Tag: Maggie Cheung Man-yuk

Hero (英雄, Zhang Yimou, 2002)

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In the closing moments of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (英雄, Yīngxióng), what we see is an empty space. The outline of a person surrounded by arrows, or perhaps the doorway they protected with their body that nevertheless remains closed. On its initial release, Zhang’s film received criticism for what some saw as an overt defence of authoritarianism. After all, what we may come to understand is that the hero of the title is the Qin emperor (Chen Daoming), the founder of the modern China, but also in historical record a brutal tyrant whose tyranny is therefore justified in the name of peace, just as contemporary authoritarianism is justified in the name or safety and order.

This reading is only reinforced by the demeanour of Qin himself who condemns the nameless “hero” to death because he has chosen authority and this is what authority demands. No forgiveness, no compassion, only brutality and an iron first. Yet he cries because he is a compassionate man and understands the sacrifice he is asking his remorseful assassin to make. He does not do it because he is cruel or out of vengeance or anger, but because he believes it necessary to ensure peace for “all under heaven”. Now we may find ourselves asking again if the assassin is the hero after all because he willingly submits himself to and sacrifices himself for a tyrannous authority because he believes it to be the best and only choice that he can make for the wider society.

Nevertheless, there is something chilling in the vision of a thousand arrows flying toward one man who does not flinch while the man who ordered them sent appears to shake with his own power. The soldiers retreat, and the king is left alone, dwarfed by the immense architecture of the palace and the blood-red calligraphy of the character for sword reimagined by another potential hero whose name echoes his final conviction that in the end the apotheosis of the swordsman lies in the realisation that there is no sword. It’s this that leads him to abandon is own desire to assassinate the king and submit himself to a greater authority in the name of peace. In the end what he rejects is the tyranny of the sword itself, yet the king is also an embodiment of that tyranny because his authority is only possible through terrifying violence. 

In this way, the assassin, ironically named “Nameless” (Jet Li), may stand in for the everyman refusing to bow to the authority of a corrupt king who cares only for power. In one of the many tales he tells, Nameless remarks that he fought with the first of Qin’s three assassins in his mind and it’s true enough that what passes between the two men is a duel of words which is eventually won by the king. Qin tells Nameless of his desire to increase his influence beyond the other six kingdoms of Warring States China and create an empire that encompasses “all under heaven”, but Nameless later cautions him to remember those who gave their lives for the highest ideal, peace, and refrain from further killing. The closing title card is displayed over the Great Wall, making plain that Qin did in fact stop after conquering the six other kingdoms to unite all of China while building the wall to protect his citizens from “northern tribes,” or perhaps competing imperialists.

But walls keep people in as well as out and are in fact another facet of the king’s tyranny and a symbol of enduring authoritarianism. The problem is that it isn’t tyranny or authoritarianism that any of the assassins oppose for they are driven only by hate and vengeance and have no greater ideology or vision for the future. The argument is that peace under the iron fist of Qin is better than the chaotic freedom of the Warring States society, yet what we’re left with is nihilism. The love between assassins Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai ) is disrupted in each of the tales Nameless relates of them, firstly by romantic jealously and then secondly ideological divide. The conclusion that Broken Sword comes to is that they must not resist, but Flying Snow cannot live without recrimination with the past and the sealing of its tragic legacy. Her revolution fails, and as such “all under heaven” there is only death and only in death is freedom to be found.

The sense that these assassins are already dead is echoed in the choice of white for the final sequence of the film. Zhang frames each of his sequences in vibrant colour, the red of the first tale in which the lovers are destroyed by a supposed love triangle, the blue of the second in which tragedy and sacrifice do not so much destroy as deify it, the green of the penultimate in which jade curtains billow and fall inside the imperial palace, and finally the cold white of death in which the lovers eventually find their home leaving their surrogate child alone in a windy desert of futility. Yet each of these sequences is filled with an intense beauty and the romanticism found in classic wuxia. What remains in the mind is the balletic fight between the tragic heroine Flying Snow and the orphaned pupil Fading Moon (Zhang Ziyi) in an autumnal forest that’s suddenly drenched in red, or feet dancing across the water, an image of an idealised past and lost love among wandering ghosts with no home to go to. Here there are no heroes, only lonely souls and frustrated ideals. 

Seven Years Itch (七年之癢, Johnnie To, 1987)

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The shifting social codes of late ‘80s Hong Kong come under the microscope in Cinema City sex farce, Seven Years Itch (七年之癢). Loosely inspired by the 1955 Billy Wilder film, Johnnie To’s third directorial feature may in some senses suggest contemporary Hong Kong is little different from mid-50s America in its overly patriarchal gender politics but does in some senses at least attempt to redress the balance by turning the tables on the feckless husband if only to defiantly restore the status quo in the uncomfortable positioning of domestic violence as a means of social control. 

The ironically named Willie (Raymond Wong Pak-Ming) is a rising executive in a quasi marriage with Sylvia Chang (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) which is to say they live together as man and wife but Wille has never bothered to put in the paperwork (something which continues to annoy his harridan of a not quite mother-in-law). The couple have been together for seven years and Willie is beginning to tire of the monotony of (not actually) married life, irritated by Sylvia’s early morning Chinese Opera practice sessions and the fact he’s had nothing but sausage and egg for breakfast every day since moving in. Consequently, he fantasises about having an affair but is too mild-mannered despite the gentle ribbing of his colleagues and constant attempts of his brother-in-law John (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai) to introduce him to the red light district. 

