Chan is an interesting example of a director who embarked on an idiosyncratic independent career after starting out in Hong Kong's commercial sector, but unlike, say, Hu or Wong or To, Chan hadn't managed to establish himself before doing so—his formal directorial debut (
Finale in Blood) was shelved for years by Golden Harvest before being dumped in theaters, and his follow-up (
Five Lonely Hearts) apparently never got a theatrical release at all. So Chan couldn't draw on decent budgets or big names (though Andy Lau exec-produced
Made in Hong Kong) and his early work has a rough-hewn look very different from the more polished Doyle-lensed
Dumplings. The late '90s films are shotgun weddings of that style (born of both choice and necessity—the aesthetic of
Made in Hong Kong was partially dictated by the use of leftover short ends from other productions, on different film stocks) and Chan's long apprenticeship in HK commercial cinema, producing skewed takes on mainstream genres and motifs. This one is kind of a Triad movie, perhaps taking some inspiration from the
Young and Dangerous series, but shown through the eyes of a desperate and frankly pathetic entry-level thug who's never going to amount to anything more than that; the soldiers-turned-bank robbers in Chan's next film
The Longest Summer don't cut any more of an impressive figure.
Little Cheung and especially
Durian Durian are more staid, and the latter suggests Chan was watching a lot of Sixth Generation work at the time. But
Hollywood Hong Kong and
Public Toilet swung hard to the opposite extreme, with an unapologetic grubbiness (early-aughts DV crap-o-vision was rarely more apt than in
Public Toilet) that coveys the glee of someone who thinks they're getting away with something, while adding some of the arty grace notes of Chan's earlier work to the mix of vulgarity and sentimentality that characterizes a lot more mainstream Hong Kong comedy.
I don't think as much of Chan's later work;
Kill Time (his attempt at a mainstream, mainland-targeted feature) is ugly in a bland, mid-budget-TV-drama way, occasionally incoherent, and badly miscast (sorry, Angelababy, but no). It deserves brownie points for attempting a ghost story that also incorporates the Cultural Revolution, two things that on their own are usually red flags for the censors and probably contributed to the sense that whatever Chan was going for didn't survive the edit. He also did a mainstream martial-arts movie with Max Zhang (
The Grandmaster,
Ip Man 3) that was an across-the-board flop but
sounds like it has guilty pleasure potential. After that he did another sharp right turn:
Three Husbands self-consciously revisits the themes and style of his turn-of-the-century work, but it's so insistent on the national-allegory aspect that Chan was formerly content to leave as subtext that it descends into blunt-force grotesqueries with the thin justification of metaphor, andwithout room for the deft juggling of styles and moods he was able to pull off back then.
The Midnight After has a similarly in-your-face state-of-the-city metaphor, but manages the balancing act better and has an almost poignantly self-effacing quality to it, like it knows it doesn't matter, but we're all stuck here so may as well do it anyway. Looking around today, I'm not sure that wasn't prophetic. But his best recent work is probably
My City, a documentary about Hong Kong "grassroots" author Xi Xi that uses her and her stories as a jumping-off point for a social portrai that emphasizes resilience and renewal over nostalgia and lament.