Tag: Tai Bo

Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不, Oliver Chan Siu-kuen, 2024)

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A title card at the end of Oliver Chan’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不) dedicates the film to all women who chose not to become mothers, and it’s true enough that the picture it paints of contemporary child rearing is relentlessly bleak. Governments in much of the developed world are fiercely trying to encourage more couples to have children, but few are really addressing the reasons why they aren’t while the ways people live their lives have undeniably changed rendering commonly held notions about parenting incompatible with the contemporary reality.

A case in point, Jing (Hedwig Tam) lives a long way from her birth family and is not surrounded by a supportive community network of other women in similar positions. Though her mother-in-law lives next-door and offers to help with the baby, it soon proves more trouble than it’s worth as she more or less takes over and runs Jing down in the process. Jing describes her to friends as “conservative,” and it’s clear that she disagrees with Jing’s parenting choices while also trying to exclude her from the family as if the baby were only her and her son’s. Ching, a fussy newborn who cries nonstop from morning to night, isn’t gaining weight and the mother-in-law immediately jumps straight to the conclusion that it’s because Jing’s milk isn’t good enough. According to her she doesn’t eat right, and going back to work may also have somehow caused a problem. Her unilateral decision to switch formula milk, tipping away all the breast milk Jing has been painstakingly expressing, without telling either of the parents is a huge overstepping of the boundaries and a betrayal of the trust Jing placed in her to look after her child, though of course the mother-in-law insists that she was only trying to do what’s best for the baby despite also having bathed her in burnt sutras.

The problem is compounded by the fact the in-laws seem to own the apartment they live in, which is why her husband, Wai, is reluctant to move closer to her family when she suggests it. As the oldest son, he is also supposed to be caring for his parents though in reality this of course also falls to Jing. As Ching’s crying is so loud and piercing, they begin receiving complaints from neighbours which eventually leaves Jing forced to take the baby outside in the middle of the night. This might not have been so much of a problem in the past before urban living environments became so cramped and people began having less children making the noise more obvious, but it’s nevertheless an unavoidable obstacle for the new parents who find themselves additionally pressured by the necessity of maintaining good relationships with their neighbours. 

To make matters worse, Jing’s husband Wai pats himself on the back for “helping” with the baby, which is after all also his responsibility so he should be doing his fair share. He still seems to operate with a patriarchal mindset that tells him the home and flat are Jing’s to take care of while his job is to earn the money. Both he and his mother seem to hold it against Jing that their baby is a girl. She asks him for more help, but he responds by getting a job that pays more but requires further hours. He spends evenings out with his friends and repeatedly fails to get the breast milk pump fixed despite frequent reminders before accusing her of “whining” too much when she tries to tell him how difficult it’s been for her stuck at home all day with the baby. Like his mother, his ideal solution is for her to give up work and devote herself to their home because they don’t “need” her money and her working is perhaps a suggestion that they might which offends his sense of masculinity.

But Jing wants to work for reasons of personal fulfilment and safety. As other women remind her, you need your own money in case there comes a time you need to leave, but also because some men keep a tight grip on the purse strings and often won’t give their wives enough housekeeping money. Jing was paying for a lot of the baby stuff herself out of the money from her job at a bakery, but after she loses it and her savings run out she has to ask Wai who isn’t keen to chip in. Ironically, her boss chooses to make her redundant when the bakery hits a bad patch because her colleague is single and at least she has her husband’s wage to rely on. Jing continues applying for similar jobs, but they all fall through when she reveals she is married with a newborn child. In the end, she lies that she’s single but the job only offers night work which is obviously no good for her situation.  

Her job was the last thing that Jing felt connected her to her old self. With no one to talk to but the baby, she fears the erasure of her identity and tells her mother that she misses the time that she was a daughter rather than a mother. She gets some support from a kind retired lady who looks after Ching and tries to encourage her, reminding her that it was different for their generation because they could just leave the kids in the house and ask a neighbour to check in on them and no one thought anything of it. But Jing still feels herself inadequate, as if she’s failing at motherhood or breaking a taboo by asking to have some sort of life for herself without being completely subsumed by the image of “motherhood”. The in-laws keep a little bird in a cage with which Jing seems to identify, even as its chirping adds to the noise and the constant thrumming of the breast pump raises her stress levels. Left with no real support, there is only really one way that Jing can escape from a world of sleeplessness and anxiety as she tries to find the smallest moment of peace and tranquility free of social expectation and the crushing guilt of maternity.

