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)
Windows on Worlds 