Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997

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Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997 The Post-Nostalgic Imagination Vivian P. Y. Lee

© Vivian P. Y. Lee 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22143–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of my brother, James Lee

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Contents

Introduction

1

Part I Time and Memory 1 Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046

21

2 Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung

43

3 Allegory, Kinship, and Redemption: Fu Bo and Isabella

66

Part II Schizophrenia, Amnesia, and Cinephilia 4 Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie To’s Urban Legends

87

5 The Kung Fu Hero in the Digital Age: Stephen Chow’s ‘Glocal’ Strategies

117

6 Karmic Redemption: Memory and Schizophrenia in Hong Kong Action Films

138

Part III In and Out 7 Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary

163

8 Outside the Nation: The Pan-Asian Trajectory of Applause Pictures

184

The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative

211

Notes

218

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary

236

Bibliography

242

Index

250

vii

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Introduction

This book is a critical study of the developments of Hong Kong cinema after the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. Neither an empirical survey nor historical account of the film industry, it attends to what I call the post-nostalgic imagination in Hong Kong cinema in the first decade of Chinese rule. Aesthetically, the post-nostalgic has nuanced connections with a long tradition of filmmaking that has developed from creative synergies of both local and foreign sources. Historically, one and a half century of colonial rule and its postcolonial aftermath has also shaded the local cinema with a tinge of ‘homesickness’, from nostalgia for a lost (Chinese) homeland in early years to a fin-de-siècle melancholy at the end of colonial rule, and ambivalence towards the prospects of the de-colonized present. The ‘Chineseness’ of this local cinema, however debatable, is still felt in the resilience of the realist tradition: refined and updated by the Hong Kong New Wave cinema and subsequent arthouse films, elements of the Chinese realist cinema still find varied employment in the mainstream cinema, with an overall thrust to reflect and occasionally critique social conditions albeit in lighter-hearted and throwaway entertainment packages. (The grassroots consciousness of Cantonese comedies and melodramas, and the national allegory in Tsui Hark’s new martial arts films are good examples in this category.) It is important therefore to point out early in this study that the post-nostalgic imagination explored in the following chapters is as new as it is not, in the sense that newness always has a genealogy and is always informed by it. Yet it is new because it gives expression to changing categories of value and frames of reference at a time of paradigm shifts, registered in the change in political sovereignty, realignments of power in the global economy, and multiple financial and biological epidemics 1

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that have ravaged the local society since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The analysis in the following chapters aims to identify key features of the post-nostalgic imagination in a range of post-1997 Hong Kong films across different styles and genres, and offer some points of departure for further research. More specifically, it addresses three important recurrent themes since the so-called ‘golden age’ of the New Hong Kong Cinema from the early 1980s to the early 1990s: nostalgia, memory, and the problematic of the ‘local’. These themes, I believe, provide clues to understanding the permutations of the local cinematic imagination in the post-handover years. Two sets of questions underscore the present inquiry: firstly, what is the nature of nostalgia in the film text? What are its constituent features? Does the deployment of nostalgia serve as a critique of the nostalgic, and hence result in a new practice of the image? Secondly, what happens to the ‘local’ under the double hegemony of the national and the global? Is the local still relevant to Hong Kong cinema in a state of flux? In my discussion, these questions are seen through specific thematic, contextual, and formal elements of the films and filmmakers in question in each chapter. The post-nostalgic, therefore, is not a reductive category or a universal formula. Rather, it points to a shared aesthetic temperament behind a diversity of filmic imaginations. Nonetheless, it is not impossible to conceptualize this diversity in more concrete terms. Among these are the notion of intertextuality as both a means and a formal expression of the post-nostalgic, and the idea of the local and its enduring instability when applied to the case of Hong Kong. To the extent that the production of the local in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s has a dual register in the arthouse cinema’s rethinking of history and the recycling of past images in commercial films, intertextuality and the local also provide vantage points to access the post-handover milieu. As we shall see, the post-nostalgic is used to characterize certain particularities of post-1997 Hong Kong cinema so as to distinguish it from the kind of postmodern nostalgia in Fredric Jameson’s critique of the late capitalist society. In the local context, intertextuality articulates quite different desires and meanings, to which I will return later in this introduction. Before turning to intertextuality as a formal and symbolic component of the post-nostalgic, it is useful here to first revisit the trajectory of the local in popular and critical discourse, and how it is understood in this study. The two decades prior to the handover is a period that marked the city’s political transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. Beginning from

