Tag: Chow Yun-fat

The Killer (喋血雙雄, John Woo, 1989)

Posted on by

“We’re outmoded characters,” a dying man laments, having previously advanced that “nostalgia is one of our saving graces.” The heroes of The Killer (喋血雙雄) are indeed remnants of an earlier time, out of place amid the modern city and adhering to a code that has long since fallen by the wayside. “Our world is changing so fast,” hitman Jeff (Chow Yun-fat) exclaims of a Hong Kong hurtling not only towards the Handover but an increasingly amoral capitalism in which friendship and brotherhood no longer have any currency.

We can tell this straightaway from the fact that the man who ordered the hit on the drug lord Jeff took out at the dragon boat races was his own nephew, Weng (Shing Fui-on). To tie up loose ends, Weng also sends his own hitmen to take out Jeff, who can’t be sure if his handler and best friend Sidney (Chu Kong) is involved in the plot to knock him off. Later in the film, Inspector Li (Danny Lee) asks what Jeff will do if Sidney betrays him, but he merely says that he will still treat him as a friend because he has been good to him in the past. Jeff says this in an abandoned church, echoing not only the codes of jianghu brotherhood now largely absent in the contemporary society but Christianising notions of forgiveness and acceptance. 

Jeff claims that he isn’t a religious man but appreciates the tranquillity of the disused chapel. Inspector Li meanwhile is often pictured next a statue of the Buddhist god of war and dressed in black in opposition to Jeff’s white, but what emerges is that the two men are effectively the same and somewhat interchangeable. Jennie (Sally Yeh), the nightclub singer Jeff accidentally blinded during a a chaotic hit and subsequently falls in love with, first mistakes Li for Jeff while Woo also pictures him sitting in Jeff’s chair and pulling a gun on his partner in much the same way Jeff cooly dispatched an assassin sent by Weng. Chang had told Li that he looked exactly like what he was, an undercover policeman, which is obviously a problem, but Jeff remarks that he is a “very unusual cop,”while Li agrees he’s a very unusual killer. 

In some senses, Li will also become the killer of the film’s title in the closing moments, a man who believes in justice but is not himself believed and knows that there will be no real justice for a man like Weng. Both men share a code which is essentially the same, a more primal kind of morality largely incompatible with the modern society and in many ways rightly so. Li even says that Jeff does not look like a killer, that there’s something “heroic” about him, and that his eyes are full of passion as if he had a dream. His words have a kind of irony to them, but Jeff does indeed have a dream in the desire to gain redemption for himself by restoring Jennie’s eyesight, which is the reason for his last big job having now been reformed by her no longer believing that the people he killed deserved to die but that everyone has a right to live.

Despite the triangular relationship with Jennie, there is an undeniably homoerotic tension in the connection between Li and Jeff even if they are also two sides of the same coin. They train their guns on each other and lock eyes, but unexpectedly find a kindred spirit in a man who should be an enemy. “The only person who really knows me turns out to be a cop,” Jeff chuckles but has an equally deep relationship with handler Sidney just as Li has with parter Chang (Kenneth Tsang) while the homosociality that defines their world is subverted by Weng who simply shoots his own underling when he becomes inconvenient to him. 

Both Li and Jeff are effectively men left with “no way out” and “nowhere to go” because their code of brotherhood is no longer understood by the contemporary society. Jennie’s progressive loss of sight also echoes their dwindling futures as if the light were going out of their world long before Woo shatters the statue of the Virgin Mary and unleashes the doves of futility inside the no longer quite so tranquil church that becomes the final resting place of manly honour and brotherly love. “Perhaps we are too nostalgic,” Jeff sighs but nostalgia is indeed his saving grace in a world in which honour and friendship exist only in a mythologised past or may never have really existed at all.

Trailer (no subtitles)

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

Posted on by

“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

Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo, 2025)

Posted on by

The Detective Chinatown team head back to turn of the contrary San Francisco in the latest instalment of the mega hit franchise, Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Tángtàn 1900). Like many recent mainstream films, its main thrust is that Chinese citizens are only really safe in China, but also implies that diaspora communities exist outside the majority population and therefore can only rely on each other. Nevertheless, there’s something quite uncanny in the film’s ironic prescience as racist politicians wax on about how here rules are made by the people rather than an emperor and plaster “make America strong again” banners on their buses. 

The crime here though is the murder of a young white woman, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), the daughter of Senator Grant (John Cusack) who is attempting to push the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act through government and destroy all the Chinatowns in the United States. An older Native American man was also found dead alongside her. Some have attributed the crime to Jack the Ripper as Alice was mutilated before she died and some of her organs were taken. The son of local gangster Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Zhenbang (Zhang Xincheng), is quickly arrested for the crime while his father hires Qin Fu (Liu Hairan) to exonerate him believing Qin Fu to be Sherlock Holmes. 

