There’s a sense of abandonment and rootless melancholy that pervades Lawrence Ah Mon’s post-Handover drama Spacked Out (無人駕駛). Each shorn of their parental relationships, the four teenage girls at the film’s centre find themselves floundering for direction, seeing no real future for themselves in a Hong Kong that has itself in a way also been abandoned to a new perhaps overbearing parental entity that cannot really be embraced or fully trusted while struggling to find the means to redefine itself.
The only real authority figure the girls know is their is ineffectual, authoritarian school teacher, Mr.Chan, who challenges 13-year-old Cookie (Debbie Tam Kit-Man) on her late arrival to school over her dyed hair and (according to him) inappropriate footwear. He asks her if she really wants an education, but then robs her of it by forcing her to stand in the playground all morning next to two other students, a girl getting similar treatment for wearing earrings, and a boy who isn’t wearing any socks. Mr. Chan evidently isn’t interested in these kids, their lives or prospects, but only in enforcing the arbitrary rules of social conformity. When another of the girls, Beancurd (Maggie Poon Mei-Kei) whose head is shaved, is accused of slashing another girl with a box knife in a convenience store, he point blank tells them that he doesn’t usually care about what happens to them outside the school but knives are on another level. “How is she supposed to wear low-cut clothes from now on?” he rather bizarrely asks despite having reprimanded each of the girls for their “inappropriate” attire while advocating a rather sexist vision of his teenage charges in which all that matters is that the wounded girl may no longer be as conventionally attractive as she might have been rather than focusing on the causes of this problematic violence or the mental and physical distress caused to the victim.
The film’s Chinese title, “unmanned”, neatly symbolises the girls’ rootlessness but also their own internalised patriarchy in which they continue to look to men for protection and guidance. Abandoned by her mother to whom she leaves long voice messages she never replies to, Cookie has only a violent father who seems otherwise absent from her life. She has begun dating a young man, Wing who is 16 years old and sells pirated VCDs in Mongkok. After sleeping with him Wing has ghosted her while Cookie is worried she’s pregnant having fallen for Wing’s dubious insistence that the first time doesn’t count. Her friend, Banana (Angela Au Man-Sze), meanwhile is the group’s man expert, having apparently had several abortions while continuing to meet men through telephone dating lines as well as the girls’ work in local karaoke booths. Only Beancurd who is a lesbian and in a fraught relationship with the more materialistic Sissy (Christy Cheung Wing-Yin) attempts to subvert male authority but is also driven to acts of self harm by traumatic memories of sexual assault.
Box cutters become ominous symbols of the frustration and despair felt by the teens, another boy in the girl’s class openly self harming but finding no support from those around him. At least the girls have each other even if they’re all just as lost and confused. On learning that Cookie may be pregnant, they rally round to solve the problem by pooling their resources to get her a backstreet abortion though on another level they’re also railroading Cookie into a decision she hasn’t quite accepted for herself. The place they end up in is grim in the extreme, filthy and with rusty equipment not to mention unsympathetic staff who just like all of the other adults care little for her wellbeing.
For much of its running time, the film adopts a kind of naturalism but descends into nightmarish psychedelica, possibly provoked by the drug-fuelled party the girls had just left after it took a rather sour and tragic turn, as Cookie undergoes the abortion and simultaneously accepts her abandonment acknowledging that boyfriends aren’t important only friends are suggesting a new solidarity which exists between the Handover generation navigating turbulent seas together in the absence of parental care or guidance. Unjudgemental of his young heroines, Lawrence Ah Mon captures a breezy sense of teenage of life with days spent at the pool with friends if equally the more destructive presence of sex, drugs, cross border smuggling, and exploitation in all of their lives while granting them at least a degree of freedom to define themselves in a new and confusing age.
Spacked Out opens at New York’s Metrograph Dec. 29 and will also stream in the US via Metrograph at Home courtesy of Kani Releasing.
Trailer
Windows on Worlds 