In an early meeting with his colleagues after work, the men all discuss affairs suggesting that if a man isn’t chasing a woman it’s because he’s “sexually disabled” or gay quite clearly tying sexual prowess to masculinity. It’s also quite clear that the men view themselves as a group entirely separate from women, brother-in-law John evidently not thinking anything of it that he’s tempting his brother-in-law to cheat on his own sister implying that to him at least Willie’s masculinity is far more important than his sister’s feelings which in the end don’t seem to matter very much to him at all. John is also, however, a henpecked husband and moral coward. Challenged by his wife, sister, or mother, he immediately changes tack, dobbing Willie in when he’d tried to use him to placate Sylvia’s suspicions of an affair and quickly backtracking after having defended his decision not to file the papers by insisting “marriage is nonsense, old fashioned” only to counter with “I’m just saying for those silly men who try to overthrow the marriage tradition, I’m not one of them,”, “I absolutely agree with marriage. For women’s respect, I oppose living together”. 

Both John, whose constant badgering for loans also places a financial strain on the (non) marriage, and Wille feel themselves emasculated by the constraints of a monogamous relationship as the constant references to wild meat imply. Meanwhile the women are also depicted as vain and parasitical, the collection of trophy wives at Sylvia’s cookery class forever showing off the expensive gifts their husbands have bought them while alternately complaining they feel ignored. The implication is that the men can’t win, if they seem indifferent the wife worries they’re playing around, but too much affection is also regarded as a sign of infidelity. 

Even so it’s Sylvia who eventually gains the upper hand in refusing to play along with Willie’s games after he convinces her join him for a little Vertigo-esque role-play on a second honeymoon in Singapore, re-enacting his brief encounter with a foxy woman he met on a plane who was in fact conning him in order to facilitate a drug smuggling mission. Fed up with his ill-treatment, she falls asleep before the couple end up in an argument about her relationship with her “gay cousin” Chinese Opera partner with an inexplicably jealous Willie descending into an unpleasant homophobic rant. When he goes back to his own seat she has a meet cute of her own with a Chinese-American businessman literally named “Mr. Money” (Wu Fung) who took a liking to her in the departure hall and quite clearly needles Willie in the soft spots of his masculinity being both wealthy and cultured, able to take Sylvia off to a much more comfortable life in America with someone who is almost certainly going to treat her better than he ever intended to. 

As in many subsequent To comedies, it’s then the man who is put on the back foot blindly flailing while trying to win back a woman he took for granted. But if it seemed as if Sylvia might actually have more power in this relationship that either of them had assumed, the notion is quickly knocked back, literally, when her henpecked father raises a hand to her mother at the airport in order to support Willie’s attempt to prevent her leaving not because he thinks his daughter will be happier but in support of Willie’s compromised masculinity while reaffirming his own. An uncomfortable suggestion to a policeman that if “you slap her everything will be OK” reinforces the idea that actually the harridan mother-in-law now respects him more because of his show of manly violence, rebalancing the relationship back towards patriarchal norms while the father-in-law then turns full on sleaze cavorting with young women in public parks. 

It all adds to the impression that Willie is a sad sack, ineffectual man but largely because he turns back towards his wife while continuing to fantasise about other women seven years later claiming no longer to find her attractive and anticipating another itch this time presumably to escape his responsibilities as a father, his eyes following a pretty park jogger played by a then rising now iconic Hong Star who had appeared in the previous film Wong and To had made together. While To’s dancing camera shows glimpses of its future romanticism, it can’t quite escape the contradictions of the material even as it does its best to hand the balance of power back to Sylvia who could, it has to be said, do better. 

Executioners (現代豪俠傳, Johnnie To & Tony Ching Siu-Tung, 1993)

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At the end of The Heroic Trio, the shadowy rise of authoritarianism seemed to have been beaten back. The three superwomen at the film’s centre had discovered joy and liberation in female solidarity and were committed to fighting injustice in a flawed but improving world. If Heroic Trio had been a defiant reaction to Handover anxiety, then sequel Executioners (現代豪俠傳) is its flip side shifting from the retro 40s Hong Kong as Gotham aesthetic to a post-apocalyptic nightmare world where nuclear disaster has normalised corporate fascist rule. 

As Ching (Michelle Yeoh) explains in her opening voiceover, a nuclear attack has ruined the city contaminating its water and leaving ordinary citizens dependent on the Clear Water Corporation for safe drinking supplies and basic sanitation. The trio have been scattered, pushed back into the roles from which they escaped at the first film’s conclusion save perhaps for Ching who continues to serve a duplicitous authority but does so with clearer eyes and a humanitarian spirit driving a medicine truck to ensure those in need have access to healthcare. Chat (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) meanwhile has reverted to her cynical bandit lifestyle, hijacking water trucks mostly for her own gain but also ensuring the water gets to the needy. Tung (Anita Mui Yim-Fong) has abandoned her Wonder Woman persona on the insistence of her husband who is now a high ranking policeman with the military authority devoting herself to the role of the traditional housewife and mother to her daughter Cindy. 

