The Secret (1979)
The Spooky Bunch (1980)
The Story of Woo Viet (1981)
Boat People (1982)
Love in a Fallen City (1984)
The Romance of Book and Sword (1987)
Princess Fragrance (1987)
Starry is the Night (1988)
Swordsman (1990) [uncredited; co-directed with King Hu, Raymond Lee, Ching Siu-Tung, Kam Yeung-Wah, and Tsui Hark)
Song of the Exile (1990)
Zodiac Killers (1991)
My American Grandson (1991)
Boy and His Hero (1993)
Summer Snow (1995)
The Stunt Woman (1996)
Eighteen Springs (1997)
As Time Goes By (1997)
Ordinary Heroes (1999)
Visible Secret (2001)
July Rhapsody (2002)
Goddess of Mercy (2003)
The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006)
The Way We Are (2008)
Night and Fog (2009)
All About Love (2010)
A Simple Life (2011)
The Golden Era (2014)
Our Time Will Come (2017)
The Place I Call Home (2019)
Love After Love (2020)
Elegies (2023)
Shorts
"My Way" [segment, Beautiful 2012 (2012)] The Place I Call home (2019)
"Headmaster" [segment, Septet: the Story of Hong Kong (2020)]
TV
"From Vietnam" (1978) — Si ji san ha (1978 - 1992)
"The Bridge" (1978) — Si ji san ha (1978 - 1992)
"The Road" (1978) — Si ji san ha (1978 - 1992)
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 independant-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.
I suspect July Rhapsody may be MY favorite of all Hui's films -- but it has a lot of competition. My sense is that it shows a fair amount of Naruse influence.
It is truly a shame how little of her best work is available at all -- and how so-so (or worse) most of the (mostly out of print) subbed releases that have come out.
I would note that Princess Fragrance is actually also Romance of Book and Sword, Part 2. This two-parter is probably my favorite wuxia film -- despite some very noticeable budgetary shortcuts here and there (most notably a deer hunting scene, borrowed from some other low-fi source -- and then used again verbatim in a later hunting scene). I wonder if it might not be the only wuxia film that feels like it has a primarily female perspective. Alas, I have seen this on VCD (as the DVD release was quite short-lived).
July Rhapsody would probably be my second favorite to pick up on disc (I have Boat People and A Simple Life), but first up has to be Eighteen Springs, an historical drama that I found to be her most poignant romantic pic. I was lucky enough to catch it at the Four Star, SF's indie theater that played HK cinema in the 90s & early 00's (also got to see the original cut of Wong Kar Wai's Ashes Of Time there too). This thread prompted me to see if there was a blu-ray & in fact there is a 2 disc BD50 set from Spectrum Films, but unfortunately only with French subtitles. Has anyone picked this up? I dont see any reviews. On the flipside, I found The Postmodern Life of My Auntie, a little too slow for me. If I recall it concerned a woman's decline from Alzheimers and its impact on a family's day-to-day life and if I recall correctly from her Q&A (SJ International Film Festival) was based on her own experiences (with her own mother or aunt). I didnt dislike it, but just a bit too mundane for me to revisit.
Last edited by Lowry_Sam on Mon Oct 14, 2024 9:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I find it a bizarre how July Rhapsody has gotten a 4K restoration but was relegated to a DVD only release by the U.S. rightsholders. I emailed them asking if there were plans to release a blu but I never heard back from, so hopefully a U.K. label will get a blu release soon.
I have yet to see any of her action films & am curious to see how they stack up to classic HK action flicks, though they would be the least likely ones for me to pick up sight unseen.