What Qin Fu, an expert in Chinese medicine recently working as an interpreter for the famous consulting detective, finds himself mixed up in is also a slow moving revolution as it turns out Zhenbang is involved with the plot to overthrow the Qing dynasty (which would finally fall in 1912). As the film opens, corrupt courtiers to sell off large golden Buddha statues to American “allies” who are later seen saying that they plan to fleece China and then renege on their promises to protect it. Meanwhile, the Dowager Empress has sent emissaries to San Francisco to take out the revolutionaries in hiding there including Sun Yat-sen.

Of course, in this case, the Qing are the bad guys that were eventually overthrown by brave Communist revolutionaries that paved the way for China of today which is alluded to in the closing scenes when Zhenbang’s exiled friend Shiliang (Bai Ke) says that China will one day become the most powerful country in the world implying that no-one will look down on the Chinese people again. But on the other hand, they are still all Chinese and so the emissary tells Qin Fu to “Save China” as he lays dying having met his own end shortly after hearing that the British have invaded Peking signalling the death blow for the Qing dynasty. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of irony in the fact that the secondary antagonist is an Irish gang who have signs reading “no dogs, no Chinese,” mimicking those they themselves famously face. The Irish gang is in league with Grant and content to do his dirty work, while Bai is supported by another prominent man who speaks Mandarin and pretends to be a friend to the Chinese but in reality is against the Exclusion Act on the grounds he wants to go on being able to exploit cheap Chinese labour. In this iteration, Ah Gui (Wang Baoqiang) is “Ghost,” a man whose parents were killed building the American railroad and was subsequently taken in and raised by a Native American community. In Bai’s final confrontation with the authorities, he takes them to task for their hypocrisy reminding them how important the Chinese have been in building the society in which they alone are privileged while “equality” does not appear to extend to them.

Through reinforcing these messages of prejudice and exploitation, the film once again encourages Chinese people living abroad to return home. Though set in 1900, the scenes of protest can’t help but echo those we’ve seen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic when racist hatred towards Asian communities has become much more open and pronounced. Qin Fu and Ghost do at least succeed in solving the mystery through scientific principles while ironically assisted by an earnest American policeman who says he thinks it’s important to uphold the law even as we can see the head of the golden Buddha sitting behind the victorious politician’s banquet table and realise that in reality taking out Grant has made little difference for the Exclusion Act will still be renewed (it was repealed only in 1943). They may have saved Chinatown, but Bai must sacrifice his American wealth and return to China much the way he left it having reflected on his life in light of the revolutionary course charted by his more earnest son. As Ghost and Qin Fu remark, if things were better there no one would want to come here though they themselves apparently elect to stay, solving more crimes and making sure that their descendants know they were here and where they were from.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Eighth Happiness (八星報喜, Johnnie To, 1988)

Posted on by

A literal series of crossed wires provoke romantic intrigue for three eccentric brothers in Johnnie To’s smash hit Cinema City Lunar New Year comedy, The Eighth Happiness (八星報喜). As so often in To’s subsequent films, a random instance of fatalistic chance changes each of brothers’ lives though not perhaps permanently as the surprisingly ironic coda makes plain. Even so, their parallel quests for love of one kind or another perhaps tell us something about the changing Hong Kong society in the midst of rising economic prosperity and looming Handover anxiety. 

Seemingly without parents, the three Fong brothers live together in a well-appointed multi-level home owned by oldest sibling Fai (Raymond Wong Pak-ming) who hosts a daytime television program titled Mainly Housewives which includes a cookery/agony aunt segment in which he attempts to solve someone’s relationship problems through food. As in many of Raymond Wong’s other roles in Cinema City comedies, Fai is feminised throughout not only in acting as the “mother” of the family preparing all the meals at home but also in his single status and the focus of his television show which nevertheless intros him with the James Bond theme. 

Second brother Long (Chow Yun-fat), meanwhile, actively camps it up claiming that he pretends to be gay in order to get girls after lulling them into a false sense of security. Despite being engaged to air hostess Piu Hung (Carol Cheng Yu Ling), he has a side mission going to sleep with a woman from each of Hong Kong’s 19 districts and is a relentless Casanova striking up an affair with unexpectedly chaotic department store assistant “Beautiful” (Cherie Chung Chor-hung). Youngest brother Sang (Jacky Cheung Hok-yau), meanwhile, is a painfully shy aspiring cartoonist who becomes an accidental white knight to a young woman caught up in a bizarre flashing incident in the local park only to be mistaken for the culprit himself. 

