Tag: Cherie Chung Cho-Hung

Last Romance (流金歲月, Yonfan, 1988)

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The close friendship between two women is disrupted when they fall for the same boy in Yonfan’s poignant melodrama Last Romance (流金歲月). Adapted from a novel by Yi Shu, the film takes place in the shadow of the Handover leaving each of the protagonists in a kind of limbo state uncertain of the future and afraid to strike out while longing to return to a bygone past of innocence and possibility.

Nancy (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) first meets So So (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) close to the end of high school and describes herself as being struck by her vivaciousness and openness that gave her a feeling of intimacy. Yet when she wanted to look at her again, she’d disappeared like a sun shower. This opening monologue hints at Nancy’s repressed longing for her friend which may in itself be romantic. Into adulthood, Nancy appears to be to some extent queer coded, dressing in androgynous fashions except for the one occasion when she meets up with fellow childhood friend Ga Ming (Shingo Tsurumi), who has since become a journalist based in Hong Kong, for a date in a stunning dress and makeup that has even her parents wondering where she’s going.

It may be a little strong to call Ga Ming a childhood friend seeing as the girls only seem to actually hang out with him on a couple of occasions while otherwise playfully joking about which of them will get to date him. As 17-year-olds, they enjoyed a day out at Ocean Park which appears to have stayed with Ga Ming in the intervening years as he continues to dream that the three of them might one day meet up there again. For him it’s become a kind of touchstone of his innocent youth that is bound up with his own feelings of rootlessness and abandonment as a Japanese-Chinese young man raised in an orphanage. He appears to have valued the girls’ friendship in part simply because he no one else pays him very much attention and he has no other friends. Meanwhile, he is struck by So So in the same way that Nancy was, remarking that he’s never met anyone like her. But at the same time, he says that for him, Nancy and So So have become one entity that is destined to come as pair.

By her late 20s, Nancy has begun to resent this. She wants to be her own person, and also to fight for Ga Ming’s affections, betraying So So by choosing not to tell her that she’s been spending time with him alone rather than risk So So stealing her spotlight. So So, meanwhile, is equally rootless in having first gone to live with her aunt while her father went to sea to earn money and then being displaced again when he passes away and she begins to feel unable to stay due to the unwanted attention shown her by her slightly creepy cousin. Unwanted male attention seems to be something that plagues So So while she only really chases the ghost of her absent father. She says that she wants security and pursues older men, becoming a bar hostess and later mistress of wealthy businessman Mr Li (Kenneth Tsang), while essentially using them for money without being able to feel much affection for the various men she associates herself with. In an echo of the city’s rapidly rising economic prosperity and her own continual displacement, she is forever moving to new and more impressive living spaces reflecting her new financial standing.

Nancy, by contrast, lives a much more stable and middle-class life after becoming a designer at a fashion company. Nevertheless, she is strictly told that “no individualism is allowed” as she’s encouraged to copy more prominent designers’ designs and reminded that everything she does should be for the company even as her sexist boss has her buying plane tickets and making arrangements for his son’s piano lessons. Thus Nancy is encouraged to keep part of herself hidden in order to be accepted by this capitalistic society and also later experiences unwanted male attention from a younger colleague who appears to be infatuated with her. She seems to find this a little disturbing, to begin with, but eventually tries to initiate romantic intimacy with him after So So and Ga Ming get together only to be unable to go through with it. It may be that her affection for Ga Ming is only a displacement activity for her unrealisable yearning for So So by seeking to become close to the man who loves her and whom So So loves but feels she cannot have.

Likewise, So So’s inability to accept genuine romantic connection with Ga Ming may be partly motivated by her repressed desire for Nancy or else her feelings of inferiority and internalised shame over her life as a sex worker whose personal wealth was made thanks to the financial investment and tutelage of Mr Li. It’s also Mr Li who helps Nancy’s father with his financial portfolio, helping him to purchase stocks and get into real estate when the market booms yet warning him that he should sell quickly with a crash imminent on the upcoming negotiations on the Handover. The brief clip of Margaret Thatcher falling down some steps hints at the coming fall of the old regime along with the implosion of the nation’s nascent capitalist rise.

Realising that all his assets are now worth nothing, Nancy’s father dies of a heart attack implying that men like him cannot really enter coming post-Handover society while Mr Li is also ruined thanks to his association with So So having heavily invested in the shipping company belonging to the family of the man she married for money who never really accepted her. In an ironic way, it’s Mr Li who becomes the father figure that So So was always looking for and for it’s for him that she later sacrifices herself and her dream of love by agreeing to abroad and be the mistress of a man who disgusts her. This new Hong Kong has no space for her either. So So and Ga Ming are left behind with their only innocent memories of an idealised love of their youth and a yearning to return to an earlier time when such things seemed possible.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Double Fixation (意亂情迷, Yonfan, 1987)

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“The secret behind the secret is too mysterious for me to explain,” according to some kind of priest in Yonfan’s stylish tribute to the Hitchcockian thriller, Double Fixation (意亂情迷). The film does perhaps take the concept of the MacGuffin a little too far in its glowing blue orb which it makes no attempt to explain with no hint as to why the bad guys are so determined to get it back that they’ll even go to great lengths to retrieve a set of photos taken of it by a hapless photographer.

Jacky (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) is, to that extent, a classic “wrong man” who gets mixed up in a surreal conspiracy after being strong-armed into taking pictures of the orb by a wealthy businessman who wanted to give them to the priest so he could unlock its secrets. When Jacky goes to hand them over, he discovers the businessman has been murdered and laments his lost pay cheque, but, at the same time, is far more interested in some pictures he took of a stunning woman in red rather the mysterious blue orb. Jacky soon becomes the main suspect in a murder and is forced on the run, only to be rescued by the mysterious woman, Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung). Though Jacky falls for her, he can’t be sure she can be trusted. After Cherie disappears from his life, Jacky encounters another woman in San Francisco who looks just like her, but says her name is Jackie and claims to have no memory of him.

