Tag: Tony Yang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Teresa Teng’s Tsugunai

Momoe Yamaguchi – 曼珠沙華 (Manjushaka)

Anita Mui – 曼珠沙華

A Leg (腿, Chang Yao-sheng, 2020)

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“Life is long. We all have some regrets.” a grieving widow is told by a disingenuous doctor in full damage limitation mode. He’s not necessarily wrong, nor is his advice that the widow’s pointless quest to retrieve her late husband’s amputated limb has little practical value though of course it means something to her and as he’d pointed out seconds earlier a physician’s duty is to alleviate suffering of all kinds. Apparently inspired by the true story of director Chang Yao-sheng’s mother, A Leg (腿, Tuǐ) is in many ways a story of letting go as the deceased man himself makes a presumably unheard ghostly confession while his wife attempts to do the only thing she can in order to lay him to rest. 

Husband Zi-han (Tony Yang) is in hospital to deal with a painful, seemingly necrotic foot which eventually has to be amputated in a last ditch attempt to cure his septicaemia. “Keep the leg and lose your life, or keep your life and lose the leg” the otherwise unsympathetic doctor advices wife Yu-ying (Gwei Lun-mei) in a remark which will come to seem ironic as, unfortunately, Zi-han’s case turns out to be more serious than first thought and he doesn’t make it through the night. Grief-stricken, Yu-ying leaves in an ambulance with the body but later turns back, determined to retrieve the amputated foot in order that her husband be buried “complete” only it turns out that it’s not as simple as she assumed it would be. 

The loss of Zi-han’s foot is all the more ironic as the couple had been a pair of ballroom dancers. As Yu-ying makes a nuisance of herself at the hospital, Zi-han begins to narrate the story of their romance which began when he fell in love with a photo of her dancing in the window of his friend’s photography studio. Explaining that, having died, he’s reached the realisation that everything beautiful is in the past only he was too foolish to appreciate it, Zi-han looks back over his tragic love story acknowledging that he was at best an imperfect husband who caused his wife nothing but pain and disappointment until the marriage finally broke down. He offers no real explanation for his self-destructive behaviour save the unrealistic justification that he only wanted Yu-ying to live comfortably and perhaps implies that his death is partly a means of freeing her from the series of catastrophes he brought into her life. 

Given Zi-han’s beyond the grave testimony, the accusation levelled at Yu-ying by his doctor that the couple could not have been on good terms because Zi-han must have been ill for a long time with no one to look after him seems unfair though perhaps hints at the guilt Yu-ying feels in not having been there for her husband when he needed her. As we later discover, however, this is also partly Zi-han’s fault in that he over invested in a single piece of medical advice and resisted getting checked out by a hospital until he managed to sort out an insurance scam using his photographer friend, wrongly as it turned out believing he had a few months slack before the situation became critical and paying a high price for his tendency to do everything on the cheap. Nevertheless, Yu-ying’s quest to reattach his leg is her way of making amends, doing this one last thing for the husband whom she loved deeply even though he appears to have caused her nothing but misery since the day they met. 

In order to placate her, the slimy hospital chief offers to have a buddhist sculptor carve a wooden replica of Zi-han’s leg made from wood destined for a statue of Guan-yin goddess of mercy but Yu-ying eventually turns it down, struck by the beauty of the object but convinced that turning it to ash along with her husband’s body would be wrong while believing that wood ash and bone ash are fundamentally different. She regrets having ticked the box on the consent form stating she didn’t want to keep the “specimen”, never for one moment assuming that her husband would not recover. Despite their dancing dreams, she thought the leg was worth sacrificing against the long years they would have spent together after, though this too seems a little unlikely considering the state of their relationship prior to her discovery of Zi-han’s precarious health. Zi-han meanwhile is filled with regret for his continually awful behaviour and the obvious pain he caused his wife. Getting his leg back allows him to begin “moving on” while doing something much the same for Yu-ying though his afterlife pledge about the endurance of love seems a little trite given how he behaved while alive. A little more maudlin than your average quirky rom-com, A Leg nevertheless takes a few potshots at a sometimes cold, cynical, and inefficient medical system, inserting a plea for a little more empathy from a pair of unexpectedly sympathetic police officers, while insisting that it’s important to dance through life with feeling for as long as you’re allowed. 

