Tag: Henick Chou

The Lyricist Wannabe (填詞L, Norris Wong, 2023)

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Sometimes a dream might have come true only we never really noticed. In Norris Wong’s autobiographically inspired drama The Wannabe Lyricist (填詞L), a young woman battles her way towards becoming a Cantopop songwriter yet perhaps she already is one by virtue of her constant act of lyric writing. What she craves is the validation of having a song published, yet experiences setbacks at every step of the way that encourage her to doubt her talent or the right to continue chasing her dreams.

At a particularly low point after being taken on by a music producer to work with a spoilt influencer who’s getting studio time as some kind of favour, Sze (Chung Suet Ying) is told that her lyrics are no good and that after struggling so hard for six years perhaps she ought to take the hint and accept she isn’t suited to this line of work. It’s an act of intense cruelty, though one in part motivated by a well-meaning faux pas. In her excitement, she told the influencer she’d write lyrics for her album for free just to be published, but the palpable sense of desperation seems to have put the influencer off unable to have confidence in the work that Sze herself has devalued.

She encounters something similar during a partnership with an aspiring pop star who says he likes her lyrics but then drops the bombshell that he plans to sing in Mandarin because it’s a bigger audience. Ironically, on a trip to Taipei to sell his album she’s told that his accent is no good for the local market and while they like the song she worked on she later realises that they hired another lyricist for “real” release without even telling her. What’s more, tones don’t matter while singing in Mandarin whereas lyric writing in Cantonese is a painstaking process of trying to ensure that the tone of the word fits the melody. Aside from its political implications, not only does the pop star’s arbitrary decision to just sing it Mandarin ruin the lyrical flow she spent so long perfecting but entirely disrespects her work.

After deciding to take a break from trying to make it in music, Sze gets a job working at a ridesharing app startup where she’s roped in to create a jingle but once again her hopes are dashed when the business strays into a legal grey area and several of the drivers are arrested. While the app’s creator silently cries in his office, his female colleague ponders going somewhere else, “anywhere that doesn’t punish dreamers” which seems like a nod not only towards an oppressive capitalism that values only marketability but equally the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the nation’s political realities. In a way this is what Sze ends up doing too, putting geographical distance between herself and the failure of her dreams by returning to the land which as the farmer says never lies to you, you reap what sow.

Yet for all her drive and perseverance there are others who view Sze’s obsession with her dreams as selfish and self-involved complaining that she rarely considers the feelings of others and neither notices nor cares if she may have hurt or inconvenienced them. She’s told that her lyrics are hollow because she lacks life experience but also is incapable of empathising and cannot see anything outside of her quest to become a lyricist. She watches other people move on, her brother getting married, friends enjoying career success etc while she’s still stuck looking for her big break only for something to go wrong just as everything was about to go right.

Wong signals the playful qualities of her fantasies though use of onscreen illustrations and even a karaoke-style video along with the nostalgic quality of the early 2000s setting of Sze’s schooldays with its MSN messenger and ICQ. Sze may be “dragged along by the melody” in more ways than one as she tries to make peace with her dreams and her future and find some way of living in harmony with the rhythms of the world around her but eventually comes to realise that she was a lyricist all along no matter what anyone else might have tried to convince her she was.

The Lyricist Wannabe screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas 15th March courtesy of Cine Asia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記, Nick Cheuk, 2023)

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A dejected teacher is forced to deal with his own unresolved traumatic past when the draft of a suicide note is discovered screwed up in a bin at the school in Nick Cheuk’s poignant drama, Time Still Turns the Pages (年少日記). Informed by a recent rise in the number of adolescents taking their own lives, the film takes aim at those who refuse to take depression among children and young people seriously while simultaneously adopting conservative social attitudes which insist that children who don’t conform to their ideas of conventional success are somehow lazy and selfish. 

That’s definitely not a view held by empathetic teacher, Cheng (Lo Chun-Yip), though he is frustrated by the school’s inability to take the note at face value while otherwise trying to keep it under wraps to avoid potential embarrassment or disruption with the exam season approaching. Consequently, the desire to find the student who wrote the note has the potential to develop into a witch hunt that might only make their situation worse, though Cheng tries to go about it as sensitively as possible. In any case, he discovers that many of his students feel lost and hopeless with no one around to turn to. One boy who is being relentlessly bullied eventually fights back but ends up getting the blame while well-meaning as he is even Cheng originally misreads the situation and fails to help him. 

