Tag: Lam Chin-Ting

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)

Let It Ghost (猛鬼3寶, Wong Hoi, 2022)

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A collection of conflicted souls find themselves haunted by the ills of their society in the directorial debut from Wong Hoi, Let it Ghost (猛鬼3寶). Very much in the tradition of Hong Kong horror comedy, the three-part anthology takes pot shots at everything from hypocritical, narcissistic TV stars, and chauvinistic, homophobic men, to familial displacement caused by rampant gentrification while asking questions about who is haunting who in a society which seems to be constantly eroding around the edges.

The hero of the first chapter, Lark, is a self-centred actor currently playing the lead in the hit TV show Incarcerated Detective in which he has the nonsensical catchphrase “Justice will always stand on the side of Justice”. Though playing a figure of moral authority onscreen, Lark is privately anything but and is becoming fed up with the show because it’s getting in the way of his burgeoning movie career. Wong makes some subtle digs at how the entertainment industry works with Lark kept out at a drinking party with useful people he clearly doesn’t like but has to get along with while needing to get back for night shoots. When he gets pulled over by a cop, he panics because he’s been drinking but it turns out the guy was just a fan who wants an autograph. The policeman’s failure to investigate him turns deadly when a sleepy Lark ends up running over a young woman and then pushing her body down a mountain to conceal the crime. 

Lark finds himself quite literally haunted by the spectre of his guilt when he realises that the young woman he killed was the guest actress for the episode in which she was supposed to be playing a ghost. Taking method acting to extremes, she turns up anyway prompting some ironic comments from the director about representation and the Hong Kong spirit before he makes full use of her now unkillable body to get exactly the effect he wants for the scene. A late twist hints at Lark’s self-obsession and insecurity if also perhaps the mutability of stardom in which no one is ever really irreplaceable. 

Like Lark, the hero of the second chapter, Kwan, is also somewhat insecure but mostly in his lowly status as a taxi driver while his materialistic girlfriend appears resentful that he can’t give her a standard of life to match that of her snotty rich girl friends. In a recurrent motif, Kwan keeps making a point that he isn’t “homophobic” but several times makes homophobic remarks and later tells a young woman that the boys love manga she’s reading “defies the Chinese values of man and wife”, while titles of books in his cab include “cute wife, obey me tonight” and “Domineering Driver and the Dainty Wife”. An attempt to impress his girlfriend with a cheap “staycation” backfires when she is possessed by a “horny ghost” whose insatiable appetites eventually become more than he can handle. The film walks a fine line between satirising Kwan’s toxic masculinity and patriarchal views and accidentally endorsing them, potentially spilling over into homophobia in the punchline of its possession gag. 

In part three meanwhile, the venue is a moribund shopping mall where a young woman runs a bridal shop inherited from her mother. The half-shuttered mall already has a ghostly quality, as Fong points out no one goes to malls anymore, and it could in a sense be she and her friends that are haunting it though there is a more literal ghost of an abandoned child as a kind of symbol of the “orphans” of gentrification displaced from their homes and left with nowhere to go. Fong and her friend Edward decide to look for a nice couple to look after the ghost, Kat, who would then be reincarnated as their child but struggle with unexpected interference from a kung fu exorcist working for security who want to get rid of Kat so the building can be sold. 

There is quite a lot of haunting going on, be it the grim spectres of celebrity culture, sexism, or the gradual erasure of the old society which brings about its own ghosts in the eerie sense of emptiness with which abandoned buildings are imbued. Cynical humour and a thick slice of irony lend each of these ghostly tales a satirical quality hinting at the unreality of the everyday marked by a sense of displacement and emptiness in a disappearing Hong Kong. 

Let It Ghost screens at the BFI Southbank on 14th July as part of Focus Hong Kong.

Original trailer (English subtitles)