Montages of a Modern Motherhood screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Dumpling Queen (水饺皇后, Andrew Lau, 2025)

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There are a lot of ironies and contradictions at the heart of Andrew Lau’s Dumpling Queen (水饺皇后, shuǐjiǎo huánghòu) inspired by the life of Zang Jianhe who founded the international dumpling empire Wanchai Ferry, but there’s no getting away from the celebratory joy it finds in the heroine’s hard-won transition from jilted spouse to successful entrepreneur. Then again, there might be something uncomfortable in the film’s framing and the repeated claim that Jianhe’s dumplings are about the warmth of familial bonds and reunion. Zong’s desire to kick back at American imperialism as manifested in the ubiquity of hamburgers and US-style delivery pizza by making Chinese dumplings accessible across the world is also an advocation for the One China philosophy in which the greater Chinese diaspora is connected as a family through “the taste of home.”

Beginning in 1977, the film is noticeably quiet about why anyone would be risking their lives to escape from Mainland China to Hong Kong, though this is what Jianhe is doing in her quest to be reunited with her husband, Hanzhou, who has been away for four years. Unfortunately, when she reaches the station at the border, Hanzhou’s mother (Nina Paw Hee-ching) rudely explains that she had him marry another woman in Thailand who has since borne him a son. Branding Jianhe a failure for giving birth to only daughters, she tells her that she can come with them but that she will be the second wife subservient to the mother of the family heir. She repeatedly claims this does not make Hanzhou a bigamist because Thai law supposedly gives him the right to marry more than one woman, though it seems the mother-in-law may not be aware that the pair were legally married in Mainland China as Jianhe’s traditional wedding photos would otherwise suggest. 

The fact that Jianhe is discarded for giving birth to daughters contributes to the film’s feminist undertones and sense of female solidarity as Jianhe strives to pass on the dumpling recipe she learnt from her own mother to the next generation of women and beyond. Jianhe must now find a way to fend for herself, which she eventually does through a combination of hard work, excellent business sense, and the supportive community around her. Though Jianhe and her children face some instances of prejudice against Mainlanders when they first arrive, they are helped by various people including enigmatic landlady Hong Jie (Kara Wai Ying-hung) who makes her a part of her boarding house community and tries not to pressure her about the rent out of consideration for the children,

But times are sometimes hard and Jianhe is directly contrasted with the woman across the way whose husband has a gambling problem and beats her. Having been injured in a workplace accident that leaves her unable to work as she had been before, Jianhe begins to feel hopeless and considers taking her own life only to be saved by her children and a neighbour who sells dessert soups, but the other woman is not as lucky and eventually makes a fateful decision, blaming herself for the man her husband has become. Jianhe is also given another shot at romance with a sympathetic policeman (Zhu Yawen) who comes from the same area of Mainland China and is taken by her dumplings, but he also wants to move abroad and Jianhe has already followed one husband to another country and it didn’t work out so well. It’s not so much that she sacrifices love for career success, the policeman could after all simply chose not to go, but that she no longer needs to compromise herself for marriage because she’s fulfilling herself through her business enterprise.

Just as the film doesn’t mention why Mainlanders came to Hong Kong, it doesn’t really go into why some Hong Kongers choose to leave save for a brief onscreen text mention about the beginning of the negotiations for the Handover though Jianhe is repeatedly keen to emphasise the universal Chineseness of her dumplings. She makes a deal with a Japanese department store, but threatens to walk when they try to make her change her packaging to bring it into line with their house style and thereby erase its cultural identity. She also refuses to allow them a monopoly after they demonstrate their lack of trust in her as a businesswoman, quickly realising she’s better off making deals with every supermarket on the island as well international flour companies. Jianhe is pretty quick to cotton to new technologies such as household refrigerators and the possibilities for frozen foods. But at the end of the day, she’s earnest and hardworking, sharing her success with her many friends who helped her along the way and always repaying kindness when she can. It’s an oddly utopian vision at times in which everyone seems to recognise Jianhe’s greatness and get out of her way, including a triad boss who helps her because she reminded him of his mother when she threatened one of his men with a meat cleaver,) but it also reinforces a sense of the One China family with the dumplings, now refined to suit local tastes, as the glue binding it together in the face of an onslaught of hamburgers and pizzas as harbingers of a cultural apocalypse.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Papa (爸爸, Philip Yung Chi-kwong, 2024)

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A man struggles with conflicted emotions after learning that his teenage son has killed his mother and sister in a bloody attack in Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s empathic character drama, Papa (爸爸). As much as he’s responsible for the deaths of those dearest to him, Ming (Dylan So) is still Nin’s (Sean Lau Ching-wan) son and he has a real desire to love and care for him while at the same time wondering why and continuing to blame himself as if this tragedy were really provoked by his failures as a father. 

