Tag: Louis Koo Tin-lok

Behind the Shadows (私家偵探, Jonathan Li Tsz-Chun & Chou Man-Yu, 2025)

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“At our age, we do what we have to do instead of obsessing over the good old days,” according to a put upon wife sick of waiting for her husband to make good on his promises. Jonathan Li Tsz-Chun and Chou Man-Yu’s Malaysia-set drama Behind the Shadows (私家偵探) is in its way as much about the disconnect in modern romance which has now been corrupted by capitalistic desires and frustrated notions of traditional masculinity as its central mystery. 

As someone says, in the old days women hired private detectives to chase their men, but now it’s the other way around. In someways, the parade of men rocking up at Wai-yip’s (Louis Koo Tin-lok) office to hire him to follow their wives, girlfriends, or women with whom they may not actually have much of a connection, all seem to be trying to regain control over their lives by asserting it over a lover they fear has betrayed them. Ironically, this is sort of true of Wai-yip too in that he’s taken to spending his evenings at his friend’s restaurant to escape his moribund marriage. When one customer brings him a photo of his own wife, Kuan (Chrissie Chau Sau-na), little knowing he’s the other man Wai-yip is irate but not as surprised as might be expected. Still, he hands the case off to a junior associate and tries to avoid thinking about it while otherwise passively seething about his wife’s potential betrayal.

But the ironic thing is that Kuan might only have done this to get Wai-yip’s attention and force him to confront their fracturing relationship. While Wai-yip hangs back, tries to act with maturity, and struggles to accept his wife’s decision, she privately wants him to fight back, to shout at her or punch her lover as a sign of manly love. She attacks his masculinity by berating him for being work-shy and refusing to have a child because they can’t afford it, though she can support them all on her salary, while Wai-yip remains hung up on the lost glory of his life in Hong Kong which he gave up to marry Kuan and move to Malaysia. The suggestion is that Wai-yip has been trapped in a kind of limbo, unable to let go of the past and embrace his new life and now Kuan is sick of waiting for him. 

The circumstances of his own marriage and the cynicism of 20 years spent chasing cheating spouses cause Wai-yip to be wary when a man comes and asks him to look for a runaway fiancée. He wonders if they’ve just had a tiff, if she’s left because the man was violent or unfaithful, or if the man is delusional and the woman doesn’t believe herself to be in a relationship with him and so is just happily living her own life. Along with all these anxieties is his sense of responsibility in knowing that this woman may be in danger if he finds her, as will Betty if Wai-yip manages to uncover evidence of her infidelity and relays it back to her gangster boyfriend. Like Kuan, Betty (Renci Yeung Sz-wing) says she just wants a man who will listen to her when she wants to talk and is half-minded to let Wai-yip send the video to find out if the gang boss cares about her enough to actually do anything about it. 

But the consequences of inaction are also brought home to Wai-yip when one of the women he’s following is murdered after he leaves his investigation to chase Kuan and her lover. Trying to makeup for his failure brings him into contact with a zombified cop, Chen (Liu Kuan-ting), whose wife is in a coma after a car accident. While Chen’s solicitous care and repeated pleading that his wife wake up may paint him as a lovelorn man, the marks on her arm that perfectly fit his fingers suggest a violent and controlling past along with a thinly concealed rage that she may have escaped him at last. “There’s nothing much the police can’t do,” he ominously tells Wai-yip while hinting at his desire for authoritarian control as mediated through the patriarchal institution of the police force and his rejection of a woman’s sexual freedom. Wai-yip feels similarly trapped as his own increasing sense of inadequacy deepens the gap between his wife and himself that leaves him unable to have an honest conversation with her about how he really feels and prevents him from healing the rifts within his own marriage even as he chases answers on behalf of other insecure men. What he indeed realises is that it’s time to move on from the past and live in the present, though as it turns out not even he may be strong enough to leave his insecurities behind. 

Behind the Shadows screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Hit N Fun (臨時決鬥, Albert Mak Kai-Kwong, 2025)

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“There’s no point looking back,” according to the heroes of Albert Mak Kai-Kwong’s surreal Muay Thai comedy Hit N Fun (臨時決鬥), but then again it seems like victory lies in staying in the ring. No matter how many times you lose, you have to keep fighting because precisely because you have no expectation of winning. Bruce’s (Louis Koo Tin-lok) gym in Macao is then a remnant of a world on the brink of eclipse that he’s been desperately trying to cling on to only to come to the slow realisation that it may be time to let it go.

His wife Carrie (Gigi Leung Wing-kei) is experiencing something similar after trying to make a comeback as an actress. A promising opportunity goes awry when she realises it’s for an advert for a menopausal tonic and protests that’s she’s far too young for all that but is immediately shut down by the producer, Elsa (Louise Wong Tan-ni), who says she doesn’t even know who she is but is only using her as a favour to her aunt, Bridget (Harriet Yeung), who is Carrie’s manager. Carrie complains that she can’t get a foothold in the contemporary cinema scene partly because of a dearth of parts for women her age, while she’s equally too afraid to let go of ingenue roles and her image of herself as one to make the irreversible shift to playing mothers of adult women. But then it also seems that you can’t get anywhere without a huge following on social media, which is largely powered by young actors from big agencies with hundreds and thousands of fans. 

