Tag: Hong Kong

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)

Immortal Story (海上花, Yonfan, 1986)

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A young woman dreams of romance after meeting a Japanese boy in Macau, but finds that fate has other plans in Yonfan’s romantic melodrama, Immortal Story (海上花). Employing a non-linear narrative, the film opens in the early 1970s and shifts back 10 years as Ling (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) meets Nakamura (Tsurumi Shingo) who is in town for a few days while his school baseball team has a fixture in Hong Kong. Though the pair are smitten with each other, Ling never sends the letters she promised to write him, realising that she is corresponding with a romantic fantasy rather than a real person, while Nakamura apparently continues to think of her after returning to Japan.

Ten years later, Ling is discovered cradling Nakamura’s body in a hotel room in Macau and is presumed to have stabbed him with a fruit knife. The film then explores what led to this tragic ending through a series of flashbacks and witness testimonies through which it becomes apparent that both Ling and Nakamura have become somehow corrupted during their time apart. Even during her youth, however, it seems that Ling did not really believe in the reality of romantic salvation and was too afraid to pursue her relationship with Nakamura. After all, she could easily have sent the letters that she continued to write for the full 10 years, but preferred to maintain the fantasy rather than risk it shattering.

Instead, she drifted into an abusive relationship with a local boy who got her pregnant and then dumped her, after which she was rescued by bar owner/madam, Blanche (Yiu Wai). If Ling is caught in a romantic fantasy, then so in a way Blanche is too as it is clear that she is infatuated with Ling who will never return her affections. In fact, when Ling reveals that she plans to leave with Nakamura, she says that she feels indebted to Blanche but also that she has effectively repaid her kindness through the money she has made working for her as an escort. This is in a way Blanche’s tragedy, that in seeking to trap and possess Ling, she ends up ruining her while Ling feels only gratitude rather than affection. To escape the trauma of her life as a sex worker, she ends up turning to drugs from which neither Blanche nor Nakamura is able to save her.

What exactly happened to Nakamura in the intervening 10 years is never revealed, but it seems that he has ironically become involved with the drugs trade and is therefore partly responsible for Ling’s fate. He vows that he will get her off the drugs and take her back to Japan with him, but agrees to help her inject not only after they first reconnect but when they meet again in the hotel room before they’re supposed to leave. Blanche isn’t wrong when she accuses him of feeding on the blood of vulnerable people, though one could say she does the same in pressing them into sex work as she does with Ling. Unsurprisingly, Blanche is against Ling reuniting with Nakamura, but also asks why she allows men to hurt her, rather than accept the care and nurture Blanche is giving her if while, at the same time, harming her through her exploitation. 

The 1970s setting maybe crucial to making the timeline work as Nakamura states the reason he can speak Chinese is that he was born in China, though this “immortal story” feels like something that might have happened much earlier. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for a lost time of innocence and possibility, though Ling already seems to think that her future is out of reach even as a teen. When she reunites with Nakamura, it’s in a ruined building where she once used to live that is about to be torn down, hinting both that their romance has no real future and that it belongs to another time or may really never have existed at all outside of a mutual fantasy. In these early scenes, Ling is entirely dressed in a bright white, as she is in the hotel room, while as a tragic nightclub singer later she wears black like the ironically named Blanche. Their outfits often complement each other in a mix of black and white symbolising both the genuineness of their connection and the corruption stemming from Blanche’s line of work. In the end it maybe Blanche who is trapped within an impossible dream of romance, caught by the futility of her desire, while in a way freeing Ling from the torment of the shadow of an illusionary lover.

Love Massacre (愛殺, Patrick Tam Kar-Ming, 1981)

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Is Love Massacre a massacre of love, a massacre for love, or is it love itself that inevitably leads to death? Patrick Tam’s second film draws inspiration from European and Hollywood cinema along with the French New Wave including the films of Godard, most obviously in its screen composition and bold use of reds and blues echoing Pierrot le Fou, while also leaning into Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in focusing on a sensory experience rather than expository dialogue.

Shot mainly in the US on account of star Brigitte Lin’s schedule, the film takes place in an uncanny space of another Hong Kong peopled by overseas students in San Francisco. Ivy (Brigitte Lin) has become good friends with Joy (Tina Lau), an emotionally fragile young woman uncertain in her relationship with boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin) who plans to move to New York. Feeling abandoned, she attempts to take her own life by slashing her wrists, but survives. Not knowing what to do, Ivy calls Joy’s brother Chu Chung (Chang Kuo-chu) for further support, but he insists that his sister is fine and resists their efforts to get Joy to see a doctor. Meanwhile, he and Ivy begin a passionate affair.

Up to this point, Lin had mostly starred in romantic melodramas and Tam plays with this cinematic baggage in beginning the film in the same vein only to later change direction as it descends into madness and violence. Chu Chung appears to be living with a mental health condition of his own which informs his reluctance to get help for Joy. Joy, meanwhile, appears to be worried both about the latent attraction between Louie and Ivy, and Ivy’s relationship with her brother. Joy tells Louie that she doesn’t like Ivy dating Chu Chung, leading Ivy to wonder if Joy may have had an incestuous obsession with her brother, though it may equally have been because she knew of his paranoia and violence and feared for her safety. 