Introduction

3

the mid-1990s, the local film industry ran into a period of recession. Many critics lamented the decline in both quality and box-office returns of local productions, thus almost confessing a fin-de-siècle nostalgic mourning of loss, as the film industry took further plunges thanks to the Asian financial meltdown in late 1997 and the SARS epidemic in 2003. The fate of Hong Kong cinema, it seems, ‘mirrors’ the political uncertainties, economic failures, and the concomitant social malaise that visited the ex-colony at this critical historical juncture. As I will explain later on in this introduction, while nostalgia triggered by the apprehension of the ‘end of (colonial) history’ pervaded the local cinema during the two decades of political transition, neither history nor the historical imagination ended with the arrival of the ‘future anterior’, that is, the anxiety over ‘what will have been’,1 as filmmakers have made crossovers to the post-handover realities of the ex-colony with an awareness of the new social, political, and cultural configurations and their impact on the understanding and articulation of the local, a problematic made more so by its multiple entanglements with the national, the transnational, and the global. This awareness calls for a self-evaluation among filmmakers and the film industry as a whole in order to survive the new challenges from within and outside the local-national context. The mutual entwinement of the local/global and national/transnational has been a central concern of recent academic discourse in the humanities, especially the way in which globalization has weakened old forms of identities and affiliations through drastic realignments of political, social, and economic interests, thereby redrawing and redefining national, regional, and cultural boundaries that used to provide frames of reference for communal and individual identification.2 In film studies it has been acknowledged that the forces of globalization and their uneven encounters with local specificities are inextricably linked to the emergence and increasing predominance of transnational cinema, which Ezra and Rowden describe as being ‘most “at home” in the in-between spaces of culture . . . between the local and the global’ and ‘a marker of cosmopolitanism [that] at once transcends the national and presupposes it’.3 In the context of Hong Kong, this fourfold problematic is heavily inflected by the history of colonialism and the condition of postcoloniality that not only follows national reunification, but also precedes it, in what Ackbar Abbas calls ‘pre-postcoloniality’ as an attribute of pre-1997 Hong Kong films. If the cinema of Mainland China in the 1980s and early 1990s has been concerned with reconstructing a common, albeit ‘unofficial’ cultural past as an integral part of a bigger quest for a renewed sense of nationhood, Hong Kong cinema of

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the same period was in the grips of a cultural imaginary of the ‘local’ that is neither completely (comfortably) Chinese nor British, but an in-between entity that draws attention to and calls into question the ambiguities of its own histories and cultural roots vis-à-vis both the colonial and the Chinese ‘heritage’. Instead of being a claustrophobic imagination of origins, the local, thanks also to the thoroughly commercialized and commodified nature of Hong Kong cinema, is open to other inflections: Hollywood, international film festivals and arthouse circuits, and the work of a critical mass of film critics and scholars have promoted Hong Kong films and filmmakers to the world. If a key aspect of transnationalism ‘is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global existence’, it is also true that ‘its nationalist other is . . . a canny dialogical partner whose voice often seems to be growing stronger at the very moment that its substance is fading away’.4 In Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, the ‘China factor’ has been a looming presence, just as the nation itself has now become both a symbolic and a material force. Ironically, this takes place at a time when globalization, and transnational filmmaking thereof, has rendered oblivious established understanding of the nation and national cinema.5 In film studies, ‘Chinese cinemas’ has replaced ‘Chinese cinema’ as a standard term of reference. While Sheldon Lu (1997: 3) sees more relevance in the term ‘transnational’ to conceptualize Chinese cinemas today, Berry and Farquhar (2006) propose to rethink the relation between cinema and the national, in which the latter term is less a geopolitical given than a problem: ‘Within the framework of cinema and the national, the national appears as multiple and constructed . . . places that have the most evidently complex relation to the national [e.g. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China] are likely to emerge as privileged sites of analysis now’.6 ‘[W]ith the shift to a framework of cinema and the national that puts the focus on the national as a problem’, say Berry and Farquhar, ‘other local and transnational identity formations [i.e. region, class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality] take center stage’.7 The complex dynamics between the local/global and the national/ transnational underline many Hong Kong films that deal with nostalgia and memory. Scholarship on this ‘nostalgic wave’ in Hong Kong cinema, and indeed in the cultural production of Hong Kong and Mainland China during the 1990s, has shed light on the nature of this nostalgia and its cinematic manifestations. In the same collection of essays on Hong Kong cinema, Linda Lai Chiu-han and Rey Chow write respectively on the use of nostalgia in the films of Stephen Chow (what Lai

Introduction

5

calls ‘enigmatization’) and Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (see below).8 Commenting on the commercial exploitation of the ‘grand narrative’ of Hong Kong’s success story, Eric Ma exposes the ideological underpinnings of the officially sanctioned nostalgic story of Hong Kong’s past shared by both the Chinese and the British authorities (Chapter 7).9 Nostalgia manifests itself in a wide range of 1980s and 1990s films which can be broadly put under three categories: (1) the overtly nostalgic: films that mainly recycle past images in self-reflexive parody (Chapter 1); (2) the projection of a fin-de-siècle sentiment through direct reference to impending crisis, personal reminiscence, or displacement, usually featuring characters caught in a present state of flux. This category includes John Woo’s hero films (a ‘cinema of crisis’ according to Tony Williams), as well as films of a more intimate and personal nature, for example Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile/Ke tu qiu hen (1990), Yim Ho’s Homecoming/Si sui liu lian (1984), and Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild/A fei zhengzhuan (1990); and (3) superimposition of nostalgic imagery on the present in the form of a ghost and/or haunting memories, for instance Stanley Kwan’s Rouge/Yanzhi kou (1987), Center Stage/Ruan Lingyu (aka. The Actress, 1991), and Ann Hui’s Spooky Bunch/Zhuang daozheng (1980). In these films, nostalgia takes three main forms: the present seen through a hallucinatory reconstruction of the past (horror and supernatural thrillers); a hallucinatory projection of the present as a moment of impending crises and ruins (John Woo and action cinema); and the past as an amalgamation of past images being rediscovered as a source of collective cultural memory (popular nostalgia films). These traits speak to the peculiar intertextuality of the nostalgic imagination in Hong Kong films in the 1990s. This study will look at mutations of the nostalgic imagination in Hong Kong horror, action, comedy, and arthouse drama films after the political handover not merely as historical and political allegories, but also as an important part of the local visual culture that enables new critical engagements with established visual codes and conventions of Hong Kong cinema. Running through my discussion is the belief that the nostalgic, hence the post-nostalgic, is a key to understanding the nuanced connections between the cinematic imagination and the larger sociopolitical realities of Hong Kong; it also demonstrates the importance of the local cinema to the collective cultural memory of the ex-colony by supplying it with both entertaining and thought-provoking images to make sense of the present. More importantly, the intimate link between nostalgia and historical memory in the Hong Kong context helps to explain a specific quality of Hong Kong films in the last decade, in that nostalgia

