Tag: Ko Hon-Man

Lonely Eighteen (我們的十八歲, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2023)

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Looseley inspired by the experiences of star Irene Wan, Tracy Choi’s meandering drama Lonely Eighteen (我們的十八歲) charts the friendship between a pair of women trying to make their way in the ‘80s Hong Kong entertainment industry. Somewhat incoherent, the film positions itself awkwardly in its complicated gender politics while also ambivalent about the heroine’s commitment to her art and the things it may have cost her if also selling a mild message about female empowerment and independence.

Elaine and Ying meet as children, each from poor families and bonding in a shared sense of frustration. While Ying later moves away, Elaine’s family plan to sell her to a wealthy man though this does not appear to actually take place and she remains under the roof of her incredibly moody and abusive father. It’s her father who wanted to sell her and who makes her life a misery, yet the later part of the film will focus heavily on her love for him and guilt that her job prevented her from getting to the hospital in time when he passed away. In any case, after reuniting as teenagers, Ying introduces Elaine to a film producer she’s met through her clubland connections and the pair are signed as fledging starlets at a studio that mainly produces Cat III erotic movies. 

The film is very clear on the dichotomy between Elaine, wholesome and transcending her humble origins, and Ying who is earthier and trapped by the bad patterns of her childhood. Elaine soon progresses towards success as an actress, but Ying is somewhat traumatised by being cajoled into full frontal nudity by producer Ben and thereafter unable to shake off the label of erotic actress. Meanwhile she’s also trapped by her relationship with Shing, a guy she met at the club and wants to spend her life with but has a destructive gambling problem that disrupts her career.

In the film’s present day, it’s Elaine (now in her 50s) who is vacillating over marriage and what it might mean for her work as an actress and independence as a woman. Her manager seems to imply she won’t be getting work after the wedding, though her fiancé also seems rather controlling and disapproving of her career preferring she become a stereotypical housewife. It’s this that Elaine begins to rebel against, wanting to rediscover herself as an actress by taking on more challenging work even if her agent would prefer she stick to the commercial, while uncertain if she really wants to get married at the price of her career. The film ends with a fantasy wedding that reechoes the film’s lowkey conservative attitudes as Elaine’s fiancé effectively gives her permission to continue acting but only if she’s “transparent” with him. 

Elaine keeps saying that she wasn’t successful as an actress and feels guilty about letting her father down, though she appears to be working steadily and lives in a well appointed home whereas Ying has struggled with mental health issues and now works part time in a supermarket. The pair of them are subject to a hypocritical double standard and the vagaries of a sexist, largely unregulated industry. Ying never escapes the label of erotic actress, while Elaine’s attempt to break out of stereotypical roles in TV drama by agreeing to appear nude in a CATIII slasher backfires and leaves her exasperatiedly explaining that what she’s made is art and not porno. 

There are rumblings in the background, mentions of the Handover and the clearing of the slum where Elaine grew up which her father defiantly resists, yet the film can’t seem to find much of a through line or sense of purpose save the implication that the two women’s lives were largely defined by their family background with the perhaps unpalatable suggestion that Elaine used hers to propel herself forward while Ying’s continued to drag her down. Meanwhile, it’s also implied that Elaine’s “obsession” with acting has cost her in terms of her relationships, not only with Ying but not having said goodbye to her father because she needed to finish a scene while also remaining childless and unmarried at a comparatively late age. The resolution may point to her gaining the best of both worlds, claiming happiness on her own terms but also skews somewhat conservative in her fiancé’s chauvinism and the notion that she should be married even if she doesn’t really want to be. Even so, it does gesture at the enduring qualities of female friendship as Elaine and Ying patch up their differences while preparing to move on to a happier future.

Lonely Eighteen screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Elisa’s Day (遺愛, Alan Fung Chi-hang, 2021)

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The legacy of abandonment visits itself on a trio of displaced Hong Kongers in Alan Fung Chi-hang’s melancholy crime drama, Elisa’s Day (遺愛). Set over 20 years from the Handover to the contemporary era, Fung draws inspiration from a real life crime while casting his ambivalent policeman, himself an orphan, as an ironic hero whose single act of compassion ends in a tragedy for which he feels he may not even have the right to atone. 

Fung begins, however, in the present day as Inspector Fai (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) prepares to collect his daughter who is shortly to be released from prison. Flashing back, we’re introduced to Daisy (Carol To Hei-Ling), a pale and distant young woman picked up for suspected drug trafficking while momentarily captivated by a familiar song and carrying a bunch of roses. From there we head further back, all the way to 1996 when 15-year-old Elisa (Hanna Chan Hon-Na) discovers she is pregnant by her bad boy boyfriend Man-Wai (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung). Each abandoned by their parents, the pair decide to run away together and find solace in a family of three, but as expected economic impossibility disrupts their search for happiness. Man-Wai joins the triads and eventually agrees to become a hitman, temporarily separated from Elisa and their daughter while lying low in Thailand. A then Sergeant Fai remains hot on his trail, keeping tabs on Elisa who unwittingly brings her young baby to the cinema where his adoptive mother Auntie Bo (Anna Ng Yuen-Yee) runs the box office, the pair of them becoming surrogate parents to the lonely little girl while Elisa is forced to turn to sex work when Man-Wai’s triad bosses fail to uphold their end of the bargain. 

