My last few posts have been attempts to fill in the gaps on the HK film archive's
100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies. Including the below, I've seen 43 of the entries. While that seems low, 45 of the entries pre-date
Come Drink With Me, and I have no real interest in the early Cantonese cinema (plus I'd be surprised if any of them were even available to watch). So 43 of 55 isn't bad.
Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997)
Well known for having been shot on left over film reels Fruit Chan grabbed up from other productions, the scrappiness, raw energy, and outsize imagination befits HK filmmaking as a whole, even if this kind of DIY independent production was highly unusual in the industry. It’s a portrait of a city at its end, ambivalent about whatever great changes await it. I’m wary of the tendency to read most Hong Kong films as handover allegories, but the title, the year, and an ending quote from Mao Tse-Tung about bright, happy youths of the future tells you everything: the film is apocalyptic. Not in the grand sense, but in the way the future has seemed to disappear, especially for the very young, and everything else has begun to wind down. Funnily, if you lay out the bare plot, it sounds like a YA novel: a scrappy kid, his intellectually-disabled friend, and a dying girl find letters from a dead schoolgirl and try to track down who they’re written to. I say funnily because this crass and violent movie about urban squalor is the antithesis of YA. Everything here feels hemmed in and pointless. One of the dominant images is the grates, mesh, and caging that seals in seemingly every apartment, and through which characters are always gazing or chatting with each other. Bitter irony and reversals dominate the narrative, and all desires seem frustrated. The movie can seem as entrapped and fatalistic as
Dangerous Encounters of the Third Kind--yet it stops short of that film’s anger even if it does share its nihilism. Fruit Chan is still able to find moments of beauty, even tenderness, amidst the chaos and squalor, and he brings a dreaminess to the film’s rhythms that’s intoxicating. There are brief visions at times of an almost joyous freedom. But these are not hopeful visions: they bring a kind of relief, a needed warmth, but they imply no hope nor progress. They are isolated moments; they don’t point anywhere. The best of them happens in a graveyard. You care for these characters, but they can’t go anywhere, and they know it. The movie makes a great pairing with
Spacked Out, another masterpiece of grubby energy and aimless storytelling whose young characters have nowhere to go in their mazelike neon city.
Spacked Out, tho’ not so violent and despairing, completes
Made in Hong Kong’s ‘97 portrait, showing how little has changed post hand over, how the young and disadvantaged have the same aimless, heedless lives without opportunity.
Made in Hong Kong is just a gem of a movie.
The Private Eyes (Michael Hui, 1976)
Maybe the earliest HK comedy I’ve watched. A gag-heavy, loosely plotted working-class comedy about a private eye (director Michael Hui) and his new apprentice (brother Sam Hui) who get embroiled with various criminals and weird clients. The thing gets too much mileage out of Bruce Lee parodies, fake buck teeth, and fart jokes, but there
is a creativity to it, like a fight in a restaurant kitchen that sees swordfish, shark jaws, and sausages used as weapons. Not as briskly choreographed as it would’ve been post Jackie Chan, but it still shows the kind of energy Hong Kong did better than anybody. I know the Hui brothers have a high reputation among critics like David Bordwell and Jessica Yeung, and I had a fine time with this one, but I wouldn't think of it first when recommending an HK comedy, let alone put it on a list of 100 must-see HK films. I’d pick
Love in the Time of Twilight,
A Chinese Odyssey, and
It’s a Drink! It’s a Bomb! before this one. But then I gather this film is important for the comic template it created and popularized. And it’s a pretty good film in the end.
God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 1989)
Even a comparatively normal film for Wong Jing can’t help being a mess of genres, tones, and plot lines. Chow Yun-Fat is the epitome of cool as the God of Gamblers, a man of almost supernatural gambling ability who travels about, upstaging other top gamblers. The premise suggests any number of stories. Which of them does Wong Jing select? The one where the God of Gamblers gets a bump on the head and regresses into a six-year-old so that Andy Lau’s loser gangster can use him
Rain Man style. So the cool, slick gangsters-and-gambling movie of the first thirty minutes transforms, out of nowhere, into a goofy buddy comedy—a charming one, admittedly. Chow’s clowning actually works, and while Andy Lau is his usual boring self, Joey Wong as his girlfriend brings the charm and energy. But the movie charges off in all sorts of directions: at one point Joey Wong has to pretend Chow is her boyfriend in order to fool her parents, a charade Chow’s childlike personality predictably ruins. Why? Who knows—it never comes up again. At another point the group moves into a brothel for some reason, and Chow starts making condom balloons, moaning like the working girls, and running around with scissors threatening to snip off people’s dicks. It’s inexplicable--but nowhere near as inexplicable as the sudden sex murder/necrophilia that, no joke, becomes a subplot 90 minutes in and seems to’ve been spliced in from another movie entirely. Then the whole thing turns into a John Woo movie, and we get maybe the bloodiest family comedy ever made. Wong gives the impression he’s making five different films at once. But for all that the movie is rather fun. The film has a tangled mess of sequels, tho’: there’s
God of Gamblers II, where Andy Lau from this movie teams up with Stephen Chow’s Saint of Gamblers from the
God of Gamblers parody,
All For the Winner. Sean Gilman on Letterboxd likens this sequel to Tony Scott making “
Top Gun 2 starring Val Kilmer and Charlie Sheen's character from
Hot Shots.” Sounds insane. Then there’s a sequel to that movie,
God of Gamblers III, where Stephen Chow travels back in time (meaning it’s technically an
All For the Winner sequel, even tho’ that movie had its own sequel,
The Top Bet!). Finally, Chow Yun-Fat returns for a direct sequel,
God of Gamblers Returns, and then there’s a prequel, a Saint of Gamblers spin off not starring Stephen Chow, and a bunch of Chow Yun-Fat starring reboots apparently. I may wade into this garden of forking paths at some point.