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is transformed by an active re-visioning of past visual codes that bespeak not a break with the past, but a need to embrace the nostalgic in new ways, that is, new treatment of old themes and new configurations of tried images to speak to the realities of the present. As the following chapters will demonstrate, whether in arthouse or commercial films, the nostalgic resurfaces in the intertextual links between past images and the film text in the present in ways and for purposes quite different from earlier films. In essence, the post-nostalgic is not ‘anti-nostalgic’, but implies a nuanced relatedness to the past as history/text/image; as such, the post-nostalgic can also be construed as a form of meta-(con)textual self-critique. I am, of course, speaking in general terms, but, as Mike Featherstone says of the relation between modernism and postmodernism, it is within the tension between a break from old forms and the discovery of a budding presence of the new in the old that the prefix ‘post’ can best be understood.10 In this light the term ‘post-nostalgic’ used in this study is an attempt to better describe and understand the new face/phase of nostalgia in Hong Kong films in the post-handover period. This term therefore is highly contextualized in meaning and has to be understood and applied as such. One other reason for coining the ‘post-nostalgic’ is to avoid a likely conflation with the kind of ‘postmodern nostalgia’ that Fredric Jameson has eloquently argued in his discussion of late capitalism and commodity culture in the post-industrial West.11 While postmodern nostalgia, as Jameson sees it, is undeniably present in some Hong Kong films, and I agree that Hong Kong society does share many of the characteristics of Jameson’s late capitalist consumer society, the nostalgic as manifested in Hong Kong cinema has other equally important traits and qualities that need to be differentiated from Jameson’s theory of the postmodern.12 For one thing, the characterization of postmodern nostalgia as ‘depthless’ and symptomatic of a weakening or loss of history does not do full justice to the kind of nostalgic and post-nostalgic imagination discernible in Hong Kong cinema. As Ackbar Abbas has cogently argued, Hong Kong cinema ‘has to be popular in order to be at all’. Granted, it is also possible, if not imperative, to make ‘a virtue out of necessity’.13 Shelly Kraicer rightly notes that in Hong Kong cinema, the opposition between art film and commercial genre film is a ‘false dichotomy . . . since its origins contains . . . a rich array of genres’, ranging from ‘artistic melodrama, social realism, didactic political commentary . . . satirical comedy, adult romance, youth coming-of-age, and historical nostalgia [to] a home-brewed authentic “art film” genre,

Introduction

7

the HK New Wave’. 14 If being ‘postmodern’ inevitably means a blatant disregard of boundary, such as that between art and commodity, Hong Kong cinema has indeed been postmodern in order to be modern, an anachronism befitting the dilemma of being ‘post-’ anything. Thus, in this study, the post-nostalgic is invoked to investigate the critical revisitation of the nostalgic in the local cinema stripped of fin-de-siècle splendor, when the ‘will have been’ has become passé, when the ‘culture and politics of disappearance’ has to be re-negotiated in the materialized present at a time when the territory is under a new set of rules governing its social, economic, and political well-being. Readers also will discover in the following chapters that the local is used in conjunction with a range of cultural and filmic practices associated with the emotional attachment to old forms, which include narrative and visual culture, architectural spaces, and various visual and generic codes that have helped establish Hong Kong cinema as a unique regional trademark in its global circulation. Nonetheless, as a predominantly commercial cinema, this trademark is, and will continue to be, subject to pragmatic adjustments and structural re-engineering that respond to not only the vicissitudes of the global market, but also the newly important ‘national domestic’ market in Mainland China. As the local becomes part of the global, the transnational is also increasingly redefined by its nuanced connections and reactions to the national. In the post-1997 milieu, these new conditions of possibilities find expressions in Hong Kong films at the levels of style, content, and production and marketing strategies. This study contends that while the national and the local are being challenged by the transnational and the global, in Hong Kong cinema the problematic of the local remains central to a wide spectrum of films and filmmakers. This is partly due to the as yet unanswered quest for identity—a local identity constituted not by some authentic essence but impurities and ambivalence at the very enunciation of the word. As mentioned above, the post-nostalgic is not anti-nostalgic, but designates a mutation in the nature of cinematic nostalgia and the shifting frames of reference that result. It is useful here to outline the contextual and theoretical considerations in analysing the nostalgia film and the use of nostalgia in film in Hong Kong cinema since the mid-1980s to provide an anchorage for the forthcoming chapters. Since this book is concerned with the post-handover years, the two decades prior to the change of sovereignty will serve mainly as the historical context for more recent developments. To this end, I try to engage current critical

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scholarship on nostalgia, memory, and historical representation in film to situate my analysis in a broader theoretical framework.