I watched this back in October, but forgot to post about it. It’s a great example of Hui’s ability to work emotional and thematic complexity into popular entertainment without the film ceasing to be popular entertainment. Here it’s the sentimental family melodrama, the kind where a younger family member bonds with an older one, learning all sorts of life lessons, and then has to deal with the realities of death and grief as time proves short. Here, Andy Lau’s middle-aged filmmaker, Roger, develops a deeper relationship with the elderly woman who’d been the family caretaker long enough to’ve become a kind of family member herself, but whose weakening health means she requires more care now than she can give. There are lots of movies like this, yet Hui, without avoiding the customary beats, makes something sensitive and adult. Partly this is due to her realism and her sensitivity to economic realities. Movies like these tend to be upper middle class so that economic realities don’t intrude on the sentimental story. The characters tend to live in large houses, have plenty of free time and energy, and don’t worry overmuch about where and how they’ll live. No such pleasant fantasy here. Hui is blunt about the realities of nursing homes in Hong Kong. Deanie Yip’s Ah To can afford one that’s not abusive or exploitative (partly down to Lau’s character knowing the owner), but if it’s not the worst, I can only imagine how bad things could get. The place is crammed and dirty; there are no rooms, just rows of small squares curtained off from each other like a makeshift hospital; and the lives of the people there feel kind of hopeless given the surroundings. So while the nursing home has the conventional assortment of lovable oddballs, it’s not a pretty or lovable place. It never becomes a kind of home, or a place where joy is found. It’s endured. What tempers the melodrama and keeps it well short of treacle is the persistent sense that if it weren’t for Roger, Ah To would be at the mercy of a grim and uncaring society. Her safety net is thin, and even with it she lives something less than a dignified life in her garish surroundings. While the family she worked for show genuine care and affection for her (evident in a New Year’s phone call), at the same time, she was their employee rather than their relative or friend, and none of them pay her much mind when she’s not around. It’s only Roger’s sudden access of selflessness after a lifetime of taking her for granted that spawns a relationship to help her bear the indignities of her final years. Hui has made a lovely film out of material that normally would have me rolling my eyes. Her gentleness and uninsistence, her care in not overstepping emotionally in scene after scene, and her eye for authenticity once again makes greatness where any other director would’ve turned out sentimental mush.
A kind of excavation and remembrance of left wing political movements and activists in Hong Kong, composed as a series of portraits of the people, movements, and social issues from the late 70s to the late 90s. The film is variously a biopic, a documentary, a melodrama, and a recorded performance. The basic stratum is a biopic of a real priest, Franco Mella, who moved from Italy to Hong Kong and participated in many left wing movements. He’s played brilliantly by Anthony Wong, tho’ it’s impossible for a Westerner to buy Wong as an Italian where HK audiences obviously read Wong’s mixed-race status as foreign enough for it to work. This level is often filmed in a handsome realist style. Next is the documentary stratum that follows various left wing activists, Wong’s priest included, as they work for social change, specifically advocating for the human rights of the Yau Ma Tei boat people, who lived on boats in Kowloon’s harbour and, due to complicated social and political forces, found it impossible to go on living on the boats while also having no official registration that would allow them to be tenants on land. On top of which, many of them married mainlanders whom the HK government began deporting, breaking up families. This section is often filmed using handheld cameras with many reframings within a scene, cinema verite style. Then there’s the melodrama, a fully invented story of two thwarted lovers whose stories intersect with the political movements and activists across the decades. This is shot like your standard HK melodrama. Finally, the recorded performance, the film’s glue. It’s a street performance delivered directly to the camera by an old Trotskyist who gives necessary context and commentary, but not always directly about what we see. The film is broken down into various sections of history, and the performance introduces each section. On top of that is a framing device where Loletta Lee (here credited as Rachel Lee)'s character regains her memories following a traumatic brain injury, kicking off the excavation in a circle that leads back to where we started. So, a complicated, intricate structure combining many different elements. Yet it works wonderfully. Yes, it does feel disjointed, moving episodically across time without making explicit links between sections; and the storytelling is often oblique or elliptical, with Hui depending on the audience to put certain pieces together. But I think this is a good formal analogue for one of the themes of the film, the formless nature of activist work. The activists here are constantly engaging in protests, sit ins, press conferences, and hunger strikes without knowing if or when any of it'll be fruitful, so that their lives are dominated by a series of actions with no obvious connections to any outcomes. Activist work often feels disconnected and non-linear. Hui gives a strong sense of how little certainty social activism brings, how its commitments require a faith or hope that could easily slide into cynicism. Because Hui is clear-eyed, she sees how political movements fail, how impossible it is to enact social change, and how individuals are so easily swallowed up by the movements of history. Her compassion for the downtrodden does not override her sober, often despairing view of Hong Kong. And yet, as the title suggests, she wishes to celebrate these people’s efforts, to excavate this history of social agitation. Ann Hui’s compassion as much as her social commitments is at the forefront--compassion for her characters, for marginal groups, for whoever suffers and whoever tries to ameliorate that suffering. And that compassion is genuine rather than performative, so the movie is never at risk of sentimentality. That said, the film’s weakest part is its melodrama. Hui often uses melodrama as a way to bring the audience into more difficult material, here using a story similar to Comrades: Almost a Love Story where two people caught up in the time's social movements have an unrequited romance across time and shifting fortunes. Yet Hui doesn’t seem interested in her melodrama here, and that lack of interest kinda hamstrings a significant part of the movie because the romance doesn’t catch fire the way her social and political portrait does. I cared about the activists, the people they were helping, the social causes they dedicated themselves to—but I never cared about the central couple as a couple (their relationships with other people and with their activism was always interesting). So, flawed, yes, but a very good movie--difficult, complicated, but rich and rewarding.