Meanwhile, Elsa can’t let go of her long-term boyfriend Daniel (Peter Chan Charm-man) who has been unsuccessfully trying to break up with her but has not yet disclosed that he’s now in a relationship with Surewin (Chrissie Chau Sau-na), a Muay Thai champion who started out at Bruce’s gym but left with his best student, Arnold (German Cheung), to start up on their own. Unlike Bruce’s traditional gym, Arnold’s is a slick, modern facility that pushes expensive package subscriptions and has a sideline in merchandising and fitness-related goods. In many ways the battle is between the wholesome sense of community presented by Bruce’s rundown school, and Arnold’s soulless corporate enterprise which doesn’t even really care that much about Muay Thai anymore.

Then again, the unlikely champion of this wholesomeness is Elsa, who decides she has to fight Surewin not exactly for Daniel but to avenge and vindicate herself. Even though it’s very unlikely that she could really beat a champion after an intense three months of training, Elsa is determined to give it a go more out of stubbornness and pride than anything else. But then all she really needs to do is stick around, much like Bruce. Elsa only needs to be standing after four rounds and as Bruce is fond of reminding her, if the final bell hasn’t rung, then you haven’t lost yet. 

While training at the gym, Elsa begins to loosen up a bit and shifts more towards the world of Bruce’s gym than her high-powered job that is founded in consumerism and geared towards selling people things they don’t want or need to distract them from a sense of dissatisfaction about their lives. But on the other hand, perhaps there’s no point in the kind of stubbornness that prevents you from moving forward. Bruce has an old leather sandbag in his gym that seems to embody its soul, yet it’s already leaking sand as if the building itself were bleeding. Ironically, it’s Arnold who eventually tries to save it while Bruce seems resigned.

What they reach seems to be a kind of compromise, utilising Elsa’s skills to modernise and expand the gym, which is really just another way of fighting if also perhaps a concession and decision to leave something behind. You could also read this as an allegory for the Hong Kong film industry which is increasingly leaning towards the Mainland but still hanging on though some might say losing its soul in softening any hint of localness. On the other hand, Hit N Fun is quite defiantly a homegrown comedy starring some of the biggest local stars from Louis Koo and Gigi Leung to Tony Wu and the rising star Louise Wong. It ultimately seems to say, we’re still here, and we’ll pick our battles, but we’ll keep fighting even if we can’t win because perseverance can be a victory in itself.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨．圍城, Soi Cheang, 2024)

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In Kowloon Walled City, you give help, you get help. Sometimes described as a colony within a colony, by the late 1980s the settlement was largely ungovernable and literal law unto itself save for the triads who maintained what little order there was. Yet in Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨．圍城) it’s a place of comfort and security, a well functioning community that as its leader Cyclone (Louis Koo Tin-lok) points out may be unpalatable for “normal” people but provides a point of refuge for the exiled and hopeless.

It’s difficult not to read it and Cyclone himself as embodiments of Hong Kong that is slowly disappearing. Dying of lung cancer, Cyclone is aligned with the fate of the walled city as someone whose time is running out, tired and world weary but still hanging on. In the opening sequence set 20 or so years before, we see Cyclone stand up to an apparent dictatorship and institute what seems to be a more egalitarian form of government though one obviously defined by violence. Nevertheless, when refugee Lok (Raymond Lam Wui Man) lands up there originally suspicious of Cyclone having been duped by local gangster Mr Big (Sammo Hung Kam-bo), he discovers him to be a stand up guy looking after those in his community and generally keeping the peace. Nevertheless, Lok’s arrival is the fatalistic catalyst for the opening of old wounds amid the free for all of the mid-80s society in which the Walled City, sure to be bulldozed, has just become a lucrative property investment.

Mr Big and his crazed henchman King represent this new order, amoral capitalistic consumerists who care little for the conventional rules of gangsterdom. Their bid to seize the Walled City has its obvious overtones as they seek to replace the (generally) peaceful egalitarian rule of Cyclone with something that appears much more authoritarian and ruthless. Believing himself to be a stateless orphan, Lok tries to keep his head down saving everything he can to buy a fake Hong Kong ID card which is also in its way a quest for identity not to mention a homeland and a sense of belonging. He finds all of these things, along with a surrogate father figure, in the Walled City only to have the new home he’s discovered for himself ripped out from under him because of a twist of fate. When he teams up with a trio of other young men who all owe their lives to Cyclone and the Walled City to attempt to take it back, it’s also an attempt to reclaim an older, more autonomous Hong Kong that exists outside of any kind of colonial control as evidenced by his final statement that no matter what happens some things don’t change.

