Hong Kong New Wave Capsule Reviews
Tony Au:
Dream Lovers — March 12, 2017
Chow Yun-fat plays a conductor who, just as he moves into a new place with his longtime girlfriend, Cher Yeung, begins having weird dreams of himself as a Qin Dynasty terra-cotta figure. At the same time, Brigitte Lin begins having visions of herself as a Qin-era woman. They both begin to see each other, in dreams and while awake: mostly being sad and in love, but Lin also sees Chow’s execution. Yueng takes Chow to see her grandmother, who introduces herself as a blind witch and tells Chow that he and Lin are reincarnations of lovers from over two thousand years before, and that they are destined to be together.
Alternating between languid, eerie encounters between Lin and Chow (she finds him at an exhibition of the Terra-Cotta Warriors, which her archeologist father is a leading expert in), where they are, inexplicably to themselves, drawn passionately and hopelessly together, with more realistic responses to their relationship: Yeung’s breakdown as her relationship with Chow can’t compete with a multi-millennia romance; a secret Lin’s father and a colleague have been keeping for almost thirty years.
Director Tony Au was a leading art director for the New Wave (Dangerous Encounters — First Kind, Boat People and several other Ann Hui films, Stanley Kwan’s Women and Love Unto Waste, which also star Chow and Elaine Jin, who has a small role here) and he has a great eye for spaces: Chow’s unfinished apartment, Chow and Lin picnicking on Pringles and wine, the ghostly blue of Qin-era Lin’s home.
As a kind of ghost romance invasion of modern Hong Kong, it anticipates Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, but it’s much more somber. Both films can probably be read allegorically as expressions of post-Joint Declaration anxiety (the Chinese past coming back to reclaim the Hong Kong present), but reducing them to that does them a disservice.
Alex Cheung:
Cops and Robbers — March 6, 2018
Hong Kong New Wave crime film with all the hallmarks of the movement: handheld shooting in the overcrowded streets, unexpectedly graphic violence, moody music and lighting (blues and reds) for psychotic villains, lack of faith in the institutions of civil society. Follows the normie lives of a squad of detectives as they negotiate girlfriends, wives and children. The villain is a cross-eyed, non-verbal gun nut who had been rejected in his attempt to join the police force because of his infirmity. He’s contrasted with the new member of the squad, a glasses-wearing youth known only as “Pretty Boy”, an enthusiastic young cop, thoroughly shaken by the violence he sees, the very opposite of the maniacal villain. Through it all is a score by Teddy Robin Kwan, who shows up mid-film in a hard rocking club appearance, playing the cops’ favorite song. The film’s opening, scored with Kwan’s sappy hippy jangle about the innocence of children (as they play the titular cops and robbers) ably sets the stage for the carnage to follow.
Alfred Cheung:
Paper Marriage — May 22, 2021
Maggie Cheung marries Sammo Hung in order to get a green card, hijinks ensue. It’s an amiable collection of bits, some of them (Maggie mud-wrestling, Maggie mugging for the camera, the fights) better than others (Maggie getting dunked in a toilet, Maggie getting peed on, Sammo explaining to Maggie that it’s ok for him to rape her because they’re married). Set in the West Edmonton Mall area of Los Angeles.
On the Run — July 19, 2020
One of the more fascinating little mini-generic cycles in Hong Kong cinema was when in the late 80s, following the success of A Better Tomorrow and City on Fire, folks who made their names in the period kung fu film started making bloody, brutal cop movies. Films like Yuen Woo-ping’s In the Line of Duty 4 and Tiger Cage movies, or Lau Kar-leung’s Tiger on the Beat movies. This one’s got Yuen Biao as a cop who stumbles onto a ring of corrupt homicide detectives when they hire someone to assassinate his ex-wife, the cop who was about to expose them. He doesn’t do any kung fu, or really any acrobatics to speak of. Mostly he just gets shot while everyone around him also gets shot. He does have a fight scene at the end, but rather than Yuen’s typical grace and elegance, it’s quick and savage, formless and manic. It reminded me more of Donnie Yen’s 2000s fights in movies like Flash Point than anything Yuen has ever done before or since.