Nostalgia: Images and memory The box-office and critical success of 92 Legendary La Rose Noire/92 Hei meigui dui hei meigui (Jeffrey Lau 1992) set the decade’s trend of nostalgic films parodying 1950s and 1960s Cantonese movies and star personae (Chapter 1). Other commercial productions, most notably John Woo’s ‘hero films’ and Tsui Hark’s eclectic corpus of action-comedies, selfconsciously reflect on Hong Kong’s political uncertainties, with a deep sense of loss imbuing both the film narrative and a cinematography that indulges in Hong Kong’s fin-de-siècle cityscape (Chapter 4). In Tsui’s case, national allegory carries satirical remarks on Chinese history, as in the case of the Once Upon a Time in China/Huang Feihong series starring Jet Li as the legendary kung fu master, Huang Feihong, a character resurrected from old Cantonese movies from the 1950s. Playful, sentimental, and at times irreverent, the nostalgia articulated in these films, by virtue of their self-conscious theatricality, that is, their self-awareness as commodities, is not about the search for a founding cultural myth, or a collective national past to be condemned or redeemed (which better describes 1980s cultural imagination in Mainland China and much of pre-1980s Taiwan literature). Instead, the nostalgic imagination celebrates its eclecticism in articulating a sense of the local, very often portrayed as an uprooted subject. At about the same time, cinematic nostalgia infused more serious arthouse films exemplified by the Hong Kong New Wave and the ‘second wave’;15 instead of hilarious gags and explosive action, these films engage with nostalgia as a vehicle for historical reflection, self-discovery, and cultural critique. Stylistically and thematically diverse, these films revisit the past as a site of contending personal memories. While Yim Ho’s Homecoming depicts China as a benign hometown for the Hong Kong migrant, Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile problematizes such naturalized homecoming: in Hui’s film, the truly nostalgic figures are die-hard (Japanese and Chinese) nationalists, and by refuting their claim to truth Hui effectively deconstructs nostalgia as national myth. Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage juxtaposes fictional and documentary fragments showcasing two actresses from 1930’s Shanghai and 1980’s Hong Kong as mutually reflexive timeframes to destabilize the authenticity of the bio-pic, and Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild re-enacts the sad tale of being banished from one’s origin to ‘de-link’ identity and authenticity.

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Defending the nostalgia film of the 1970s in American cinema against Jameson’s criticism of the pastiche as a de-historicizing commodity form, Vera Dika points out the potential resistance of certain nostalgia films (e.g. American Graffiti and The Conformist), noting, via Roland Barthes, that the recycling of old forms ‘does not demythify the original’ but implies ‘a tendency to utilize original forms for critical oppositions or displacements’ (original italics).16 Although this critical function does not apply to all nostalgia films, Dika’s argument illuminates the complex, sometimes subconscious, impulses in filmic recycling of past images, and also the tension between the ‘depthless’ recycled images and the weight of historical memory these images refer to and evoke in the audience. Commenting on the historical meaning of nostalgia films in 1990s Hong Kong, and also as a corrective to the Jamesonian critique of nostalgia mentioned above, Natalia Chan writes, The reconfiguration of the idols of 1950s and 1960s cinema and the reconstruction of the social setting and moral values of the historical past that carry out the nostalgic emotion in audience reception signifies the collective unconsciousness and the social memory of the people of Hong Kong. It is a nostalgia that points to the introspection of the past, the anxiety of the present, and the uncertainty of the future of the city. It is also a nostalgia that awakens the sense of social belonging as well as the search for cultural identity.17 If nostalgia as manifested in Hong Kong cinema constitutes a form of social memory, this memory, or its cinematic evocation, is less rooted in actual historical events than in a shared cultural imaginary (hence the ‘collective unconsciouness’) and a shared sentiment when experiencing, and re-experiencing, images from the past. Indeed, nostalgic films during this period usually display a self-conscious artificiality to draw attention not to a verifiable past but to the film styles and period codes of the local popular culture. While it is tempting to dismiss this kind of nostalgic appropriations as mere ‘surfaces’, a kind of pastiche that is depthless, de-historicizing, and devoid of critical content typical of the postmodern commodification of art and culture, contemporary art, high and low, seems to have embraced the pastiche as a potential tool for cultural critique and subversion: ‘Postmodern pastiche is about cultural memory and the merging of horizons past and present’, says Ingeborg Hoesterey;18 it is a ‘dialogical mode . . . of cultural production in postmodernism’ and ‘a vast semantic field in which . . . superimpositions of genre and mode come about as a result of cultural perceptions

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and conceptual traditions’.19 As a form of pastiche that merges horizons past and present, cinematic nostalgia in its high and low forms invites critical re-appraisal as a self-reflexive mode of historical representation characterized by self-conscious theatricality and a creative engagement with pre-existing images and texts.