A Leg screens Aug. 14  & streams in the US Aug. 15 – 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Zone Pro Site: The Moveable Feast (總舖師, Chen Yu-hsun, 2013)

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In these high speed days, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that “cooking means something” or at least it should do according to “Doctor Gourmet” Hai (Tony Yang). A warm tribute to the Taiwanese tradition of bandoh outdoor banquets, Zone Pro Site: The Moveable Feast (總舖師, Zǒng Pù Shī) positions the figure of the chef as a kind of conduit bridging the gap between people through the art of well cooked food. Heroine Wan (Kimi Hsia Yu-chiao), however, thoroughly rejected the ambitions of her top chef father and determined on a life in the city with her heart set on becoming a famous model, actress, and celebrity. 

Life in Taipei is however hard. Career success is hard to come by and duplicity lurks round every corner. Wan learns this to her cost when two shady guys turn up on the pretext of delivering a birthday cake only to explain to her that her boyfriend, whose loans she’s unwisely co-signed, has skipped town and left her with the bill. Confused and afraid, Wan decides to skip town herself, planning to head back to her hometown and ask her mother for help. What she discovers however is that her mother is on the run too after losing the family restaurant partly through her subpar cooking skills which could never match those of her late husband, and partly through the betrayal of his apprentice who poached all their best customers and set up on his own. Despite being “in hiding”, the only way Puffy (Lin Mei-hsiu) has been able to make ends meet is by putting on an impromptu dance show in the central square to promote her small noodle stall. Luckily for them both, Wan makes a chance encounter on the train with a nice young man, Hai, who turns out to be a “Doctor Gourmet” specialising in “fixing” failing restaurants.

His arrival comes at just the right moment as Wan and her mother get a visit from potential clients – a sweet older couple who first met 50 years previously at a wedding catered not by Wan’s father Master Fly Spirit, but by his now departed mentor. Wan’s mother was going to turn the request down because neither she nor Wan know how to make the traditional dishes the couple are looking for, but Wan makes an impromptu decision to try and make their wedding dreams come true, warning them that it might take a little extra time and not quite match up to their romantic expectations. 

Wan’s problem is that she always hated her family’s restaurant. She resented the heat and the smell and the grease, often placing an empty box over her head and retreating into a fantasy world to escape the chaos. Her father wanted her to take over, leaving her a notebook filled with his recipes which was unfortunately stolen by a homeless man who mugged her at the station, but she was dead set on escape and becoming a “someone” in the city. Unlike her mother, however, she has real talent for cooking and is equally skilled at using her good looks and sweet nature to get things done. Soon after her arrival at the noodle stand, she’s already got herself a gang of geeky groupies calling themselves “Animals on Call” who are ready to do pretty much anything she asks of them. 

That comes in handy when Puffy persuades her to enter a national cooking competition where her rival is none other than Tsai, the apprentice who betrayed them, backed up another famous ex-chef Master Ghost Head (Hsi Hsiang) who has a fiery temper and spent some time in prison which might be why he still dresses like an ultra cool motorcycle guy from the ‘70s. There were apparently three great masters, the other being the eccentric  Master Silly Mortal (Wu Nien-jen) who is later discovered living in a subway tunnel where he keeps the art of bandoh alive through a literal underground restaurant where his regulars bring him a selection of ingredients before sitting down to enjoy a communal meal. It’s Silly Mortal whose food is said to evoke human feelings who guides Wan towards a series of epiphanies about the nature of “traditional” food. According to him, there are no rules about what goes together, and having a “traditional” heart is really about embracing the true nature of bandoh. Only by having a heart full of joy can you make good food. 