Summer Snow (1995)
Takes the form of the light family melodrama, but its subject is illness and death and how families deal with the indignities of both. Roy Chiao, the stern and unpleasant family patriarch who doesn’t get along with his daughter-in-law, Josephine Siao, begins to show signs of alzheimer's. When his wife dies and his disease progresses, his daughter-in-law finds herself as his caretaker. The film's biggest flaw is its depiction of alzheimer’s. It gets some stuff right, like the failure to recognize loved ones, the wandering off, the erratic decision making; but other stuff, like Roy Chiao walking around catatonic much of the time, or thinking he’s 12 years old one moment and a young man the next, doesn’t ring true. At times the presentation feels like vague filmic ‘mental illness’. I’m no expert, obviously, but I have some experience with alzheimer’s patients, both within my family and through volunteering, and I often failed to recognize the people I’d met and worked with in Chiao’s performance. And even the stuff it gets right it misplaces: Roy Chiao is meant to be in the early stages but many of his behaviours are late-stage, eg. failing to recognize nearly all of his family, failing to recognize that his wife is dead in front of him, thinking he’s decades younger than he is, failing to recognize basic situations like taking a bath, etc. Sometimes he engages in comic delusional behaviour that’s more appropriate for those comedies where a family member has a wild but charming intellectual disability or mental illness. Roy Chiao isn’t playing a character but a set of traits. So the depiction felt generalized rather than clearly seen, which disappointed me. Hui is better at the family dynamics, which have the lived reality and authenticity I’ve come to expect. And she’s so subtle and clear eyed about the power dynamics, including how middle class families will quietly jockey for who has responsibility for aging family members, and how economic realities influence decision making. And Hui makes plenty of time for well observed relationship drama. Movies don’t often centre long-term marriages between middle-aged partners like Hui does here. Some of my favourite moments involved the quiet, comfortable humour they’re able to find to make their difficulties bearable. It was touching and felt real. Hui even throws in a subplot about how aging in the workplace is affected by younger, more technologically literate employees in an era of rapid modernization, which was unnecessary and underdeveloped but still fascinating. Hui mixes a lot of optimism into her story, often through humour or some small good fortunes; but the final shot of Josephine Siao’s face is ambivalent. So the film has a lot of Hui’s strengths, but is let down somewhat by its central conceit.
Night and Fog (2009)
Based on a real incident where a man with a long history of abusive behaviour murdered his wife and children. A movie told in retrospect, with interviews with the victim’s friends and helpers framing each stage in her victimization. Not memories exactly, as most of what we’re shown they didn’t witness, but something like the bare truth behind their memories. Hui abandons her usual gentleness in order to be blunt about the realities of abuse, so blunt that it risks cartoonishness. Not that the form the abuse takes is unrealistic, but as presented it exteriorizes Simon Yam’s psychology to such an extent that his abuse becomes flattened into polemic. Both this and All About Love the following year are explicit social arguments first, dramas second. Hui usually made her social commitments subtext, or in Ordinary Heroes, part of historical excavation/documentary. Here, they become simple polemic. Necessary polemic, but you feel you’re being beaten about the head. I minded less in All About Love because the film was more celebratory, an argument made through humanizing rather than stridency. Here, it’s a very serious sledgehammer Hui’s wielding. The best parts were the ones laying out the byzantine HK social system, its absurdities and failures, the ways it fails to serve the marginalized groups that need it most. And her portrait of the workings and female solidarity in women’s shelters is poignent. She does a great job, too, of showing how class, nationality, and linguistic divisions affect social standing and access to resources, especially with immigrants from the Mainland. Hui is upfront too about the way social systems fail women and immigrants: from social workers who minimize abuse because they’re mandated to preserve families first, to the service workers who refuse to deal properly with Mandarin speakers or who suspect mainland women to be prostitues, to the police who lie to cover for their failures to follow up on reports of abuse, to the class systems that allow monied men from HK to come to rural China, spread their money around, and gain a wife who’s dependent on them (with the victim’s family who benefited from his money becoming complicit in his abuse). I also felt like this was Hui’s reclamation of the Category III shocker. Hui uses the typical structure of the most infamous ‘true-life’ Cat IIIs (Dr. Lamb, The Untold Story, Sister of Darkness), with the movie opening with the aftermath of an atrocity before moving back to show the ugly lead up to the crimes, culminating in an explicit depiction of the heinous deed we opened with. Except here, instead of prurience, Hui attempts to transform exploitation into sincere social commentary and lend dignity to a subgenre that cynically exploits crimes against women and children. A movie full of good points worth making, but I wearied of being beaten about the head.