The Legendary La Rose Noire (Jeffrey Lau, 1992)
A pair of girls find themselves in the midst of a triad double-cross, and to explain the pile of bodies, blame it on a fictional super hero, The Black Rose. Naturally, they find themselves hunted by not just the police and the triads, but two apprentices of the real Black Rose. The movie has style and energy, but the unrestrained goofiness was hard to bear. I admired the filmmaking but found little to laugh at. Like the other Jeff Lau’s I’ve seen this seems to be densely allusive and parodic, but I lacked the social and cultural context to really pick it up. I mean, I got a lot of the direct film references, but any pop culture references outside of that were lost on me. The long middle section where Maggie Siu and Tony Leung Ka-Fei are prisoners of a pair of eccentrics was especially obscure, coming across as a barrage of inexplicable situations and non sequiturs whose meaning I have to assume lies in one’s knowledge of HK pop culture. For someone in the know, this must be brilliant. To me, it was exhausting and confusing. In the way of much Cantonese comedy, the plot is loose, there only to structure an endless series of bits and gags. Again, you have to admire the energy: the invention never flags, the ideas never dry up—it’s screaming madness all the way. But this kind of energy is enervating if you don’t find it funny. And that’s mainly what I felt: exhaustion mixed with admiration.
Wonder Women (Zulian Kam Kwok-Leung, 1987)
A cute hangout comedy that follows two beauty show contestants over the course of a week as they become friends, look for work, and navigate romance. It was a nice break from the antic, gag-heavy comedy of so much HK fare. Mainly, we watch two charming women (Carol ‘Do-Do’ Cheng and Cecilia Yip) make their way through HK’s corporate world and neon night life as they pack a month’s worth of experiences into a single week. Movies focused on female relationships are pretty rare in HK film (many of the best are from Tsui Hark), so it was nice to see a movie where the emphasis is on two women navigating a particularly female relationship. Not that the film isn’t packed with conventional gender roles, but it was fun to see these two women get to know each other and express concern and sympathy for each other’s struggles all while giving a portrait of 80s nighttime Hong Kong. That rare thing: an HK comedy with some emotional maturity.
Man on the Brink (Alex Chung, 1981)
A gripping New Wave crime story about an uncover cop going to pieces while working for the triads. The story is conventional; what convinces is the raw energy of the thing. It hurtles along, as untiring as it is grimy. The story is refreshingly low stakes, too: we’re not following the attempt to take down a big crime boss. The players are petty criminals, the busts mainly robberies, and the undercover details banal and everyday. There’s nothing elevated. We’re watching a man come apart in the grubby everyday world of street crime in Hong Kong. Again, it’s the raw, chaotic style of the movie that pulls you along. The movie seems always on the verge of coming apart at the seams: the handheld camera is forever charging around, struggling to follow characters as they sprint hangdog from scene to scene, while frantic groups of people push, pull, and crowd around the camera until it seems like any minute the film itself will fly apart with the boiling frustrations of a volatile city. It feels like someone’s grabbed a camera and just run into the streets with it. There’s a lot of authenticity to how the thing feels—for the most part, anyway. There are contrivances here and there, and a late montage full of overripe expressiveness out of step with the film’s aesthetic, pulled seemingly from another movie entirely. But in general this is a raw movie even compared to
City on Fire, which I’m sure it inspired. Lam’s film has its own grittiness and charging energy, but it’s marrying that with the more poetic flavour of post-Woo heroic bloodshed films. Both are run through with fatalism, but Lam’s film was tragic and had a certain grandeur at times; Chung’s is nihilistic and squalid.
Man on the Brink’s frenetic urban style reminds me of
Long Arm of the Law as well, tho’ it has more focus and more tonal control. A fantastic movie, sadly underseen. Don’t miss an opportunity to see it.
Homecoming (Yim Ho, 1984)
The reverse of movies like
Long Arm of the Law and
Comrades, Almost a Love Story. There, mainlanders were seeking new economic opportunities in Hong Kong, illegally or otherwise. Ho’s movie is the other side of that process: the return back home after years spent living in Hong Kong. What’s found is ambivalent. The years of better opportunities have turned bitter and disappointing, while home, tho’ familiar, is fraught. New class and status distinctions make situations uncomfortable or engender petty jealousies, while a lack of success in traditional areas like marriage or child rearing invite unwanted diagnoses even as the diagnoser’s own family life reveals unexpected fragility. Yim Ho films this all in a subdued and careful way. Melodrama is there if he’d wanted it, but he doesn’t even gesture at it, let alone side-step it. It’s a gentle, quietly observed story full of sadness, ambivalence, and a sense of fragile tho’ deeply felt connection to home, to family, to friends, to ideas and ideals. It’s a lovely movie, not at all in the normal style of Hong Kong storytelling. This urgently needs a rescue.