At any rate, Chu Chung did not disclose to Ivy that he was already married to a woman in Hong Kong (Deanie Ip) whom he appears to resent because she tries to constrain him by medicating his mental health condition. He ends up killing her to free himself so that he can pursue his relationship with Ivy, but soon becomes dangerously obsessed with the implication that his madness is caused by an excess of primal emotion that he is unable to control as symbolised by the violent intensity of the Mark Rothko paintings seen frequently throughout the film. 

Ivy had felt herself conflicted on coming to know of Chu Chung’s marriage accidentally and feeling both deceived and abandoned by him. She lived in a kind of fantasy of idealised romance that has now been compromised by her uncertainty after reading about a man with the same name in the paper who has apparently killed his wife in Hong Kong and gone on the run. When Chu Chung returns, his behaviour is strange and obsessive. He insists on marrying Ivy while claiming to have dealt with his wife, later confessing in detail about how he disposed of the body and ominously adding that he’ll have to think of a better way to do it next time because it was altogether too much bother. 

Yet despite the intensity of Chu Chung’s romantic obsession, Tam depicts his violence with extreme detachment. Chu Chung’s killing is matter of fact and motivated by resentment in that he mistakenly believes they are deliberately preventing him from being with Ivy, who has ironically sought out Louie after running away from Chu Chung in fear. In the earlier stages of their affair, Ivy had often been seen in a vivid red dress given to her by Chu Chung which symbolised her passionate emotion, but on Chu Chung’s return she is mainly seen in white which is a colour more closely associated with death. Chu Chung is also dressed entirely in white, which, on the one hand, is designed for maximum impact as his clothes become stained with blood, but also marks him out as a figure who represents destruction.

To that extent, he comes to embody the violent intensity of romantic obsession suggesting that love itself is a kind of madness that can only result in death just as it does for Joy when her love for Louie is not met with the same degree of passion. In confronting Chu Chung, Ivy is also directly confronting the emotions she was otherwise afraid to face and perhaps conquering them in being forced to make a choice how best to “help” Chu Chung while his obsession threatens to consume her. Using Hitchcockian music cues and conjuring a sense of dread in a city that seems isolated and empty, almost an imaginary backdrop with its de Chirico-inspired murals, Tam subverts genre tropes to spin a tale of love and madness. In the end, the “love killing” of the Chinese title might not be the ones perpetrated by Chu Chung but the final decision taken by Ivy motivated either by mercy or a desire for liberation.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Full Alert (高度戒備, Ringo Lam Ling-Tung, 1997)

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“Neither of us are normal people,” the antagonist of Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (高度戒備) points out to his opposite number, an increasingly compromised cop not so different from the man he is pursuing. Something is poisoning the waters of contemporary Hong Kong, and as it turns out there’s no real cure for this sickness. Neither man can escape the ghosts of his past, nor can he accommodate himself with this new reality of the coming post-Handover society defined by nothing other than nihilistic despair.

When residents of an apartment block begin falling ill, policeman Pao (Sean Lau Ching-wan) is called in only to discover the body of a man in the rooftop water tank. The image of his face floating in the water has a haunting, nightmarish quality that is only deepend by the anxiety of his killer who can’t be sure if he was really dead when they put him there, or ended up drowning all alone in the dark. His fate is ironically echoed in Kwan’s (Francis Ng Chun-yu) use of the sewer network to plot a heist on the Jockey Club on the busiest day of the year, emerging into a rain-drenched city only to be faced by despair and futility in the form of Pao.

Yet at times, Kwan is an oddly sympathetic villain. He comes across as a kind of everyman pushed to the brink by a society he feels is unjust and has treated him poorly. “I’ve come here to get back what I lost,” he explains as if he too were trying to find a way back to the pre-Handover society. He targets the Jockey Club in revenge for having his life ruined by gambling and hopes to make ironic use of his engineering background as an explosives expert fired for abusing his position to illegally sell explosive devices.

Pao, by contrast, is also a haunted man and not least by Kwan who comes to represent his other self. Just as Kwan is plagued by visions of the architect from the water tank, so Pao cannot escape the memory of having killed a man as a serving police officer. “It’s not easy to kill someone,” Kwan laments, reflecting that his transgression has changed him in untold ways that give him an odd kind of affinity for Pao. While chasing Kwan in a crowded marketplace, Pao loses his cool and fires his gun despite the risk to the general public, causing a motorcyclist to crash. When Kwan rings him, it’s less like taunting than a genuine sense of commiseration in which he likens Pao to a boy he knew at school who cried in the toilets after losing out on the number one spot that he had been fixated on taking. “That made me sad too,” he admits bearing out the inherent bond between rivals and the loneliness that exists outside it. Each man is, to an extent, motivated by fear and the desire to free themselves by destroying their other self.