Each of the brothers is offered a new romantic possibility because of a telephone malfunction caused by an elderly lady driver forgetting her glasses and ploughing through local works mangling the lines. Sang is reunited with Ying Ying (and her martial arts champion swordsman mother) after overhearing a suicide attempt but ending up at her apartment by mistake, thereafter finding himself facing a challenge of masculinity on discovering that she already has a very buff and macho boyfriend who in his own way also seems jealous and insecure. Meanwhile, Long overhears a conversation between Beautiful and a colleague at the store about their ideal men, entering into passive aggressive courtship while discovering that her boyfriend is fabulously wealthy (or, at least, his father is) leading to a standoff in which he ends up proving his masculinity by burning money he doesn’t really have, smashing his own cheapo watch to intimidate the other guy into destroying his diamond Rolex, and then trashing the car he borrowed from Fai to expose the fact the other guy isn’t really wealthy or man enough to do the same because at the end of the day it’s his father’s money and he’s not so rich that these very expensive status symbols mean little to him. 

Fai meanwhile has a much more normal romance which is disrupted, mostly, by his brothers’ chaos and then near destroyed rather than forged through a misdirected phone call. After Long trashes his car, he asks Sang for the number for a repair guy but instead gets through to Fong (Fung Bo Bo) whose musician husband has just walked out on her seconds before which is why she’s quite rude to him on the phone, slamming the receiver down the second time he rings. Annoyed on a personal level Fai asks Long to troll her by ringing up at 3am every night causing her to injure her ankle and later fall on stage during a Cantonese opera performance. Then he ends up meeting her by chance in real life when she ends up buying the last of his favourite biscuits at a local cafe, only to discover she’s his interview for that day’s show where she’s supposed to talk about her art but finds his face so funny she can’t stop laughing. Had it not been for business with the telephone harassment they might have had a conventional romance, but the further machinations of the chaotic brothers soon convince her that Fai is not a reliable life partner. 

To convince her he’s really a good guy, Fai undertakes a grand gesture making himself the focus of his culinary/agony item by cooking up the spiciest soup imaginable and drinking it on live TV to atone but such a meaningless feat does nothing for Fong who doubtless is over romantic stunts and looking for something more concrete. Long’s grand gesture, by contrast, fares much better as he chases Piu Hung to a fancy hotel and makes a scene from the other side of the glass before falling in the pool while trying desperately to save an engagement ring while suddenly on the back foot after she learns about his philandering. Fai is only able to redeem himself through artifice, he and Fong signing through their romantic drama while performing Cantonese opera surrounded by the brothers and their girls trying at least to support him in his own romantic endeavour which their chaos has largely undermined. 

It’s another cosmic irony therefore that whereas the chaos of the misdirected telephone calls earns both Sang and Long everything they wanted in both career and romantic success, Fai who generally does the right thing ultimately loses out through another chaotic development while even Beautiful apparently achieves her dreams. Despite his earlier protestations during get phone call that Hong Kong was beautiful and there was no need to leave, Song and Ying Ying decide to travel the world perhaps expressing a degree of anxiety in pre-Handover Hong Kong, while Long is left with internalised anxiety over his new role as husband and father, and Fai is back pretty much where he started. A typical Lunar New Year nonsense comedy, there’s no disputing that much of the humour in The Eighth Happiness is of its time, but there is something of To’s later obsessions with comic fate and romantic farce that transcends Raymond Wong & Philip Cheng’s Cinema City silliness. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

One More Chance (別叫我”賭神, Anthony Pun Yiu-Ming, 2023)

Posted on by

A feckless gambler gets a final shot at redemption when he’s suddenly asked to take care of an autistic son he never knew he had in Anthony Pun Yiu-Ming’s nostalgic drama, One More Chance (別叫我”賭神). Previously titled “Be Water, My Friend”, the film has had a troubled production history only reaching cinema screen four years after filming concluded in March 2019 and has been retitled in the Chinese “Don’t Call Me the God of Gamblers” which seems to be a blatant attempt to cash in the audience’s fond memories of similarly pitched Chow Yun-fat vehicles from the ’80s and ’90s such as All About Ah Long.

In truth, Chow is probably a little old for the role he’s cast to play as the middle-aged barber Water who’s long since fled to Macao in an attempt to escape problems with loansharks caused by his gambling addition. Of course, Macao is one of the worst places someone with a gambling problem could go and so Water is already up to his neck in debt and a familiar face at the local casino. That’s one reason he ends up going along with the proposal of old flame Lee Xi (Anita Yuen Wing-Yee) to look after her grownup son, Yeung (Will Or Wai-Lam), who is autistic, for a month in return for 50,000 HK dollars up front and another 50,000 at the end assuming all goes well. She claims that Water is Yeung’s father and even provides forms for him to send off for a DNA test if he doesn’t believe her, but at this point all Water is interested in is the cash. 