This sensibility extends to the casting of the film which includes a series of Hong Kong legends including a notable appearance from the legendary Sammo Hung not to mention Louis Koo alongside a generation of younger stars such as Tony Wu and Terrance Lau Chun-him. Adapted from the manhua City of Darkness by Andy Seto, the film opens with a flashback to the original war for control of the Walled City that hints at deeper, extended backstories otherwise unexplored though equally mythologised by those who impart them to them Lok, a prodigal son and eventual inheritor of the City’s legacy. Even so, the comic book elements sometime distract from Soi Cheang’s otherwise evocative if hyperreal recreation of the Walled City slum or the political subtext that can be inferred in the presence of supernatural abilities such as those which seem to grant King near invincibility.

In any case, Soi Cheang looks back equally towards the history of heroic bloodshed in particular in his tale of brotherhood and loyalty in which the secondary antagonist is literally imprisoned by his own futile desire for a pointless vengeance on the descendent of a man who had wronged him but was already long dead himself. As he’d said, the future of the Walled City is in the hands of the younger generation who choose to end the cycle by setting him free rather than imprison themselves along with him while defending their home as well as they can. With some incredibly well designed action sequences including one that make its way onto a double-decker bus, Soi Cheang’s beautifully staged action thriller as its name suggests has a rather elegiac quality but also the spirit of resistance in its gentle advocation for the importance of supportive communities.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is in UK cinemas from 24th May courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)

The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (掃毒3︰人在天涯, Herman Yau, 2023)

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Who is the most foolish, the arch criminal who didn’t realise his two best buddies were undercover cops, or the cops that killed or took bullets for him? The latest in the White Storm series of standalone action thrillers with starry casts thematically dealing with drugs and organised crime, White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (掃毒3︰人在天涯) like its immediate predecessor casts the net a little wider than just Hong Kong and is keen to stress the real victims of the international drug trade are the economically disadvantaged farmers who are left with no other option than to turn their fields to poppies. 

Back in Hong Kong, meanwhile, the film opens with local drug lord Suchat (Sean Lau Ching-Wan) retrieving a huge haul of drugs dropped in the ocean by helicopter only to be interrupted by the police who were watching all along. Suchat’s righthand man Yuen (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) blows his cover by pulling a gun to convince him to surrender, but Suchat chooses not to and in the firefight that ensues his other buddy, Hang (Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing), who is also an undercover cop and in fact very good friends with Yuen, is seriously wounded. In a show of loyalty, Suchat rescues Hang and manages to flee to Thailand where he sets up in his home village soon coming to the attention of the warlord who controls the local drug trade.

Describing the gang as the “rising stars of the Golden Triangle”, Suchat eventually cuts a deal with the general to provide security for his logistical operation in which drugs, mostly ice but also heroin, are transported inside fruit and other foodstuffs to be moved through the local market. Suchat had originally tried to set up his own operation only to fall foul of the general but also concedes that the margins in this game are fairly thin, no one in this area has any money to spend on drugs and there’s no point trying to produce them with the general in town so his only option is to provide a different service at another point in the chain. Hang becomes fond of the young woman who nurses him back to health, Noon, who explains that the only crop anyone is interested in is opium so aside from the food they grow for themselves it’s all they can produce to support themselves. There may a particular implication in her reply when Hang asks her if she’s ever considered moving that this even if this place is not a “home” because she has no remaining family members (her grandfather in fact seems to die of opium poisoning) it is still her hometown and why should she have to leave it. 

Before being taken to Thailand, Hang’s boss had worried that he might have spent too long undercover to successfully come back and it’s true enough that he seems to have become conflicted not only in his feelings for Noon but reflecting on the genuine brotherhood that exists between himself and Suchat whom he will eventually have to betray. Hang almost died for him, and Suchat repaid the favour by refusing to leave him behind. But on the other hand, there’s also a degree of homoerotic tension between himself and Yuen who rushes straight over to Thailand to rescue him once he’s able to make contact only to be frustrated when Hang tells him he has to go back to the village to save Noon who, as she’s already told him, does not actually want to leave despite the danger of constant violence from drug gangs and army raids. 

The film ends with the razing of the village of the Thai authorities who evidently decide the loss of life is justified in the necessity of stopping the general though it’s the ordinary farmers who lose their lives, families, homes and livelihoods because of their proximity to the trade in drugs. “I miss Hong Kong” Hang finally exclaims as if longing to shake off his undercover persona and recommitting himself to his role as a policeman but also perhaps hinting at a more subversive meaning as Yau ends on the clouds parting to reveal the famous city skyline amid picturesque terrain. Filled with a series of incredibly elaborate action sequences culminating in the all out warfare of the village raid, Yau’s heroic bloodshed subversion has its share of absurdity in the complicated relationships between its central trio and the ambivalent justice of its final resolution.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Anita (梅艷芳, Longman Leung Lok-man, 2021)

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“I have the spirit of Hong Kong in me, I won’t resign to fate so easily” insists Anita Mui in a television interview following a year-long career break after a slap in a karaoke bar earned by standing up to a drunken gangster sparked a turf war and sent her into a temporary exile in Thailand. Running away wasn’t something Anita Mui was used to, though she had been it seems humbled by the experience and in Longman Leung Lok-man’s perhaps at times overly reverential biopic of the star who passed away of cancer at 40 in 2003, primed to rise stronger than before with greater focus and determination to serve the people of her home nation. 