Though the women seem to have maintained their bond, Ching and Chat turning up for a Christmas celebration with Cindy, the political realities soon disrupt their friendship as they find themselves at odds with each other given their shifting allegiances. As in the first film, Chat has continued to accept work from dubious authority in the form of the Colonel including tracking down a man who embarrassed the police by firing a gun at a rally for a cult-like protest leader, Chung Hon (Takeshi Kaneshiro), only the gunman later turns out to be a patsy and Chat has unwittingly helped them bump off the voice of the people as an overture for a military coup. Ching is secretly working for responsible government trying to safeguard the President to prevent his assassination by the Colonel, but obviously cannot say very much about her mission arousing Tung’s suspicions that she may have been part of a plot to have her husband killed. 

In any case, the true villain turns out to be a kind of Wonder Woman mirror image in that the mysterious Mr. Kim (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang), CEO of Clear Water Corporation, is a man who wears a mask to hide his scarred face and dresses like an 18th century aristocrat as if engaged in some kind of Man in the Iron Mask cosplay. Kim and the Colonel have been collaborating to engineer a military coup by deliberately restricting water supplies. The oblivious Chung Hon had unwittingly been Kim’s stooge, stoking up public resentment about the water situation to give the government an excuse for a crackdown and the Colonel to move. Chat’s path to redemption amounts to vindicating the faint hope that the water contamination was a hoax, which she eventually does by taking Cindy with her to smash the corporate dam and return the water to its rightful flow and the people of the city. But like the Evil Master, Kim does not die so easily turning up for a surprisingly hands on fight squaring off against the barely unified trio who are only just beginning to repair their friendships on coming to a fuller understanding of the reality of their circumstances. 

They are all in a sense liberated, though less joyfully than in the first film and largely through violent loss. The good guys don’t always win and a fair few die while all the women can do is keep moving, fighting off one threat after another with few guarantees of success and not even each other to rely on. Where the first film had embraced a hopeful sense of comic camp, Executioners skews towards the nihilistic in its dystopian world of corporate overreach and increasing militarism in which the trio no longer trust each other and are each re-imprisoned inside their original cages from patriarchal social norms to capitalistic inhumanity and questionable loyalties with the only hopeful resolution resting on “the sincerity of our friendship” in a world which may be healing but is far from happy. 

Executioners screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

The Heroic Trio (東方三俠, Johnnie To, 1993)

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Female solidarity becomes an unexpected weapon against stealthy authoritarian take over in Johnnie To’s gloriously camp superhero action fest, The Heroic Trio (東方三俠). Uniting three of the top stars of the age in Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, and Michelle Yeoh the film flirts with Handover anxiety in the “Evil Religion” that threatens to steal the children of Hong Kong, but eventually locates the source of salvation in the heroine’s shared humanity brokered by a tripartite solidarity of justice and equality that defies both the patriarchal world around them and the cruel authoritarianism in which they have been raised. 

In an almost biblical allegory, large numbers of male infants have been going missing over the last 18 months and the police are, predictably, mystified relying on the reappearance of the mysterious superhero Wonder Woman to solve the mystery herself. Truth be told, top Inspector Lau (Damian Lau Chung-Yan) hasn’t yet realised that Wonder Woman is his own wife, Tung (Anita Mui Yim-Fong), so perhaps his investigative skills aren’t all that despite the dynamism of the opening scenes which see him demonstrate his masculinity by leaping out of a window stop a thief from driving off in his classic car which is parked outside a creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere. Nothing really gets done until the chief of police gets a note that his own infant son is next on the list, though he briefly considers simply swapping his kid for another couple’s child while hiring “Thief Catcher” Chat (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) to get him back when he’s kidnapped by an “Invisible Woman”, Ching (Michelle Yeoh), whom Tung manages to wound while saving the decoy baby. 

As it turns out, Ching has been taking the babies on behalf of “Evil Master” (Yen Shi-Kwan) who lives in an underground lair in the sewers and is the head of a mysterious cult hellbent on finding a new king for China. There may be a degree of Handover anxiety in Evil Master’s mission, seeking to possess and control Hong Kong by brainwashing its children eventually possessing Ching by removing her bodily autonomy while her sisters must quite literally free her from his icy grasp. Each of the kidnapped boys is said to have a divine destiny, though Evil Master doesn’t know which one is the new king and has a habit of simply killing the ones who disappoint him while the others are raised as mindless automatons consuming those like them and destined to become thoughtless killing machines like the bloodthirsty Kau (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang). 

Chat, who was raised as one of Evil Master’s minions but managed to escape thanks to the largess of Ching and his since become an ultra-capitalist bounty hunter if one less cynical than she originally seems, thinks it’s better to simply end the cannibal kids’ misery before they end up like Kau while Tung prioritises saving the infants so they can be returned to their parents before being subject to one of Evil Master’s weird rituals. Ching, meanwhile, is only participating in Evil Master’s plan to protect the man she loves, a mad scientist slowly succumbing to poisoning caused by his invention in true genre fashion. It is then in a sense love that causes Ching to reject her programming, but it’s the solidarity of Tung and Chat, along with a desire for vengeance, that finally gives her the courage to rebel. 

