Tag: Charlene Choi Cheuk-Yin

The Goldfinger (金手指, Felix Chong Man-keung, 2023)

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Following Wong Jing’s Chasing the Dragon and Philip Yung’s Where the Wind Blows, Felix Chong’s financial thriller The Goldfinger (金手指) is the latest in a series of Hong Kong films revolving around colonial-era corruption in which the apparent lawlessness of the pre-Handover society allowed crime to flourish along with a nascent greed nurtured by the island’s rising prosperity as an increasingly important financial centre. In an ironic touch, the film even opens with mass protests against the introduction of ICAC with protestors calling for more respect for law enforcement officers while implying some dark authoritarian force is in play even as angry policemen demand the right to immunity from their own misconduct.

In any case, what arises is a cat and mouse game between wily conman/entrepreneur Henry Ching (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and ICAC investigator Lau (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) who chases him for 15 years trying to expose his web of financial fraud. A failed businessman on the run from debt having supposedly abandoned an idealistic desire to build homes for people, Ching arrives in Hong Kong seeking a land of opportunity and largely finds it though through dubious means. Teaming up with similarly embittered businessman KK (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), who is resentful towards his family who treat him with disdain for being a mistress’ son and force him to do their dirty work, to build a giant real-estate based empire that is in reality rooted in complex financial fraud.

Working on the rationale that stocks can be spent like money, Ching makes contacts and manipulates markets which is all very well as long as no one asks for the cash because it doesn’t exist. Chong hints at the realities of the housing market in Hong Kong today in which land is at a premium and apartments largely unattainable as Ching alternately allies with and subverts British rule to build a property empire, setting his sights on acquiring prestigious Golden Hill building as symbol of a new Hong Kong and his own hubristic desire for personal success. With shades of Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Beauty, Ching attends soirees organised by the British and puts on a show for his targets. In his attempts to woo a British bank, his office is suddenly invaded by salsa dancers and gold glitter falls from the ceiling much to the chagrin of a bemused and increasingly mistrustful KK.

Even so the title of the film is echoed in a comment Ching makes to Lau that though he may thinks he’s some genius with the Midas touch he’s really just a patsy, pushing him to investigate possible international conspiracy that is bigger than either of them. Ching has already become a legend with a series of stories about how he made his stake money which range from running into Imelda Marcos in a shoe shop and getting backing from the oppressive regime in the Philippines, to narrowly escaping a war zone and catching a CIA spy in Moscow. He even has the hutzpah to attempt to bribe Lau by offering him a vast fortune and a scholarship for his daughter to study abroad if only he’d find a way to nix the case.

The corruption is indeed embedded, as is obvious when a judge with a posh British accent actively welcomes Ching to the court in a friendly manner and suggests they conduct their business swiftly to avoid any unnecessary turmoil to the Hong Kong economy. Friends in high places largely assist him, whether through personal greed or blackmail though as another of his associates admits, in the end there is no real loyalty among thieves only increasing fear and desperation along with resentment that Ching seems to be taking more than his fair share of the loot. Loosely based on the Carrian Group scandal, the film never loses sight of the damage one man’s greed and duplicity can do as millions of Hong Kong citizens find themselves out of pocket and uncompensated when the shares they bought become worthless, but equally suggests that in the end justice will always be denied to ordinary people while men like Ching will never fully pay for their crimes. With gorgeous production design, Chong beautifully the woozy world of Hong Kong in the ’70s and ’80s amid an intense cat and mouse game of financial fraudsters and a compromised authority.

The Goldfinger previews from 30th December ahead of opening in UK cinemas 5th January courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Just 1 Day (給我1天, Erica Li, 2021)

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“Who has time for nostalgia with all the novelties out there?” asks the heroine of screenwriter Erica Li’s directorial debut Just 1 Day (給我1天), an adaptation of her own novel. She does, as it turns out, in fact that’s all she may eventually have time for in this tale of romantic transience as she, in a sense, learns to seize her future by living in the past through reconnecting with a childhood friend. 

Now in her early 30s, bank clerk Angelfish (Charlene Choi Cheuk-Yin) is an unfulfilled career woman who enjoys her job chiefly for the ability to be of service to others. Meanwhile, she’s trapped in a potentially dead end relationship with a man who she’s recently discovered has a longterm girlfriend in Canada he never gets round to breaking up with. Attending a primary school reunion marking the institution’s imminent relocation, Angelfish runs into a long lost childhood friend, Mosaic (Wong Cho-lam), now a sketch artist with a sizeable online following. Unbeknownst to her, Mosaic has long been carrying a torch but never had the courage to say anything partly because of a hangup about his short stature. As we later discover, however, he’s running out of time. Paying a visit to the bank where Angelfish works to enquire about insurance he reveals he’s suffering from the same condition that killed his father, ALS, and potentially has only a few more years to live. Shooting his shot, he asks Angelfish to spend just one day with him as his “girlfriend” to cross it off his list. Provided there’s no funny stuff, she agrees but of course discovers something far more profound than a fleeting connection. 

This being Angelfish’s story, Mosaic’s illness is more or less treated as a plot device intended to confront her with her own sense of mortality so that she reassesses her life choices in order seek true happiness. Mosaic in fact teaches her this when explaining the concept of a vanishing line so that she might learn to fix her eyes on the horizon and see the rest of the world in relation to it. Meanwhile, the fact that ALS is a degenerative condition is also aligned with the idea of a world slowly disappearing, the eventual message paradoxically amounting to the notion that nothing ever really disappears because it continues to exist in the hearts and minds of everyone that remembers it. In order to preserve this sense of “nostalgia”, Mosaic meticulously sketches the old Hong Kong before its inevitable destruction while Angelfish finds her vocation in recreating it through miniature diorama. 

The conflict is brought home to her in the opposing natures of her two men, boyfriend Ken chuckling at her distress over the destruction of a local landmark by claiming that the old has to go to make way for the new, but later finding himself unable to break up with his longterm girlfriend out of a sense of expectation and obligation. One might say he is similarly trapped by “nostalgia”, or at least an emotional coward either too afraid to take a risk on new love or unwilling to abandon the security of the familiar. Her female friends, meanwhile, present two opposing paths, one a free spirited flight attendant and the other a conventional housewife whose dreams of the perfect family are eventually dashed on discovering her husband’s infidelity. To that extent, what Angelfish chooses is a kind of independence in wedding herself to a memory while paradoxically living in the moment in the knowledge that her love has its own vanishing point. 

Though boasting cinematography by Christopher Doyle, Just 1 Day is fairly conventional in shooting style akin to many other contemporary Hong Kong dramas save its brief segues into the past and eventual transition into an artificial world of nostalgic memory. Nevertheless as much a love letter to a disappearing Hong Kong as a tearjerking romantic dramedy or inspirational tale of a soon to be middle-aged woman finding fulfilment in following her heart, Just 1 Day effortlessly sells its central messages of living life to the full while making and preserving memories that will, it assures, sustain you when all else is gone. 

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)