Leung does indeed paint Anita (Louise Wong) as a daughter of Hong Kong, opening with her childhood as a vaudeville double act with self-sacrificing sister Ann (Fish Lew) in 1969. Jumping forward to 1982, the pair enter a TV talent competition but only Anita makes through to the final and then eventually wins launching herself into superstardom and path to success that later seems to her to have been too easy. Indeed, Leung frequently cuts to montage sequences featuring stock footage of the real Anita Mui receiving a series of awards and eventually moving into a successful film career with her appearance in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge bringing her best friend Leslie Cheung (Terrance Lau Chun-him) with her as she goes. 

If there’s a defining quality beyond her defiance that Leung is keen to capture, it’s Anita’s generosity and kindheartness. In the opening sequence, the 6-year-old Anita goes to great pains to rescue a balloon trapped in a tree for a little boy who then runs off happily forgetting to say thank you. Ann tells her off for going to trouble for someone who couldn’t even be bothered to say thanks but as she said it makes no difference she’d just just have told him it was no bother and the whole thing would be a waste of time. Her path to fame is not one of ruthless, she is keen to pay it forward and to help others where she can. She is obviously pained when her sister is cut from the competition and mindful of her feelings while bonding with life-long friend Leslie Cheung after his performance at a nightclub bombs while hers is a hit thanks in part to her ability to charm her audience in three different languages switching from Cantonese to Mandarin for a contingent of Taiwanese guests and Japanese for a gaggle of businessmen sitting at the back during a rendition of classic unifier Teresa Teng’s Tsugunai. 

Then again, though we see much of Anita Mui’s post-comeback charity work including that to raise money for flood victims in Taiwan, we obviously do not see any of her pro-democracy political activism or role in assisting those fleeing the Mainland after Tiananmen Square. Such controversial aspects of her life may be taboo for the contemporary Hong Kong or indeed Mainland censor, as perhaps are any overt references to Leslie Cheung’s sexuality even if Anita’s other key relationship, her stylist Eddie, is played with a degree of camp by a fatherly Louis Koo. For similar reasons, despite the emphasis on supporting other artists her major protege Denise Ho, who was recently arrested for her support of Hong Kong independence, is also absent. 

Meanwhile, the film is otherwise preoccupied with a more literal kind of maternity in directly contrasting the course of Anita’s life with that of her sister Ann who married and had children but later passed away of the same disease that would claim Anita just a few years later. The film presents her life as one of romantic sacrifice, that she was forced to choose between love and career and never found true romantic fulfilment. The love of her life, according to the film, was Japanese idol Yuki Godo (Ayumu Nakajima) who was more or less ordered to break up with her because the Japanese idol industry is much more controlling of its stars than that of Hong Kong, only his real life counterpart Masahiko Kondo was actually involved in a fair amount of scandal a short time later having become engaged to a Japanese idol who broke into his apartment and attempted to take her own life after he broke up with her and began dating another pop star. Anita is often described as the Hong Kong Momoe Yamaguchi with whom she shares her low and husky voice as well as rebellious energy, though Momoe Yamaguchi in fact retired quite abruptly after marrying her on-screen co-star and devoted herself to becoming the perfect housewife and mother in an echo of the romantic destiny the film implies continually eluded Anita culminating in her decision to marry the stage during her final concert. 

At the end, however, the film returns to her as a daughter of Hong Kong embodying a spirit of rebellion it subversively hints is now in danger of being lost. Yet Anita refused to resign herself to fate, ignoring her doctor’s advice to stop singing after developing polyps in her vocal chords and again when told to stop working during her treatment for cancer. Her defiance and resilience along with the conviction that anything is possible if you want it enough echo the spirit of Hong Kong in 2003 though later wounded by her loss and that of Leslie Cheung who tragically took his own life a few months before Anita too passed away. Featuring a star-making turn from model Louise Wong in her first acting role, Leung’s brassy drama capturing the fervent energy of Hong Kong in its pre-Handover heyday is a fitting tribute to the enduring spirit of its defiant heroine. 