Equally eccentric in some respects, Hai takes a back seat after reminding Wan that cooking is really a way of sending a coded message to its intended target. The two goons eventually join the team, working together earnestly to prepare for the biggest banquet of all which is both the old couple’s wedding celebration and the competition’s finale. Master Ghost Spirit talks about taking the “grief” out of meat through fine cutting, while Master Silly Mortal is all about putting positive emotions in, but the missing piece of the puzzle is Master Fly Spirit who sends his final message to Wan only after death as she rediscovers him through his recipes. Not quite giving up on her celebrity career, Wan embraces her inner chef, happy with the idea of making lunchboxes to sell at the station with her new friends and family rather than chasing money through oddly nihilistic cuisine as Tsai had done. In the end, it’s all about joy and togetherness, sharing tasty food in the open air where anyone and everyone is welcome to bring whatever they have to the table.

Zone Pro Site: The Moveable Feast screens in New York on Feb. 16 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival Winter Showcase.

International trailer (English subtitles)

This Is Not What I Expected (喜欢你, Derek Hui, 2017)

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This is not what i expected poster 1The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, as they say, but the course of true love never did run smooth. The debut directorial feature from editor Derek Hui, This is not What I Expected (喜欢你, Xǐhuan Nǐ) is, to be frank exactly what you’d expect it to be but that only works in its favour. A classic tale of opposites attracting, This is Not What I Expected takes its cues from The Shop Around the Corner only this time it’s not pen pals and music boxes but big business and culinary communication.

Ditzy chef Gu Shengnan (Zhou Dongyu) has been having an affair with her caddish boss whom she decides to teach a lesson by carving a rude message into the bonnet of his car. Only, in a motif which will be repeated, she got the wrong one and has actually left her mark on the car of uptight international hotel magnate Lu Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Jin is after some new hotels to acquire so where should he fetch up at other than the one where Shengnan works? Jin hates pretty much everything about the second rate establishment including the food which is when Shengnan’s sleazy boss asks her to cook up something special to stop Jin from leaving. Cleverly analysing the leftovers from Jin’s rejected meals, she cooks him something to remember and succeeds in capturing his heart. Intrigued, Jin decides to stay on the condition that Shengnan cook all his meals from now on. However, Jin has no idea that Shengnan is the culinary mastermind he can’t stop thinking about and is increasingly irritated by all of their bizarre encounters.

Despite their superficial differences, Shengnan and Jin are perfectly in tune, their culinary messages perfectly understood by each on an elemental level. In real life, however, things are quite different. Jin, a ruthless if eccentric businessman with a mania for precision and a terror of anything remotely out of place, finds Shengan’s happy go lucky, disaster prone existence particularly difficult to understand. Hoping to escape her, he even gives Shengnan an electronic tag that will set off an alarm whenever she’s close by so the pair can avoid each other and the chaos that seems to happen when they meet.

Meanwhile, the conflicts continue to expand in the background. Shengnan doesn’t have much of an issue still being single past the socially acceptable age, but worries that she’s not getting anywhere in her career and will be stuck sous-cheffing forever despite her obvious talents while getting her heart broken by sleazy players like her odious, ambitious boss. Rosebud, the ironically named hotel, is hardly a top tier establishment and probably too much bother for Jin to consider taking on if weren’t for his strange fascination with the cook. His extended stay is beginning to raise eyebrows with his coldhearted father/boss while a mild conflict begins to flicker in his heart when he realises the business plan requires firing the entire kitchen staff and hiring a three star Michelin chef.

Hui does perhaps over egg the pudding in creating a “romantic” rival for Shengnan once she discovers that Jin also employs a (female) “private chef” whose return from vacation might explain why he abruptly stopped dropping by the hotel (and her apartment where he’d virtually moved himself in). The lines between desire and hunger remain increasingly blurred as the two women resentfully vie for the position of tastemaker, tussling over which of them understands Jin better and truly deserves to be the one providing him with sustenance. Yet as the personal chef finally comes to realise (a few steps ahead of Jin), what Jin’s hungry for is no longer just food, what he needs is something more organic than a contractual relationship.