In a brief flashback, Tung had failed to save Ching during a tough training session with their mentor who had cruelly told her that she’d have to fight for justice alone while Ching, cast out, sought support by turning to the dark side. The scene repeats itself twice in the film’s closing scenes in which Tung is this time able to save Ching but only because of the support from their friend and equal Chat making up the third point of the triangle and anchoring them both firmly to ensure they will not fall. “Life is meaningful if you can face yourself” Tung tells Ching, shedding her mask having presumably dealt with her own dark past and pulling her sister up with her as an equal leaving the past behind to fight for a future of justice and freedom. 

To and action director Ching Siu-tung recast Hong Kong as Gotham with a production design quite clearly inspired by Western comic books in which the three heroines end by getting fancy capes that flicker in the wind. Chat, a motorcycle-riding delinquent force of nature, even at one point launches herself into battle on an oil drum propelled by dynamite which she later uses to take out the cannibal kids not to mention Evil Master himself. But it turns out the spectre of creepy, ritualistic authoritarianism doesn’t die so easily, Evil Master’s charred skeleton gets back up for one last hurrah until his brain finally explodes when confronted by Ching’s rejection having returned to the fold and now ready to sacrifice herself for a freer future for all. Essentially a comic book wuxia, To’s ironic action drama allows its heroic trio to find salvation in female solidarity anchoring each other in a world beset by fear and villainy.

The Heroic Trio screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Comrades, Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜, Peter Chan, 1996)

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“Fate brings people together, no matter how far” according to a wise old chef in early ‘90s New York. He’s not wrong though Peter Chan’s seminal 1996 tale of fated romance Comrades, Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜) is in its own way also about partings, about the failure of dreams and the importance of timing in the way time seems to have of spinning on itself in a great shell game of interpersonal connection. But then, it seems to say, you get there in the end even if there wasn’t quite where you thought you were going. 

As the film opens, simple village boy from Northern China Xiaojun (Leon Lai Ming) arrives in Hong Kong in search of a more comfortable life intending to bring his hometown girlfriend Xiaoting (Kristy Yeung Kung-Yu) to join him once he establishes himself. His first impressions of the city are not however all that positive. In a letter home, he describes the local Cantonese speakers as loud and rude, and while there are lots of people and cars there are lots of pickpockets too. It’s in venturing into a McDonald’s, that beacon of capitalist success, that he first meets Qiao (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk), a cynical young woman hellbent on getting rich who nevertheless decides to help him by whispering in Mandarin realising he doesn’t understand the menu. Hailing from Guangdong, Qiao can speak fluent Cantonese along with some English and thus has much better prospects of succeeding in Hong Kong but takes Xiaojun under wing mostly out of loneliness though accepting a kickback to get him into an English language school where she piggybacks on lessons while working as a cleaner. Bonding through the music of Teresa Teng, they become friends, and then lovers, but Xiaojun still has his hometown girlfriend and Qiao still wants to get rich. 

As we later learn in one of the film’s many coincidences, Xiaojun and Qiao arrived on the same train if facing in different directions. Hong Kong changes each of them. When Xiaojun eventually manages to bring Xiaoting across the border, he’s no longer the simple village boy he was when he arrived while Qiao struggles with herself in her buried feelings for Xiaojun unwilling to risk the vulnerability of affection but visibly pained when confronted by Xiaojun’s responsibility to Xiaoting. She finds her mirror in tattooed gangster Pao (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai) who, like her, shrinks from love and is forever telling her to find another guy but is obviously hoping she won’t as afraid of settling as she is. 

For each of them this rootlessness is born of searching for something better yet the irony is as Xiaojun says that Hong Kong is a dream for Mainlanders, but the Mainland is not a dream for most in Hong Kong who with the Handover looming are mainly looking to leave for the Anglophone West. Qiao’s early business venture selling knock off Teresa Teng tapes fails because only Mainlanders like Teresa Teng so no-one wants to buy one and accidentally out themselves in a city often hostile to Mandarin speakers as Xiaojun has found it to be. What they chased was a taste of capitalist comforts, Qiao literally working in a McDonald’s and forever dressed in Mickey Mouse clothing which Pao ironically imitates by getting a little Mickey tattooed on his back right next to the dragon’s mouth. But when they eventually end up in the capitalist homeland of New York, a driver chows down on a greasy, disgustingly floppy hamburger while Qiao finds herself giving tours of the Statue of Liberty to Mainland tourists in town to buy Gucchi bags who tell her she made a mistake to leave for there are plenty of opportunities to make money in the new China. 

Ironically enough it’s hometown innocence that brings them back together. The ring of Xiaojun’s bicycle bell catches Qiao’s attention though she’d thought of it as a corny and bumpkinish when he’d given her rides on it in their early days in Hong Kong. Xiaojun had in fact disposed of it entirely when Xiaoting arrived partly for the same reason and partly because it reminded him of Qiao. The pair are reunited by the death of Teresa Teng which in its own way is the death of a dream and of an era but also a symbol of their shared connection, Mainlanders meeting again in this strange place neither China nor Hong Kong, comrades, almost lovers now perhaps finally in the right place at the right time to start again. Peter Chan’s aching romance my suggest that the future exists in this third space, rejecting the rampant consumerist desire which defined Qiao’s life along with the wholesome naivety of Xiaojun’s country boy innocence, but finally finds solid ground in the mutual solidarity of lonely migrants finding each other again in another new place in search of another new future. 

Comrades, Almost a Love Story screens at Soho Hotel, London on 9th July as part of Focus Hong Kong’s Making Waves – Navigators of Hong Kong Cinema.