To begin with, he pretty much thinks of Yeung as cash cow, descending on a Rain Man-esque path of using him to up his gambling game but otherwise frustrated by his needs and ill-equipped to care for an autistic person whom he makes little attempt to understand. For his part, Yeung adapts well enough and tries to make the best of his new circumstances but obviously misses his mother and struggles when Water selfishly disrupts his routines. For all that, however, it’s largely Yeung who is looking after Water, tidying the apartment and bringing a kind of order into his life while forcing him to reckon with the self-destructive way he’s been living. 

Picking up a casino chip in the opening sequence, Water describes it as a “chance” in an echo of the way he’s been gambling his life just as he decides to gamble on taking in Yeung. At one point, he wins big on the horses but takes his winnings straight to the casino where he’s wiped out after staking everything on a single bet only to realise he’s been played by another grifter at the table. It seems that Xi left him because of his gambling problem and the resultant change in his lifestyle that had made it impossible for her to stay or raise a child with him, causing Water to become even more embittered and cynical. Where once he provided a refuge for wayward young men trying to get back on the straight and narrow, now he’s hassled by petty gangsters over his massive debts.

Nevertheless, it’s re-embracing his paternity that begins to turn his life around as he bonds with Yeung and begins to have genuine feelings for him rather than just fixating on the money while simultaneously recognising that Yeung is already a man and able to care for himself in many more ways than others may assume. One could say that he gambles on the boy, staking his life on him rather than endless rolls of the dice to fill an emotional void but also rediscovering a sense of himself and who he might have been if he had not developed a gambling problem and left it up to chance to solve all his problems. Unabashedly sentimental, the film flirts with nostalgia in the presence of Chow and Anita Yuen and largely looks back the Hong Kong classics of the 80s and 90s if with half an eye on the Mainland censors board, Bruce Lee shrine not withstanding, but nevertheless presents a heartwarming tale of father and son bonding and paternal redemption as Water crosses the desert and finally reclaims himself from his life of dissipation. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

All About Ah-Long (阿郎的故事, Johnnie To, 1989)

Posted on by

“Don’t ever make mistakes, you’ll never get a second chance!” warns the hero of Johnnie To’s melancholy male melodrama, All About Ah-Long (阿郎的故事). Ah-Long is indeed a man who’s made mistakes, mistakes he fears can never be corrected that have removed all possibility of his redemption only to be presented with new hope through a chance encounter and to have that hope eventually smashed by the cruel hand of fate. 

A former motorcycle racer, Ah-Long (Chow Yun-fat) has a job driving a truck at a quarry and lives in a tiny two room apartment sharing a bed with his 10-year-old son, Porky (Huang Kun-Hsuen). A fateful introduction from an old friend, Dragon (Ng Man-tat), accidentally reunites him with former girlfriend Por Por (Sylvia Chang), now calling herself Sylvia having become a successful ad executive after moving to the US following the couple’s acrimonious breakup while Ah-Long, badly injured in a motorcycle crash, ended up spending some time in prison. Sylvia’s class conscious mother had not approved of the relationship and in fact told her that the baby had died to convince her to move abroad. Discovering that Porky is alive, she begins to want him back planning to take him with her when she returns the to the US in the company of her fiancé Patrick (Alan Yu Ka-Lun). 

The situation may be somewhat reminiscent of the then recent Kramer vs Kramer but the parameters of the dilemma are different. Sylvia did not wilfully abandon her child nor is she being asked to choose between motherhood and personal fulfilment though as we later discover the traumatic circumstances of Porky’s birth have left her unable to bear any more children meaning that Porky is the only possibility of her reclaiming her maternity. Her request is in its own way selfish, considering her own feelings over Porky’s in suggesting they remove him from his home and everything he’s known while disrupting the clearly very close relationship between Ah-Long and his son. There is also something uncomfortable in the mediation of her love as she showers Porky with expensive gifts Ah-Long could never hope to provide, almost as if she were trying to buy him or at least tempt him away from wholesome working class Hong Kong towards consumerist paradise in the US hinting at the new international possibilities of a future outside of the post-Handover nation. Emptying his bank account, Ah-Long buys the puppy in a pet store window that Porky had doted on, but the boy barely reacts too busy playing with the new desktop computer Sylvia has set up for him in addition to tidying the apartment and making soup while Ah-Long was out. 