Nostalgic intertexts: Locating the local in the post-1997 imagination In her article on Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, Rey Chow reflects on the nature of nostalgia and its ‘embodiment’ in the filmic image: ‘Nostalgia is not simply a reaching toward the definite past from a definite present, but a subjective state that seeks to express itself in pictures imbued with particular memories of a certain pastness’ (215, italics added).20 In Chow’s reading, nostalgia is a subjective state and a powerful presence in the filmic image, or what she calls ‘the filmic-image-as-nostalgia’, for the image, says Chow, is replete with objects and details, and bodily gestures and facial expressions that, when projected on screen, ‘becomes collective as well as completely private’.21 Thus nostalgia as an imaginary has to be understood in terms of its fantastical qualities, that is, the ‘pictures’ that carry memories of pastness. This understanding of the visuality of nostalgia, or nostalgic envisioning of pastness, highlights not only the imagistic quality of nostalgia, but also the (inter)textuality of a nostalgic invocation of pastness, for every pictorial (re)construction of pastness necessitates repetition and appropriation of other texts—a pastiche of certain pre-existing images that constitute the collective or private repertoire of cultural memory. This is precisely what Rey Chow discovers in the work of Li Bihua (author of the novel on which Rouge is based): ‘Li Bihua’s writings are always characterized by a fascination with the materials of past literature—with words, phrases, idioms, legends, history books . . . Li constructs loss as something that is not specifiable and yet traceable in the intertextual relation between the past and the present’ (original italics).22 The ‘idiomatic’ nostalgia is similar to what Linda Lai Chiu-han calls ‘enigmatization’ in 1990s Hong Kong films (especially Stephen Chow’s ‘cinema of nonsense’), referring to the genre’s strategy of ‘addressing a distinctly local viewer with quotations of popular stereotypes, stock characters, recognizable plot lines, and other conventions from classical Cantonese and Mandarin films, either in a period context or a contemporary setting’. In her analysis, Lai not only acknowledges the social function and subversive potential of these popular texts, but she also notes that ‘the substance of popular memory [in these films] is

Introduction

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centrifugal to the dominant discourse of Hong Kong’s economic success story’ or the ‘official grand narrative of “Hong Kong history”.’23 While both Chow and Lai’s essays deal with nostalgia in pre-1997 Hong Kong cinema, their arguments are insightful to a critical appraisal of what comes after. First of all, they suggest that nostalgia is not simply a depthless pastiche but, in its localized form nostalgia in Hong Kong cinema reflects the unique character of the social memory it embodies, as reconstituted forms of popular culture, a text created by parodying and appropriating older texts. This aspect of cinematic nostalgia, as a means to re-appropriate the past through revisiting pre-existing images, is at work in many post-1997 films discussed in the following chapters. As the following chapters will demonstrate, the aesthetic of nostalgia after 1997, especially in the mainstream cinema, tends to be less celebratory in its evocation of the past; more importantly, it is less certain about the meaning of the past images and codes being recycled in the present. While there remains an emotional attachment to old form, this nostalgic sentiment is often countered by a desire to anchor the past in the present, that is, to reinvent the film medium through a conscious reconfiguration of past images. In some cases, the reconfiguring act carries as much thematic weight as what is signified on-screen. Different from the recycling of past images in most nostalgia films, the high degree of selfconsciousness in the use of intertextual references at the stylistic and sometimes thematic levels across genres, from visual styles and characterization to spatial representation, seems to go beyond nostalgia. In other words, the post-nostalgic is a serious attempt to regain a sense of history by a self-conscious grounding in the local popular cultural tradition, especially that of filmmaking. As such, the post-nostalgic can be understood as an aesthetic temperament shared by the films discussed in this study, and by many others I cannot cover due to the limitation of space. The urge to reinvent through self-reflexive intertextuality also demands a reinterpretation of the local against the repertoire of clichés, be they visual, verbal, ideological, social, or political. Among such clichés is the so-called grand narrative of the Hong Kong success story, which seemed to have lost its credibility during a prolonged economic depression in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The HKSAR government’s repeated policy failures in managing these unprecedented crises, especially in its handling of the SARS epidemic in 2003, added fuel to the already widespread social discontent and further demoralized the public, culminating in the 500,000-strong mass protest on July 1, 2003 and subsequent resignations of two high-ranking officials and

