Tag: Hong Kong

Vampire Cleanup Department (救殭清道夫, Chiu Sin-Hang & Yan Pak-Wing, 2017)

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There are strange things going on all around you that you have no idea about. The life of the average man on the street can be far more mysterious than you could ever imagine. Or so the hero of Chiu Sin-Hang and Yan Pak-Wing’s nostalgic comedy Vampire Cleanup Department (救殭清道夫) realises on being co-opted into a top secret government anti-vampire squad after embarrassingly getting bitten on the bum by a creature of the night.

Tim (Babyjohn Choi) is a down-on-his-luck young man who was raised by his eccentric grandmother after his parents’ death and now assumes she has dementia because she continues to call him by his father’s name. All of his family members seem to have some association with rubbish, his grandmother collecting cardboard to alleviate their poverty, and Tim seems to have internalised a sense of himself being the same. Tim thinks his parents were regular street cleaners who were killed in an accident, only later finding out that they were part of the cleanup squad and everyone has been keeping this from him to keep him safe from vampires. Realising that he’s immune, however, after being bitten on the bum and feeling no ill effects beyond embarrassment, they decide he’s a prime candidate for injecting new blood into the team.

Though most obviously paying homage to classic hopping vampire movies such the Mr Vampire series several of the alumni of which are featured in the film, it also seems to have some spy movie influences with its small cell of operatives and Bond-esque vampire fighting gadgets while in some ways seeking to move on from the central Taoist mythology. Master Ginger (Yuen Cheung-yan) is apparently the only Maoshan Taoist left in Hong Kong. Part of Tim’s early training involves learning all of the various seals he uses to trap vampires but photoing them instead, while otherwise basically acting as a general dogsbody doing the team’s washing and other miscellaneous tasks.

Meanwhile, the gang is seemingly targeted by a shady rival organisation run within the local police force. Slimy policeman Chu (Jiro Lee Sheung-ching) is working with a foreign scientist who says that vampires are real, they’re just dead bodies infected with a virus that makes them move. He needs more samples to come up with a vaccine, and Chu seems willing to do whatever it takes to get them to him. A vaccine is eventually developed, but it is it seems homegrown in being taken from Tim’s blood which is immune to the toxin and developed through his parents’ sacrifice, which is perhaps a subversive hint of a grassroots organisation run by ordinary people like street cleaners standing up to an authoritarian external force that wants to stamp out their history and take away their power.

But at the same time, as all this has been kept from Tim, he has a hard time separating the “vampires” from the people they used to be, convinced that some of them can be rehabilitated and go back to being more like people. On his first case, he comes across a beautiful young woman (Lin Min Chen) who was apparently buried alive as a sacrifice to the landlord vampire, another hint at lingering feudalism and land profiteering in the contemporary era. Tim is moved by seeing what he thinks are tears, but turn out to be droplets leaking from the air conditioner. Nevertheless, he can’t bring himself to burn her as he’s been being taught to do so takes her home and starts looking after her until she eventually bonds with him and fights back against her former master.

Shedding his nerdy image by removing his glasses so he can see “properly”, the conclusion that Tim comes to is that vampires and human beings are much the same in that there’s good and bad everywhere. Sometimes it’s possible to turn an enemy into a friend and aim for peaceful co-existence, but at the same time a lot more youngsters have joined the apparently secret organisation to defend their streets from an evil external threat. Though a little more cute and cuddly than the films that inspired it, Vampire Cleanup Department does at least succeed in resurrecting the hopping vampire tradition for a new generation.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Okinawa Rendez-vous (戀戰沖繩, Gordon Chan, 2000)

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Romantic confusion ensues when a collection of Hong Kongers and Japanese gangsters meet in Okinawa in Gordon Chan’s breezy rom-com Okinawa Rendez-vous (戀戰沖繩). Set in the picturesque environment of a seaside resort, the film takes on the trappings of a heist caper but is really about misdirected romanic attraction brokered by some missing money and more than a few acts of wilful deception as master thief and mailroom cop become locked in a game of cat and mouse.