Jin is, in a sense, an embodiment of heartless modern capitalism, raised to be “despised” in order to preserve “solitude” and a “clear mind”. Jin’s austere father is all about order and control, he doesn’t like the emotional because it’s irrational and unpredictable, but the straw that finally breaks Jin’s back is when he tells him that the food at the hotel can’t be “too good” because it would be “distracting” for the clients. For the first time, Jin begins to question his ideology and realises that perhaps it wasn’t so much that he enjoyed eating alone as that he convinced himself he did to avoid thinking about the fact that no one wanted to eat with him. An epiphany born of a strange blow fish fever dream shows him that life in Shengnan’s world, for all of its problematic chaos, could be charming not to say warm even in the rain. It’s not what he expected, but it’s good – like an expertly prepared meal, best to savour it while it lasts.

Original trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Monster Hunt 2 (捉妖記2, Raman Hui, 2018)

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Monster Hunt Poster 2Despite numerous production difficulties, Monster Hunt went on to become a bona fide box office smash and international pop culture phenomenon on its release in 2015. Children and adults alike fell in love with the adorable little radish monster Wuba who, in grand fairytale tradition, is the secret heir to all of Monsterdom and the subject of a prophecy which posits him as the long awaited unifying force set to restore equality between humans and their Monster brethren. By the time this sequel, Monster Hunt 2 (捉妖記2, Zhuō Yāo Jì 2), rolls around, things are looking up for Wuba seeing as no one’s actively trying to eat him, but like so many kids in modern China he misses his human mum and dad who made a difficult decision at the end of the last film that Wuba should live with Monsters in Monsterland because it just wasn’t safe for him in the human realm.

Consequently Wuba has been living happily in the forest where the Monsters have made a little village for themselves. The Monster village is a place of laughter and song where everyone is welcome and they dance cheerfully all night long. That is, until evil monsters turn up looking for Wuba again, destroying the village and leaving him on the run all alone back in the human world. Meanwhile, Tianyin (Jing Boran) and Xiaolan (Bai Baihe) are on a quest to look for Tianyin’s long lost dad – a famous monster hunter who left Tianyin behind as a child to keep him safe, just like Tianyin had to leave Wuba. Nevertheless, though Tianyin and Xiaolan have developed a sparky domesticity, they’re both unwilling to admit how much they miss little Wuba and wish they could go get him back from Monsterland even if they know he’s probably safer hidden away from those who might want to do him harm. While looking for Tianyu and Xiaolan, Wuba gets himself semi-adopted by a very odd couple of chancers in the form of shady gambler Tu (Tony Leung) and his monster partner Ben-Ben.

Once again the theme is family. Monster Hunt spoke, perhaps, to all those separated families in modern China or more particularly to the children in revealing that parents sometimes have to make difficult choices and end up living apart from their kids so that they can give them a better life. Monster Hunt 2 accepts the premise but then provides an emotional correction in making plain the pain Tianyu and Xiaolan feel on being separated (perhaps forever) from Wuba, until they eventually settle on tracking him down and facing whatever dangers come their way together. They come to this realisation after saving a mother and son who’ve been (unfairly) arrested by the Monster Hunt Bureau and witnessing their happiness just in being together despite the sticky situation they may be in.

Meanwhile Wuba, sad and alone, is happy to have found himself a surrogate family in the form of kindly Ben-Ben and the spiky Tu – a virtual mirror of Tianyu and Xiaolan when they first met. As in the first film, Tu originally takes Wuba in because he wants to sell him to Madame Zhu (Li Yuchun) – a woman he has cheated in both love and money, whose patience apparently knows no end. This brief episode of Wuba and his two new uncles is a subversive one in terms of mainstream Chinese cinema, and unlike the early union of Tianyu and Xiaolan there is little comedy in the easy coupledom of Ben-Ben and Tu who become two men raising a child together in relative happiness. This is perhaps the reason for the strange coda in which Tu and Ben-Ben have a brief chat about girls, relegating Tu’s earlier awkward admission of affection one more of brotherhood than love and affirming their total heterosexuality (both the female love interests are also from the same species, just to make things crystal clear).

