China and is taken by her dumplings, but he also wants to move abroad and Jianhe has already followed one husband to another country and it didn’t work out so well. It’s not so much that she sacrifices love for career success, the policeman could after all simply chose not to go, but that she no longer needs to compromise herself for marriage because she’s fulfilling herself through her business enterprise.

Just as the film doesn’t mention why Mainlanders came to Hong Kong, it doesn’t really go into why some Hong Kongers choose to leave save for a brief onscreen text mention about the beginning of the negotiations for the Handover though Jianhe is repeatedly keen to emphasise the universal Chineseness of her dumplings. She makes a deal with a Japanese department store, but threatens to walk when they try to make her change her packaging to bring it into line with their house style and thereby erase its cultural identity. She also refuses to allow them a monopoly after they demonstrate their lack of trust in her as a businesswoman, quickly realising she’s better off making deals with every supermarket on the island as well international flour companies. Jianhe is pretty quick to cotton to new technologies such as household refrigerators and the possibilities for frozen foods. But at the end of the day, she’s earnest and hardworking, sharing her success with her many friends who helped her along the way and always repaying kindness when she can. It’s an oddly utopian vision at times in which everyone seems to recognise Jianhe’s greatness and get out of her way, including a triad boss who helps her because she reminded him of his mother when she threatened one of his men with a meat cleaver,) but it also reinforces a sense of the One China family with the dumplings, now refined to suit local tastes, as the glue binding it together in the face of an onslaught of hamburgers and pizzas as harbingers of a cultural apocalypse.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Hit N Fun (臨時決鬥, Albert Mak Kai-Kwong, 2025)

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“There’s no point looking back,” according to the heroes of Albert Mak Kai-Kwong’s surreal Muay Thai comedy Hit N Fun (臨時決鬥), but then again it seems like victory lies in staying in the ring. No matter how many times you lose, you have to keep fighting because precisely because you have no expectation of winning. Bruce’s (Louis Koo Tin-lok) gym in Macao is then a remnant of a world on the brink of eclipse that he’s been desperately trying to cling on to only to come to the slow realisation that it may be time to let it go.

His wife Carrie (Gigi Leung Wing-kei) is experiencing something similar after trying to make a comeback as an actress. A promising opportunity goes awry when she realises it’s for an advert for a menopausal tonic and protests that’s she’s far too young for all that but is immediately shut down by the producer, Elsa (Louise Wong Tan-ni), who says she doesn’t even know who she is but is only using her as a favour to her aunt, Bridget (Harriet Yeung), who is Carrie’s manager. Carrie complains that she can’t get a foothold in the contemporary cinema scene partly because of a dearth of parts for women her age, while she’s equally too afraid to let go of ingenue roles and her image of herself as one to make the irreversible shift to playing mothers of adult women. But then it also seems that you can’t get anywhere without a huge following on social media, which is largely powered by young actors from big agencies with hundreds and thousands of fans. 

Meanwhile, Elsa can’t let go of her long-term boyfriend Daniel (Peter Chan Charm-man) who has been unsuccessfully trying to break up with her but has not yet disclosed that he’s now in a relationship with Surewin (Chrissie Chau Sau-na), a Muay Thai champion who started out at Bruce’s gym but left with his best student, Arnold (German Cheung), to start up on their own. Unlike Bruce’s traditional gym, Arnold’s is a slick, modern facility that pushes expensive package subscriptions and has a sideline in merchandising and fitness-related goods. In many ways the battle is between the wholesome sense of community presented by Bruce’s rundown school, and Arnold’s soulless corporate enterprise which doesn’t even really care that much about Muay Thai anymore.

Then again, the unlikely champion of this wholesomeness is Elsa, who decides she has to fight Surewin not exactly for Daniel but to avenge and vindicate herself. Even though it’s very unlikely that she could really beat a champion after an intense three months of training, Elsa is determined to give it a go more out of stubbornness and pride than anything else. But then all she really needs to do is stick around, much like Bruce. Elsa only needs to be standing after four rounds and as Bruce is fond of reminding her, if the final bell hasn’t rung, then you haven’t lost yet. 

