#2
Post
by Mr Sausage » Mon Oct 14, 2024 11:43 am
The Secret (1979)
A young couple are found dead in the woods, mutilated and hanging from trees. A mentally challenged local is quickly arrested, but questions remain, and a lingering sense of mystery and even the supernatural hangs over the victim's family and neighbours. Ann Hui’s directorial debut marries European genre sensibilities with the experimentation of the HK new wave then just emerging. The elliptical editing feels Soderberghian at times, nowhere more so than the opening, where multiple timelines, present and recent past, are cut between so that they lay atop each other, the cuts often motivated by shared sounds or even sounds that context suggest are from one scene but which are revealed to be from another. Basic exposition becomes expressive montage. There’s a tension and feeling of dislocation built up by these odd editing rhythms. Hui is plainly influenced by 70s genre cinema like Don’t Look Now and the work of Argento, Carpenter, De Palma, etc., and she organizes a solid murder mystery full of atmosphere and tension. She borrows from Carpenter and De Palma the purposeful camera, for instance, one that snakes around and moves in and out for reasons of its own, suggesting a menacing presence. In particular there’s this amazing moment where the camera creeps slowly in on a sleeping woman, but stops when she opens her eyes, only to resume its slow forward creep when the woman closes her eyes as if the camera itself is stalking her despite not actually being a POV shot. Hui uses the techniques of giallo and slasher cinema to suggest a menacing presence, but with more subtlety, not just in how her camera doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself, but because this prowling, stalking feel is untethered to any literal prowler. It builds instead the context in which our characters now live, the dead hanging over their lives, haunting them with an absence that paradoxically crowds them in. Hui distinguishes herself from her New Wave colleagues with a patient and careful style, and quiet, internalized performances (Sylvia Chang is especially good). I love HK movies, but you watch enough of them and you get a bit wearied of the loudness, so Hui’s composure and patience were welcome indeed. This is also a more female-centric film, with Hui and screenwriter Joyce Chan emphasizing female characters and spaces, and preferring communities and communal grief to masculine tropes like the lone obsessed male or the weathered police detectives relentlessly searching for truth and closure. That said, no doubt wanting to leave the audience with a big pop, Hui goes balls out for the finale. Not sure that was the best choice, but it does little to mar this solid, effective, deceptively simple film. There’s more going on here than many similar movies, with a confident, creative experimental aesthetic. A fantastic debut.
Visible Secret (2001)
This was fun: a breezy romantic comedy with some horror overtones and Shu Qi doing her charming free spirit thing. I actually enjoyed the lax, repetitive storytelling. It seemed to match the aimless, yet trapped nature of the protagonists. While the pair and their friends are technically adults, they’re also very much still children. The loss of their parents at a young age has not left them to grow up parentless, it’s left them unable to grow up at all. They’re hemmed in by childhood hurts they’re unable to move past, and for the pair at least, seem unable to connect with anyone besides each other and the local children they play games with. It’s no accident their happiest moments are among children playing childish games. However breezy and amusing, there is a weight of sadness to this one that the film skips over until hammering home with its melancholy final scene and utterly sad final shot. I have only seen three Hui’s now, but I’m getting the sense that, unlike fellow New Waver Patrick Tam, who seemed eventually to crumble, Hui is able to work within the compromises that come with a commercial cinema and apply just a little extra, a little artistry, to what in other hands would be merely genre exercises. The movie also looks amazing, with its location photography that makes the city into a character in its own right, and its use of strong primary colours. There’s a lot of visual beauty to the thing, enough so that I could understand people being let down by the relative lack of ambition on other fronts. The movie contains more than it needs to, but not enough to make it a hidden masterpiece. It’s a fine film by a filmmaker I’m beginning to suspect is excellent. Oh, and it only struck me now that I’ve seen them in back-to-back movies, but Sylvia Chang and Shu Qi look remarkably alike.
July Rhapsody (2002)
A gentle, sensitive movie, mixing naturalism with a quiet lyricism. It’s been a while since I saw a movie that insisted on itself so little. The story is conventional, a teacher’s midlife crisis complicated by the romantic attentions of a pretty student. Hui avoids any temptation to lean in to the lurid or sensational aspects. There are no events. Scenes build gently on each other to generate a web of emotions and memories. The movie is expertly handled, but I’m torn. I can’t help wishing it had pushed itself more, been more lyrical or more romantic or more kitchen sink. Its touch is so gentle you wonder sometimes if you can really feel it. But at the same time, there is a submerged complexity, something I’m beginning to feel is Ann Hui’s specialty, one that only comes out here through certain structural choices. The teacher’s romance with his student takes on a deeper and more ambiguous undercurrent from its collocation with past and present events happening mainly to the teacher’s wife. The movie doesn’t insist on these connections—it doesn’t insist on anything—but they complicate the story just enough. This is a mature and sophisticated movie.