Yet the message is strong – families want to stay together, parents want to be with their kids and kids want to be with their parents so maybe the world should just let them, even if those families aren’t quite like everyone else’s. With much better production values than the first film and a much more consistent tone, Monster Hunt 2 is a vast improvement on its predecessor though it treads more or less the same ground and is content to meander between several set pieces with more than a few seemingly extraneous sequences of Tu getting up to mischief or Xiaolan using her feminine wiles on a nerdy inventor (though these at least add to the more complex arc of the feminised Tianyu and masculine Xiaolan each moving towards a gender neutral centre). Monster Hunt 2 maybe more of the same and little more than the next instalment in a series, but nevertheless its winning charm and gentle warmth are enough to ensure there will still be devotees of Wuba ready to reserve their seats for the inevitable part three.

Currently on limited release in UK cinemas. Screening locations for the UK, Ireland, US and Canada available via the official website.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Village of No Return (健忘村, Chen Yu-hsun, 2017)

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健忘村_畫報風篇_RED_OK_VWouldn’t it be wonderful to just forget all the terrible/embarrassing things that have ever happened to you and live in a paradise of blissful ignorance? To put it bluntly, this is an experiment with historical precedent and one which has never yet worked out for the best. Absurd Taiwanese comedy Village of No Return (健忘村, Jiànwàng Cūn) is both a raucous life in the village comedy and subtle satire on the roots of tyranny, cults of personality, fake news and the evils of the art of forgetting that ultimately turns into a defence of the benevolent dictator.

Somewhere around 1914, the early years of the Chinese Republic, an ambitious warlord (Eric Tsang) has his sights set on capturing Desire Village which, he has been assured by a fortune teller, contains numerous treasures and will make him a king. Unfortunately, his village mole is the unscrupulous Big Pie (Ban Zan) who treks home with carrier pigeons he’s supposed to send back with the message “wait”, “come”, or “don’t come” only Big Pie can’t read. None of that really matters in the end because Big Pie is shortly to die in mysterious circumstances just as a mysterious monk, Fortune Tien (Wang Qianyuan), rocks up with a strange “Worry Ridder” device he claims can permanently ease anxieties.

The main drama revolves around melancholy village girl, Autumn (Shu Qi), who was married off to the ugly and abusive Big Pie against her will. Still pining for the son of the village leader, Dean (Tony Yang), who went off to become an official but has become displaced during the Revolution, Autumn has spent her life literally shackled to the stove and has begun to dwell on death as an antidote to the hopelessness of realising Dean is probably not coming back. Autumn is, however, the last to hold out against the lure of the Worry Ridder, reluctant to give up the memory of Dean no matter how painful it may continue to be.

Fortune Tien is nothing if not persuasive. Little by little he sells the virtues of his machine and quickly has the villagers eating out of his hand. Before long he’s erased the memories of life before he came and installed himself as village chief, presiding over a collection of beatific zombies content to do the literal spade work while Fortune Tien reigns supreme with an easy answer for everything. The parallels are obvious, even if Tien’s case is more extreme. History is rewritten, anyone who remembers differently has a faulty memory or is, perhaps, mad. Only Tien can be relied upon to arbitrate the truth of his false revolution.

The Worry Ridder itself is a fabulously designed piece of anachronistic technology, displaying memories like silent movies with scratchy sound and operated by a modern user interface complete with kitschy animation. Its evils can only be undone with the long lost “Soul Restorer” and its overuse seems to lead to an advanced senility. Though it does indeed erase memories and offer a kind of drugged up serenity, the machine cannot undo the underlying emotions and so those lingering feelings of love or attraction, misplaced or otherwise, remain even without the reasons for their existence. Love is the force which saves the day as Autumn, temporarily saved from her hellish life as the wife of Big Pie after becoming the “First Flower” of Tien’s dictatorial regime, continues to dream of her former love leading her to question Tien’s all powerful grip on the accepted truth.   