A riff on Vertigo, the film plays with identity and obsession as Jacky, abruptly cleared of suspicion as if the crime he was accused of committing may not have happened at all, continues to question his relationships with both Cherie and Jacky. Where Cherie had been a melancholy sophisticate living in a lonely mansion, Jackie is a down to earth aspiring actress whose fashion sense seems far more in the moment. She even seems to have Kim Novak’s hairstyle from the second half of Hitchcock’s movie. As Jacky gets closer to her, he’s honest about the fact that he can’t forget Cherie and the feelings he has for Jackie may be different in nature. Of course, this pains Jackie who can’t find a way to get through to Jacky who is still obsessed with a woman who may not have actually existed.

Jacky eventually comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter who the mysterious woman is as long as she remains “herself” as a means of integrating his love for both Jackie and Cherie who are different but also the same. Yonfan also hints at Jacky’s own duality in often framing him with his reflection, while in a sense his gaze is doubled and refracted by his use of the camera. The film’s Chinese title may be that of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, echoing Jacky’s obsession and doubts about Cherie’s loyalties, but the English title too is reflective suggesting both Jacky’s fixation on a double of his lost love, and the fixation the villains seem to have with retrieving the photos for no clear reason. 

As such, the film has a rather surreal mentality what its unexplained magical orbs, weird priests, and a random comedy character in the form of a strange-looking, effeminate man who carries around a teddy bear and turns up at Jacky’s studio wanting to become a male model but later seems to be connected to the bad guys. Jacky has a naive sense of optimism, sure that all this will be sorted out quickly because he’s an innocent man and never quite taking the situation he’s in very seriously even as he’s chased by a pair of “CID officers” who don’t seem to be obeying police ethics. Yonfan then largely sidesteps the darkness at the centre of the story and dramatises it more as one of improbable adventure and romantic confusion in which Jacky struggles with his conflicted feelings for two women who might be one and the same. The film is just as enthralled by Cherie Chung as its protagonist appears to be as her ghostly presence seems to haunt every frame with her motivations constantly unclear until the very last second. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Spring Outside the Fence (竹籬笆外的春天, Li Youning, 1985)

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Two young women attempt to ride the waves of a changing Cold War Taiwan in Li Youning’s bittersweet melodrama, Spring Outside the Fence (竹籬笆外的春天, zhúlíbā wài dechūntiān). The titular fence is that of the military dependents’ village where the two women grew up that comes to represent an increasingly distant past and a vision of Taiwan that has all but become obsolete by the film’s conclusion in 1972 in which the nation seems to have abandoned both the US and the idea of reclaiming Mainland China to forge a more independent future.

The film opens in 1949, not long after the Chinese Civil War and nationalist defeat in which Chiang Kai-shek’s forces fled to Taiwan. The military dependents’ village is a settlement for the family members of former KMT soldiers and a rather ramshackle, rundown place. Nevertheless, Ai Hua (Su Ming-ming) says she likes it because the people are kinder there than elsewhere. They’re like one big family with everyone supporting each other. To that extent, one could describe her relationship with best friend Li Lin as “sisterly”, though there are hints in her longing gazes that suggest her affection for her may lean towards the romantic. When Li Lin begins dating their childhood friend He Kang, Ai Hua abruptly agrees to go out with another boy she’s previously turned down only to later admit there is “no chemistry” between them.

That’s partly because he’s a slightly patronising hypocrite who tries to encourage Ai Hua to work on her English so she can study abroad in the US. He gives Ai Hua books on “existentialism”, while He Kang had given her poetry after reading some of her own in the newspaper. When Taiwan is kicked out of the UN, the other boy first broaches the subject with Ai Hua but then drops it saying he thinks it’s probably too difficult for her to understand. Despite his sense of betrayal that America sided with China, he is still studying English and planning to study in the US in order to get ahead. Ironically, capitalism has now become the enemy of right-wing patriotism even among the formerly privileged waishangren whose status has begun to decline. With the Vietnam War coming to a close, the bar in Taipei where Li Lin works as a hostess, and Ai Hua as an accountant, begins to refocus its attentions on chasing Japanese businessmen rather than US forces.

He Kang’s early death can also seen as symbolic of the death of the KMT’s vision of Taiwan. As a child, he’d given a firebrand speech about becoming a fighter pilot like his father to liberate the Mainland with a large picture of Chiang Kai-shek dominating the classroom. The children used to enjoy standing on the air raid shelter watching the planes go by safe in the knowledge that they were protected. For Li Lin, the planes also seemed to symbolise freedom and a world outside of the village. Her room is full of pictures of classic Hollywood stars like James Dean and Clark Gable, while she listens to the Beach Boys and dances to the The Twist aligning her with the anti-communist sensibilities of the KMT. Her love for He Kang is also bound up with this ideology in which the village is only ever really a transient space designed to exist only until the Mainland is retaken and the families return. 

Speaking of her own emotional repression, Ai Hua remarks that she was always envious of Li Lin who was confident in expressing her feelings and having a good time outside the fence while she remained trapped within it. Though Li Lin remains wedded to the past, wearing He Kang’s jacket and the aeroplane necklace he gave her in lieu of a ring, the two women watch the plane carrying Chinese-speaking American airman Michael, whom Li Lin has rejected, fly away with a sense of sadness tempered with optimism. They have now only each other, but have perhaps achieved a kind of self-sufficient independence free of both Mainland China and America in the new nation of Taiwan. 

The Spring Outside the Fence screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

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

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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)