Anita screens at the Soho Hotel, London on 8th July as part of Focus Hong Kong’s Making Waves – Navigators of Hong Kong Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Teresa Teng’s Tsugunai

Momoe Yamaguchi – 曼珠沙華 (Manjushaka)

Anita Mui – 曼珠沙華

All U Need Is Love (總是有愛在隔離, Vincent Kok Tak-chiu, 2021)

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All things considered, there are worse places to quarantine than a five star hotel especially if it’s free but then again forced proximity with those you love, or those you don’t, can prove emotionally difficult. An old school ensemble comedy, Vincent Kok’s All U Need Is Love (總是有愛在隔離) features a host of A-list stars each providing their talent for free in order to support the struggling Hong Kong film industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic but as its name suggests eventually offers a small ray of hope that the enforced period of reflection may have fostered a spirit of mutual solidarity and personal growth. 

Kok opens, however, with a tense chase sequence as a shifty looking man runs from the authorities at the airport only to be picked up by the PPE-clad Epidemic Task Force who whisk him away to a secret location where he’s placed inside a weird bubble and interrogated by Louis Koo. Several more top HK stars including Gordon Lam fetch up in the bubble each implicating the Grande Hotel as the centre of of a coronavirus cluster at which point an order is given to place it under total lockdown requiring everyone inside to remain for a 14-day quarantine. 

Essentially a series of intersecting skits, Kok’s ramshackle drama nevertheless has its moments of satire as the hotel chief takes to the stairs for an inspirational speech in which he frequently slips into English and bizarrely likens himself to the captain of the Titanic because we all know how well that went. He spends the rest of the picture trying to escape without anyone noticing while his dejected security guard/brother tries to bump him off. Meanwhile, two gangsters develop a homoerotic bromance while plotting how best to profiteer off the pandemic through smuggling anti-COVID paraphernalia just as panic buying takes hold on the outside. 

Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that All U Need Is Love is also guilty of some rather old fashioned, sexist humour particularly in the antics of a pair of old men (Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Eric Tsang reprising their roles from Men Suddenly in Black) and their minions who misled their wives in order to embark on a sexual odyssey only to have their plans both improved and then ruined by the quarantine order. Meanwhile, a young couple who were in the hotel preparing for their wedding banquet ironically scheduled for the last day of the quarantine find themselves at loggerheads as the man gets cold feet over his fiancée’s bridezilla micromanaging, and her father undergoes a total makeover while continuously watching Japanese pornography in his room. 

Watching it all, a little girl, Cici, becomes the moral voice of the pandemic innocently hoping that nature will continue to heal itself even after the sickness ends. It’s she who shows the gangsters the error of their ways in pointing out that if they steal all the anti-COVID equipment then they will end up being more at risk because no one else is protected, while she also softens the heart of the hotel’s cynical manager to the point that he too makes a lengthy speech about becoming a better person thanks to his experiences during in the pandemic. 

During their enforced proximity friends and strangers have indeed needed to rediscover their love for their fellow man as they band together in mutual solidarity waiting for their freedom. Culminating in an oddly uplifting wedding decked out with balloons and messages from friends and family played via iPad, Kok’s anarchic ensemble farce does its best to discover a silver lining among the fear and anxiety of the pandemic as it ironically brings people together through driving them apart. Along with his A-list cast, Kok throws in a series of movie parodies and pop culture references from an impromptu rendition of Baby Shark to a surprise appearance from the Landlady from Kung Fu Hustle as well as a suitably random cameo from Jackie Chan. Repurposing the traditional Lunar New Year movie, All U Need is Love is a classic nonsense comedy designed to lighten the mood in these trying times while celebrating the essence of Hong Kong cinema through, arguably, its most idiosyncratic of genres. 

All U Need Is Love streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese/English subtitles)

Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch (追龍II：賊王, Wong Jing & Jason Kwan, 2019)

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In the grandest tradition of Hong Kong “sequels”, Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch (追龍II：賊王) has almost no connection to 2017’s Chasing the Dragon which starred Donnie Yen and Andy Lau as famed ‘70s gangster Crippled Ho and bent copper Lee Rock respectively. It is however part of a planned trilogy of films directed by Wong Jing and Jason Kwan “celebrating” legendary Hong Kong “heroes”. Abandoning the grand historical sweep of the first film, Wild Wild Bunch situates itself firmly in 1996 on the eve of the handover when, it claims, Hong Kong was close to a lawless state seeing as the colonial British authorities were already in retreat and therefore largely disinterested in governing. 

It’s this laxity, coupled with an age of excess, which has enabled the rise of real life kidnapping kingpin Cheung Tze-keung (Tony Leung Ka-fai) also known as Big Spender and here known as Logan Long. Logan makes his money by ransoming the richest figures not only in Hong Kong but the wealthier stretches of the Sinosphere and the Mainland cops are after him because they see him as an inconvenience from old Hong Kong they’d rather not inherit. Accordingly, they enlist veteran Hong Kong policemen, Inspector Li (Simon Yam Tat-wah) and bomb disposals expert He Sky (Louis Koo Tin-lok), to help them because they’ve heard that Logan is in need of a new explosives guy after the last one blew himself up. Sky is supposed to go deep undercover in Logan’s gang to save his next victim and take him down in the process. 