Weaving back and forth through the last 30 years, Yung meditates on a theme of loss while linking Nin’s life with key moments in history. In 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China and also the beginning of the Asian financial crisis, Nin buys a newfangled digital camera hoping to record the birth of his daughter, Grace. Nin isn’t convinced by this technological advance and wonders if it will just lead to people wasting their time taking endless photos now they don’t have to worry about running out of film, but it’s also the means by which he is eventually able to preserve his family by making use of the temporary pause provided by its timer function so that they can all occupy the same space for a moment but also for eternity.

Otherwise, he worries that the family’s business concerns put too much strain on their relationships. He and his wife Yin (Jo Koo Cho-lam) worked opposing shifts at a 24hr eatery meaning they rarely got to spend time together and the children grew up with each of their parents never fully there. Though Nin had wanted to stop opening overnight so they could have a more conventional family life, Yin, from Guangdong on the Mainland, was against it and wanted to keep going until the children were a bit older. There’s an implication that this 24hr culture is also something of an older Hong Kong that’s gradually being erased in the post-Handover society and that Nin and his family are living in an age of decline.

Though Ming won’t give a reason for what he did, in his court testimony he claims to have heard voices telling him that there were too many people and it was making everyone angry so he needed to kill a few and bring the population down. Nin again blames himself, reflecting that the family live in a typically cramped flat where the children have to share a room and everyone is piled on top of each other even if he and his wife are rarely there at the same time. In flashbacks to happier times when Ming was small, there’s a suggestion that Ming resented his sister and that he always had to share not only his possessions, his mother suggesting that they buy a smaller bike for his birthday so Grace can use it too, but his parents’ attention. In a particularly cruel moment, Ming tells Grace that none of her favourite characters from Doraemon are actually “real” but merely imaginary friends Nobita made up in his head because he is autistic. 

But along with his aloofness, poor social skills and lack of empathy, Nin remembers Ming caring for the stray kitten Grace adopted but then grew tired of though he had not originally been in favour of taking it in. He seems to have been living with undiagnosed schizophrenia, something else Nin blames himself for wondering if there was something he could have done. “If I’d been there it wouldn’t have happened,” he tells the press in the incident’s aftermath, but even if he was ill it’s hard to believe the little boy he taught to ride a bike and took on trips to the beach could have done something so violent and hateful and then show such little remorse. Even so, he’s still his son and the only thing he can still rescue from the wreckage of his life while meditating on all he’s lost. As such, it’s another recent film from Hong Kong about how to live on in a ruined world. Yung’s camera has an elegiac quality aided by a retro synth score and the neon lighting of an older Hong Kong drenched in melancholy, but also weary resignation and a determination to keep going if only in memory of a long absent past that were it not for a photograph “to prove that we were here” would go unremembered.  

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo, 2025)

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The Detective Chinatown team head back to turn of the contrary San Francisco in the latest instalment of the mega hit franchise, Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Tángtàn 1900). Like many recent mainstream films, its main thrust is that Chinese citizens are only really safe in China, but also implies that diaspora communities exist outside the majority population and therefore can only rely on each other. Nevertheless, there’s something quite uncanny in the film’s ironic prescience as racist politicians wax on about how here rules are made by the people rather than an emperor and plaster “make America strong again” banners on their buses. 

The crime here though is the murder of a young white woman, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), the daughter of Senator Grant (John Cusack) who is attempting to push the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act through government and destroy all the Chinatowns in the United States. An older Native American man was also found dead alongside her. Some have attributed the crime to Jack the Ripper as Alice was mutilated before she died and some of her organs were taken. The son of local gangster Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Zhenbang (Zhang Xincheng), is quickly arrested for the crime while his father hires Qin Fu (Liu Hairan) to exonerate him believing Qin Fu to be Sherlock Holmes. 

What Qin Fu, an expert in Chinese medicine recently working as an interpreter for the famous consulting detective, finds himself mixed up in is also a slow moving revolution as it turns out Zhenbang is involved with the plot to overthrow the Qing dynasty (which would finally fall in 1912). As the film opens, corrupt courtiers to sell off large golden Buddha statues to American “allies” who are later seen saying that they plan to fleece China and then renege on their promises to protect it. Meanwhile, the Dowager Empress has sent emissaries to San Francisco to take out the revolutionaries in hiding there including Sun Yat-sen.