While training at the gym, Elsa begins to loosen up a bit and shifts more towards the world of Bruce’s gym than her high-powered job that is founded in consumerism and geared towards selling people things they don’t want or need to distract them from a sense of dissatisfaction about their lives. But on the other hand, perhaps there’s no point in the kind of stubbornness that prevents you from moving forward. Bruce has an old leather sandbag in his gym that seems to embody its soul, yet it’s already leaking sand as if the building itself were bleeding. Ironically, it’s Arnold who eventually tries to save it while Bruce seems resigned.

What they reach seems to be a kind of compromise, utilising Elsa’s skills to modernise and expand the gym, which is really just another way of fighting if also perhaps a concession and decision to leave something behind. You could also read this as an allegory for the Hong Kong film industry which is increasingly leaning towards the Mainland but still hanging on though some might say losing its soul in softening any hint of localness. On the other hand, Hit N Fun is quite defiantly a homegrown comedy starring some of the biggest local stars from Louis Koo and Gigi Leung to Tony Wu and the rising star Louise Wong. It ultimately seems to say, we’re still here, and we’ll pick our battles, but we’ll keep fighting even if we can’t win because perseverance can be a victory in itself.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

I Did It My Way (潛行, Jason Kwan, 2023)

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“Oldies are still the best,” one bad guy tells another while listening to a retro pop song about the inability to distinguish good from evil, “life was simpler back then.” Jason Kwon’s I Did it My Way (潛行) is in many ways an attempt to recapture the action classics of the 90s starring many of the same A-listers though they are all 30 years older and in some cases really ageing out of the kinds of roles they’re accustomed to playing in these kinds of films. Nevertheless, the action is updated for the contemporary era in its unsubtle messaging that drugs and cyber crime are bad, while the police are definitely good and will always win.

Indeed, barrister George Lam (Andy Lau Tak-wah) is not a particularly sympathetic villain and is given little justification for his crimes save doing things his way. Cybercrime specialist Eddie Fong (Edward Peng Yu-Yan) isn’t terribly sympathetic either, but mostly because of his bullheaded earnestness. Chung Kam-ming (Simon Yam Tat-wah) asks him to work with regular narcotics cop Yuen (Lam Suet), but Eddie originally refuses, insisting that they formed their new cybercrimes squad because the “old ways” weren’t working, so it’s better that they keep their investigations separate, which is of course quite rude to Yuen especially as he goes on to add that Chung’s only asked him out of politeness and professional deference. Chung, however, reminds them that they’re all part of one big family and should learn to work together. 

One might think that a criminal enterprise is also a kind of family, but it’s shown to be illegitimate in comparison to that of the police. Yuen’s undercover agent, Sau Ho (Gordon Lam Ka-tung), has a family he’s trying to protect, as does Lam who is about to marry his much younger pregnant girlfriend. For them, family is also a weakness because it gives them a reason to be afraid not to mention something to lose. Beginning to suspect him, Lam uses Sau Ho’s wife and son as leverage, symbolically taking them hostage along with Sau Ho’s promised future that would allow him to emigrate for a life of freedom under a new identity. 

Like the song says, Sau Ho is also struggling to define his identity as an undercover cop caught between his original desire to fight crime and the criminal lifestyle he’s been forced to live which leaves him never quite sure what side he’s actually on. Lam claims he only started dealing drugs after his girlfriend was raped and subsequently developed depression but that’s too late for him to turn back and so he’s gone all in. There is a kind of brotherhood that arises between them that’s permanently strained by their positioning on either side of this line and the inevitability of confrontation. Fong promises to save Sau Ho, but he failed to save most of their other undercover officers, while Sau Ho and Lam pledge to save each other, though the act of salvation could mean different things to each of them while both torn between their respective codes and the natural connection that’s been fostered by their long years working together as part of the gang. 