Hong Kong cop Dat (Tony Leung Ka-fai) is on holiday in Okinawa with his girlfriend Sandy (Gigi Lai Chi) whom he plans to break up with and her friend Cookie (Stephanie Che) whom he hates. His trip is brightened when he spots Jimmy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), a master thief he remembers from his police files but is not actually wanted for anything right at this moment. Meanwhile, Jimmy is in Okinawa trying to blackmail a yakuza by threatening to expose his diary. The yakuza, Sato (Masaya Kato), was all set to pay him, but his Hong Kong girlfriend, Jenny (Faye Wong), runs off with the money and beings living a simple life working at a seaside bar while living with the owner (Asuka Higuchi) who is so obsessed with Hong Kong hitman movies that she’s picked up fluent Cantonese through osmosis. Dat takes a liking to Jenny while using her in his plot to catch Jimmy through entrapment by plotting to a rob local bank, while Sandy draws closer to Sato who cared less about getting the money back than he did about Jenny but is learning to let go of both of them.

Apparently on a tight deadline, Chan assembled the cast in Okinawa with only a vague plot outline and no script hoping to improvise the rest. The main thread is the competition between Jimmy and Dat for the affections of Jenny, along with the obvious contrasts between the cop and the thief. Ironically named “Mr. Law”, policeman Dat is not especially sympathetic and seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is actually involved in plotting a robbery that would take him down as well Jimmy if actually went ahead. For reasons best known to himself, he’s brought his girlfriend on holiday with the idea of breaking up with her, which seems like an awkward scenario begin with, but perhaps sped up by his attraction to Jenny whom he mistakenly assumes to be some kind of pure woman at the centre of intrigue rather than a thief herself.

Jenny tells Sato that she just fell out of love with him and was looking for an exit, while Dat also says something similar about his relationship with Sandy, hinting at the transient nature of love and along with it its meaninglessness. Nevertheless, even as playboy Jimmy strings along other local women and pretends he’s only interested in conquest, he seems to develop genuine feelings for Jenny while she strings Dat along and uses both men to protect her money but is secretly trying to help Jimmy. After being dumped by Dat with a plagiarised poem he probably gives to all his girlfriends, Sandy finds love with Sato and plans to stay in Okinawa, while romance may be blossoming between Cookie and Dat and Jimmy’s right-hand man takes up with the recently dumped bar owner who finally gets the Hong Kong “killer” she’d always dreamed of.

Which is all to say that Dat was right when he said that life is unpredictable, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Despite the potentially dangerous nature of this situation, no one ends up getting (physically) hurt, and everyone eventually finds their way to where they’re supposed to be, positioned for maximum happiness. Making the most of its picturesque Okinawa setting, the film, in the end, comes down on the side of love. The stolen money is reduced to a MacGuffin, while the blackmail and entrapment plots fall by the wayside as each begins to discover new and unexpected romantic possibilities in this otherwise transient place. Light, breezy, and filled with gentle humour, there is, however, a genuine sense of poignancy in the final scene as the lovelorn Jimmy discovers his romantic destiny just might work out after all.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆, Fruit Chan, 1993)

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A wandering ghost trapped in an umbrella sticks around to get revenge on her philandering husband while becoming an accidental radio star in Fruit Chan’s torrid answer to Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, Finale in Blood (大鬧廣昌隆). Inspired by a classic folk legend passed down through Cantonese recitative, the film uses the medium of a ghost story to examine the nature of love as, as someone later puts it, love doesn’t necessarily “possession”.

The witness to the tale is hapless radio announcer Ming-Pao (Lawrence Cheng Tan-Shui) whose job it is to read out food prices on a station that has become popular for its soap opera-esque tales of horror. Down on his luck, he agrees to help a friend who smuggles Western medicine complete a job only to find himself subject to a police rad during which he gets knocked into the harbour. Somehow he is saved by the haunted umbrella which turns out to belong to Fang Yin (Ruth Winona Tao), a recently deceased young woman who subsequently becomes attached to him and co-opts Ming-Pao into helping her get vengeance against her cheating husband, Ma (David Wu).