Through flashback we realise that Ah-Long was womanising bad boy, drunk and abusive, but has apparently seen the error of his ways humbled by his accident and matured by fatherhood now apparently reformed and dedicated solely to Porky’s upbringing. All he wants for him is a comfortable life and he knows that Sylvia can give that to him even if it means leaving Ah-Long behind alone in Hong Kong. While Sylvia’s fiancé Patrick claims not to care about her past but becomes increasingly controlling and paranoid, unwilling to accept Porky and insistent that they adopt a child of their own while resentful of her relationship with Ah-Long, Ah-Long continues to dream of a traditional family reunion with Porky showing the former lovers how to walk together during a parents’ three-legged race at the school sports day. 

Yet there is always a degree of distance between the one-time couple. To opens the film with the camera looking up at a pair of high rise buildings as it sinks to street level and then rises finding first Ah-Long’s moped and then the tiny apartment he shares with Porky. The camera pulls up again to catch the name of the swanky hotel where Sylvia is staying, a captivated Porky mystified by the elegant glass elevators rising inside, while Sylvia can hardly bear the literal rollercoaster ride at a local theme park the implication being that she can no longer bear the ups and downs of a life like Ah-Long’s while Porky may not be able to ascend to her life of middle-class stability. The promise of a life of comfort threatens to break the bond between father and son, the question becoming whether it is selfish of Ah-Long to prioritise their emotional bond in a life of wholesome poverty rather than sacrifice himself in allowing Sylvia to take Porky with her back to affluent if emotionally empty America. 

Even so, it begins to seem as if the pair may reach a form of equilibrium that places them on a similar level as Sylvia rejects the overbearing Patrick and leaves a door open for the reunion of the traditional family with a reformed Ah-Long who has learned the error of his ways and done his best to make amends. In true To fashion, however, fate has other ideas. Ah-Long sees his longed for dream in front of him and rides fast towards it only to be denied as if the universe had suddenly refused to grant him his redemption. The bleak conclusion perhaps implies that there really are no second chances for men like Ah-Long no matter how much they want them, while the peculiar contradictions of pre-Handover Hong Kong preclude such ordinary visions of happiness as could be found in familial reunification. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

An Autumn’s Tale (秋天的童話, Mabel Cheung, 1987)

Posted on by

Cherie Chung and Chow Yun-fat find love in exile in Mabel Cheung’s charming New York rom-com, An Autumn’s Tale (秋天的童話). Penned by Alex Law, Cheung’s breezy chronicle of love and handover anxiety is subtle and sophisticated romance for grownups finding its youthful heroine stepping into herself in stepping away from home springboarding from emotional heartbreak into personal growth while beginning to fall for her equally lost and hoplelessly diffident yet larger than life new city neighbour. 

After two years of patient saving, Jennifer (Cherie Chung Chor-hung) is finally heading to New York to reunite with hometown boyfriend Vincent (Danny Chan Pak-keung) and study acting in the city. Her mother has put her in touch with a distant relative who is apparently a former sailor turned big man in Chinatown nicknamed “Figurehead” (Chow Yun-fat) who’s agreed to pick her up from the airport and sort her out with a flat. What Jennifer hasn’t disclosed is that she hasn’t told Vincent she’s coming and plans to surprise him when he returns from a baseball game in Boston. When she arrives, however, she discovers not only that Figurehead has somewhat misrepresented his level of success but that Vincent is seeing someone else and places little value on their past relationship, viewing his hometown girlfriend as childish and unsophisticated now he’s a big city guy changed by his new environment but not for the better. 

Jennifer’s culture shock on arriving in late 80s New York is instantly apparent as “Figgy” takes her back to the rundown Chinatown slum where he is living to a flat which looks like no-one’s been up there in 20 years, still has a gas-operated refrigerator, and is filled with the last tenant’s abandoned belongings. Perhaps bearing out the realities of the international dream, Figgy has obviously been telling everyone back home how great his life is in New York and how well he’s been doing for himself while living aimlessly in the city spending his days drinking, gambling, and fighting paralysed by anxiety and too frightened to move forward. Even so he does his best to help Jennifer adjust to life in New York, helping her fix up the apartment and trying to be sympathetic after witnessing her brutal breakup with the no-good Vincent.

Then again, “We belong to two different worlds” she eventually reflects in trying to decide not only if she’s fallen in love with Figgy or he her but if he’s really got longterm potential. She says he makes her feel free, but as she becomes more used to life in New York and less afraid of its differences she grows eager to see the rest of the world while Figgy, 10 years older, claims he’s seen it all already and has no real desire to go anywhere anymore. To him, everything in New York is just an inferior version of something they already had in Hong Kong, broadway musicals are “yankee opera”, pizza is “yankee pancakes”, the music of Americana street musicians is “yankee tunes” that remind him of a Chinese funeral march. While he works in a Chinese restaurant for Chinese people, Jennifer gets a job at an upscale place going by the name “Big Panda” run by a sleazy friend of woman she babysits for that is intent on selling a Westernised idea of China to the locals. Trying to play the big shot in his ill-fitting suit, Figgy doesn’t even understand the menu or the extortionately priced itemised bill presented to him in English but recklessly throws $20 bills at the tip-happy waiter. His only dream is to open a small restaurant on a pier overlooking the ocean that Jennifer convinces him to name “Sampan” like the boat but also in honour of his English name, Samuel Pang. While Jennifer continues to move forward, Figgy remains diffident, too afraid to voice his feelings and consumed by a sense of under-confidence that leaves him unable to pursue either his dream or innocent love. 

