26th Hong Kong International
Film Festival 2002
by Alison Jobling
HKIFF Episode 3: Life and death, time and tide, things and other
things
I'll start with the group of films I've categorised as "life and
death". First up is Visible Secret, a nice ghost story from
Ann Hui that was surprisingly effective despite containing only a smidgeon
of visual effects. This was the director's cut, and featured the excised
scenes with Jo Kuk and Eason Chan on the MTR. I have to say that these
scenes worked very well, and contributed to the film, although the MTR
management disagreed.
The rich colours and moody locations of Visible Secret
contrasted vividly with those of Lily Festival by Hamano Sachi,
which used settings as undramatic as you could find. This lovely
watercolour of a film dealt with a group of ladies in retirement flats in
a tranquil village, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of an aging
Don Juan into their midst. The care with which the characters were brought
to life, and the gentle and somewhat surprising treatment of what ensued,
made this a truly delightful film. And although I seem to be descending
into cliche, the film never did, and with You Shoot, I Shoot and All
About Lily Chou-Chou it made the best of the fest for me.
Back to Ann Hui, and another realistic film, although this one was not
at all delightful. Boat People, starring George Lam and his
mustache and Andy Lau, follows a photographer (Lam) who gradually realises
that what he's being shown by Party cadres in Vietnam is not the whole
truth. It's a gruelling film, told in a stark and relatively schmaltz-free
manner. In particular, the scene showing Andy and his fellow camp inmates
clearing mines nearly made me lose my lunch: if you think your work day is
stressful, try theirs.
Where Lily Festival is gently humorous, and deals with death in
its due season, both Visible Secret and Boat People treat
the subject of death that comes out of turn and unwelcome. All three
films, in their respective ways, delve into human responses to, and
feelings about, death. Tokyo X Erotica, on the other hand, offers
no such human perspective. Instead, we're given a series of episodes
featuring much bonking followed by death, and I can't say I really gave a
toss about a single character. In fact, life would have been a trifle more
pleasant if they'd all died in the first five minutes so we could have
left early.
I must rant here just a tad, so be prepared. Where Russell Hoban, in
his superb novel Pilgermann, gave us the grotesque Bruder Pfortner
(sorry, no umlauts), he gave us a personification of death that revealed
the inevitable indignity. This character was used as a counterpoint to the
human interactions in the story, resulting in a view of human life that
was both sublime and tragic, and undeniably moving. Tokyo X Erotica
director Zeze Takahisa strips away the meaning and leaves the grotesquerie,
giving us Death in a bunny suit. Annoying pretensions to significance
combined with a salacious but entirely unerotic sex made this film a fine
companion piece to Shanghai Panic.
Onto "time and tide", with a third Ann Hui: Starry is the
Night, with Brigitte Lin, George Lam and his mustache again, and David
Wu. The story follows Brigitte, from a university student who becomes
involved with her professor (Lam) to a social worker who gets involved
with a young man (Wu). The two men turn out to be father and son, angrily
estranged. I'd call this a watchable but unremarkable film, which would
also describe my next offering, Running Out Of Time 2. The
combination of Johnnie To and Lau Ching Wan failed to work the usual magic
this time, which To readily admits: he'd intended the film to have a
somewhat allegorical nature, to foster optimism in a depressed Hong Kong,
but it didn't quite come off.
The last film in this group was Second Time Around, by Jeff Lau.
Like some of Lau's earlier works, such as Days of Tomorrow and A
Chinese Odyssey 1 and 2, this treats the issues of time and regret.
Since this was my second time around for this film, I was able to follow
it a little better: it's confusing as hell the first time around. This
viewing, however, I was able to relax and appreciate the finer features,
such as, I must confess, Ekin Chen's startling jacket. Honestly, if anyone
has any strings they can pull, I'd kill for that purple, fringed, patent
leather creation, and don't see how anyone could watch anything else with
that on screen.
One of the bonuses of this film, I might add, aside from the
aforementioned item of sartorial splendour, was the opportunity to see
Cecilia Cheung in a likeable role. Or perhaps swaggerin' Ekin and his
eye-popping jacket temporarily stunned my senses, although I wasn't quite
stunned enough to miss the inconsistencies in the casino activity: once
you've been in the biz, you tend to notice things like that. To be fair,
the scene where Ekin deliberately burns past the card he knows, to get the
one he doesn't, was pretty impressive, but again I think you have to have
the context.
That about wraps it up. Did I mention that I am going back next year?