Ming-Pao ends up unexpectedly hosting the ghost story spot during which Fang Yin steps in to tell her own story, though everyone assumes it’s Ming-Pao mimicking a woman’s voice, and becoming a huge hit as the populace appears to sympathise with the various ways Fang Yin was made to suffer because of her husband’s poor treatment. The way she tells it, she came to Hong Kong to take over her father’s hotel, but found it quite a dull business before taking a liking to a mysterious guest who turned out to be an undercover policeman whose case she accidentally blows. Nevertheless, the pair enter an awkward courtship in which Ma seems to delight in introducing her to the seedier side of Hong Kong in its brothels and opium dens. Ma is evidently not a particularly diligent policeman, and has a kind of arrangement with a sex worker (Chikako Aoyama) who intensely resents Fang Yin and is confused about the ambiguous nature of the relationship she has with Ma.

Fang Yin also finds herself confused and humiliated as Ma often fails to return home, forcing her to go looking for him low places and often discovering him with his mistress. Ma meanwhile, defends himself claiming that it’s only natural for a man to stray and that he was just “on a moral holiday” when Fang Yin returned early from a trip and found the pair together. Ming-pao, meanwhile, is the total opposite of Ma. Though he may be a bit hapless, getting involved in his friend’s smuggling business, he feels sorry for Fang Yin and the way her husband treated her. Though he is originally irritated to have been saddled with a ghost, after that he tries his best to help Fang Yin, even digging up her body and placing it in moonlight so she can temporarily possess it. This does, however, place him at risk as Ma and his mistress begin noticing the similarities between the radio story and the murder they’ve committed.

In helping Fang Yin, however, Ming-Pao effectively uses the studio’s biggest star who has, against the odds, taken a likening to him mostly because of his performance on the radio show which is, of course, actually performed by Fang Yin. Though Sha-sha (Josephine Koo Mei-Wah) initially comes to the conclusion that Ming-Pao is the killer, she later sympathises with Fang Yin too and laments her situation as one third of an incredibly destructive love triangle. The unnamed sex worker is very possessive of Ma and almost boasts in claiming to have buried Fang Yin’s body herself. Ma is more equivocal, trying to placate Fang Yin though with a gun behind his back. Likewise, he eventually tells the sex worker that he never loved her and their relationship was always transactional. A coward, it’s never quite clear what his real feelings are, but only that this three-way relationship was always doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Ming-Pao’s smuggling friend diagnoses the problem as less one of Ma’s moral transgressions and more one of selfishness on the part of the women who should simply have learned how to be less “possessive” and share their man. Ming-Pao’s Hong Kong is though a more helpless place filled with a sense of despair and defeat. Chan lends the picture a kind of sleaziness, embracing the fetid atmosphere with rainstorms and sweatiness before ending on an ironic note of serenity as the three lovers are seemingly reunited for all eternity.

Trailer (no subtitles)

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)

The Snowball on a Sunny Day (金多寶, Philip Yung Chi-Kwong, 2026)

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Philip Yung isn’t the first person you think of when it comes to Lunar New Year Comedies. His previous films have largely been hard-hitting crime dramas such as Port of Call and Papa. The Snowball on a Sunny Day (金多寶) is then a world away with its largely warmhearted story of an ordinary family pulled apart by the demands of modern living but brought back together through subterfuge when it becomes necessary to keep up the pretence that they’ve won the lottery.

As one of their neighbours says, every family needs its little white lies every now and then. Widowed grandmother Mui (Elaine Jin) has been playing the same lottery numbers for 30 years. Buying the ticket has become the responsibility of granddaughter Sunnie (Chung Suet Ying), but she is currently living a frantic life as a script supervisor/runner on film sets. Her plan to use her father’s Jockey Club account to buy one online is frustrated when he reveals he’s cancelled it after a run of bad luck at the tracks, meaning she’ll have to go to the shop in person. When she gets there, the security guard turns out to be someone she had an altercation with on a shoot, so they won’t let her in. A relative, Great Uncle Wah, says he’ll buy a ticket for her, but is escorted out by loan sharks before he can do so.