The severing of this connection is again part of the price for their involvement with crime, with Lam led to believe that his choices have ironically robbed him of the pleasant familial future he dreamed of, while Sau Ho is returned to the familial embrace of the police force. Chung is repositioned as a benevolent father who can save his men, while Eddie too is forced to reintegrate by working with the other officers to fight cybercrimes which often intersect with those of other divisions. While the film includes several action sequences, it also insists that the major battle takes place online between hackers and police computer specialists, dramatising these online fights with CGI to slightly better effect than 2023’s Cyber Heist but still struggling to move on from an outdated iconography of the web. Even so, it’s clear that crime never pays even if a policewoman asks herself if it’s really worth it on a trip to the police cemetery. The sun has come out once again, making the dividing line between good and evil clear if also reinforcing the paternalistic authority of law enforcement under which living life “my way” will never be tolerated.

I Did It My Way is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Alone No More (得寵先生, Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai, 2024)

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A little dog literally and more figuratively saves the life of a grumpy old man in Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai’s warmhearted drama Alone No More (得寵先生). Touching on themes of old age loneliness, familial estrangement, animal cruelty, and life’s stray dogs, the film makes the case that all lives are important, both human and canine, and that we should try to forgive each other in the same way that dogs seem to continually forgive us.

In any case, it’s difficult to see why stray dog Roast Piggy chooses the grumpy Kai (Lawrence Cheng Tan-shui) to be her owner despite his animosity towards her. Kai is hostile to pretty much everyone and appears to have a strained relationship with his remaining family members from the resentful brother who became his boss at work to the daughter Zoie (Fish Liew) who rarely returns his calls. Having recently retired, it seems that Kai has not much else left to live for which might be why he makes the decision to end his life and leave his retirement fund for Zoie and her daughter. Luckily, Roast Piggy arrives just in time to save Kai and alert Una (Amy Lo) who runs a dog sanctuary and had been trying to catch her.

Though Kai tries to chase Roast Piggy away, she always comes back to him and he eventually comes to accept her but only after getting a lesson in what the consequences of calling animal control can actually be. The film doesn’t go into why Hong Kong seems to have such a large problem with stray dogs but the man at the pound says they euthanise thousands a year many of which are microchipped but have owners who either can’t be contacted or simply refuse to take the dog back. It turns out the Roast Piggy was abandoned by her former owner because a fortune teller told him she was bad luck and it does seem like other of the dogs were similarly released into the wild either because their owners no longer wanted them or because they could not afford to pay for their medical treatment. Una had wanted to adopt Roast Piggy herself if Kai wouldn’t take her, but is cautioned by her boyfriend Chan (Jay Fung Wan-him) that it could get expensive if the problem turns out to be that Roast Piggy had heart worms. Though Roast Piggy seems friendly and used to people, it is clear some of the other stray dogs have unfortunately been mistreated and require further rehabilitation before they can be put up for adoption with a regular family. 

The same might be said of Kai who does begin to mellow after taking in Roast Piggy and getting a new lease of life helping out at the dog sanctuary. Nevertheless, his relationship with his daughter who is married to a Canadian man having moved there with her mother as a child is a little harder to repair. Though Una encourages him to make amends, she also has a strained relationship with her mother she is otherwise unwilling to work on though there is no real reason why she should. This sense of disconnection feeds back into her relationship with boyfriend Chan who, conversely, is under his father’s thumb and as always does exactly as he’s told. It’s Chan’s money that’s bankrolled the sanctuary which adds an additional layer of complication, though he is perhaps being slightly unreasonable when he’s hurt that Una doesn’t agree to suddenly drop everything and move to Edinburgh with him because she wants to stay in Hong Kong to save stray dogs. 

In a way, Kai and Una are the ones left behind, he by his age and loneliness and she by her regret and isolation. It’s clear that Una has replaced relationships with people with those with dogs whom she finds it easier to talk to. A subplot about a horrible person who’s been putting down poisoned meat because they don’t like the dogs being around hints at the callousness and cruelty that led to them becoming strays in the first place but also to the prejudices that see those like Kai and Una excluded from mainstream society even if Kai was indeed a very difficult person to be around before meeting Roast Piggy. Nevertheless they too find sanctuary at the Warm Heart dogs home along with purpose and compassion in caring for these kindhearted animals who have so much love and forgiveness even towards those that tried to cast them out.

UK trailer (English subtitles)