Short clip (English subtitles)

Teresa Teng – Tian Mi Mi

In the Mood for Love (花樣年華, Wong Kar Wai, 2000)

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“That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.” So runs a melancholy title card placed a little before the conclusion of Wong Kar Wai’s Sirkian melodrama, In the Mood For Love (花樣年華). Extracted perhaps from the hero’s nascent foray into romantic fiction, the lines hint both at his plaintive sense of longing for lost love, and also to a changed Hong Kong which leaves the lovers stranded having missed their moment for happiness and thereafter trapped, like so many Wong heroes, in a perpetual evocation of the nostalgic past. 

Set like Days of Being Wild in the Hong Kong of the early 1960s, In the Mood for Love is in a sense an anti-melodrama concerning itself with the other side of an affair as betrayed spouses find in each other a kind of solace which ironically leads to love but a love that can never truly be fulfilled. Reporter Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) first brushes past secretary Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), sharing a name with the lovelorn box office girl of Days of Being Wild, when he attempts to rent a room for himself and his wife only to discover she has already taken it. The couple next door, however, are also looking to rent out their spare room now their son has married and so the pair find themselves next-door neighbours. Their respective spouses, seen only from behind and heard only on the other end of telephone calls or distantly from another room, eventually become more than that, their affair exposed as much as by their excessive business trips and suspicious overtime as by the rather crass practice of buying identical gifts for the illicit lover and legal partner, something also practiced by Li-zhen’s sleazy boss (Kelly Lai Chen) who enlists her husband to pick up a pair of handbags for wife and mistress. 

Li-zhen’s husband Chan (Roy Cheung Yiu-Yeung) seems non-plussed by the request but it perhaps gives him ideas, though not particularly good ones considering his mistress lives next-door, Li-Zhen pointing out to Mo-wan that a woman might not like a gift of a handbag identical to that of her neighbour before admitting she’s noticed his wife carrying just that, while Mo-wan is wearing the same tie as Chan who claimed it was a present from his boss which is why he’s been wearing it every day. Confronted on a similar point, Li-zhen’s boss makes a point of changing his tie before meeting his wife for a birthday dinner. Male adultery is, it seems, normalised and to an extent permissible as long it remains a secret even if openly. With her husband so frequently away, however, Li-zhen becomes a figure of suspicion, her landlady Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan Di-hua) warning her that her late night returns have not gone unnoticed while others marvel at her elegance, unable to accept she’s all dressed up just to buy noodles in the rain. 

For all these reasons, the relationship between Mo-wan and Li-zhen must remain chaste and pure even as they consciously role play their adulterous spouses. “We won’t be like them” Li-zhen insists, later echoed by Mo-wan’s admission that “I thought we wouldn’t be like them, but I was wrong.” He wanted to know how it started, and now he does. “Feelings can creep up just like that. I thought I was in control” he remarks in a speech which seems to echo Celia Johnson’s shattering revelation in Brief in Encounter “I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people”. Like the old busybodies of Coward’s prurient, middle class England, the landlady acts as an enforcer of conventional morality, always on the look out for breach of conduct and believing herself acting in Li-zhen’s best interest even as her admonition leaves her in a moment of virtual collapse, grasping the doorframe for support as her eyes momentarily fill with tears. 

Yet it’s Mrs. Suen’s eventual absence that informs us of a sea change. Years later, in 1966, she’s one of many in an apparent mass exodus fleeing the political instability in the wake of a series of riots against British colonial rule. Mrs. Suen is vacating her apartment to live with her daughter in the US where she may stay indefinitely. The Koos from next-door have already moved to the Philippines to live with their son, laying bare the ongoing expansion of the Hong Kong diaspora. Mo-wan eventually finds himself in Singapore, though fleeing emotional rather than political instability, eventually travelling to Angkor Wat in a failed attempt to exorcise his sadness, while Li-zhen, unable to act on her desires and trapped by patriarchal ideas of conventional morality is, like Happy Together’s Po-Wing, left only with memory living in the metaphorical past of Mrs. Suen’s apartment. Something has changed, a once impossible love may now be possible, but “that era has passed”. The couple have missed their moment, trapped on either side of an unbreachable divide. 

For Mo-wan, “the past is something he could see but not touch” a subject of perpetual longing blurred and indistinct as if seen through a dusty window pane. Working again with Christopher Doyle, Wong’s sweeping cinematography captures Mo-wan’s etherial existence through comparatively restrained composition and use of gentle tracking shots following the lovers as they repeatedly pass each other in shadow on the stairs or wander along the deserted, rainy streets of a midnight city. Like a long slow waltz, In the Mood For Love sends its protagonists spinning back towards opposite sides of the floor, trapped in a world which no longer exists and consumed by an irresolvable longing for the nostalgic past. 

Transfer: presented in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio though like the other films in the series of 4K restorations featuring the near universal green tint in a significant change for a film known for sumptuous colour and particularly associated with the use of deep reds.