Cross posting from the Made in China list, just so everything's together.
Mr Sausage wrote: Sat Aug 09, 2025 2:25 pmStarry is the Night (Ann Hui, 1988)
Brigitte Lin (who’s brilliant here) is an overworked 40-year-old social worker who begins a love affair with an 18-year-old client. That affair kicks off a series of memories of her affair with her married college professor two decades prior. The movie mixes together memories with contemporary events in a stylish way, with associational imagery compelling time shifts. This does lend the movie a disjointed feel, but an appropriate one, with Lin’s internal world feeling fragmented and undigested. More intriguing is Hui’s use of politics: she pairs the two strands with the political events dominating the times. The historical section increasingly intersects with the violent pro-democracy protests in 1967 HK, while the contemporary section has Lin involved in the campaign of a reformist political candidate. The relationship between the main plot and the political themes is oblique, but the political sections give a kind of overarching commentary on Lin’s relationships: her early idealism and naivity shadowed by violent outbursts and authoritarian crack downs, while her later torrid relationship is shadowed by self-defeating attempts to change things by playing a rigged game. This is a reductionist description: quite a lot of subtle commentary is going on in the way the personal and the political align in ever more revealing ways that Hui, with her admirable trust in the audience, chooses not to spell out. It’s the best part of the movie, the use of parallel narrative strands to build larger thematic units. Less successful is the film’s late use of cliched coincidence out of the hoariest melodrama. Up til then the movie had been playing things realistically, so the moment feels contrived and manipulative, putting too emphatic a point on things where elsewhere it trusted the audience to make connections between past and present, personal and political, etc. More uncomfortable, tho’, is that the movie never acknowledges the obvious ethical problem with the two relationships. The ethical dimension of the early relationship only comes up in terms of the professor’s adultery, whereas Lin’s relationship with the boy is framed as a feminist battle against the social strictures that being a professional and a woman place on her. While the film doesn’t need to make a judgement on its characters’ actions, that it doesn’t even raise the obvious ethical issue just makes the movie feel as tho’ it’s missing something. Hui would address the same situation in July Rhapsody, again using two age-gap relationships across time to comment on each other, with much more success. Given the autobiographical slant of so many of Hui’s films, the fact that she twice returned to the subject of a professor in the 60s pursuing a relationship with a young student, and that she gives Brigitte Lin her birth date and characteristic haircut, I can’t help wondering if these films are Hui’s way of working through something similar from her own past. The emotion in Starry is the Night still feels raw and undigested—strong enough to compel associations with bombs and explosions, to produce fraught stories of bruising oneself against social chains. July Rhapsody on the other hand shows an artists who’s achieved some kind of distance on the events, who can look back with more wisdom and clarity, even generosity, than was possible in her early 40s despite being two decades out from the original events. Starry is the Night is a weaker film for Hui, but a fascinating one for what it shows of Hui’s development as an artist, especially when paired with its thematic cousin, July Rhapsody. Even minor Hui’s are full of riches.
The Spooky Bunch (Ann Hui, 1980)
A charming supernatural comedy no doubt inspired by the success of Sammo’s Spooky Encouters the same year, tho’ gently comic and romantic where Sammo was loud and crass. A traveling opera troupe arrives in a small town and encounters a host of spirits connected to a war-time curse. The movie’s a bit hard to follow, not helped by the fact that the copy I watched was an abysmal VHS rip whose burnt-in subs were often too washed out to read. While the material’s fine, it’s the style that interested me. It’s shot cinema verite style, especially in the performance sections where the handheld camera roves through a parade or amidst the backstage bustle. It’s a very New Wave style, but also a departure from the Argento/Carpenter influenced camera work and discontinuous editing style of Hui’s debut, The Secret. I enjoyed the thing’s messy energy—it bristles with life in all its chaos and unpredictability. But I’m surprised it made the HK Film Archive’s 100 Must-See HK Films over Song of the Exile and Ordinary Heroes. The movie’s pretty lightweight and, unusual for Hui, not interested in delving into its characters.