Of course, in this case, the Qing are the bad guys that were eventually overthrown by brave Communist revolutionaries that paved the way for China of today which is alluded to in the closing scenes when Zhenbang’s exiled friend Shiliang (Bai Ke) says that China will one day become the most powerful country in the world implying that no-one will look down on the Chinese people again. But on the other hand, they are still all Chinese and so the emissary tells Qin Fu to “Save China” as he lays dying having met his own end shortly after hearing that the British have invaded Peking signalling the death blow for the Qing dynasty. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of irony in the fact that the secondary antagonist is an Irish gang who have signs reading “no dogs, no Chinese,” mimicking those they themselves famously face. The Irish gang is in league with Grant and content to do his dirty work, while Bai is supported by another prominent man who speaks Mandarin and pretends to be a friend to the Chinese but in reality is against the Exclusion Act on the grounds he wants to go on being able to exploit cheap Chinese labour. In this iteration, Ah Gui (Wang Baoqiang) is “Ghost,” a man whose parents were killed building the American railroad and was subsequently taken in and raised by a Native American community. In Bai’s final confrontation with the authorities, he takes them to task for their hypocrisy reminding them how important the Chinese have been in building the society in which they alone are privileged while “equality” does not appear to extend to them.

Through reinforcing these messages of prejudice and exploitation, the film once again encourages Chinese people living abroad to return home. Though set in 1900, the scenes of protest can’t help but echo those we’ve seen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic when racist hatred towards Asian communities has become much more open and pronounced. Qin Fu and Ghost do at least succeed in solving the mystery through scientific principles while ironically assisted by an earnest American policeman who says he thinks it’s important to uphold the law even as we can see the head of the golden Buddha sitting behind the victorious politician’s banquet table and realise that in reality taking out Grant has made little difference for the Exclusion Act will still be renewed (it was repealed only in 1943). They may have saved Chinatown, but Bai must sacrifice his American wealth and return to China much the way he left it having reflected on his life in light of the revolutionary course charted by his more earnest son. As Ghost and Qin Fu remark, if things were better there no one would want to come here though they themselves apparently elect to stay, solving more crimes and making sure that their descendants know they were here and where they were from.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

All Shall Be Well (從今以後, Ray Yeung, 2024)

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There’s nothing that breaks a family apart as quickly as an inheritance. As a cynical lawyer points out, even mothers and sons fall out when it comes to money, so there’s nothing like it to to focus minds with an us and them mentality to clearly define who is and isn’t included under the umbrella of family. But why is it that meaningless pieces of paper hold so much sway over us when we ought to by be governed by the emotional truths that until a moment earlier ruled our lives?

Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) had been fond of saying “because we’re family.” She never doubted her place in that of her partner who all appear, at least outwardly, to love her and accept her relationship with Pat in the way they’d accept any other marriage. But when Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) suddenly passes away in her sleep after one last family celebration the situation changes. Well-meaning family members step in to help with the work that must be done when someone dies, but perhaps unwittingly begin to take over slowly erasing Angie from their lives as not really one of them after all.

Her problems are two-fold. The biggest being that Pat never got round to making a will, nor did she think to put Angie on the deeds to the apartment they shared together or leave her financially provided for seeing as she’d managed all the money they’d made when they owned a factory and ran it together. The secondary problem is that Hong Kong does not recognise same sex marriage and so their relationship was not legally recognised. Had Angie been legally married to Pat, she should have inherited everything anyway because she was her spouse even without a will but with things the way they are she’s at the mercy of Pat’s brother Shing (Tai Bo). She never thought this would be a problem, because they’re family, but slowly realises that perhaps they don’t actually see her that way and with Pat gone no longer feel the need to include her.

Her sister-in-law Mei (Hui So Ying) insists on using a feng shui expert to plan the funeral who quickly puts the kibosh on Angie’s desire to have Pat buried at sea as she’d requested. Leaving aside the possibility that the feng shui master is conning them and receiving financial incentives from the people who run the columbarium, the family quickly begin to ignore Angie’s concerns swayed by the claims that interring her ashes will be more beneficial for her descendants which are Mei and Shing’s children seeing as Angie and Pat had none of their own.

A little disappointed in her kids, Mei at one point insensitively remarks that Angie is lucky not to have any though we’re also told that she almost gave in to parental pressure to marry a man in order to become a mother. Daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) makes lowkey racist remarks about her Indian neighbours as a way of expressing her frustration with her moribund marriage and unsatisfying living arrangements, while son Vincent (Leung Chung Hang) struggled to find employment and now works as an Uber driver thanks to the gift of a car from Angie and Pat which allows him to earn a living. He’s originally upset with his family’s suggestion of kicking Angie out of the apartment, but is also in a difficult position himself when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and they can’t find anywhere habitable to live on the kind of salary an Uber driver can earn. Though in her 60s, Mei is still doing a physically strenuous job as a hotel maid while Shing has taken a position he finds degrading as a nightwatchman at a carpark following the closure of his restaurant some years previously. 