In the Mood for Love is currently available to stream in the UK via BFI Player in its newly restored edition as part of the World Of Wong Kar Wai season.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Days of Being Wild (阿飛正傳, Wong Kar Wai, 1990)

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“I used to think a minute could pass so quickly, but actually it can take forever” laments a lovelorn heroine in Wong Kar Wai’s melancholy ‘60s romance Days of Being Wild (阿飛正傳), somehow neatly encapsulating the director’s entire philosophy. The heroes of Days are obsessed with minutes, seconds, hours, years, the barely perceptible passing of time. Clocks pervade the frame, their violent ticking the most prominent element of Wong’s strangely barren soundscape, a constant reminder of a life slowly etched away ceaselessly beaten towards an inevitable conclusion. 

The hero, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), describes himself rather poetically as a bird without legs cursed to fly and fly meeting the ground only once at the moment of his death, an overly sentimental metaphor for which he is later taken to task by the equally rootless Tide (Andy Lau Tak-wah), a former policeman turned sailor who wonders if it’s just a line he uses to seduce lonely women with boyish sadness. We might wonder the same thing as he picks up the lonely Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), a Macao émigré apparently unable to sleep, by telling her she’ll see him in her dreams before forcing her to look at his watch for a whole minute as if that after 3pm on April 16, 1960 were now a sacred date forever etched in time. She thought that sounded “so sweet”, but as he later tells her Yuddy is not the marrying kind and she too is trapped inside that moment, often framed behind bars or the tiny window of her box office booth before the door is cruelly slammed on her romantic delusion seemingly by automatic operation of the clock. 

In a twist of fate, Li-zhen meets Tide during his previous life as a policeman when she makes a fairly embarrassing attempt to get back together with Yuddy after he reacts coolly to her suggestion of marriage only to discover him with his new love, cabaret dancer Mimi (Carina Lau Kar-ling). “I’m not gonna be as stupid as her” Mimi insists flouncing out of his apartment only to find herself just that, making a desperate visit to Li-zhen at the stadium after the affair has ended to tell her to her back off only for the rather unsympathetic Li-zhen to point out they’ve both been deceived, “he treats all women the same”. 

A perpetual lothario Yuddy moves from woman to woman without touching the ground, but his rootlessness is seemingly born of maternal disconnection in his ambivalent relationship with the Hong Kong sex worker who raised him but refuses to disclose the identity of his Filipina birth mother supposedly a noble woman who for unknown reasons paid a foreigner US$50 a month to raise her son. Like the other women in Yuddy’s life, Rebecca (Rebecca Pan Di-hua) does her best to tie him down, apparently unwilling to reveal his origins in fear he’d leave her, but also mirrors him in her constant quest for affection bought from a series of younger men and apparently one older who threatens their relationship in inviting her to a new life overseas. Ironically enough, she soon tells her son to “fly, fly as far as you can” all the way to the Philippines, though Yuddy already suspects he’s been a flightless bird all along, dead from the very beginning.

Yuddy’s search for closure and identity ends disappointment and a painful lack of resolution, as does the nascent romance between the policeman and the box office girl, her mistimed phone calls amounting to a literal missed connection while Tide ponders lost love from foreign seas, and Mimi tragically chases the ghost of Yuddy all the way to Manila pined for by Yuddy’s self-conscious friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung Hok-yau) left behind alone. Trapped in the timeless present, they are each denied either past or future, lost in a lovelorn dream of perpetual longing. As if to ram his point home, Wong shows us another clock and then another man we’ve never seen before (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as he gets ready for an evening out, crouching slightly in what appears to be a shallow, sub-divided garret making it clear that these stories have no endings, flying and flying until they hit ground and seemingly born in the air. A woozy, zeitgeisty journey through mid-century loneliness, Wong’s second feature leaves its melancholy heroes consumed by nostalgia for an ill-imagined future unable to escape the cruel tyranny of an interminable present. 

Transfer: Among the more faithful of the recent 4K restorations, Days of Being Wild nevertheless shifts to a slightly greener hue in keeping with the house style adopted for the series, adding to Wong’s sense of melancholy nostalgia and perhaps in keeping with Doyle’s original artistic vision.

Days of Being Wild is currently available to stream in the UK via BFI Player in its newly restored edition as part of the World Of Wong Kar Wai season.

Original trailer (unrestored, English subtitles)

Moon Warriors (戰神傳說, Sammo Hung, 1992)

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“In fact, some stories are true. Especially the heartbreaking ones” according to a melancholy fisherman in Sammo Hung’s tragic wuxia romance, Moon Warriors (戰神傳說). Arriving in the middle of a fantasy martial arts boom, Moon Warriors boasts some of the biggest stars of the day in a beautifully composed tale of intrigue and derring-do as well as featuring an A-list creative team with such high profile talent as Mabel Cheung, Alex Law, Ching Siu-Tung, and Corey Yuen also involved in the production. 

Somewhere in feudal China, 13th Prince Shih-san (Kenny Bee) is on the run after being usurped by his evil brother, the predictably named 14th Prince (Kelvin Wong Siu) who burnt down his castle and has been following him throughout the land razing villages wherever he goes. Accompanied by trusty bodyguard Merlin (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) who is silently in love with him, Shih-san is desperate to get in touch with the Lord of Langling (Chang Yu), also the father of his betrothed princess Moony (Anita Mui Yim-Fong), in the hope of uniting their forces to retake the country together. Meanwhile, goodhearted yet eccentric fisherman Philip (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) is doing a spot of hunting in a bamboo grove during which he notices Shih-san and the others wading into a trap and leaps to the rescue, helping to despatch the black-clad assassins. As Shih-san is badly injured, he takes them back to his cheerfully idyllic village, serves them the local delicacy of spicy shark fin soup, and generally befriends them before 14th Prince’s goons track them all down again at which point he takes them to his secret hideout which turns out to be an ancient temple dedicated to Shih-san’s emperor ancestors. 