Meanwhile outside the village other threats are looming. Prior to their own revolution, the villagers had been excited to learn of the coming railways, mistakenly believing that randomly building an unconnected station (which is like a farm for trains!) would make them rich. The nefarious gangster quickly gets forgotten but he seems evil enough seeing as he’s flying kites made out the skins of his murder victims, though his biggest allies – the Cloud Clan, are led by a portly postmistress (Lin Mei-hsiu) to whom he presents an “iron horse” (i.e. a bicycle) which proves a surprisingly difficult challenge for her to master. The Cloud Clan’s main weapon is their sweet sound, beatboxing a background melody for the surprisingly beautiful voice of the postmistress often heard just before she whips out her giant machete and dispatches her foes with ruthless efficiency. An absurd satire on the ease with which tyranny makes use of human failings, Village of no Return ultimately wonders if blissful mindlessness is really all that bad if all your needs are met and you can count yourself “safe” and “happy”. A good question at the best of times, but one that seems oddly urgent.

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video in UK & US.

International trailer (Mandarin with English subtitles)

Phantom of the Theatre (魔宫魅影, Raymond Yip Wai-man, 2016)

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phantom-of-the-theatreNo ghosts! That’s one of the big rules when it comes to the Chinese censors, but then these “ghosts” are not quite what they seem and belong to the pre-communist era when the people were far less enlightened than they are now. One of the few directors brave enough to tackle horror in China, Raymond Yip Wai-man goes for the gothic in this Phantom of the Opera inspired tale of love and the supernatural set in bohemian ‘30s Shanghai, Phantom of the Theatre (魔宫魅影, Mó Gōng Mèi Yǐng). As expected, the thrills and chills remain mild as the ghostly threat edges closer to its true role as metaphor in a revenge tale that is in perfect keeping with the melodrama inherent in the genre, but the full force of its tragic inevitability gets lost in the miasma of awkward CGI and theatrical artifice.

Shanghai was a swinging, cosmopolitan town in the 1930s. A multicultural melting pot it was both a business centre and a bohemian paradise in which the Chinese film industry flourished. Aspiring film director Gu Weibang (Tony Yang) has just returned from studying in France and is looking for an actress to star in his first project. Attempting to hand his script to the winner of the local awards ceremony, Weibang’s plan is frustrated by some awkward political shenanigans between an older actress, a younger one, and the patron that’s trying to abandon one woman for the other, but Weibang is soon to have more problems on his plate connected to the series of strange deaths which have begun to occur in the “haunted” theatre in which he wants to shoot his upcoming masterpiece.

The mystery element fades relatively quickly as we’re introduced to the very human villain who does, however, behave in an appropriately phantom fashion as he appears and disappears in various locations around the ruined theatre, making use of secret passages and hidden doorways to put his dastardly plan into action. The main thrust of the narrative is the gothic romance between Weibang and his leading actress Meng Si-fan (Ruby Lin) which is complicated both by his existing girlfriend (the pathologist working on the mysterious theatre deaths) and the spectre of the long buried past. The fire which destroyed the theatre 13 years previously resulting in the deaths of a troupe of acrobats lies at the centre of the mystery but places the two lovers on different sides of an unbridgeable divide as powerless bystanders in the newly post feudal world.

Weibang wants to make films about the things people can’t say – an interesting meta comment given that ghosts are still taboo all these years later, but the irony is that film is a seductive dream, a distraction from the reality, a haunted theatre all of its own. Dreams, reality, and cinema begin to overlap as Weibang finds himself playing the leading man and falling for the leading lady in a tragic supernatural romance whilst his creepy setting continues to give up its own ghosts. In the end the only ghosts Weibang and Si-fan will have to deal with are ones of their own pasts. Faced with a final showdown, long buried truths are finally revealed and choices made but the bittersweet ending leaves us on a positive note as those concerned discover the power of forgiveness – that forgiving others is an act of kindness to oneself and revenge little more than the theft of your own life in pointless pursuit of retribution.