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the then Chief Executive Tung Chee-wah himself in 2005. The local film industry, like other sectors of the economy, took further plunges during these trying years. In fact, the local film industry had been hard-hit by the erosion of the domestic market by Hollywood films and a growing piracy market since mid-1993. As box-office revenues continued to drop and local productions declined, filmmakers were under tremendous pressure to either sink or swim. It was at this critical time that new angles were sought to engage with old genres, and new light was shed on conventional modes. At the same time, the success of a few directors in capturing overseas (Western) audiences, as in the cases of John Woo and Wong Kar-wai, and the growing interest in Chinese films worldwide prompted Hong Kong filmmakers to rethink the relationship between local content and international film cultures. Meanwhile, the loosening restrictions on cultural import and joint-venture productions in Mainland China had drawn many to seek opportunities in the lucrative film market up North. Hong Kong films, it seemed, must reach out to the global market for its future survival. This awareness translates to an increasing presence of Hong Kong films at international film festivals and expos, which in turn necessitates corresponding adjustments in filmmaking and marketing strategies. Given the complex topos of the global mediascape (Appadurai) and the overlapping interests and territories in trans/national cultural production, local articulations are usually shrouded in ambivalence, running the risk of either a regressive politics that essentializes (fantasizes?) primordial identity or depoliticized apologetics of consumerism. These tendencies are observed at different levels of social and political discourse in Hong Kong nowadays. One can hardly miss the nationalistic overtones communicated through top-down soft propaganda in the mass media: government-sponsored ‘theme songs’ and musical performances by Canto pop idols; television dramas and documentaries reinforcing patriotic feelings; regular well-orchestrated ‘visits’ by Olympics gold medalists, Chinese astronauts, and other Mainland public figures sporting a modern, affluent lifestyle—all these are efforts by the local and central authorities to cultivate a sense of national belonging in Hong Kong, and to instill pride in the achievements of the Motherland (zuguo), a term that somehow has been adapted by the media to replace the more neutral word ‘China’ (zhongguo) after the handover, especially since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The current CEO of the Hong Kong government, Donald Tsang, provoked public furor in his 2008 policy speech, which proposed increased spending on government-funded ‘educational’ trips to China for high-school

Introduction

13

students while demanding individual background checks on a minimal increment (HKD 300/month) in old-age benefits, at a time when the ‘financial tsunami’ originated in the United States had thrown the world economy into unprecedented turmoil, and many locals out of jobs. On the other hand, a particular brand of nostalgic consumerism still holds sway, as popular products and images carrying an aura of ‘old Hong Kong’ run in parallel with the cult of ‘old Shanghai’.24 As Ackbar Abbas puts it, the real issue lies not with a lack of identity, but with too many. What is needed, instead, is a new subjectivity that can resist the temptation of ‘identity’ as an innocent given, be it superimposed or oppositional.25 Between global citizenship and national belonging, it seems, the local as a site for cultural self-reinvention and ‘minoritarian’ practice easily slips into an ideological cul-de-sac. But it is by no means passé as a critical category. Instead of seeing identity as an end in itself, the local in Hong Kong films is better posited as a new problematic, one that situates itself in the interstices of past and present, mobilizing its own cultural resources as a form of memory without any pretensions of authenticity, of being well-defined and absolute. This understanding of the local, in its multiple articulations and engagements with the material and ideological forces of globalism, nationalism, and transnationalism, allows us to enter the variegated cinemascape of post-1997 Hong Kong through many generic doors; it also partakes of a larger effort by film scholars to re-examine the relationship between film as entertainment/commodity, film as art, and film as a powerful form of social discourse.26 After all, if the local is a construct invented to cope with a ‘bad situation’, its slipperiness becomes ‘something good’, a ‘weakness’ that a postcolonial subject uses to resist the rigid codification of power. Such an understanding of the local offers an opportunity to rethink the questions of nationhood, specifically those relating to China (originary culture), Mainland China (geopolitical power), and Chineseness (ethnic-cultural affiliation). This book consists of three parts: ‘Time and Memory’, ‘Schizophrenia, Amnesia, and Cinephilia’, and ‘In and Out’. The chapters in ‘Time and Memory’ examine the treatment of nostalgia and memory in a cluster of films that illustrate the post-nostalgic mode of historical imagination. The first two chapters examine the works of three arthouse directors: Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, and Fruit Chan. These directors mark the different stages of the New Hong Kong Cinema and its subsequent development since the early 1980s, each showing its own distinctive style and thematic concerns. All three directors exhibit a penchant for evoking

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cultural memories through critical engagement with nostalgia, a mode of historical imagination that infiltrated many Hong Kong productions in the pre-1997 period. Chapter 1 looks at two of Wong Kar-wai’s ‘60s trilogy’, In the Mood for Love/Huayang nianhua (2002) and 2046 (2004). While these films can be classified as ‘nostalgia films’ according to the period style and nostalgic ambience that dominates the narrative and mise-en-scène, my analysis is concerned with the more intricate aspects of the use of nostalgia in these films. Through an examination of the visual and structural strategies of Mood and 2046, I argue that the films’ self-reflexive intertextuality, hybrid temporal/spatial references, and stylistic flourishes offer not only nostalgic reminiscences but also a critique of nostalgia in the form of a close self-analysis. This chapter ends with a preliminary outline of the nature and characteristics of the post-nostalgic imagination that the rest of this study will further investigate and elaborate. Wong Kar-wai may be the ‘Hong Kong auteur’ par excellence by virtue of his internationalist aesthetics and distinctively postmodern appeal; yet the more down-to-earth approach to cinematic representation characteristic of the social realism of the Hong Kong New Wave is still upheld by fellow arthouse practitioners. Chapter 2 looks at two such examples, Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes/Qian yan wan yu (1999) and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung/Xiluxiang (1999). Ann Hui is a pioneer of the New Wave; while Fruit Chan made his first commercial film in 1993 (Finale in Blood/Da nao Guangchanglong), his truly breakthrough film is Made in Hong Kong/Xianggang zhizao (1997). Nonetheless, both directors show a penchant for social criticism in film, and both demonstrate a strong preference for shooting on location, using the local urbanscape not only as a backdrop but also as a repertoire of memories and local histories. This being said, Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung represent two modes of remembering: Ann Hui’s film seeks to give voice to the silenced and marginalized by re-enacting the social and political events of the 1970s and 1980s, while Fruit Chan’s film uses the popular cultural tradition, particularly Cantonese opera and Cantonese cinema, as the locus of collective memory and social critique. In both films, the grand narrative of Hong Kong’s historical transformation into an ‘economic miracle’ and first-class global city is persistently challenged. The interweaving of references to old texts, real or imaginary, underscores the critical function of the post-nostalgic in these films. The subject of Chapter 3 is the younger generation. The films in question are Fu Bo (2003) by Wong Ching-po and Lee Kung-lok, and Isabella (2006) by Edmond Pang Ho-cheung. Wong and Lee’s film is a low-budget independent production shot on video, while Pang, with a track record in