All About Love (2010)
Hui using the form of the sweet mainstream romcom to explore issues of gender, sexual identity, and pregnancy. Rather than explore rigid identities, fluidity is the theme, be it in dress, sexual preference, or identity, along with the prejudices that attend it both in- and outside the queer community. But on the outside this is a pleasant romcom about a pair of former lovers, Sandra Ng and Vivian Chow, who meet again at a group for pregnant single mothers, rekindle their relationship, and attempt to build a found family. Hui has been open about using commercialism here to make her subject matter more acceptable, as she’s unwilling to play coy. She approaches her subject matter in an upfront way, from casual sex, to abortion, to queer lifestyles, to polyamory, to found families, to feminism, to single motherhood, to social prejudices, to political activism (the film ultimately takes on too much, introducing new themes and plots even well into the final act). Hui just hopes the frothy, comedic manner will soften this foregrounding of touchy social issues. So there is a level of triteness to the movie’s immediate surface. Funnily, to most modern viewers of international cinema, it’s the subject matter and politics that are going to make the romcom conventions palatable, rather than the other way around as Hui had envisioned. This is anyway a much more palatable film than Tsui Hark’s similarly styled and titled romcom from a year earlier, All About Women. Tsui’s film was about women only insofar as men and romance were involved, and was manic and bloated to the point of exhaustion to boot. Hui’s film is actually about women and women’s issues, and is more careful and restrained with it’s comedic exaggerations. It’s a useful corrective to all that earlier film’s flaws. An imperfect but cute and likeable movie with an important social drama inside it.
Zodiac Killers (1991)
Apparently Hui’s attempt at making a straightforward commercial hit: a crime thriller set among Chinese students in Japan as some of them become entangled in a yakuza plot. The movie is quick, crass, and lurid, but Hui is still sensitive to the emotional lives of her characters, the women especially, and takes care to represent the small traps and unhappinesses of foreign life for women, their reliance on male sponsers and hostess work as they become a transient underclass. There’s one striking moment where a figure of comic fun, a painted up madame (Kyoko Kishida in a cameo) who tries to seduce Andy Lau, reveals a wealth of sorrow and lost time as Hui allows the crass comic moment to expand long enough for a character to emerge from the initial caricature. I can’t think of another Hong Kong filmmaker who would do that. Most of them would be content to play the moment up grotesquely and carry on, where Hui maintains a compassionate eye and an interest in people. A curious moment is where Hui shows scenes of a Japanese kid’s show, maybe Dragon Ball, that is shockingly gynecological and very uncomfortable. I’m guessing that between these two scenes we get two sides of Hui’s feminism at work, the compassionate observer of female experience, and the committed social critic. Despite being a foreign-set gangster film, there isn’t any real plot, just the aimless drifting of lonely people. But that laxness doesn’t help the film, as crucial characters, like Cherie Chung’s Japanese lover (Junichi Ishida), a hunted criminal recently returned from abroad, don’t get an introduction, they just show up as tho’ they’d always been there. It’s hard to care about his character or his relationship to Chung when he only shows up half way, without introduction, and then only to be replaced by Andy Lau later on. In fact his whole plot feels shoehorned in from another movie. The overall effect is of a random collection of elements in search of a structure. The movie’s one of Hui’s less successful projects, but still, you can appreciate how she’s trying to do more with it than most movies bother with. If it had picked a lane, had been the sensitive social drama Hui was clearly more interested in making, or the straight ahead action thriller she was ostensibly making, it might’ve been a more satisfying film instead of the undigested mix of the two. But there is lots of good material here, and an unflinching ending that most movies wouldn’t have the courage to commit to.
Song of the Exile (1990)
A carefully observed autobiographical drama. Maggie Cheung, an international student studying in London in the late 70s, returns home for her sister’s wedding and finds herself having to navigate the fraught, complicated family relationships that she went to London to avoid. Cosmopolitan, fluent in English, and restless, Cheung resents her mother’s provincial attitudes and homebody lifestyle. A belated revelation that her mother is actually Japanese, a war bride that fled post-war Japan with Cheung’s father and had to make a new life in a strange land under hostile eyes, prompts Cheung to visit Japan with her mother, meet her extended family, and reckon with all she doesn’t know. That sounds like a familiar story, but Hui rarely plays anything straight. Instead of a warm drama of Cheung rediscovering herself in another country and finding a place in her family, the Japan sections cut her off. She instead experiences cultural and linguistic isolation in a way she never has before, and it’s through this difficulty communicating, this impossibility of really entering the Japanese side of her family, that brings her to empathize with her mother. Cheung’s mother, for her part, doesn’t flower either back in her homeland, but finds her long years in China have changed her. Sentimentality is replaced by something far richer. I understand that, like Cheung’s character, Hui also studied in London in the 70s and has a Japanese mother, tho’ I can’t say how much the rest of the movie reflects her experiences. The film grapples with identity and mixed cultural heritage in a layered and unexpected way. I see why the movie played at Cannes. There’s a lot here to appeal to European art house sensibilities. It’s also a masterpiece and maybe my favourite Hui so far.