Inevitably, Mui’s numbers come up and Sunnie doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she never bought the ticket, so she embarks on an elaborate ruse to pretend they’re all millionaires by “borrowing” an expensive villa where her friend Jay (Edan Lui ) is currently “housesitting” for a film producer who’s apparently disappeared following rumours of some kind of financial impropriety. In some ways, Mui’s desire for a house where the whole family could live together is reflective of the current realities of the Hong Kong housing market. Even with a lottery win, the villa wouldn’t really be within their reach, which is why they have to make up excuses to convince her mother Charlotte (Harriet Yeung), an estate agent, that there are reasons it’s so “reasonably priced” that aren’t necessarily dealbreakers for the family such as being a stigmatised property where a violent death took place. 

Meanwhile, this tranquil, spacious environment and relief from financial pressures provide a place in which Sunnie’s parents, who are currently separated but keeping the breakdown of their marriage secret from Mui, a chance to work out their differences. Her father Ken (Jiro Lee) is a washed up former idol star who evidently didn’t make any financial plans for his or his family’s future and now makes a living as a taxi driver who refuses to move with the times by following GPS or working via apps. Sunnie, meanwhile, was sent to live with Mui so that her mother Charlotte could devote her attention to her younger brother Harry (Marek Li Hoi-Lam) who is neurodivergent and has health issues. 

While some tension exists between Mui, Sunnie, and Charlotte, Sunnie is reaching the age at which she begins to realise the sacrifices that were made on her behalf and is mindful of repaying them. Her career as a filmmaker is, however, off to a slow start with her life mostly spent at the beck and call of autocratic directors, managing extras and on occasion having to step in herself such as playing the part of a ghost when an actor doesn’t show up and wearing the costume that Mui has hand stitched for the production, presumably without any pay. There are various meta comments about the declining state of the Hong Kong film industry coupled with a sense of nostalgia for an earlier time when her grandfather hand painted posters and marquees for the latest releases after he and Mui migrated from Indonesia. 

Mui’s life on the public housing estate similarly evokes a sense of warmth in a community that’s otherwise disappearing. Aside from the jobsworth of an estate manager to goes around telling people off for drying their washing outside or breaking some sort of other rule, Mui is well liked by her neighbours and only wants to move to have more space so the family could all live together. Through all the zany, farcical action as they try to keep up the act for Mui, from whom you can’t can’t really hide anything, the family begins to repair itself in true New Year comedy style while apparently making friends with some of their other “enemies” such as an extra/ice cream van diver and a Liverpool fan with whom Manchester United devotee Ken has some kind of vendetta. Despite the silliness, the film has a degree of genuine poignancy in its closing moments as various truths are revealed and the family is forced to remember what it is that’s really most important. 

The Snowball on a Sunny Day screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Deadline (自殺通告, Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai, 2025)

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What does it mean to get “an education”? Is the school system only really there to brainwash the young into following accepted the path and prepare them to be receptive to authority, actively destroying both the ability and desire to think for oneself? The fact that Kiwi Chow’s Deadline (自殺通告, zìshā tōnggào) was not approved for release in Hong Kong on the grounds of “national security” may indicate the direction of its perspective on the interplay between the intensity of the education system and entrenched authoritarianism.

The mere fact that En Shan high school is described as “elite” already implies that it exists to perpetuate a kind of social inequality, though in other ways some might say that it also encourages social mobility in that the students come from all backgrounds and are selected for academic excellence rather than simply the ability to pay the fees. Education does seem to be life’s make or break. Students who don’t make it to university are perceived as being relegated to a kind of underclass from which there is no other escape. Yet at the same time, perhaps university isn’t right for everyone and not all of the pupils want to live a life dedicated to achieving conventional success that might otherwise leave them miserable.

Chun Chiu (Jimmy Liu) is one of the few brave ones who’s decided he doesn’t want to go to university and is happy enough pottering around with his plants. He doesn’t care if people look down on him because he knows he’s happy in himself, and they probably aren’t. Consequently, he’s also the only one to really see what’s going on at the school and to want to try to stop it. Despite its elegant name, there’s a kind of bloodthirstiness that underlines the survival of the fittest mentality at En Shan where they wear mildly fascistic uniforms and start the day with a haka-style dance in which they recite the school’s mantras about being the best of the best and that there’s no point coming second. These children are prevented from forming real friendships or developing social skills and empathy because they’ll always be rivals waiting for the ideal time to stab each other in the back.