We find out just how evil 14th Prince is when he gets his minions to kill all of Moony’s ladies-in-waiting and dress up in their clothes to mount a sneak attack on the Langling estate while holding on to the pretty kites Moony was flying before the gang arrived. Though petulantly flying kites seems like quite a childish activity for a princess about to be married off, Moony more than holds her own in the fight even if finding it difficult to deal with having killed someone for the first time. Sent to protect her, Philip is less than sympathetic, but after a few arguments, a near death experience, and some magic glitter, the pair begin to fall in love, which is a problem because Moony is betrothed to Shih-san. 

What develops is a complicated love square in which Merlin pines for Shih-san who seems more interested in Philip, while Philip repeatedly tries to leave the group because of his conflicted loyalties and a feeling of inferiority as a peasant suddenly mixed up in imperial intrigue and forbidden romance. Moony tries to give him her half of a precious jade talisman which plays beautiful music, but her melancholy suggestion that it will sound better with his flute than with the other half which is held by Shih-san flies right over his head. Shih-san, meanwhile, who was spying on them talking, suddenly decides to give him his half too, leaving Philip holding the whole thing. Merlin, as it turns out, has a series of interior conflicts of her own that leave her resentful of just about everyone except Shih-san. 

Eventually, however, nowhere is safe from the destructive effects of political instability and Philip’s fishing village is soon a target for the vicious 14th Prince, ensuring he enters the fight with the help of his improbable best friend, a killer whale named “Sea-Wayne”. Before the romantic dilemmas can be resolved, the courtly intrigue collapses in on itself, fostering an accidental revolution in the literal implosion of an old order, suddenly becoming dust as in some long forgotten prophecy. In a strange moment of flirtatious smalltalk, Philip had remarked that legend has it the flowers in these fields are only so beautiful because they grow on top of bodies buried far below, something he later discovers to be more than just a fanciful story. 

There might be something in the tragic tale of two branches of elites destroying each other in order to take control of a disputed territory while the ordinary man is left behind alone to reflect on the fall of empires, but perhaps that’s a reading too far in a melancholy wuxia of 1992 and its unexpectedly gloomy ending in which true feelings are spoken only when all hope is lost. Nevertheless, with all of its high octane fight scenes, painful stories of romance frustrated by the oppressions of feudalism, and surreal killer whale action, Moon Warriors is a strangely poetic affair as doomed love meets its end in political strife.

Trailer (no subtitles)

All’s Well, Ends Well (家有囍事, Clifton Ko, 1992)

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Now an annual institution, the “New Year Movie” was only just beginning to find its feet at, arguably, the end of a golden age in Hong Kong cinema. Clifton Ko’s All’s Well, Ends Well (家有囍事) is often regarded as one of the key movies that made the genre what it is today, taking the box office by storm and spawning a small franchise with a series of sequels, the latest of which All’s Well, Ends Well 2020, is released this year. The original, however, is a classic “mo lei tau” nonsense comedy starring master of the form Stephen Chow as an improbable lothario chased into domesticity by the beautiful Maggie Cheung. 

The plot, such as it is, revolves around three brothers – Moon (Raymond Wong Pak-ming), Foon (Stephen Chow Sing Chi), and So (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing). Oldest son Moon is a regular salaryman married to devoted housewife Leng (Sandra Ng Kwan-yue). Though it’s his seventh wedding anniversary, he’s late for the family dinner at home with his parents and brothers because he’s entertaining his mistress, Sheila (Sheila Chan), instead. Foon, meanwhile, is a disk jockey on local radio filling in for a friend taking a day off to get married. Eccentric movie enthusiast Holliyok (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) rings into the show to complain that she feels lost and lonely, so Foon takes her address and phone number under the pretext of gifting her a laserdisc. So, meanwhile, is an effeminate young man who teaches flower arranging and clashes with his tomboyish, motorcycle riding “auntie” Mo-shang (Teresa Mo Shun-kwan) who practices extremely aggressive massage techniques. 

As this is a New Year movie, the conclusion we’re moving towards is the repairing of the family unit with the two unmarried brothers eventually pairing off, culminating in a mass wedding in which mum (Lee Heung-kam) and dad (Kwan Hoi-san) can participate too. Before that, however, we’re dropped into the increasingly affluent world of Hong Kong in the early ‘90s in which men like Moon think they’re king. Leng, meanwhile, laments that she married her husband after high school and unlike him does not have the option to quit her “job”, forced to serve the two “company directors” day and night with no overtime or double pay. Quit is exactly what she does do, however, when confronted with Moon’s infidelity. After promising to take her out for a swanky dinner, he gets distracted by his mistress and ends up getting rid of Leng to have dinner with Sheila after which he is so drunk she has to carry him to his own door. Sheila may have thought she was pushing herself into a middle class way of life, but being a housewife is hard work too, especially with Moon’s rather demanding if eccentric parents who suffer separation anxiety from their TV set and prefer to be vacuumed down to keep themselves clean while they watch. 

