Tag: Lam Ka-Hei

Table for Six 2 (飯戲攻心2, Sunny Chan Wing-Sun, 2024)

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“It’s okay to be screwed, we’ll unscrew you later,” youngest brother Lung (Peter Chan Charm Man) comforts his dejected brother in an accidental advocation of what means to be a family in Sunny Chan’s followup to the phenomenally successful comedy  Table for Six. Like the previous film and in true Lunar New Year fashion, Table For Six 2 (飯戲攻心2) explores the concept of family in a wider sense along with contemporary attitudes to marriage and traditional gender roles.

Even so, it has to be said this table is now uneven as oldest brother Steve has literally run away from his romantic dilemmas taking off for Africa leaving new girlfriend Miaow (Lin Min-Chen) behind claiming she’s too far out of his league and it’s not fair of him to waste her youth. Ironically enough, Bernard (Louis Cheung) has now started a wedding business helping people pull off extravagant public proposals such as the sort of fake one he prepares for Monica (Stephy Tang Lai-yan) as a publicity stunt featuring him dancing in a 90s-style music video. As part of the campaign, they’ve set up Lung and Miaow as a fake couple hoping to build a following for their romance online much to unexpected chagrin of Josephine (Ivana Wong) who has begun to embrace her dreams by becoming a well-known quirky chef who makes food disguised as other food. Though they had agreed to separate so the could both follow three dreams at the end of the previous film, Josephine suddenly proposes leading Bernard to put on an extravagant wedding as promotion for his business. 

In a way, Bernard’s company symbolises the performative qualities of marriage as couples put themselves through a stressful and expensive ritual more out of obligation than real desire. When Lung is prevented from reaching the ceremony on time, Bernard ends up impersonating him in a full body costume making plain that the spectacle is more for show than sentiment and it could really be anyone up there simply fulfilling a role. In fact, no one even checks the certificates were properly signed. Then again, just as in Josephine’s cooking sometimes the “fake” and can actually contain the “real” just in a different way than expected. She may say that once a relationship has cooled the spark can’t be regained, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a new, different, spark couldn’t be found. 

Perhaps that’s what happened for Bernard and Monica who’ve now overcome the awkwardness of Monica having been in a longterm relationship with oldest brother Steve. Ironically enough, they’d more or less decided not to get married only to be blindsided by their reactions to the “fake” proposal but as it turns out more because of the emotional baggage from their parents’ failed relationships that have left them too afraid to get married. Monica is still traumatised by her father’s extra marital affair which resulted in a half-brother she’s never met but has since become a Cantopop star, while Bernard still has bad memories of being treated as a “red-headed” child and like Steve is preoccupied with a desire to keep the family together while worried that he isn’t really up to it. 

The lesson Bernard learns is that family is a burden that’s carried together so he didn’t need to save it on his own and that it’s alright to mess things up because his family will be there to take care of him. Miaow meanwhile is left in the same place as Steve had been in the first film, wondering how long she should wait for love or if Steve is ever coming back, trying to decide whether to accept a promising job offer in Japan or stay in Hong Kong. Part of her reluctance to move on is that she’s become wedded to the family and fears losing her place within it but as Monica says her status wasn’t dependent on blood or relationships and that she’s already been accepted into the family just for being herself. 

Then again, families can also be annoying as Bernard remembers after inviting his gangsterish uncles to one of the weddings only for them to muscle in as a major sponsor for another own insisting on designs the dress themselves complete with a par of shark fin wings to promote their business none of which meshes well with Monica’s passion for conservation. In any case, as Monica reflects family means you can embarrass yourselves together so maybe wearing a stupid dress for a few minutes isn’t such a big deal. Heartfelt and zany, Chan’s farcical drama shifts past the performative aspects of marriage and family to what lies beneath which, like Josephine’s cooking, may not always be what it first appears.

Table for Six 2 is in UK cinemas from 9th February courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (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)