Though inspired by the real life legend, Sky’s infiltration is obviously fiction and in actuality Cheung Tze-keung was caught before his kidnapping of Macau gambling magnate Stanley Ho, here Standford He (Michael Wong Man-tak), could take place though setting the tale in the former Portuguese colony famous for its casinos (illegal in Mainland China) adds another meta level of colonial critique in situating itself firmly in the world of wealthy elites corrupted by their fabulous wealth. Real life gangster Cheung was apparently a well-liked figure, branding himself as a loveable rogue and less altruistic Robin Hood who liked to spread his wealth around by giving out lavish gifts seemingly at random though also enjoying living the high life himself. Logan is much the same, holing up at his mansion safe house in the rolling hills with his criminal “family”, declaring himself a fair man. If you cross him he’ll be sure to investigate fully but if he finds you betrayed him his revenge will be merciless. He cares deeply about his guys but also, perhaps unwittingly, terrorises them to the extent that they all pretend to enjoy eating durian fruit to please him, while reacting to tragedy with old-fashioned gangster ethics in trading his own girlfriend and a significant amount of cash to a gang member whose pregnant wife ended up dead because of his cowardly brother Farrell (Sherman Ye Xiangming) who is frankly a walking liability. 

Sky too is a family man, constantly worrying about his elderly mother and giving instructions to Li as to how to look after her if anything goes wrong and he doesn’t make it back from Macau. Sky’s mum is also quite concerned that her son has never married, and there is something quite homely in the strangely deep friendship between Li and Sky which has its unavoidably homoerotic context in Li’s cheerfully intimate banter in which it often seems he’s about to kiss his brother-in-arms which might not go down so well with the Mainland censors board who are otherwise so obviously being courted with the heroic presentation of the PRC police force only too eager to clear up the mess the British left behind. 

Then again, Cheung Tze-keung’s case was notable in that is presented an early constitutional conflict to the One Country Two Systems principle seeing as he was a Hong Konger tried (and sentenced to death) on the Mainland for crimes committed outside its jurisdiction, something which had additional resonance in the climate of summer 2019 in which vast proportions of the city came out to protest the hated Extradition Bill. In any case, Wild Wild Bunch owes more to classic ‘90s Hollywood actioners than it perhaps does to local cinema with its frequent bomb disposal set pieces and final climactic car chase which nevertheless literally pushes Logan over the line and into the arms of the PRC, the flamboyant gangster taking a bow as he tears up his ill gotten gains with a rueful grin in acknowledging his loss to a superior power. 

US release trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

A Witness Out of the Blue (犯罪現場, Fung Chih-chiang, 2019)

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“The world is not supposed to be like this” a failed revenger exclaims as he breathes his last in Fung Chih-chiang’s absurdist noir crime thriller A Witness Out of the Blue (犯罪現場) in which the career criminal on the run turns out to be the only noble soul. In a world like this, an eccentric policeman later suggests, good people can commit crimes while those who prosecute or are victimised by them are often no better than that which they claim to hate, eagerly taking advantage of a bad situation to take what they feel at least they are entitled to. 

It all links back to an unsolved murder, one of the many “crime scenes” referenced in the Chinese title. The dead man, Tsui (Deep Ng Ho-Hong), is believed to be part of a gang led by notorious underworld figure Sean Wong (Louis Koo Tin-lok) who was responsible for a botched jewellery store robbery which went south when the police stooge blew his cover trying to stop one of the gang members getting violent with a hostage. Wong shot the undercover policeman and opened fire on the police, eventually escaping our second scene of crime with the loot, while an old lady was so frightened she had a heart attack, and the store assistant who tried to raise the alarm was left paralysed. Police inspector Yip (Philip Keung Ho-man) who ran the undercover operation against Wong’s gang is convinced that Wong killed his associate during a dispute over dividing the loot and is fixated on bringing him in. Eccentric cop Larry Lam (Louis Cheung), however, is not convinced in part because he’s patiently listened to the only eye witness, a parrot, who says Wong didn’t do it. 

Nicknamed “garbage” and apparently a model cop until some kind of accident a few years previously, Lam is certainly an unusual law enforcement officer. For one thing, he’s in deep debt to loan sharks after borrowing money to start a cat sanctuary because he felt sorry for the abandoned felines left to cower in the rain in the face of the world’s indifference. Lam is convinced that he can get the parrot to talk, if only he can figure out how to communicate with it seeing as the only words it knows are “help me”, “genius”, and “idiot”. Based on the parrot’s testimony and his own gut feeling, Lam doesn’t think Wong is guilty so he has three other suspects: the son of the woman who died who works as a butcher at the market, the paralysed store assistant who has since got religion, and her security guard boyfriend (Andy On) who was rendered powerless in the attack, unable to protect her and apparently still carrying an immense amount of anger and resentment towards the criminals. Lam also comes, however, to doubt his superior wondering if his war against Wong is less in the pursuit of justice than revenge for the death of his officer. 