Introduction

15

commercial productions, was able to obtain studio backing for his arthouse debut. Both films are set in Macau, a former Portuguese colony. While the tiny colonial enclave is not unfamiliar to Hong Kong film audiences, with a few exceptions Macau has functioned mainly as an excursion or adventure spot where the main action happens to spur. In Fu Bo and Isabella, Macau is neither the typical ‘Las Vegas of the East’ nor a backwater colonial enclave. Instead, the intense human drama in these films alludes to an existential crisis unfolding against the backdrop of the two cities’ (post-)colonial landscape. In all three chapters, the post-nostalgic encapsulates what I see as a common denominator of the films examined. Under this rubric I examine how these films translate the nostalgic mode of historical imagination into a renewed engagement with history as part of the living present. The second part, ‘Schizophrenia, Amnesia, and Cinephilia’, focuses on the action film. The rationale behind this choice is, firstly, Hong Kong action film (together with the martial arts film) is one of the most transnational and geographically mobile genres and for decades has been the film industry’s major export and source of domestic and overseas revenues. Secondly, in recent years the action film has increasingly become part of a global visual culture to which Hong Kong artists have made tremendous contribution. This development is closely linked to the problematic of the local and the cinema’s adaptability to political and economic vicissitudes domestic and otherwise. In this part, I look at the permutations of the action film in terms of a struggle with its own memory. The commercial weighting of action films precludes the kind of philosophical contemplations exemplified by the art directors mentioned above. Memory, as it were, is always a negotiated existence, mediating between a sharpened awareness of the genre’s need to internationalize itself to survive in the global market, the emotional attachment to local traditions, and an anxiety of losing its own history to the new global visual regime of which it is ineluctably a part. The three chapters deal with the works of Johnnie To and his Milkyway Production team, Hong Kong’s ‘King of Comedy’ Stephen Chow, and veteran action directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, to examine the way in which their films reflect and reflect on the changing landscape of Hong Kong cinema through genre refashioning. The chapter on Johnnie To traces the development of the new aesthetic of the ‘group hero’ and the inevitable decline, literally and symbolically, of the traditional hero prototype. These two trends were already present in other action films since the mid-1990s, but To is a key figure in transforming the genre and bringing it to international audiences. As we shall see, To’s

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Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997

aesthetic signifies a creative synergy of conventional elements, foreign influences, and contemporary sensibilities, which account for his growing popularity among local and overseas audiences. To’s reworking of genre rightly places him among the ranks of ‘internationalized Hong Kong auteurs’ after Wong Kar-wai and John Woo. Chapter 5 temporarily shifts the focus from action to comic kung fu films, Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer/Shaolin zuqiu and Kung Fu Hustle/Kung fu. These two films, I argue, embody Chow’s ‘glocal’ strategies, that is, to reinvent the local for a global audience. Known for his prolific career in ‘nonsense’ comedies (mo lei tau), Chow’s ground-breaking kung fu films earn him the much delayed recognition outside Hong Kong. To some scholars, Chow’s Shaolin Soccer partakes of the ‘new localism’ in contemporary East Asian cinema, through which the ‘local’ is recoded in a film language amenable to a wider audience in the region.27 My reading of Chow’s films attends to the creative deployment of conventional themes, visual vocabulary, and subject matter alongside mixed references to Hollywood classics to obtain a postmodern ‘remix’ of style and images. In this process, the incorporation of CGI (computer graphic imagery) plays an important role in updating and perfecting kung fu in a world obsessed with digital technologies. Indeed, Chow’s glocal strategies are a way to accommodate the filmmaker’s dialectical impulses: a deep reverence to the local cultural traditions (especially Bruce Lee-style kung fu, Cantonese melodrama and martial arts films) and a desire to transcend his localism. Chapter 6 concludes this part with a close-reading of Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak Siufai’s Infernal Affairs/Wujian dao trilogy (2002, 2003) and Confession of Pain/Shang cheng (2006). The Infernal Affairs trilogy has been regarded as a turning point in Hong Kong’s action film, if not Hong Kong cinema per se since its decline in the mid-1990s. The box-office grossing of Part 1 surpassed the Titanic in 2002, and the trilogy has been hailed as a landmark Hollywood-style ‘high concept’ blockbuster in Hong Kong cinema. Comparatively, Lau and Mak’s subsequent and no less high concept film, Confession of Pain, has received less critical attention. Upon closer look, the latter film offers a fertile ground for comparison with its exemplary predecessors. My discussion probes the distorted psyche of the cop-hero in these films to uncover their hidden links: the obsession with memory and its schizophrenic articulations; the symbolism of the hero–villain; and the configuration of the city, its relationship to nostalgia, and resistance to its temptations. My analysis of the these films yields a different conclusion on the Infernal Affairs trilogy, especially Part 2, whose recycling of stock images from the past is symptomatic of a failed nostalgia