The implication is these socio-economic pressures encourage them the abandon their responsibility to Angie as the beloved aunt they’ve known all their lives. But then there’s also the mild homophobia that rears its head, introducing Angie as Pat’s “best friend” and not allowing her to stand in the front with family at Pat’s funeral as if their relationship wasn’t really real because they were both women. Of course they may have behaved the same way had Pat been a man, squeezing Angie out because she had no legal claim as a common-law spouse, but it certainly seems to make it easier for them to abandon her and take everything she worked so hard to build with Pat as if they were really entitled to it. Shing justifies himself that he has to look after “his” family, which doesn’t include Angie, while cruelly implying that it’s what Pat would have wanted. 

In the end, Angie is left with no other option than to sue for her “rightful” share as a ”dependent” in an effort to force the family to recognise the legitimacy of her relationship with Pat. Thankfully she has another family in her community, though her own still living parents only partially accepted her relationship with Pat again referring to her as a “best friend” and making cracks about how she never married. But her family was Pat, and Pat is gone. Yeung paints a touching picture of grief as Angie reacts all the things she did with Pat but now alone, accompanied only by a sense of absence and comforted by her memories while otherwise exiled from a world that had seemed until then filled with familial love.

All Shall Be Well screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

For Alice (給愛麗絲, Chow Kam Wing, 2024)

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“I don’t know if I’m really lucky or really unlucky,” a young woman wonders after a series of narrow escapes amid the otherwise dismal circumstances of her life in Chow Kam Wing’s debut feature, For Alice (給愛麗絲). A lament for failed fatherhood, Chow plays with noir tropes and the legacy of classic Hong Kong cinema in his neon vistas of despair but eventually discovers a kind of catharsis even as the absent patriarch can redeem himself only in his absence.

Shuang has spent his life in and out of prison and evidently chose to not to maintain contact with his wife and daughter during his latest stretch. The titular Alice is like her namesake lost in the wonderland of contemporary Hong Kong though she named herself for the song and is doing her best to overcome the many problems in her life many of which stem from her relationship with her often absent mother and her string of problematic boyfriends including the latest one, a tailor, who is sexually abusing her. When her mother disappears yet again on a gambling trip to Macau she decides to run away, intending to stay with a friend and sleeping rough when it doesn’t pan out. She meets Shuang, she thinks, by chance sensibly wary but also grateful for the kindness of a stranger. 

As it turns out, her mother may have had a reason for all those gambling trips and it isn’t all that different from Shuang’s for his life of crime in that they are both doing it for Alice while constantly frustrated by the socio-economic realities of contemporary Hong Kong. Now in his 60s, Shuang wants to make amends and live a more law-abiding kind of life while redeeming himself as a father but struggles to find a foothold while slowly but anonymously building a paternal relationship with Alice who is facing similar problems to those he faced as a young man. Longing to escape her circumstances she sets her sights on independence and is tempted by criminality, ironically suggesting she will become a smuggler or deal drugs to support herself even as Shuang counsels her against it, encouraging her to pursue her education so she doesn’t end up like him. He didn’t have a choice, he explains, but she does and could make a better life for herself. 

But she’s still constrained by an overly patriarchal social system as she finds herself scrambling when her teacher wants to talk to her parents to discuss her smoking on school premises. Who could she possibly ask with her mother absent and the man in the position of a step-father actively harmful and in no position to help? Unbeknownst to her, Shuang accepts his paternal role and offers a genuine apology for his failed fatherhood, his irresponsible absence and its effects on the life of his daughter who was then left unprotected, vulnerable to life’s vagaries and the impossibilities of a stratified society. Yet in the end the only way he can help her is to damn himself, accept his choices and his absence and do what he can for Alice from afar. 

Chow’s Hong Kong is place of constant danger and ever present futility filled with dank corridors, rundown buildings, and neon-lit streets. Yet there is something resonant about Alice’s resilience and desire for freedom while accepting the friendship, help and support of a friendly neighbour adopting a less oppressive paternal role that aims, like the bird in bottle, to set his daughter free both of his own destructive legacy and the constraints of the situation she finds herself in. A parallel is seen in the life of Shuang’s friend, Jiu, again fixing his sights on one last job to provide a better future for his family but at the same time risking it knowing that it may mean forfeiting it entirely. Nevertheless, Shuang redeems his paternity in its denial, an act both of self-sacrifice and revelation in which he restores to Alice a more positive paternal legacy along with a sense of love and support otherwise absent from her life as a young woman largely alone in an often hostile environment.

For Alice screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

The Goldfinger (金手指, Felix Chong Man-keung, 2023)

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Following Wong Jing’s Chasing the Dragon and Philip Yung’s Where the Wind Blows, Felix Chong’s financial thriller The Goldfinger (金手指) is the latest in a series of Hong Kong films revolving around colonial-era corruption in which the apparent lawlessness of the pre-Handover society allowed crime to flourish along with a nascent greed nurtured by the island’s rising prosperity as an increasingly important financial centre. In an ironic touch, the film even opens with mass protests against the introduction of ICAC with protestors calling for more respect for law enforcement officers while implying some dark authoritarian force is in play even as angry policemen demand the right to immunity from their own misconduct.