Yip and Wong are in some ways mirror images of each other, the morally questionable cop and the noble criminal. On the run, Wong takes up lodging with a cheerful woman named Joy (Jessica Hsuan) who is visually impaired but seems to think Wong is a good person even though she can’t “see” him. All of Joy’s other residents are extremely elderly, one of them sadly lamenting that the man who previously inhabited Wong’s room died peacefully in his sleep though he was “only 95”. “Money is no use after you die”, they tell him in an effort to persuade him to join in some 100th birthday celebrations, “life is all about contribution”. Quizzed on what he’d do with the money, all Wong wanted was to be able to sleep and as we see he seems to be suffering with some kind of psychosis, experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations of teeming ants and the ghostly voices of his former gang members. Yet he’s not “bad” in the way Yip characterised him to be, he never kills anyone he didn’t have to, is indignant about being accused of betraying his own, and is just as resentful towards Yip as Yip is towards him for the unfairness of his petty vendetta. 

But like all the best crime stories, all there is in the end is futility. The world shouldn’t be like this, but it is the way it is. Maybe Joy and her pensioners have it right, quietly living their lives of peaceful happiness being good to each other while evil developers breathe down their necks trying to destroy even their small idyll of goodness. Wong is drawn to them, but perhaps knows he’ll never belong in their world of infinite generosity though perhaps oddly he’s the only one who doesn’t really seem to care so much about the loot. Still, as Lam has it “Life is full of wonders” like crime-fighting parrots and eccentric policemen who stand in line buying limited edition trainers on behalf loansharks to finance their animal sanctuaries. Good people also break the law. “In memory of lost souls” reads the sign above the final scene of crime, and it’s not without its sense of irony. 

A Witness Out of the Blue streams in the US via the Smart Cinema app until Sept. 12 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

An Inspector Calls (浮華宴, Raymond Wong & Herman Yau, 2015)

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Inspector Calls poster 1J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls found itself out of favour until a phenomenally successful stage production brought it back into the national consciousness in the early ‘90s, but even if some decry its inherent melodrama as a relic of another era the play’s comments on the entrenched classism of British society sadly still ring true. An Inspector Calls is many things, but one thing it defiantly is not is funny – a series of concentric tales of betrayals and oppressions, Priestley’s drama lays bare the callousness with which the privileged bolster their position through the story of one faceless factory girl standing in for an entire social class whose lives are often at the mercy of those “above” them.

In adapting Priestley’s play as a Chinese New Year movie (a strange concept in itself), Herman Yau and Raymond Wong relocate to contemporary Hong Kong, re-conceiving it as a broad comedy of the kind one might expect for the festive period. The setup is however still the same. The Kau family will be receiving a visitation – this time from Inspector Karl (Louis Koo Tin-lok) who has some difficult news for each of them. Three hours previously, a young woman committed suicide in her apartment by drinking bleach, taking the child she was carrying with her. Inspector Karl views this as a double murder and, based on the diary they found at the crime scene, has brought the reckoning over to the Kaus’.

The Kaus, at the present time, are preparing an engagement party for daughter Sherry (Karena Ng) who will be marrying the handsome younger brother of a factory owner, Johnnie (Hans Zhang Han). What no one can know is that the family business is going under, the Kaus are broke, mum and dad don’t get on, and all of this finery is merely rented affectation. The only member of the family who still seems to have something like a social conscience – Tim (Gordon Lam Ka-tung), the 27-year-old younger son, is viewed by all as a feckless and naive hippy, hiding out in his childhood bedroom, still all fluffy cushions and toy soldiers.

As the Inspector explains, he holds Mr Kau (Eric Tsang Chi-wai) responsible because the woman once worked in his factory and he fired her for participating in a strike for better pay and conditions. Sherry got her fired too when she worked in an upscale fashion store. Johnnie knew her during an unfortunate period as a bar hostess, and Tim as a masseuse. Mrs Kau (Teresa Mo Shun-kwan), who heads up a woman’s charity and publicly espouses tolerance while privately judgmental, once turned her down for familial support seeing as the father of her child was still living. She advises holding him to account and if he won’t pay, forcing his family to take responsibility on his behalf. The irony being that the father is likely her own son and that if this poor woman had rocked up at the Kaus’ with a sad story and an infant in her arms, she would have been met with nothing more than contempt save perhaps some hush money to send her on her way.