Meanwhile, Cheng is also under a lot of stress following the breakdown of his marriage caused in part by his issues with emotional intimacy. Called back towards the past, he begins re-reading the diary of a young boy who details physical abuse at the hands of his authoritarian father (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) that left him feeling worthless as if the world had no place for him. Eli struggles academically and particularly in comparison with his younger brother Alan while his hardline father views him only as an extension of himself and is embarrassed on a personal level that his son doesn’t measure up. Consequently, he beats him senselessly while insisting that he is simply lazy and doesn’t apply himself rather than accepting that he isn’t academically inclined and is unlikely to ever master the piano. 

Only his piano teacher, Miss Chan, is kind and patient with him though his father soon ruins that relationship too leaving the boy with nothing. Learning from this example, Cheng vows to become a different kind of teacher who doesn’t become angry with children who aren’t reaching their potential but makes a point of talking to them to figure out what’s wrong and how he can help. Unfortunately, he feels as if he’s failing to become the person he wanted to be in part because there are too many problems in the contemporary society which places intense pressure on people to conform to outdated notions of conventional success largely though academic achievement. 

Yet what Cheng discovers to be more dangerous is a growing sense of loneliness and alienation among young people who feel lost and hopeless in the contemporary society. He reflects that Eli’s despair stemmed from feeling as if no one wanted him and he wasn’t really included as a member of his family who looked down on and rejected him because of his lack of academic success. Cheng doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way, but ironically isolates himself, alienating his wife who fears he’ll never really be ready to move on into a more settled adulthood as a father with children of his own. 

In many ways, Cheng’s desire to end the cycle turning away from his father’s authoritarian violence towards care and compassion in looking after his students even as he struggles to come to terms with his own traumatic past and fears of abandonment. Granted, he doesn’t and perhaps can’t do very much to tackle the causes of the teens’ depression and their roots in the status-obsessed, politically turbulent contemporary society, but he can at least learn to open himself up to be of help to others who like him are struggling and feel as if they have nowhere to turn. Poignant and empathetic, Cheuk’s drama makes a plea for a little more compassion and understanding not only for the young but for those carrying a heavy burden in the best way they can. 

Time Still Turns the Pages opens in UK cinemas 24th November courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話, Amos Why, 2023)

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Have we become too dependent on our phones, allowing them to divide rather than connect us? For those at the centre of Amos Why’s zeitgeisty comedy Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話), they do seem to have become a double-edged sword. Yet in the end, it’s a series of handsets that reconnect them with their youth if only to remind them of the disappointed hopes of a defeated middle-age given additional an weight by subtle hints of post-Handover despair. 

Asked why he’s decided to move to the UK, Raymond (Peter Chan Charm-Man) replies that everybody’s doing it even if he resented being sent away to study in Aberdeen, Scotland as a teenager in the wake of the Handover. The real reason is that he’s got himself involved in a lot of shady stuff and has just had his phone hacked so he fears blackmail or arrest. He’s organised a farewell dinner with old high school friends Chit (Endy Chow Kwok-Yin) and An (Rosa Maria Velasco), but nothing quite goes to plan in the curious ways the lives of three former friends remain entwined even if they’ve all been in some sense corrupted by the changes in their society. “All is well as long as we never change” reads a teenage message to a future self, but of course it’s a promise that can’t be kept even if in the end, “life must go on anyway.”

Still, the society itself is fairly corrupt given the prevalence of scams many of them connected to our phones. Raymond failed to get his hacked phone fixed and opted for a new number instead, but Ana in particular keeps getting weird calls from him she later realises must be an attempt to scam her out of money by someone posing as Raymond and explaining that he needs money desperately. But Ana is also the victim of another “scam” in the form of Chit’s new business strategy of getting a “monthly fee” from clients rather than be reliant on work for hire arrangements. Even the restaurant itself along with its “Japanese” chef seems to be fraudulent, while An remains preoccupied with her husband’s womanising and Raymond ironically with his series of bad decisions that culminate in tax fraud. Meanwhile Raymond’s daughter Yanki (Amy Tang Lai-Ying) is also indulging in a kind of scamming selling intimate pictures to nerdy guys via telegram and smartphone apps and ironically remarking that she doesn’t want to get scammed again when discussing ever increasing payment options with her hapless targets.

Yet as Chit discovers when he leaves his phone at home, everything seems inconvenient when you’re phoneless. In a running gag, he repeatedly tries to borrow someone’s landline but is refused leaving him wandering around the city looking for a “restaurant” in one of three very similarly named redeveloped blocks. His wife’s is the only number he remembers by heart, but she remains resentful of his meeting up with Ana, his first love, whom he previously described as a “gullible” auntie and is on some level “scamming” by convincing her to keep him on a monthly retainer. Raymond’s phone threatens to expose him, Ana uses hers to spy on her husband and stepson, and Chit’s in a sense incapacitates him, leaving him alone and disorientated in his own city no longer certain how to travel around it amid the rapidly changing landscape and seemingly identical redevelopment projects.