The school reinforces this sense of judgment and hierarchy through adopting a social credit-style system in which pupils’ “privileges” are linked to their performance and obedience levels. Chun Chiu is at one point locked out of the garden because his scores have fallen so low he’s not allowed outside the prison-like school environment. Everyone at the school, including the teachers, is under constant surveillance with an AI programme responsible for assigning grades and points. Headmaster Kung wants to get rid of Mr Gao (Huang Di-yang) because the system says his performance is poor, while star teacher Mrs Tien tries to defend him. To begin with, Gao seems as if he might be resisting in another way by giving care and attention to struggling pupils like Heng (Bai Run-yin) who is taking medication for ADHD. But it turns out that Gao is so worried about losing his job as he has to pay maintenance for his ex-wife and child that he’s been giving the kids performance enhancing drugs in the hope of boosting his own approval ratings in the app.

Heng is also getting bullied by some of the other pupils, not just because he’s different but because they resent it that they think he’s being given special advantages by taking medicine that helps him concentrate and being given extra time to finish exams. This leads Heng to try and and cancel his accommodations in a bid to avoid being singled out and in a mistaken gesture of solidarity with the other kids to prove he’s not being given any extra privileges. Meanwhile, they’re all taking similar medication that’s designed to aid concentration and reduce the need for sleep for they can study for longer. But the drugs also prevent them from sleeping when they want to and suppress their appetites so they don’t eat. They cause low mood and suicidal ideation, which, coupled with the already high-stress environment, is a recipe for disaster.

To combat this culture, someone drops a series of ominous flyers threatening the school that there will be a suicide if they don’t “stop poisoning us” by ending the practice of holding exams under medication. While headmaster Kung appears oblivious to the monster he himself has created and has no real idea what’s going on in the school, to his credit he does seem keen to find out if there are any pupils in danger of harming themselves rather than solely trying to silence the whistleblower or save the school’s reputation. He has no idea about the drugs and is shocked on realising how prevalent they’ve become in the school. When they start doing drug tests and discover that over half the pupils are taking them, the director of the board of governors, who has the real power, tells him to stop the testing before they find any more.

But it turns out that this problem extends far beyond the school as in some cases it’s the parents who are making their kids take these drugs, and the head of the student council, Mo (Michael Chang), that’s been selling them. After a few deaths have occurred, Tien and Kung want to stop the exams, but are prevented from doing so, in part because the education system is a national machine. The kids can’t just take the exam on another day because they can’t come up with all new papers just for them at short notice. In a truly chilling moment, Mo gets up on his chair begins chanting the nonsensical mantra “exams are a human right” while insisting on being allowed to take them even if it means that more pupils end up dying. After all, that’s just less competition for him. They’re already locked into this system and refuse to be cast out of it, in part because they’ve learned how to manipulate it so perfectly.

Then again, obsessive study doesn’t leave you with much time to think about anything else even if you’re not also sleep deprived and malnourished as a result of long-term drug use. Chun Chiu’s friend Peiching (Tai Ya-chih), the current number one, becomes conflicted in part because she realises that she does not really know who she is and is incapable of determining what she wants out of life. She said she wanted to be a doctor because that’s what her parents were so she thought she was supposed to be too, but doesn’t know if that’s actually what she wants. Peiching seems genuinely worried about rival Ruoyan (Mimi Shao Yi-mei) who self-harms out of frustration and feelings of inadequacy, but equally only perhaps because thanks to the drugs she stands a real chance of knocking her off  the top spot. Mrs Tien may secretly be thinking of moving abroad precisely because her own daughter does not suit this rigid educational system, but remains largely unable to change it while the students have, it seems, already internalised its tenets unable to let go of a world in which everything is defined by numbers and ranking without the intrusion of independent thought or human empathy.