Boat People (1982)
John Woo and Tsui Hark (the latter a Chinese born in Vietnam) used the aftermath of the Vietnam war as a backdrop for torrid melodrama and crime stories. Ann Hui uses it to explore political and social drama whose power lies in its matter of fact tone and willingness to present horrors next to everyday banality such that the former comes to seem a part of the latter even as the audience surrogate, George Lam, fails to process this enmeshing. Just three years on from The Secret, Hui uses more conventional, unobtrusive filmmaking to get her points across (for the most part anyway—there’s a death towards the end that cross cuts the event with its aftermath). The aesthetic isn’t documentary, but the location shooting, set design, and naturalistic acting lend a lot of authenticity. There’s no narrative to speak of, but that too feels authentic, the movie driven more by the rhythms of life than by story-telling conventions. The performers do able jobs, but it’s Season Ma as the scrappy 14-year-old slum dweller who runs away with the movie. The movie’s despair can be hard to process, but at least the despair is less didactic than the first third would suggest: the overt political elements do their job of undermining the regime’s utopian fictions with clear-eyed glimpses of abuse and oppression, but the lack of obvious villains, a number of careful ambiguities, (the one apparatchik war hero who can’t divest himself of his French colonialist values and cosmopolitan ethos is an obvious example), and most importantly, a shift in focus from politics to the various people whose everyday lives make up Communist Vietnam—all of these move the film away from its discursive beginnings to create something richer and more interesting, a movie about empathy and humanity set in a time and place where those things are in short supply. The film becomes political in a wider sense: how the downtrodden are dealt with in society. A marvellous film. Its lack of obvious ambition might keep a lot of viewers from thinking it a masterpiece even as they admire its craft, but like every other Ann Hui I’ve seen, this has riches in it. A movie I don’t doubt rewards multiple viewings and careful thought.
Love in a Fallen City (1984)
A movie whose gentility and restraint can feel stifling. I feel guilty saying that of something so handsome and skillfully constructed, but its elegance is so perfect, the movie so poised, that I couldn’t help wanting a throb or bit of dirt to crack its surface. I haven’t read the Eileen Chang novel it’s based on, so I can’t tell how well it’s matching her own style, but we’re far from the rough social realism of Boat People and the experimentalism of The Secret. The movie is nothing if not in good taste. Beautifully so—Ann Hui’s films are always wonderful to look at, but the visuals here are especially pretty, with Hui and cinematographer Tony Hope showing their sophisticated eye. The cinematography glows: it’s textured, gently gauze filtered, and effortless in its way of finding expressive and novel compositions. It’s the prettiest Hui film I’ve seen so far, maybe even the prettiest thing she’s ever done. The style and glamour of 1930s Shanghai overwhelms you without insistence (again, the good taste). There is a rupture eventually, in the final twenty minutes when the war finally breaks out. But the majority of the movie is pre-war elegance. The story is a familiar one, with an independantly-minded woman trying to navigate the social constraints of a conservative society and shame culture, her heart and personal ethics in conflict with her society. This is a very good film, and I enjoyed it a lot, but I didn’t feel it the way I did so much of Hui’s other work. Its choice not to explore story, character, and history in favour of a delicate romance composed of moments, in which gestures and glances dominate the frame while everything else is pushed to the margins, is unexpected and maybe in line with Chang’s novel, but risks simplification and superficiality. Chow’s character, for instance, goes mostly unexplored. And yet it’s such a beautiful movie! I don’t know. I might have to watch this again some time, but there’s lots to recommend here even if it didn’t quite catch fire for me.
The Story of Woo Viet (1981)
A companion piece to Boat People, showing what happens on the other side to those who escape Vietnam aboard boats. Chow Yun-Fat is a Vietnamese soldier who flees the fall of Saigon, only to find himself a target of Vietnamese agents inside his refugee camp, forcing him to flee illegally to Manila with Cherie Chung. Chung is sold into sex slavery on the other side, forcing Chow to become a fixer and hitman to some cheap crime lord to pay off her debt. So Hui and assistant director Stanley Kwan (who share a title card) submerge their bitter social portrait within a crime thriller. Sean Gilman reads this as a proto-heroic bloodshed film, and I kind of agree, what with Chow Yun-Fat walking around in aviator sunglasses, oozing cool and intensity, and having a bromance with Lo Lieh that’s more convincing than his romance with Cherie Chung. I don’t wonder if seeing him in this is what made John Woo cast Chow in A Better Tomorrow. What’s missing is the heroism and valourizing. Far from his customary style, action director Ching Siu-Tung produces action that is dirty and brutal, sometimes astonishingly so, with no place for elegance within the ferocity. Chow Yun-Fat’s attitude aside, I didn’t feel like the sweaty desperation of the crime narrative allowed for much heroism, sacrificial or otherwise. Rather than A Better Tomorrow or The Killer, I think the movie best compares to Long Arm of the Law with its dark, violent story of illegal immigrants whom social inequality leads into crime and tragedy. I prefer Hui in her sensitive, empathetic mode, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the movie, as grim as it got. Hui and Kwan capture the seedy intensity of HK and Manila to the point you nearly taste it. It’s a texturally rich social portrait. That persuasiveness does a lot to hold up the not always coherent crime plot.