Life hasn’t turned out the way any of them thought it would, recalling their carefree days 25 years previously in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Banners advertise a “New Era”, but the trio are trapped in the past with which they are eventually reconnected thanks to the retro handsets that unlike the technology of today still work and contain a series of time capsule messages to their future selves. History in a sense repeats itself as Raymond prepares to leave, but each is able to come to terms with their unfinished business and begin making concrete decisions about their futures. Suddenly “can we meet on Saturday?” takes on a new sense of poignancy when everyone seems to be leaving but then again, perhaps our phones really do connect us even if they sometimes connect us to scammers or people we don’t really want to talk to. Subtly hinting a sense of disappointment which runs a little deeper than middle-age malaise, Why looks back to the carefree days of 1997 allying the broken dreams of youth with the “New Era” of today but nevertheless grants his heroes a sense of new sense of possibility even the face of their despair. 

Everyphone Everywhere screens July 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © 2023 Dot 2 Dot Creation Limited. All Rights Reserved.

A Light Never Goes Out (燈火闌珊, Anastasia Tsang, 2022)

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A mother and a daughter take very different paths in trying to come to terms with grief in Anastasia Tsang’s poignant drama, A Light Never Goes Out (燈火闌珊). A tale of loss in more ways than one, the film is also a deeply felt lament for the old Hong Kong which finds itself slowly erased as symbolised by the movement to remove the “dangerous” neon signage which was once such a part of the city’s identity. 

Heung’s (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) late husband Bill (Simon Yam Tat-Wah) had been a master craftsman of just such signs though as far as Heung knew had retired a decade previously as the industry continued to decline. Where once the city was full of neon, modern businesses prefer cheaper LED signage. Now that Bill is gone, Heung struggles to find direction in her life. She continues cooking for three even though they’re only two and sadly reflects on how dark and sad the streets now feel as she witnesses the signs that Bill spent so much of his life crafting unceremoniously dismantled. While all she wants to do is hang on to the past, her daughter Prism (Cecilia Choi Si-Wan) takes the opposite path insensitively getting rid of her father’s things without her mother’s knowledge while secretly planning to move to Australia with her fiancé Roy. 

In some ways the two women represent a set of opposing views with the mother standing in for those who decide to stay and fight for the soul of Hong Kong, and the daughter those who decide their future lies abroad in her case in Australia where she believes there is “more creative freedom”. When Heung tells some construction workers that “your new laws are illegal”, it sounds as if she’s talking about more than just building ordinances while exasperated by the idea that something which seemed very ordinary just a short time ago is deemed against the law because of a sudden and arbitrary introduction of additional legislation. 

It might be assumed that the neon lights fade because young people do not care for them, but Heung’s greatest allies are the young apprentice, Leo (Henick Chou), she belatedly discovers Bill had taken on before he died and a young woman who fiercely protects the neon sign that hangs above her bar. It’s she who also points out that Bill supported her during the SARS crisis when her family’s business was suffering, bearing out his humanity in helping those in need while suggesting that it is spirit of the neon lights that has kept Hong Kong going during its darkest days. Bill had been a bit of a dreamer, fond of encouraging those around him to wish upon a star while insisting that nothing’s predetermined and if you wan’t something you can make it happen all of which sounds like a subtly subversive advocation for the fight for Hong Kong. 

As he later says, his signs may have been torn down but they can be built again while Heung and her daughter eventually find a way to reconcile in their grief and she gains a surrogate son in the earnest Leo who encountered rejection all his life until discovering a calling in the art of neon signage. Leo’s commitment suggests that something of the neon lights can be preserved and brought into a new era while there is a genuine poignancy in the significance of the sign reading “myriad lights” which eventually guides each of the heroes towards their resolution in attempting to fulfil Bill’s dying wish of recreating a sign which had long since disappeared but held a memory for another couple that another one long departed had held for he and Heung. 

Tsang often cuts back to stock footage of a neon-lit Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s before contrasting it with the comparatively empty streets of today which appear almost soulless in their slick modernity. It is in a sense nostalgia, a yearning for another Hong Kong which is fast disappearing or perhaps being deliberately erased as symbolised in the final, post-credits shot of the famous floating restaurant with its vibrant exterior and giant green “Jumbo” sign which capsized in June 2022 after being towed out of Hong Kong for storage in Cambodia. A poignant tale of grief and healing, Tsang’s moving drama nevertheless suggests a flame still burns in the flickering lights of the old Hong Kong which continue to illuminate the night sky in defiance of those who might seek to extinguish them. 

A Light Never Goes Out opens in UK cinemas on 12th May courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)