To put it bluntly it’s the 33-year-old Figgy who is not really ready for serious romance while through her failed relationship with Vincent and growing experience of independent city living Jennifer is beginning to figure out what it is she wants out of life and out of love. Their romance can’t blossom until they meet each other as equals, Figgy finally pulling himself together and gaining the confidence to chase both love and his dreams. A beautifully understated, naturalistic romance with an ending to rival Comrades Almost a Love Story, An Autumn’s Tale is also love letter to the city of New York with all of its danger and possibility as two lost youngsters learn to find a home in each other while discovering the courage to become themselves.

An Autumn’s Tale screens at the BFI 25th January as part of Focus Hong Kong

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Last Affair (花城, Tony Au Ting-Ping, 1983)

Posted on by

“Why choose Paris?” a mysterious voice inquires. “Because it’s Paris” comes the slightly depressed reply. In terms of the movies, the City of Light has an undeniably romantic reputation, but those who go there are often drawn more towards the darkness. Art director Tony Au Ting-ping’s distinctly European directorial debut The Last Affair (花城) helped to launch the film careers of then TV stars Chow Yun-fat and Carol Cheng Yu-ling and finds a lonely young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage travelling to Paris alone for a friend’s wedding only to discover that you cannot escape yourself through romantic delusion. 

The dejected Ha-ching (Carol Cheng Yu-ling) once eagerly studied French after school with her best friend Bing (Pat Ha Man-lik) in the hope of travelling through Europe but married young and never got the opportunity while Bing moved to Paris and is about to marry a Vietnamese man who owns a family-run restaurant. Looking back at an old photo of the pair of them together, she laments that she was once young and full of dreams but is now middle-aged and filled with disappointment. Bing is surprised that Ha-ching has come to Paris on her own, but she deftly changes the subject, apparently unwilling to talk about her husband, Wai-ming seemingly a representative of an empty elitism of the newly prosperous society. Later she writes him a letter she doesn’t have the courage to send informing him that her trip to Paris has convinced her that she never loved him and she doesn’t see how their present relationship could continue. 

In any case, Wai-ming is supposed to arrive just before the wedding but perhaps only because he’s also going to a big architecture conference in Lyon. When he eventually turns up, he’s extremely rude to Bing and her fiancé who is obviously irritated but making a tremendous effort to be polite while Wai-ming makes a fuss about the quality of the hotel, snapping at Ha-ching that she should have booked the Georges V because it’s not as if they don’t have the money while endlessly droning on about himself. In short, it’s not difficult to see why Ha-ching is unhappy. 

Before he arrives, however, she starts to see a different future fuelled by ideas of European romance after locking eyes with handsome violinist Kwon-ping (Chow Yun-fat) busking in the subway. Awkwardly, Kwong-Ping turns out to be a member of Bing’s circle of friends, and the pair quickly hit it off, beginning a passionate affair. A phone call to his apartment from a French woman, however, has Ha-ching feeling uncertain. She has fallen in love with Kwon-ping and is intending to throw her life away for him, but he likes to have a good time in the bohemian bars of the city whereas she’d rather stay in cooking Chinese food to make them both feel more at home. Artists and dreamers all, the people at the bar make her uneasy. She’s always wanted to know how to find true happiness and has a feeling most of those at the bar are the same, never quite finding it and left with a terrible sense of incompleteness. In truth, she’s a little more conventional than she’d perhaps assumed.

That sense of existential displacement is something that, on the surface of things at least, doesn’t seem to bother Kwon-Ping, but then again perhaps explains the momentary monogamy of his womanising in which he loves them when he’s with them but forgets them when he’s not. For many, Paris seems to be the city of broken dreams. Melancholy art student Siu-tong is forced to make ends meet painting “traditional” furniture designs to European tastes while trying to make it as an artist. Bing’s fiancé is casually dismissive of those who paint for money by the river, but Siu-tong is left with no other choice, dismissed by the furniture maker and finding that all of the talk of his getting a solo show was just that. His girlfriend went back to the Philippines to study, worried he’d forget her, while he’s too ashamed to tell her that he’s giving up and going back to Hong Kong to be an art teacher. 