The Kaus are merely a series of examples of the various ways the wealthy mistreat the poor, wielding their sense of entitlement like a weapon. Yau and Wong adopt an oddly Brechtian approach in their expressionist production design with the faceless masses identified only through titles – the word “labour” on the workers’ caps, “manager” in the fashion store, “secretary” at the foundation. None of these people are really worthy of names because they will always be “less” while the Kaus are “more” in more ways than one. Actions, however, have consequences. The family console themselves that this is all far too coincidental, that they couldn’t all have known the “same” woman in different guises, but that in many ways is the point – she isn’t one woman but all women, used, abused, and discarded not only by heartless men but by jealous and judgemental members of her own sex too. Better than her than me, they might say, but that’s no way to run a healthy society as the sensitive, slightly damaged Tim seems to see.

Like the Birlings, the Kaus attempt to brush the Inspector’s warning off, thinking it’s all been some elaborate prank that can they laugh about and then forget, but there will be a reckoning even if they attempt to gloss over the various revelations regarding their moral failings. Wong and Yau’s vague gesturing towards the outlandish greed of the hypocritical super wealthy is undercut by the ridiculous New Year slapstick of it all despite the Metropolis-like production design and expressionist trappings, giving in to an excess of its own in an extremely unexpected musical cameo from a martial arts star and the decision to end on a social realist photo of an innocent, pigtailed proletarian woman dressed in red. Nevertheless, strange as it all is the bizarre adaptation of Priestley’s play has its own peculiar charm even if it’s outrageousness rather than moral outrage which takes centre stage.

Currently available to stream online via Netflix in the UK and possibly other territories.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Accident (意外, Cheang Pou-Soi, 2009)

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Accident poster 1Is an accident ever really just an accident? The cosmos may be conspiring against us, but one can’t rule out a man-made conspiracy in a world as venal and corrupt as ours has become. Riffing off The Conversation, Cheang Pou-Soi’s The Accident (意外) stops to ask if you really do reap what you sow or if you merely think you do as its increasingly paranoid hero attempts to manipulate fate for his own ends only to find himself encircled by a net of his own making.

The Brain (Louis Koo Tin-lok) is the head of a very particular gang. A hitman of sorts, he specialises in untraceable crimes, choreographing elaborate pathways to death that appear indistinguishable from accidents. He knows that he is not the only such orchestrator of endings and that he has likely made enemies and rivals as a result of his activities and so is extraordinarily careful when it comes to the execution of his work.

It is, therefore, a concern when a bug appears in a routine job. Uncle (Stanley Fung Shui-fan), the oldest member of the team, drops a cigarette butt. It might seem like a small thing, but it makes a mark and leaves a little piece of Uncle at the crime scene – a tiny fragment that could become a part of a larger whole exposing the entire enterprise. The Brain is so careful that he even uses a hankie to funnel change into the bus driver’s ticket box, but he’s known Uncle a long time and is loath to cut him loose for a “minor” infraction even if the buzzing in the back of his head reminds him that maybe Uncle’s lapse of judgement wasn’t mere sloppiness.

A man attempting to live with tragedy by imposing order on a chaotic world, The Brain’s sense of cosmic coherence begins to unravel after the next job goes horribly wrong. Someone is plotting against him and one (or more) of the team must be in on it. He tracks his mark to an insurance broker (Richie Jen Hsien-chi) who is his mirror image in every respect as another gambler against the random, spies on him, and almost becomes him in installing himself in the apartment beneath his and literally tracking his every move thanks to a madman’s map on the ceiling and some carefully placed bugs.

Yet, is his assumption right? This could all just be a series of coincidences ranging from an old man’s dementia, to inauspicious weather, and unforeseen tragedy. The Brain, however, needs to believe in his own primacy of agency, that there are no “coincidences” and everything that befalls him is a product of his own actions. He wants revenge – against the man he believes has deliberately punctured his carefully controlled world, but also against the universe itself and the various ways it has misused him.

Fate, however, has other ideas and history later repeats itself with relentless and horrifying cruelty. The Brain, perhaps himself wandering into an “accident” of his own making, chases death in his double who finds himself touched by The Brain’s curse – uncertain yet convinced that he has been the victim of more than circumstance and vowing revenge on the (presumed) orchestrator of his fate, becoming just as strung out and paranoid as The Brain himself.

Produced by Milky Way, Accident does indeed share something with To’s whimsical worldview in which it is the random, inexplicable acts of chance which govern our lives. Fate cannot be outrun or out-thought, there is an accident waiting for all of us (who are each products of the accident of birth). Free will is an illusion, and The Brain will pay a heavy price for the depth of his faith its efficacy and rebellion against a chaotic universe through his attempt to use its propensity for random chance against it and for his own ends. A heady mood piece filled with the intense anxiety of existential unease, Cheang Pou-Soi’s perfectly crafted chronicle of a fragmenting consciousness spinning ever deeper into an entropic well of self-destruction is as melancholy an encapsulation of the human condition as one may hope to see as its hero battles valiantly against the inevitable while secretly perhaps longing to lose, like a degenerate gambler betting against fate.

Currently streaming via Netflix in the UK (and possibly other territories).

Original trailer (Cantonese with Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)