More than just riding on Woo, Lam, and Chow’s coattails, these movies at the end of the 80s are as much a result of the older generation of Shaws/GH stars merging with the more confrontational sensibilities of the Hong Kong New Wave. The director, Alfred Cheung, is mostly known for comedies, but he also (co-)wrote the screenplays for New Wave classics The Story of Woo Viet (directed by Ann Hui) and Father and Son (Allen Fong). And while the gang of bad cops features kung fu stalwarts Lo Lieh and Yuen Wah (and is led by Charlie Chin, a veteran of Hong Kong and Taiwanese film who was one of the “Two Chins & Two Lins” of 70s Taiwanese film who crossed over to the Hong Kong in the 80s, along with Brigitte Lin), the assassin is played by Pat Ha, star of Patrick Tam’s Nomad and Angie Chen’s My Name Ain’t Suzie.
The uneasy balance between the two styles, New Wave angst and dread versus the old school ideals of heroism and craft, is palpable, and gives the film its queasy, unstable feeling. It’s a world completely inexplicable to its hero, more cruel than he can comprehend. And as in many of these films (Johnnie To’s The Big Heat, for example, from the same year), the sense of doom is explicitly tied to the fear of the impending Handover. But it could just as well be anything else: there are no shortage of things in the world to make one feel like the end is nigh.
Clarence Fok:
The Iceman Cometh — July 18, 2020
Demolition Man, but with Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah coming from the Ming Dynasty into the present as a somewhat garbled metaphor for the Handover with Maggie Cheung in her wacky crazy girl phase (see also A Fishy Story) around to liven things up.
Yuen Wah is effectively nasty but Yuen Biao is too goofy either for the darkness of this world or for the romance with Cheung to really be convincing. Imagine not having chemistry with Maggie Cheung.
Eddie Fong:
The Private Eye Blues — November 15, 2017
In Eddie Fong’s 1994 comic noir, Jacky Cheung plays a deadbeat detective who gets assigned to find a missing teen-aged girl. She finds him almost immediately — the mystery is who she is and why everyone (the Mainland government, the British authorities, local Triad gangs) is trying to find her. She might be the Chairman’s granddaughter, she might be an escaped psychic — it ultimately doesn’t matter, and Cheung, swilling beer and moping about the breakup of his marriage, doesn’t particularly care. He’s the soul of Hong Kong on the brink of the Handover: everyone wants a piece of him and he just wants to be left alone.
In America, noir built tragedy out of post-war paranoia, men trapped in a world that no longer made sense after the atrocities of war and the reshuffling of social roles at home: women are dangerous harbingers of change and violence is a matter of course. The Girl in The Private Eye Blues isn’t a femme fatale, but her opposite, a manic pixie nightmare (Mavis Fan both looks and acts like Faye Wong in the same year’s Chungking Express) who claims to know the future, but only sometimes. Paranoia turns to farce, every shot a world off its axis, not in chiaroscuro black and white, but the hazy neon blue of the Hong Kong night. A world where the future could be predicted, but can’t ever be controlled.
Kirk Wong:
Crime Story — February 9, 2018
I don’t know that it’s quite the Oscar-calibre performance that Edward Yang seemed to think Jackie Chan was capable of, but he’s quite good and he did pick up the Best Actor Golden Horse award for it.
Kirk Wong directs and brings a new kind of grittiness to the Chan persona, a much darker version of the Police Story character (though more bound to the codes of ethical police work than Jackie’s descent into vigilantism). In fact, the first forty-five minutes or so barely features any fisticuffs — what action there is is almost exclusively vehicular. The mid-section of the film, as Chan tries to make his case against obviously dirty cop Kent Cheng, drags with a lot of dramatic side-eye acting punctuated by portentous chords, but the finale is pretty spectacular, filmed among the ruins of the Kowloon Walled City and blowing them all up.
Yim Ho:
The Happenings — August 26, 2013
A group of discotheque youths attempt to skip out on their gas station bill. Things escalate quickly. Things fall apart.
