Tag: Wong Ting-Him

Elisa’s Day (遺愛, Alan Fung Chi-hang, 2021)

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The legacy of abandonment visits itself on a trio of displaced Hong Kongers in Alan Fung Chi-hang’s melancholy crime drama, Elisa’s Day (遺愛). Set over 20 years from the Handover to the contemporary era, Fung draws inspiration from a real life crime while casting his ambivalent policeman, himself an orphan, as an ironic hero whose single act of compassion ends in a tragedy for which he feels he may not even have the right to atone. 

Fung begins, however, in the present day as Inspector Fai (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) prepares to collect his daughter who is shortly to be released from prison. Flashing back, we’re introduced to Daisy (Carol To Hei-Ling), a pale and distant young woman picked up for suspected drug trafficking while momentarily captivated by a familiar song and carrying a bunch of roses. From there we head further back, all the way to 1996 when 15-year-old Elisa (Hanna Chan Hon-Na) discovers she is pregnant by her bad boy boyfriend Man-Wai (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung). Each abandoned by their parents, the pair decide to run away together and find solace in a family of three, but as expected economic impossibility disrupts their search for happiness. Man-Wai joins the triads and eventually agrees to become a hitman, temporarily separated from Elisa and their daughter while lying low in Thailand. A then Sergeant Fai remains hot on his trail, keeping tabs on Elisa who unwittingly brings her young baby to the cinema where his adoptive mother Auntie Bo (Anna Ng Yuen-Yee) runs the box office, the pair of them becoming surrogate parents to the lonely little girl while Elisa is forced to turn to sex work when Man-Wai’s triad bosses fail to uphold their end of the bargain. 

“Everyone’s gone leaving only me behind” Elisa laments, learning that her estranged mother plans to move to the UK with her second family abandoning her once again in another, more complete sense. Trapped behind in a rundown area of the city, she finds herself caught between conflicting realities. Man-Wai pledges to stay with her forever but is soon gone eventually returning with promises of taking her to Thailand their dream of a better life symbolised by the red roses he brings with him that he claims reminded him of her. Man-Wai meanwhile is constantly told by his triad bosses that the future lies in Mainland China, a place he is originally so reluctant to travel that that he thinks killing is a better option only to later submit himself once again leaving Elisa alone in Hong Kong with no money and only a dwindling hope of ever achieving the familial bliss she longed for when she decided to run away with Man-Wai. 

For his part, Fai is also an orphan though his fate his was different in that he was found by Auntie Bo who gave him a loving home. Even so he has his share of guilt, feeling responsible for Auntie Bo’s spinsterhood fearing that she never married or had children of her own because taking him in made it impossible in the more conservative Hong Kong of 70s and 80s. Ironically enough they become a surrogate family for the infant Daisy, but it’s Fai’s sense of empathy that eventually provokes tragedy in his decision not to arrest Man-Wai on his return seeing how much he loves his family and wanting to give him a chance to put things right rather than take a little girl’s father away from her. Unable to forgive himself, he abandons his responsibilities only to be reminded of them later finally ending the cycle by being willing to accept the responsibility which has been left for him. 

Transitioning through the Hong Kong Handover, Fung evokes a sense of continual displacement, Elisa’s life destroyed firstly through abandonment and then through conflicted desires torn between a potential Thailand paradise and Mainland reality while longing only for a stable home(land). Daisy is offered something similar, her drug trafficker boyfriend to promising to take her to Thailand on their next run, the drugs ironically concealed in a bouquet of red roses just like those her father once brought for her mother. Her only salvation lies in the arms of Fai, a literal authority figure, reassuming his paternal responsibility and thereby restoring a sense of familial and political stability. Told in fragmentary, non-linear fashion, Fung’s melancholy tale of the legacies of abandonment and an innocent love eroded by economic and social realities eventually finds hope in familial repair and the remaking of a home in self-defined family.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Till We Meet Again (生前约死后, Steven Ma, 2019)

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“What if you let go of my hand and I get lost?” an over anxious little boy asks his mother. “Then you should stay where you are,” she tells him, “Mum will definitely come back for you.” It’s an instruction the now adult Wai (Steven Ma Chun-Wai) has perhaps taken too literally, struggling under the weight of grief and filial guilt while standing still waiting for his mother to find him again in the hope of earning her forgiveness for a sin he does not quite want to remember. Semi-autobiographical, Steven Ma’s Till We Meet (生前约死后) again is at once a dark psychodrama of man undone by loss but also a deeply touching evocation of an unbreakable mother son bond. 

Now a solitary salesman, 30-something Wai has only one wish – to reunite with his mother whom he hasn’t seen in over 10 years fearing that she bears some kind of grudge against him. We in fact see Mui (Josephine Koo Mei-Wah), his mother, angrily telling another woman, Lai (Bee Wong Chiu-Yam), that she refuses to see her son though the scene is not quite as it first seems. After abruptly quitting his job, Wai wanders out into the street and endures some kind of mental breakdown after which he visits his psychiatrist who reminds him that his mother is dead and has been for some time. 

Wai avows that he doesn’t like taking his medication because it makes him feel “sluggish” but increasingly finds his mental universe fracturing, shifting between sepia-tinted memories of his early childhood during which his mother first became ill and his life as a young man during which she suffered a relapse and later passed away. We begin to doubt Wai’s perception, uncertain if people and events he encounters are “real” or a product of his psychosis. His mother, ghost or merely spectre of memory, hovers on the sidelines apparently unwilling to see him though perhaps for his own good in hoping he will finally be able to move on and learn to be happy in acceptance of his loss. 

Tracey (Jennifer Yu Heung-Ying), his perhaps unrealistically invested psychiatrist, reminds Wai that he isn’t the only person who’s ever been bereaved or felt abandoned, left behind by those who have gone far away. She herself lost her mother young and was then abandoned by her father who left her in the care of an uncle who too abandoned her and ran off with all her father’s money. Another ghostly, perhaps imagined, conversation with Mui reveals that again Tracey may not have the full story and may never get it but unlike Wai may still have the chance to achieve a kind of closure with the traumatic past. He meanwhile carries the burden of his repressed guilt as it slowly works its way to the surface, cutting through his fragile psyche like a knife. 

While Mui’s conversations with third parties presumably taking place entirely within Wai’s mind may hint at a deeper psychological crisis they are essentially attempts to work out his guilt and shame, one-sided dialogues that eventually guide him back towards an acceptance of the truth he was intent on forgetting beginning with the traumatic fact of his mother’s death. Perhaps to some Wai’s maternal attachment may seem extreme, as the psychiatrist echoes in reminding him he’s not the only son to suffer such catastrophic loss, but it’s underpinned by a sense of filial guilt that lies at the heart of their bond in his worry that his own distress pushed Mui into pursuing a path she may otherwise have rejected on the grounds it would only cause her more pain for an additional few weeks of life. 

Trapped in his grief and guilt, Wai staggers through a nightmarish existence elegantly manifested in Ma’s abrupt tonal shifts as Wai finds himself staggering along a darkened corridor complete with faulty lighting and a single exit, while the sky itself seems to brighten to more romantic tones as he embraces a fantasy of a happier time drawing closer either to a kind of closure or the victory of his delusion whichever way you wish to read it. A painful journey through guilt and grieving, Ma’s unsparing drama provides few easy answers for living with loss but does perhaps allow its hero a degree of escape if only in unreality. 

Till We Meet Again streams in the UK until 15th February as part of Focus Hong Kong

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)