Leng, not quite having intended to really leave, is forced to reassert herself as an independent woman. She re-embraces her love of singing, getting one of the few jobs that’s open to women in her situation – working in a karaoke box. Eventually, she glams up and becomes a “credible” rival to Sheila, who has now become the housebound “hag” resented by the regretful (but perhaps not remorseful) Moon who has learned absolutely nothing at all about being a good husband.  

Meanwhile, Foon romances Holliyok through movie roleplay, cycling through Pretty Woman, to hit of the day Ghost, before heading into the darkness of Misery, and the unexpected salvation of Terminator 2. After himself getting caught with another girl, Foon gets hit on the head with an egg and “develops” a “brain disease” that causes him to lose his mind. Holliyok swears revenge, but, inexplicably, can’t seem to give up on the idea of Foon’s love while he remains just as pompously macho as Moon, believing women are things you win and then discard. 

Counter to all that, So and Mo-shang occupy a rather ambiguous space – quite clearly coded as gay complete with offscreen lovers they communicate with only by letter until they make a surprise appearance to make a surprise announcement. First feeling a spark of unexpected attraction while making some electrical repairs in the kitchen, they are eventually shocked straight – So transforming into a pillar of conventional masculinity, and Mo-shang suddenly wearing her hair long (did it grow overnight?), putting on makeup and dressing in ladies’ fashions. Thus, their gender non-conforming natures have been in some sense “corrected” by “love’ or “electroshock” depending on how you choose to look at it, assuming of course that their newfound romance is not just a clever ruse to neatly undercut the use of their homosexuality as a punchline. In any case, as the title says, all’s well that end’s well, and the Shang household seems to have regained its harmony, rejecting Sheila and all she stands for to embrace true family values just in time for the festive season.  

Screened in association with Chinese Visual Festival.

Rerelease trailer (traditional Chinese/English subtitles)

Doubles Cause Troubles (神勇雙妹嘜, Wong Jing, 1989)

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Doubles cause troubleWould you be willing to live with someone you hate for a whole year just to get a share in an apartment? According to the sheer prevalence of this plot device in comedies throughout the ages, the chances are most people would, especially in a city like Hong Kong where competition is fierce. In any case the duelling cousins at the centre of Wong Jing’s disappointingly normal farce Doubles Cause Troubles (神勇雙妹嘜) find themselves doing just that, only the situation turns out to be much more complicated than one might imagine.

When self-centred nurse Liang Shanbo (Carol “Do Do” Cheng Yu-Ling) receives a visit from a lawyer informing her that her grandmother has passed away she’s a little put out because the old lady owed her money. She’s comforted with the news that she’s been left an apartment, but less so when she learns there’s a catch. Shanbo’s grandma really wanted her to patch things up with her cousin, actress Zhu Yingtai (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk), and has left the apartment to both of them with the caveat that they have to live there together for a period of one year after which they can sell it and inherit 50% of the proceeds each or else it’ll all go to charity. Neither Yingtai or Shanbo is very happy about the idea but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up and after all, it’s only for a year. When they arrive, however, they discover there’s another tenant – Ben (Poon Chun-Wai), a suave businessman who leaves them both smitten. Ben, it turns out, is not quite what he seems and staggers home on the first night to die in Yingtai’s arms after muttering something about a code.

Unlike most Hong Kong comedies of the era, Wong plays things disappointingly straight while remaining as broad as it’s possible to be. Odd couple Shanbo and Yingtai bicker and trade childish insults while throwing themselves first at the handsome Ben and then at his equally good-looking “brother” Sam (Wilson Lam Jun-Yin) without really giving too much thought to anything else that’s going on until they find themselves well and truly embroiled in a conspiracy. It turns out that Ben had been involved in a smuggling operation in which he betrayed his team and made off with a priceless Taiwanese “national treasure” that the rest of the gang would like to recover which is why Shanbo and Yingtai are being followed around by a “flamboyant” rollerskating henchman and a butch female foot-soldier.

The political realities of 1989 were perhaps very different, but there is an unavoidable subtext in the fact that the dodgy gangsters are all from the Mainland and are desperate to get their hands on a precious Taiwanese national treasure (which they intend to sell for a significant amount of money). The girls find themselves with ever shifting loyalties as they reassess Ben, come to doubt Sam, and fall under the influence of mysterious “inspector” Xu (Kwan Ming-Yuk) whose warrant card is “in the wash”. Completely clueless, they are helped/hindered by useless petty gangster Handsome (Nat Chan Pak-Cheung) and his henchman Fly (Charlie Cho Cha-Lee) who’ve been chasing Shanbo all along while Yingtai falls victim to Wong himself in one of his characteristically sleazy cameos as a lecherous businessman who has toilets instead of furniture in his living room and a boxes full of date rape drugs behind the bar (poor taste even for a Wong Jing movie).

Of course the real message is that blood ties and immediate proximity to danger can do wonders for a “difficult” friendship and so granny gets her wish after all even if not quite in the way she might have planned. Then again, why was Ben staying in her luxury apartment in the first place? Who can say. Setting a low bar it may be, but Doubles Cause Troubles is not even among Wong Jing’s funniest comedies though it does have its moments mostly born of sheer absurdity and enlivened by the presence of a young Maggie Cheung alongside a defiantly committed cast desperately trying to make the best of the often “risible” material.

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

Celestial pictures trailer (English/traditional Chinese subtitles)