Bing, meanwhile, has troubles of her own, preparing to get married but perhaps getting cold feet in settling while still hung up on old love. She can’t forgive Kwon-Ping for his womanising ways, but is too close to the matter to be able to talk to Ha-ching even if she can tell that there’s something not right with her old friend. Unable to accept that Kwon-Ping is not a one woman sort of man, Ha-ching begins to go quietly out of her mind, falling out with Bing while resentful of her husband and certain she does not want to return with him to her old life in Hong Kong. She meets a Canadian-Chinese man travelling Europe alone and making ends meet through selling handicrafts along the way, but ultimately reflects that solo travelling is not the path to happiness at least not for her and is therefore faced with the impossibility of witnessing the implosion of her romantic delusion. Framed in the grandiose tones of avant-garde opera, Ha-ching’s existential despair takes a much darker turn than might originally be expected, but is perhaps in keeping with Au’s overtly European arthouse aesthetics. 

The Story of Woo Viet (胡越的故事, Ann Hui, 1981)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Displacement and a legacy of violence conspire against a young man attempting to escape the trauma of war in the second in Ann Hui’s “Vietnam trilogy”, The Story of Woo Viet (胡越的故事, AKA God of Killers). Starring a young Chow Yun-fat as Chinese-Vietnamese refugee headed to Hong Kong with a hope of making it to the US, Woo Viet’s story suggests that violence may be impossible to escape in a world increasingly corrupted by human indifference while only crushing disappointment awaits for those who live on dreams alone. 

After years fighting for the South Vietnamese army, Woo Viet (Chow Yun-fat) is one of many young Chinese-Vietnamese men attempting to escape through claiming asylum in Hong Kong so that he can eventually apply for a visa to the US. The reasons he needed to leave are readily apparent. Even on the overcrowded, primitive boat on which he arrives in Hong Kong, Woo Viet has already witnessed several atrocities in which fellow passengers were dumped overboard, killed, or marooned on isolated islands. He has become the surrogate father to a little boy who is now alone on the boat because his dad was killed by the guards, and subsequently becomes a target for Viet Cong “special agents” after they strangle his friend in his sleep for having seen something he shouldn’t have.  

Luckily, Woo Viet has a friend in Hong Kong, a female “penpal” Lap Quan (Cora Miao Chien-Jen) who sent him letters he rarely answered all through the war. After Woo Viet is forced to kill a special agent in the refugee camp in order to ensure his own survival, he finds himself relying on Lap Quan to help him organise a fake passport. He no longer has the luxury of waiting to do things properly, he needs to leave the country as soon as possible. The fake passports available are, for some reason, Japanese meaning he has to learn to at least sound plausible by picking up a few handy phrases to fool the border guards. It’s in the language classes that he meets fellow refugee Shum Ching (Cherie Chung Chor-hung) who is travelling to the US because a former customer who has already emigrated told her that he wanted her to come no matter what the cost. The problem is the HK trafficker has not been honest with either of them. Woo Viet may have a decent shot at actually making it to the US, but the girls are to be sold on at the first available Chinatown, which in this case is Manila where they’re waiting for a connecting flight. Having bonded with Shum Ching, Woo Viet surprises the traffickers by giving up his chance to go to America to stay in the Philippines to try and rescue her. 

“Whichever Chinatown it is, I think my situation will be the same” Woo Viet writes back to Lap Quan, keeping up a correspondence which becomes increasingly dishonest as he struggles come to terms the shattering of all his dreams. Trapped in a Philippine Chinatown, he discovers the only way he can save Shum Ching is by serving the gangsters that “bought” her from the HK trafficker. Yet, also in his letter to Lap Quan he claims that “it is much simpler to kill people here compared to Vietnam”, while suggesting that the reason his situation is “the same” in Chinatowns the world over is that he has no real identity and can therefore “solve people’s problems with no problem” which is why he’s ended up working as a hired gun for HK gangster Chung. 

Even so, he still harbours hopes of making it to the US when he’s made enough money to “redeem” Shum Ching who is already dreaming of finding a tiny house for them both where she can cook him proper Vietnamese food. While in Manila, he’s partnered with a slightly older man, Sarm (Lo Lieh), who came from Hong Kong a decade earlier. Woo Viet thinks he should have earned plenty of money after a decade making kills for Chung, so he doesn’t understand why he’s still here rather than off somewhere else enjoying a better life. He still doesn’t quite see that Sarm is a vision of his possible future, a man so beaten down by life that his only goal is to drink himself into an early grave. Sarm no longer believes in a future for himself, but he wants to believe in one for Woo Viet, and so he tries to help him but brotherhood, like love, is no match for the casual cruelty of the world in which they live. 