Princess Fragrance (Ann Hui, 1987)
Actually the second part of Hui’s big wuxia, The Romance of Book and Sword, an adaptation of a Louis Cha novel (I’m really going to have to read one of his books at some point—but they’re just so long!). I couldn’t find the first part anywhere, but somebody uploaded the second to youtube, and I didn’t know if it’d still be around if or when I ever found the first one. So I settled for watching the second half of a movie. Set in the deserts and forests of northwestern China among the muslim Uyghurs, the leader of the Red Lotus society, dedicated to fighting the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, helps the locals fend off the Manchu troops intent on conquering them while also carrying on a romance with the titular princess, whose fragrance comes from her childhood habit of eating flowers. An old fashioned martial epic in the King Hu vein, much different in style than what Tsui Hark/Ching Siu-Tung would popularize a few years later. It’s grander in scale, allows its narrative more breathing room, and is free of the wild fantasy that would come to define this subgenre. Hui focuses instead on political conspiracies and interpersonal drama, with a minimum of flying. But the style is also slower and clunkier, and the acting is wooden (the cast of mainland actors have none of the charisma or talent of their HK colleagues). The film’s major asset is the cinematography and location shooting, which even in the substandard copy I saw looked wonderful. It also has a sense of brutality and fatalism that contrasts sharply with so many later wuxias, which tended to aim at the grand and tragic. I can’t really judge only half a movie, but I enjoyed what I saw and hope the full thing gets a proper release someday.
Mr s -- Alas, though I have both halves of Romance of Book and Sword, I have this only on VCD. Very low-fi -- and not sure whether it can be ripped by any software I still have.
Acting isn't as strong perhaps, but visually (except for one sort of unfortunate shortcut in pt. 1) this is spectacular -- and the story is also quite powerful (and wrenching).
A movie like this ought to be boring. In a way it is boring. So how is it also so riveting? It’s just a bare look at average lives in the HK satellite town Tin Shui Wai. People shop, cook, attend family gatherings. Mostly they don’t talk much. The movie doesn’t just capture their conversations, but their silences. The silences while eating, while walking from one room to another, while thinking or daydreaming, while sifting through a newspaper, while working. The movie captures their spaces, too, with deep focus, wide-angle lenses that take in the material conditions the characters live in. They’re not pretty spaces, but their ugliness is average. The movie isn’t formless—everyday repetitions structure it—but it is plotless, with life seeming like a series of unconnected events organized only by our habits. HK movies are often loud and bustling, crammed with energy and extroversion. Hui avoids that characteristic energy for the most part. But the film does have energy of its own: it’s willing to linger, but over quite a lot of different things. The movie shifts between a couple modes: a handheld documentary style, a locked down observant style, and, less frequently, a conventional dramatic style. The documentary style usually brings you into the subject, often using a flatter lense and letting shoulders or the sides of heads crowd the frame, while the observant style is often more removed, emphasizing space and distance with wider lenses and framings either above or below head height. Cannily, both are used to express the same emotions, often loneliness and disconnection. The lowkey loneliness and emptiness of modern life is the context for another of Hui’s stories of how everyday people find small moments of kindness and humanity to brighten their lives. But that context is so crucial to how Hui avoids sentimentality in stories that, on the surface, seem designed to be a feel good tv movie. Here, a widow living with her lazy son befriends a lonely old woman living in their apartment block and begins doing random acts of kindness for her. But these acts of kindness aren’t transformative; they happen in a context where they don’t replace loneliness and dissatisfaction but simply make it more bearable, and otherwise seem pretty fragile. One small shift can give or take a lot from people very easily. Hui has no interest in remoulding life to please her audience; her movie is as much a reminder of the banality of life as it is the need for kindness—and it’s the size of that banality, with its repetitions, unhappinesses, and tedium that gives the very small, almost insignificant acts of kindness in the movie their power. Nobody solves each other’s entrenched family or economic problems, but they do take each other’s hand when needed. The movie is telling a conventional story and yet makes you feel all the time that you’re watching the raw stuff of life. Indeed, tho' a small portrait of only a few people's daily lives, it becomes a portrait of a whole city as well and a way of life, a catalogue or anatomy of places, people, and things that rarely get attention. It always impresses me how Hui manages stuff like that. There are a few moments where Hui doesn’t trust herself and overdoes things, but they’re rare. Hui doesn’t need to be loud to get her effects—the movie’s most devastating scenes are its quietest. This went up on Tubi recently: recommended.