Deadline screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK and opens in UK cinemas 16th October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代, Angie Chen, 1985)

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Angie Chen’s response to The World of Suzie Wong, My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代) opens in the present day with its heroine apparently a gothic mystery, a Miss Havisham-style recluse and ghost of old Hong Kong trapped within the apartment of a legendary madam from old Shanghai. This conception of her turns out to be something of a myth in itself, as accidental witness to history Dick recounts to a young man working as a delivery boy (Jacky Yeung Tak-Ngai) for his ever evolving chip shop that she is actually still a wildly successful restauranteur and fixture in the local nightclub scene. 

This small enclave of Wan Chai, however, seems to have become a kind of ghost town having been largely abandoned as the American sailors who were once its main clientele stopped coming after the twin waves of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Shui Mei (Pat Ha Man-Jik) now owns this block which signals her eventual mastery over the world in which she lives, if also her loneliness and isolation, occasionally staying in Miss Xiao’s (Angela Yu Chien) old apartment as if unable to let go of the irresolvable past. Her story is then, at least in part, a chronicle of the nation’s own post-war history as she successfully adapts to the times, yet retains a sense of melancholy nostalgia for an older Hong Kong which is fast disappearing as the Handover looms closer.

Indeed, Shui Mei’s life begins in an impoverished fishing village which is set a stir by the return of Monroe, a seemingly glamorous woman dressed in the latest fashions and handing out sticks of gum to the awestruck locals. Sex work is seen as a pathway out of poverty and towards the new modern society that Monroe represents. Having been raped by three local boys, it is also in a way Shui Mei’s means of rejecting her victimisation and asserting full ownership over her body even if, in other ways, she is exploited by brothel owner Miss Xiao, herself an exile who fled to Hong Kong from the formerly glamorous and sophisticated international centre that was Shanghai.

While working as a bar girl in Wan Chai, Shui Mei falls for Miss Xiao’s adopted son, Jimmy, on whom she has a quasi-incestuous fixation. Rather than casting an actor already under contract to Shaw Brothers, Chen cast a then unknown Anthony Wong, billed under the name Anthony Perry, through extensive auditions largely for the similarities he shared with the role. Like Jimmy, Wong was abandoned as a small child by his father, a British colonial official who already had a wife and children in the UK with whom he later emigrated to Australia. Jimmy’s idolisation of Hollywood icon James Dean and desperate search for his biological father, an American seaman, are symbolic of the search for cultural identity in a Hong Kong caught between a series of colonial influences while denied the kind of mastery over itself that Shui Mei eventually achieves.

Shui Mei’s relationship with Jimmy causes a rift with Miss Xiao that leads to her exile from Wan Chai, though Jimmy proves to be a faithless lover. After years of boasting of the revenge he’ll take for his mother’s suicide when he finds his father, Jimmy is seduced by promises of American wealth and comfort and accepts his invitation to return with him to the US, callously abandoning Shui Mei. Years later, when he returns with his two young sons, he has become in some ways very much Americanised. He complains that his first wife lacked a strong work ethic while having adopted an orientalist idea of the submissive hometown wife who will work hard in his business and raise his children. Though still resentful over her abandonment, Shui Mei harbours a lingering desire to rekindle the romance of her youth only to be cruelly disillusioned. Jimmy has forgotten her. He has not come back for Shui Mei, but is clearly in the market for a much younger woman, eventually marrying one of Shui Mei’s proteges at the bar she has opened in another part of the city after saving money made through temporarily working as a streetwalker.

This does, however, reinforce the idea that Shui Mei cannot rely on a man to save her but only on herself and female solidarity. When her new bar is targeted by triads, she enters a partnership with Sister Ying (Deanie Ip Tak-Han), the former wife of a gang boss who has pull in the underworld and a habit of chasing off gangsters with meat cleavers. Though the relationship is heavily implied as both a romantic and business partnership of equals, Shui Mei does not quite accept its validity due its same sex nature and wonders if she can really stay with Ying forever while tempted by the prospect of a more conventional, heterosexual union with Jimmy along with an easy life in America having run herself ragged creating a business empire and suffering the physical affects of a violent triad attack.