In any case, what arises is a cat and mouse game between wily conman/entrepreneur Henry Ching (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and ICAC investigator Lau (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) who chases him for 15 years trying to expose his web of financial fraud. A failed businessman on the run from debt having supposedly abandoned an idealistic desire to build homes for people, Ching arrives in Hong Kong seeking a land of opportunity and largely finds it though through dubious means. Teaming up with similarly embittered businessman KK (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), who is resentful towards his family who treat him with disdain for being a mistress’ son and force him to do their dirty work, to build a giant real-estate based empire that is in reality rooted in complex financial fraud.

Working on the rationale that stocks can be spent like money, Ching makes contacts and manipulates markets which is all very well as long as no one asks for the cash because it doesn’t exist. Chong hints at the realities of the housing market in Hong Kong today in which land is at a premium and apartments largely unattainable as Ching alternately allies with and subverts British rule to build a property empire, setting his sights on acquiring prestigious Golden Hill building as symbol of a new Hong Kong and his own hubristic desire for personal success. With shades of Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Beauty, Ching attends soirees organised by the British and puts on a show for his targets. In his attempts to woo a British bank, his office is suddenly invaded by salsa dancers and gold glitter falls from the ceiling much to the chagrin of a bemused and increasingly mistrustful KK.

Even so the title of the film is echoed in a comment Ching makes to Lau that though he may thinks he’s some genius with the Midas touch he’s really just a patsy, pushing him to investigate possible international conspiracy that is bigger than either of them. Ching has already become a legend with a series of stories about how he made his stake money which range from running into Imelda Marcos in a shoe shop and getting backing from the oppressive regime in the Philippines, to narrowly escaping a war zone and catching a CIA spy in Moscow. He even has the hutzpah to attempt to bribe Lau by offering him a vast fortune and a scholarship for his daughter to study abroad if only he’d find a way to nix the case.

The corruption is indeed embedded, as is obvious when a judge with a posh British accent actively welcomes Ching to the court in a friendly manner and suggests they conduct their business swiftly to avoid any unnecessary turmoil to the Hong Kong economy. Friends in high places largely assist him, whether through personal greed or blackmail though as another of his associates admits, in the end there is no real loyalty among thieves only increasing fear and desperation along with resentment that Ching seems to be taking more than his fair share of the loot. Loosely based on the Carrian Group scandal, the film never loses sight of the damage one man’s greed and duplicity can do as millions of Hong Kong citizens find themselves out of pocket and uncompensated when the shares they bought become worthless, but equally suggests that in the end justice will always be denied to ordinary people while men like Ching will never fully pay for their crimes. With gorgeous production design, Chong beautifully the woozy world of Hong Kong in the ’70s and ’80s amid an intense cat and mouse game of financial fraudsters and a compromised authority.

The Goldfinger previews from 30th December ahead of opening in UK cinemas 5th January courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Back Home (七月返歸, Nate Tse Ka-ki, 2023)

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“This place is cursed” according to an exasperated policeman dealing with yet another suicide at a rundown public housing estate in Hong Kong in Nate Tse Ka-Ki’s gripping supernatural thriller, Back Home (七月返歸). It’s true enough that this seems to be a fairly haunted land in which it has become quite difficult to tell the living from the dead, “they seem so real, I can’t tell the difference” a little boy admits while unfairly burdened by the ability to see things that others don’t or at least have become adept in not seeing. 

Wing (Anson Kong Ip-sang) too once had the ability to see ghosts, but apparently grew out of it after moving to Canada to live with his uncle a decade previously. All this place holds for him now is horror, he admits on being called home following his estranged mother’s attempt to take her own life. Now stable but in a coma, a doctor suggests it’s like her soul has gone wandering and they’ll have to wait to see if it ever comes back. Staying in his childhood home, Wing finds himself assaulted by painful memories of the past along with more literal ghosts he can’t really be sure aren’t manifestations of his trauma or symptoms of a fracturing mind. 

Then again, there is something very weird about this particular block. The people who remember Wing remember him as “spooky”, a boy who was rejected by the community around him after claiming to see ghosts. His embarrassed mother regularly railed at him, accusing him of lying and blaming him for his father leaving the family while seemingly suffering from mental health issues that have also seen her reduced to a figure of fun by the local kids. She tries all sorts of Taoist rituals including having him beaten with a burning stick to close his third eye all which understandably results in Wing deciding to remain silent and speak no more of ghosts while otherwise unseeing them in effort that must place extreme strain his own mental health. His plight is essentially one of repression in which he is haunted in more ways than one while forced to deny his authentic self because of a social taboo.