“It’s just that we’re standing on different sides,” Kwan reflects, remarking that Pao is a good cop and he doesn’t mean to go against him, but believes he has no other choice. The Taiwanese gangsters may believe they have no other choice either, plotting either to rescue Kwan or neutralise him before he can expose their plans. Nevertheless, the loss of one of their men is directly contrasted with Pao’s loss of his fellow officer, arguably through his own recklessness and obsession with catching Kwan at all costs. Kwan, meanwhile, is conflicted too, apologising for involving Pao’s family and on some level self-aware that he’s destroying himself. He may not actually expect to survive but does his best to shield those he loves from the consequences of his actions, just as Pao wonders if he should quit the force to be there for his wife and son.

Shooting guerrilla style in the streets of Hong Kong, Lam captures a very real sense of panic and anxiety hanging over the city as the Handover draws closer. With the “reunification” coming, all that matters is peace, according to Pao’s superior officer, though peace is something Pao will never find, just as Kwan will never really find escape, not from himself or from a Hong Kong which seems to be in a state of total collapse. To that extent, they are each ghosts of a rapidly disappearing city fighting to take back what they’ve lost, but in the end finding only despair and loneliness. 

Wild Search (伴我闖天涯, Ringo Lam Ling-Tun, 1989)

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Loosely inspired by Peter Weir’s Witness, Ringo Lam’s Wild Search (伴我闖天涯) sees Chow Yun-fat’s melancholy cop falling for Cherie Chung’s isolated village girl while chasing down arms dealers in a changing Hong Kong. Just as Mew-Mew enters the more traditional world of the inland Chinese community, Hong Kong also seems to be facing incursions from the outside while becoming richer and more sophisticated as a burgeoning financial centre.

This clash of cultures can perhaps be seen in the relationship between Elaine (Elaine Jin), an antiques dealer from the inland Chinese village, and Hung (Paul Chun), a Chinese-Vietnamese gangster with friends in high places. Suckered into using her antique shop as a front to smuggle guns in from Vietnam and sell them on to Japanese yakuza, when is Elaine killed by one of her own men during a police raid Hung denies all knowledge of her and refuses to accept paternity of her now orphaned daughter Ka-Ka. He says that he has plenty of mistresses and suggests to Mew-Mew that he is essentially untouchable thanks to his connections. 

Hung appears to be the source of corruption both the inland Chinese community and Hong Kong as a whole. Elaine’s father has disowned her because of her relationship with Hung and having a child out of wedlock. Despite her orphanhood, the grandfather (Ku Feng) rejects Ka-Ka, refusing to speak to her or waving a knife in her face and screaming that he’ll sell her if she doesn’t stop crying. Mew-Mew first bonds with her because she’s the only witness in his arms dealing case, but also adopts a quasi-paternal position over her largely because no one else is willing to do so. He also draws closer to Elaine’s sister Cher (Cherie Chung Chor-hung) who is caring for Ka-ka, even if the implication is that she is the pure-hearted innocent uncorrupted by contemporary capitalism unlike her sister who went to the city.

But there are incursions and corruptions even within the Inland Chinese community as Cher is pressured by her ex-husband who spent a long time in China where he had another woman and a family he kept secret from Cher. Now he’s insistent on moving back into the family home despite being officially divorced, and becomes increasingly paranoid about Cher’s relationship with Mew-Mew. There might then be a minor irony in the fact that Leung had a wife and son in China, while Mew-Mew is also a widower who lost his wife and son and was originally wary of embarking on another romance. 

Nevertheless, there is a kind of healing that takes place through these interconnected relationships that eventually squeezes the Vietnamese gangsters out. Though he resented Ka-ka as a symbol of all the ways his daughter had wronged him, the grandfather eventually comes to love and accept his grandaughter. Leung, meanwhile, ends up going completely crazy when he begins to realise that Cher has chosen Mew-Mew but eventually concedes defeat on witnessing Mew-Mew’s selflessness when he rescues him from the marauding gangsters even though he’d just been trying to kill him with a meat cleaver a few moments ago. Hung, by contrast, is laid low when his men start turning against him in the hope of better treatment.

Somehow, this world that had seemed broken beyond repair in the opening scenes in which the Christmas lights and neon signs are juxtaposed with scenes of women escaping violent men and bloodied corpses in the street, has been made whole again and not least through the repeated refrains of Teresa Teng’s The Moon Represents My Heart along with shots of the moon above Hong Kong that echo the innocence of the romance that arises between Mew-Mew and Cher. To that extent, the action scenes may play second fiddle to the drama but are also themselves visceral and kinetic from the high-speed car chases to the final showdown in which the gangsters make it all the way to the village as Mew-Mew’s romantic and professional lives collide in a bloody fight to the death with the twin forces of their corruption. While the gangsters might be willing to unleash terror in public places little caring for the lives of ordinary people, Mew-Mew and friends will seemingly counter that with compassion and solidarity while protecting all that they hold dear.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)