Though the end of her story may seem sad, Dick explains to his young delivery boy that Shui Mei refused to be beaten and got back up again each time she was knocked down, which perhaps provides a more positive prognosis in the shadow of the Handover. In one sense, she may have become a ghost of old Hong Kong as her silhouette now appears at Miss Xiao’s window, but may otherwise have avoided her fate. Despite their falling-out, an ageing Shui Mei returned to care for Miss Xiao who unlike her had been left behind by changing times, abandoned by all including her adopted son Jimmy who returns only after her death following many years of estrangement. Though Shui Mei may be consumed by an irresolvable nostalgia, like the nation itself she has progressed from her life in the impoverished fishing village to become an economic powerhouse while achieving total mastery over herself as an independent woman.

My Name Ain’t Suzie screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子, Taylor Wong Tai-Loi, 1989)

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“Brother Ho, you’re a kind leader, but not a good triad member,” a underling remarks of his rival, the biological son exiled from the world of crime now returned but struggling to accept his triad inheritance. Though Taylor Wong Tai-Loi’s Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子) is said to have been intended to depict the life inside the triads in a more realistic way, the Chinese title, which translates as something more like “my time in organised crime,” more closely implies that this is a personal story of one man’s attempt to reconcile the two sides of himself.

Aging boss Uncle Kwan (Tien Feng) is challenged by a young upstart and killed during an ambush. With his dying breath, he instructs his right-hand men Shing (Michael Chan Wai-man) and Keung (Shing Fui-On) to tell his son, Ho (Chow Yun-fat), not to join their gang or seek revenge but to continue living his life in America. Kwan evidently sent Ho there with the intention of keeping him out of the world of organised crime, making sure he got an education and can live a nice, middle-class life. Ho indeed seems to have done quite well in the US. He has a large suburban house he lives in with his wife and young son, and has recently got into the real estate business. Nevertheless, he has a close relationship with his father even if he never approved of his triad activities.

Despite Kwan’s request, when Ho and his family return to hold the funeral, Shing and Keung press him to take over as head of the gang. Ho is understandably reluctant and insists he’ll be returning to America when all the formalities have been completed. Nevertheless, he ends up becoming somewhat involved in the gang’s business, using his corporate knowledge from America to suggest they simply sublet some of their territory to other gangs to stave off conflict and turf war, little realising that will lead to just that. Not knowing how the triad world works, he makes some catastrophic mistakes that lead to some of his father’s men being killed or injured.

In many ways Kong (Roy Cheung Yiu-Yeung), one of Kwan’s protégés, is his mirror image. Taken in by Uncle Ping (Lam Kau) and raised in triad society, he is in some ways Kwan’s natural heir but resents both still being treated as a petty foot soldier and that Ho has had all the opportunities not afforded to someone like him. Ho tells him that he’s still young, and could get a “proper job,” but Kong is illiterate and has been in triad society for most of his life. There are no other jobs he could go to, while Ho was sent abroad to study. Ho does not really belong in this society, but is respected as the biological son, while Kong, who cannot live anywhere else, is shunned and ignored.

Ho takes him to task for recruiting other young men to act as foot soldiers and scapegoats, but as Kong points out, this is how his father recruited him and triad society does at least provide a family for those who have no other. In going to America, Ho has lost touch with his culture and become somewhat exiled from his family, but also feels responsible for the empire his father built and the men who followed him. In some ways, his internal conflict may reflect a sense of anxiety that those who go abroad with the Handover looming will lose both their cultural identity and any possibility of influencing the future of the place they’ve left behind.