Even so, it’s a taboo others would quite like to break. In some ways we can’t quite tell if it isn’t Wing who’s dead and haunting his childhood home or if everyone else is actually a ghost. The ominous Uncle Chung who sells paper sacrifices hints as much when he unironically offers to make some for Wing while his overly cheerful wife’s constant offers of her special soup seem as if they may have some kind of ulterior motive. Complaining that there’s definitely something rotten in this apartment block, Wing discovers that there have been other victims besides his mother and hears from a little boy, Yu, that anyone who visits the forbidden seventh floor meets a sticky end. What’s waiting for Wing up there is a Lynchian world of repressed memory eager to confront him with his traumatic past and either set him free or trap him there forever. 

Bonding with Yu who is after all much like himself, a lonely little boy rejected by his peers while constantly “bothered” by wandering spirits, Wing starts to suspect there’s something more sinister going on. Director Nate Tse Ka-ki drops in repeated visual clues such as the distinctive pairs of scissors that seem to turn up in odd places while otherwise blurring the lines between the world of the living and the dead and alluding to other kinds of exile such as Wing’s life in Canada and estrangement from his family. On his return “back home”, he feels conflicted and resentful almost as if his mother had called him back and was refusing to let him go while grandma Chung ominously offers to look after Wing’s offspring when he eventually has one now that he’s where he’s supposed to be she assumes for good. It’s difficult not to read something sinister in her speeches about engineering a better future to “bring peace to this place” even before it becomes clear that it isn’t so much the lifting of a curse she’s interested in as its fulfilment. Some viewers may also detect something familiar in her delivery. In any case, in embracing a younger version of himself Wing may finally be able to escape his haunting even if it leaves him with a difficult choice between comforting fantasy and an objectively horrific “reality”.

Back Home screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: ©️mm2 Studios Hong Kong

The Cabbie (運転手之戀, Chen Yi-wen & Chang Hwa-kun, 2000)

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The crazy freewheeling life of a lovestruck taxi driver eventually takes a turn for the contemplative in Chen Yi-wen & Chang Hwa-kun’s infinitely charming comedy, The Cabbie (運転手之戀, yùn zhuǎn shǒu zhī liàn). Despite the film’s sunny atmosphere, darkness does indeed hang around the edges in the frequent references to car accidents and dismemberment yet it seems to be something that the affable hero can live with as he narrates a series of strange incidents from his ordinary life while meditating on his zany family when faced with mortal anxiety. 

As taxi driver Quan (Chu Chung-heng) points out, life can be pretty strange. His taxi can sometimes act as an unofficial confessional as his fares take the opportunity to unburden themselves to a complete stranger in a confined space, confessing the embarrassing details of their lives and even at one point seemingly confessing to a murder. Quan takes it in his stride, feeling as if he is one with his cab, Ah Di, and duty-bound to deliver his charges to their rightful destinations physical and emotional. Yet in an odd way it’s almost as if we’ve become the driver in this story and Quan is our fare, breaking the the fourth wall to speak to us directly of his strange life and the circumstances which led to this present turn of events. 

Quan is however unusual in that he tells his mother and father quite directly that he has no intention of marrying, giving a fairly logical reasoning based on the fact he believes women do not like him and he is not apparently much interested in them. This is of course a source of anxiety for his parents, his taxi driver father also turning fare in ranting at an old lady at the convenience store about his wayward son before trying to awaken something within him by gifting him porn. His mother meanwhile, the local coroner, decides to give up on him while ordering Quan to freeze his sperm so she can have a grandchild with or without his direct involvement at some point down the line. 

In any case, Quan changes his mind on falling in love at first sight with grumpy policewoman Jingwen (Japanese actress Rie Miyazawa, dubbed into Mandarin). Taking his mother’s advice about making an impression (not necessarily a good one) to heart, Quan decides the best way to woo his crush is to get fined by her as many times as possible. Even so there’s an undeniable Romeo and Juliet vibe to their relationship given the natural animosity between taxi drivers and traffic cops, along with a sense of cosmic irony that feeds directly back into the film’s darker themes. So much of life for Quan is coincidence, an act of cosmic collision not unlike the car crashes that occur so frequently outside the taxi depot. Quan encounters Jingwen by chance and then continues to push his luck by meeting her again in similar circumstances until she gives in to his unusual ardour. Yet not all of these accidents end well. One of Quan’s neighbours earns extra cash turning up at crash sites and making sure that the family gets all of the deceased’s body parts, reaching under twisted metal to retrieve pieces of severed flesh while his mother is indeed a coroner with a severed head in a jar sitting proudly in her office. 