“Everyone’s gone leaving only me behind” Elisa laments, learning that her estranged mother plans to move to the UK with her second family abandoning her once again in another, more complete sense. Trapped behind in a rundown area of the city, she finds herself caught between conflicting realities. Man-Wai pledges to stay with her forever but is soon gone eventually returning with promises of taking her to Thailand their dream of a better life symbolised by the red roses he brings with him that he claims reminded him of her. Man-Wai meanwhile is constantly told by his triad bosses that the future lies in Mainland China, a place he is originally so reluctant to travel that that he thinks killing is a better option only to later submit himself once again leaving Elisa alone in Hong Kong with no money and only a dwindling hope of ever achieving the familial bliss she longed for when she decided to run away with Man-Wai. 

For his part, Fai is also an orphan though his fate his was different in that he was found by Auntie Bo who gave him a loving home. Even so he has his share of guilt, feeling responsible for Auntie Bo’s spinsterhood fearing that she never married or had children of her own because taking him in made it impossible in the more conservative Hong Kong of 70s and 80s. Ironically enough they become a surrogate family for the infant Daisy, but it’s Fai’s sense of empathy that eventually provokes tragedy in his decision not to arrest Man-Wai on his return seeing how much he loves his family and wanting to give him a chance to put things right rather than take a little girl’s father away from her. Unable to forgive himself, he abandons his responsibilities only to be reminded of them later finally ending the cycle by being willing to accept the responsibility which has been left for him. 

Transitioning through the Hong Kong Handover, Fung evokes a sense of continual displacement, Elisa’s life destroyed firstly through abandonment and then through conflicted desires torn between a potential Thailand paradise and Mainland reality while longing only for a stable home(land). Daisy is offered something similar, her drug trafficker boyfriend to promising to take her to Thailand on their next run, the drugs ironically concealed in a bouquet of red roses just like those her father once brought for her mother. Her only salvation lies in the arms of Fai, a literal authority figure, reassuming his paternal responsibility and thereby restoring a sense of familial and political stability. Told in fragmentary, non-linear fashion, Fung’s melancholy tale of the legacies of abandonment and an innocent love eroded by economic and social realities eventually finds hope in familial repair and the remaking of a home in self-defined family.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

All About Ing (小伟, Huang Zi, 2019)

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A small family finds itself pulled in different directions in the wake of a medical emergency in Huang Zi’s poetic family drama All About Ing (小伟, Xiǎo Wěi). The three are perhaps in slightly different places, each longing for freedom from one thing or another but finding themselves bound by a sense of legacy while haunted by both past and future as they attempt to reorient themselves around their shared loss, searching for new ways forward while always looking back. 

Opening with the poignant image of an empty chair, Huang slowly walks us into the “Ing” home (not their name though each of their names contain it) as patriarch Weiming (Ko Hon-man) gets a haircut from his wife while his son Yiming (Howard Sit Lap-Yin) lazes on the sofa behind. The sense of familial harmony is however soon broken as mother Muling (Janis Pang Hang-ying) chases down her indifferent son while her husband has recently entered hospital with a condition that appears to be much more serious than he thought it to be. Firstly criticising the hospital unsure if he’s getting the best care because the place seems “too new”, Weiming is convinced there’s nothing seriously wrong with him because the doctor says he can go home in a few days. Muling, however, is aware the reality is a little different and has decided not to tell her husband that he has advanced liver cancer letting him believe he merely has “cirrhosis”. 

Divided into three arcs following each of the family members as they attempt to come to terms with the ways their lives will change, the first part of the film follows Muling as she finds herself carrying the burden of family all alone trying to keep them together while her son dreams of escaping abroad and her husband is in continual denial about the state of his health. Perhaps she wants to escape too, her friends at a factory cafeteria gossiping about a mutual acquaintance who was so set on going abroad that she apparently left her husband to marry a wealthy old man living in Cyprus. “What freedom? Is abandoning her son and husband freedom now?” her friend asks while Muling pensively stirs her soup thinking something much the same, later identifying with the lonely old granny who keeps wandering off from the flat next-door while her family it seems don’t even really bother to look for her. Will that be her future too, wandering all alone like a living ghost forgotten by those closest to her? 

A teenage boy Yiming is not particularly primed to see things from his mother’s perspective, longing for escape through studying abroad keeping the news of his acceptance at university in the US a secret from Muling just as she keeps the extent of Weiming’s illness a secret from him. He resents her for her thinking “something bad” will happen to his father while slacking off in class, rejecting her offer of an introduction to a cram school run by a friend but cheating on his homework by copying another girl’s answers. Like Muling’s friend, Yiming’s classmates are convinced there’s no future for them in China joking about jobs as security guards or successful shop merchants while determined to seek their fortunes abroad perhaps partly out of a sense of teenage rebellion against constraining family mores. Yet Yiming is also struggling to process the idea of death experiencing strange dreams of a ruined village he eventually visits with his father on a last trip back to his hometown. 

Weiming’s elderly mother looks not unlike the escaped granny framed vaguely from behind, while his brother too appears somewhat ghostlike as if frozen in time dressed in an old-fashioned donkey jacket and carrying a mysterious photo tube. The two boys he meets on a misty beach who do not acknowledge his presence appear like ghosts of their younger selves while Weiming himself has begun to haunt the landscape ominously looking in through a window at his wife and son on the other side. The family went back to visit Weiming’s family grave but they can’t find it, the town now in ruins while a holiday resort is currently under construction slowly taking over the mountain featured in a picture the family retrieve of Weiming’s father they will later hang on their living room wall. “I want to change the world” Yiming idly mutters on the train home though Weiming doesn’t hear him, the son poignantly turning round to share something with his father after they return home only to find his chair empty. Another his elliptical long shots, Huang closes by returning to his opening POV once again a ghost exiting the space as if returning to a familiar chair while the family attempts to repair itself, moving forward in memory of the past not trapped by it but carrying it with them as they go. 

All About Ing is currently available to stream in the UK as part of the Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (English / Simplified Chinese subtitles)