Yip places the emphasis on his visuals with a sumptuous, truly gothic aesthetic filled with faded grandeur, Western architecture, and candle lit rooms perfect for suggestive shadows and ghosts which lurk in mirrors. Though occasionally plagued with poor quality CGI and leaning towards theatrical artificiality in its studio bound look, Phantom of the Theatre does succeed in building a generally creepy atmosphere even if failing to reach the giddy heights of China’s finest take on the material so far – A Song at Midnight. Despite the solid visuals, Phantom of the Theatre never achieves the levels of doomladen fatalism and inexorable malevolence which the genre demands nor does it succeed in making its central romance truly matter lending it a slightly underwhelming quality. Still, the impressive visuals and melancholy tone make for a charmingly old fashioned ghost story in which the haunting is all too real.

Original trailer (Mandarin with English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Cold War 2 (寒戰II, Longman Leung & Sunny Luk, 2016)

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coldwar 2Cold War 2 (寒戰II) arrives a whole four years after the original Cold War rocked Hong Kong with police corruption scandals and fantastically convoluted internal plotting. Heroic policeman Sean Lau (Aaron Kwok) may have won the day, even if he ultimately had to compromise himself to do it, but the police van is still missing and MB Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fei) is still lurking in the background. As is his son, Joe (Eddie Peng) – languishing in prison but apparently still with the resources to cause trouble whilst behind bars.

Joe Lee has Lau’s wife kidnapped, forcing Lau to compromise himself by giving in to his demands all of which culminates in an intense subway set piece in which Lau inadvertently ends up handcuffed to an exploding smoke bomb while Joe Lee escapes. Embarrassing is not the word. Lau now looks bad, and old rivals have their eyes on the police chief’s chair. An enquiry is currently underway into goings on at police HQ lead by top lawyer Oswald Kan (Chow Yun-fat) but his impartiality is severely damaged when one of his own is caught in the crossfire whilst investigating Joe Lee’s nefarious activities.

Like the first film, Cold War 2 is an intense interpersonal thriller though this time the enemies are even closer as the old boys network becomes the means by which commissioners are unseated and installed. Service records are everything – Lau is unpopular with his colleagues because he started out at ICAC and has never served as a rank and file policemen. From one point of view, this makes him an ideal candidate because he has no personal ties to the body of serving officers but his rivals despise him for this very reason. He isn’t one of them, does not have first hand understanding of front line policing, and most importantly is not a part of their interconnected layers of military style brother-in-arms loyalties.

Lau’s predictable miscalculation regarding Joe Lee creates an opportunity to get rid of him and take back the force. “Save the police” is a message which is repeated over and over as the plotters attempt to win others over to their cause, insisting that Lau has lost the media battle for the hearts and minds of a public now trained to be afraid of their police force. Lau is the continuity candidate – mistakes have been made, but his stately manner and apparently steady hands may yet win the day. Those same hands are getting dirtier by the second, but they’ve been brushing the morally grey, not (yet, at least) immersed in the red of innocent blood like those of the corrupt top brass at police HQ.

If the plotting is intricate and filled with double crosses and betrayals, directors Luk and Leung have ensured a steady stream of explosive action sequences to accompany the ongoing cerebral games. Cold War also had its share of action packed spectacular set pieces but Cold War 2 may surpass them with the surprise factor alone including one shocking multi-car pileup inside a tunnel in which cars, buses and bikes go flying before an all out fire fight ensues. Lau’s constant gazing at the “Asia’s Safest City” signs which adorn police headquarters (right next to the metal detectors you need to pass through to get in) has never looked so melancholic and drenched in irony.

It’s a battle for the soul of the police service, but it’s being fought as a dirty war. Lau is the decent and honest man forced to behave in a slightly less honest and decent way, even if for the best of reasons. His rivals are running on pure ambition and pettiness. Despite their claims they do not have the interests of the people of Hong Kong as their foremost concern. The corruption stems far further back than anyone might have previously guessed and is more or less coded into the system. The police van and equipment are still missing and the central plotters are still in place. This is a partial victory at best but then what kind of action fest wouldn’t leave a door open for a sequel. The cold war maybe about to turn hot, but you can rely on the steely eyed Police Commissioner Sean Lau to be there, ready and waiting, when the first shots are fired.

Original trailer (English Subtitles)