Woo Viet’s floating rootlessness is perhaps an echo of a potential anxiety in a Hong Kong facing its own sense of displacement with the handover less than 20 years away, as perhaps are his feelings of hopelessness as he attempts to write himself into a better future in his now constant letters to Lap Quan in which he somewhat insensitively talks of his love for Shum Ching born precisely out of that same sense of rootless desperation. Soon after they meet, the pair attempt to visit a flower market at night but their romantic moment is disrupted by another refugee couple being caught and dragged away by police, instantly throwing a fatalistic shadow over their innocent connection. All Woo Viet wanted was an ordinary settled life, perhaps adopting that orphaned little boy from the refugee camp and bringing him with them as he and Shum Ching claim a better life in the US, but even small dreams are seemingly impossible in a world in which the predominating force is not love or compassion but violence.  

The Occupant (靈氣逼人, Ronny Yu Yan-Tai, 1984)

Posted on by

There’s no such thing as a reasonably priced apartment, and so when you find one that seems strangely spacious for the rent, it’s prudent to wonder why that might be. Yes, that’s right, your dream apartment may in fact be haunted! Going a bit meta, Ronny Yu Yan-Tai gets in on the comedy ghost game with The Occupant (靈氣逼人), a tale of supernatural suspense starring Taiwanese-Canadian actress and singer Sally Yeh as a young woman returning from Canada for a three week stay to work on her dissertation researching “Chinese superstition”.

Having not thought to book ahead for her accommodation, Angie (Sally Yeh Chian-Wen) is shocked to discover that hotel rooms in the Hong Kong of 1984 are in no way cheap. Locked out of even the cheapest flea pits, she decides to try renting an apartment only to run into the slimy Hansome Wong (Raymond Wong Pak-Ming), an unscrupulous estate agent/used car salesman. Angie spots an apartment sitting on his board that’s in her budget and asks to see it. Hansome is delighted because it’s been on the market ages, but what he doesn’t disclose is that the reason it’s so cheap is that the place is haunted. Angie is originally quite confused by the fact her furniture seems to move back to its original position all by itself, and irritated by loud noises such as a woman singing and a couple having an argument late at night, but on being told that she’s the only resident by the decidedly creepy caretaker (Yam Ho), decides she’s not really bothered if the apartment has another occupant besides herself and anyway it might be quite useful for her thesis. 

Very much in the Wong Jing vein, much of the early comedy revolves around Hansome’s cringeworthy attempts to worm his way into Angie’s life. Luckily for her, he says, Hansome is a very “superstitious” person and so offers to show her around all the best “superstitious” sights of the city, particularly a local temple where they seem to do every kind of taoist ritual going. The problem is that Angie can’t seem to get rid of him. He even pulls the trick of saying that he left something behind in her apartment so he can come in and retrieve it, only to get his arm trapped in a priceless vase. Hearing about the ghost he vows to stay the night and protect her from the boogeyman, but he didn’t count on the real thing turning up and expelling him from the apartment in exasperation with creepy men everywhere. 

Meanwhile, Angie is actually quite taken with a handsome policeman she runs into at the airport, but incorrectly assumes he’s a “sex maniac” because he was only hanging out with her as camouflage for surveilling another woman who turned out to be a pickpocket. Valentino (Chow Yun-Fat) is an honest cop, which is why he ends up getting asked to take some time off after discovering a fellow officer visiting an establishment they were raiding on a tip off that it was employing underage girls. Like Hansome, Valentino has also taken to Angie, if in a slightly less creepy way, and the three of them eventually get together to try and solve the ghost problem (not that Angie actually has much of a problem with it). 

On investigation, Angie discovers that the previous occupant of the apartment was a nightclub singer who apparently shot herself after a failed affair with a married man who wouldn’t leave his family. She becomes ever more obsessed with the dead woman, Lisa Law (Kitman Mak Kit-Man), despite the warnings from Valentino’s former policeman turned taoist priest buddy (Lo Lieh) who tells her that the ghost most likely bears a grudge and will try to engineer a reprise of her tragedy using a susceptible subject. Yu has fun parodying some of the genre staples like magical charms supposed to ward off ghosts which get mysteriously lost at critical moments, but edges towards a real supernatural dread as the curse takes hold, swallowing our trio in a bizarre recreation of the past which accidentally reveals a long hidden truth and helps to alleviate the ghost’s anger. In her frequent voice overs recorded on a dictaphone, Angie reveals that she came to Hong Kong with a low view of “Chinese superstition” but thanks to her experiences now has a new appreciation for the power of the supernatural. Ghosts it seems can’t be exorcised so much as appeased, ignore them at your peril.

Original trailer (no subtitles)