Yet, on the other hand, there is perhaps the idea that Ho survives abroad, while Kong sacrifices himself to save him in recognition of the fact that Ho has tried to do the same. In torching the Taoist altar along with his father’s photo, Ho sets fire to triad society itself along with the world his father left behind, asking for his father’s forgiveness while leaving to return to his new life in America without looking back. One of the first films to be awarded a Cat III certificate for its depiction of triad ritual which upset the colonial authorities, the film plays out more like a yakuza drama of fragmented paternal legacy and compromised brotherhood while exposing the inherent corruption of a gangster society before reaching a sense of catharsis as Ho prepares to burn it all down.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂, Allan Fung Yi-Ching, 1989)

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Zany rom-com meets serial killer thriller in Allan Fung Yi-Ching’s decidedly odd horror comedy, In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂). Though the title may hint at romantic melodrama, the film is filled with unexpectedly edgy humour and references to the real life “Jars Killer” case that also inspired the film Dr. Lamb in which a taxi driver murdered several of his female passengers and kept their body parts in Tupperware boxes at his home where he lived with his apparently oblivious family members.

Lung (Alfred Cheung Kin-Ting) is the head of a small band of late night taxi drivers who entertain each other with various party tricks over the radio, Lung’s being the ability to tell Christmas cracker-style jokes. They seem to have a long-standing vendetta against another gang of taxi drivers who challenge them to drinking contests and other tests of strength. Lung, meanwhile, has a fixation with beautiful TV reporter Jenny (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) who once said something nice to him getting out of his cab, and makes a point of watching the news whenever she’s on. His taxi driver friends mostly seem to support his crush and are keen to help him in his romantic quest which is why they all agree to pass on tips about newsworthy goings on that Lung can send to Jenny in the hope of making himself useful to her.

Jenny, meanwhile, is sort of grateful for the tips because she feels undervalued at the station where she works. She clearly wants to be a crusading reporter exposing things like political corruption and injustice, but as her boss tells her, the people of Hong Kong prefer soap operas to news and in any case, they don’t have the budget for serious investigative reporting. There is a mild criticism here of the mass media landscape which is increasingly compromised by its commercial concerns in world in which the line between factual reporting and entertainment is beginning to blur. The press are desperate for salacious content to keep viewers hooked, feeding on human misery and almost willing it into being.

Thus it’s not a stretch when it first appears that Lung has gone off the deep end after being insulted by Jenny’s terrible elitist boyfriend John (Lawrence Ng Kai-Wah) and actually become a serial killer just so that Jenny can have something exciting to report on followed by a scoop on his confession. It turns out that Lung is not the real killer and only wanted to give Jenny a real confession wrapped up in a false one, but this still bears out the depths of his problematic, one-sided romantic obsession with a public figure. In some ways, Lung is presented as an underdog whose pure-hearted love just hasn’t been properly noticed, yet. He picks up another man with flowers for Jenny who is more obviously deranged, but is irritated rather than noticing that he is really no different. He is also irritated to see John pick Jenny up, but, at the same time, perhaps thinks it’s fair enough if she has a boyfriend already.

The problem is that John might actually be the worst person in a film about a cannibalistic serial killer without needing to actually kill anyone. He is possessive of Jenny and has an unpleasant, elitist world view in which he is violent towards Lung and point-blank tells him that a lowly taxi driver who didn’t even finish high school has no business dating an educated, upper-middle-class woman like Jenny. Though this originally presented as an unpleasant point of view and a symbol of the kind of classist oppression faced by men like Lung, the film eventually embraces it with Lung coming to the conclusion that John is right, he’s not good enough for Jenny and ought to date someone from his own social class such as fellow taxi driver Ti (Sandra Ng Kwan-yue). As such, it adopts a rather conservative attitude that supports class divisions and negates the idea of social mobility in insisting that love across the class divide not only will not work but is in some way improper.

Lung may realise both that his infatuation is not “love” but “worship” and that his behaviour has been dangerously obsessive bordering on madness, but this is not the reason that he finally decides to give Jenny up so much as a sense of inferiority in returning to his own working-class world. Meanwhile, the film treats Ti as something of a joke, firstly mocking her for being a tomboyish woman in a man’s occupation, then half-hinting that she maybe transgender. Despite its offbeat humour, the film goes to a fairly grisly place in its final stretches, transitioning into slasher territory as Lung and Jenny are stalked by the real killer upset by Lung’s attempts to claim responsibility for their crimes. Order may have been restored, but this Hong Kong remains a fairly bleak place overshadowed by violence and anxiety in which romantic fantasy may be the only means of escape.

Trailer (no 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)