In the end it might be that Quan is a mere passenger of fate, relating his life to us as it flashes before his eyes while threatened by a weird fare. What begins as absurd nonsense comedy as Quan tells us about his crazy family and the strangers who climb into his cab eventually takes an unexpected, poignant turn for the existential even as Quan continues to closely identify himself with Ah Di which might beg the question of who is driving who. Madcap and anarchic, there is something genuinely cheerful in Quan’s often simple existence governed both by chance and the rules of the road lending a fatalistic pall to all of his otherwise freewheeling adventures. Things don’t always always go right for him, but even when they go wrong it’s generally in the right way. Fast-forwarding though the “boring bits”, Quan races us through his life in the cab before taking us where we need to go keeping it cheerful while preparing for the inevitable collision with cosmic irony. 

The Cabbie screens 20th October as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙, Chan Kin-long, 2020)

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A former serviceman turned triad middleman bonds with a similarly oppressed South Asian petty criminal in Chan Kin-long’s noirish crime drama Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙). An unexpected awards contender, the first directorial effort from actor Chan aligns its disparate heroes as two men in a sense betrayed by the world in which they live, one longing for a way out and the other too convinced he no longer deserves one to continue looking. 

“Let’s start over” Chiu (Gordon Lam Ka-tung) philosophically muses over a cigarette contemplating the coming handover. As a brief title card explains, when the British Army pulled out of Hong Kong, it hung its local recruits out to dry, disbanding their units and leaving them entirely without support. 25 years later, Chiu has become a dejected triad middleman, as we first meet him setting up a dubious deal for smuggled turtles between Taiwanese mobster Pickle (To Yin-gor) and local top dog Boss Tai (Ben Yuen). On his way back to his flat in Chungking Mansions, Chiu literally runs into a South Asian man apparently in the middle of a drug deal. Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan) dreams of bigger prizes, listening to the stock market report on the morning news and musing about robbing a bank. His cousin Mani (Bipin Karma), more conflicted in their criminal activities, cautions him against it reminding him that they already face discrimination and don’t need to add to their precarious position by giving their ethnicity a bad name. “If we have money people can’t look down on us” Kapil counters, seemingly desperate to escape his difficult circumstances by any means possible which eventually leads him to make the incredibly bad decision to cheat local triads out of their drug supply. Leaving Mani and his schoolboy brother Mansu (Anees) alone to carry the can (literally), Kapil takes off while Mani finds himself crawling into Chiu’s flat for refuge when chased by Boss Tai’s chief goon Chook (Michael Ning). Unwilling at first, Chiu agrees to let Mani stay, for a price, only to find himself falling ever deeper into a grim nexus of underworld drama. 

Chiu’s plight as a former British serviceman makes him in a sense an exile in his own land, a displaced soul free floating without clear direction unable to move on from the colonial past. We later learn that he is in a sense attempting to atone for a karmic debt relating to the death of a friend during the Asian financial crisis, also beginning in 1997, of which he was a double victim. Most of his old army buddies have moved on and found new ways of living, some of them rejecting him for his role in their friend’s death and tendency to get himself into trouble while Chiu can only descend further into nihilistic self-loathing in his self-destructive triad-adjacent lifestyle. 

Mani, by contrast, did not approve of his cousin’s criminality, particularly resenting him for using Mansu’s schoolbag as a means of shifting drugs. He dreams of a better life but sees few other options for himself, hoping at least to send Mansu to university and ensure he doesn’t share the same fate. Chiu continues to refer to him solely by a racial slur, but simultaneously intervenes in the marketplace when Chook and his guys hassle another South Asian guy insisting that they’re all locals and therefore all his “homies”, despite himself warming to the young man and even going so far as to sort out child care for Mansu otherwise left on his own. “Harmony brings wealth” Boss Tai ironically exclaims, but harmony is it seems hard to come by, Chiu’s sometime Mainland girlfriend expressing a desire to return because the city is not as she assumed it would be while little Mansu is constantly getting in fights because the other kids won’t play with him. 

“There’s always a way out. I’ll start over” Chiu again tells Mani, though he seems unconvinced. Clearing his debts karmic and otherwise, Chiu discovers only more emptiness and futility while perhaps redeeming himself in rebelling against the world of infinite corruption that proved so difficult to escape. A moody social drama with noir flourishes, Chan’s fatalistic crime story is one of national betrayals culminating in a highly stylised, unusually brutal action finale partially set in the green-tinted hellscape of a gangster’s illegal operating theatre. Men like Chiu, it seems, may not be able to survive in the new Hong Kong but then perhaps few can. 

Hand Rolled Cigarette streams in Europe until 2nd July as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)