Introduction

17

due to its inability, or unwillingness, to re-engage the past with critical hindsight. This setback is addressed, and to some extent redressed, in Confession of Pain, when the past is de-sentimentalized, when the camera’s black humour allows the hero–villain’s memory to fade into the banalities of Christmas festivities. The last part, ‘In and Out’, is concerned with the self-positioning of Hong Kong vis-à-vis China. It approaches this local/national dynamics from two angles: (1) the changing role of the Chinese Mainland and the Mainland Chinese in the cinematic imagination, hence the open-ended question and questioning of Chineseness in the filmic text; and (2) the phenomenon of pan-Asian filmmaking and the implications for the local cinema outside the bounds of the nation. This boundary-crossing perspective on Chineseness is reflected in the generic range of films under discussion: Samson Chiu’s Golden Chicken/Jin ji 1 and 2 (2002, 2003, mainstream comedy) and Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian/Liulian piaopiao (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong/Xianggang you ge Haolaiwu (2001, alternative/drama) in Chapter 7; and in Chapter 8 the pan-Asian co-productions of Applause Pictures, a relatively new production company founded by filmmakers Peter Chan Ho-sun and Allan Fung. This part has its point of departure the so-called ‘China factor’ in Hong Kong cinema during the last decade of colonial rule. In this study the ‘China factor’ is seen not as passé but as liberated from the rather clichéd allegorical tenor in pre-1997 cinematic discourse. The liberation, I argue, is a function of the post-nostalgic as a response to the arrival of a political certainty that has hitherto caused an overwhelming amount of uncertainties in the lived and imagined realities of many a local Hongkonger. Instead of being simply a play to end all play, this non-negotiable certainty ironically opens up new angles to contemplate the past with critical hindsight; more importantly, the reality of national reunification has become a new ground for rethinking old barriers and new barricades in social and cultural life. This part will take into consideration gender and gender stereotypes in the representation of Hong Kong–China relations. Gender and sexuality in post-colonial identity politics is a very broad and complex issue and it would take another book-length study to do a comprehensive research on this subject. In this part, gender politics are entangled with the changing perceptions of Hong Kong and China, or the ‘Hongkonger’ and the ‘Mainlander’. In Chapter 7, the figure of the prostitute makes fun of not only a long-held local bias against Mainland women, but also a timehonoured narrative of the Hong Kong success story endorsed by both the British and the Chinese authorities. It is through the contrastive

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filmic representations of the ‘happy prostitute’ (Golden Chicken) and the ‘northern chick’ (bak gu/bei gu, meaning prostitutes from Mainland China) that the latent tension between mutual (mis-)perceptions is brought to light. As the last chapter of this book, Chapter 8 takes the discussion a little further away from the local context, looking at cross-border co-productions sporting a pan-Asian outlook. Given that co-productions have almost become a new benchmark in Asian cinema, a consideration of the impact of co-production on the content and style of films made by Hong Kong-based studios is in order. To this end I have chosen a cluster of co-produced films from Applause Picture: Going Home/Huijia (Peter Chan, 2002) and Dumplings/Jiaozi (Fruit Chan, 2004), the Hong Kong segments of Applause’s horror omnibus films, Three/San geng and Three . . . Extremes/San geng 2; and Perhaps Love/Ruguo ai (2005) and The Warlords/Toumingzhuang (2007), Peter Chan’s most recent international blockbusters. While the omnibus segments belong to an experiment to gauge the pan-Asian markets, the latter two blockbusters are made with the international (Western) audiences in mind. The difference in the films’ conceptualization and market positioning, I argue, account for the choice of subject matter, cast, genre, and filming style. My reading of the horror films examines the mutation of the ‘China factor’ in the pan-Asian context, while the portion on Perhaps Love and Warlords reflects on how the mechanism of transnational filmmaking has interfered in the creative process. The fin-de-siècle splendour of Hong Kong cinema before the end of British rule has paved the way for a post-fin-de-siècle search for new beginnings. The open-endedness and versatility of the current situation informs my closing thoughts in ‘The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative’, which recasts the main arguments in the core chapters in the light of new and developing trends and what they might hold for the future. These conjectures will better serve the purpose of this book than the finality of a conclusion. If cinematic nostalgia in the 1990s was nurtured by a commodity culture threatened by disappearance, a decade later it has become part of the collective memory of how the city has got by. In the following chapters, each film/filmmaker constitutes a site of self-reflective encounter with some aspects of personal and collective memories. The remainder of this book, perhaps, can be read in the same way: a story of how the local cinema has got by.

Part I Time and Memory

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1 Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046

Wong Kar-wai is probably the most rigorously studied auteur from Hong Kong. Described by Tony Rayns as a ‘poet of time’,1 Wong has been under considerable critical spotlight ever since his 1988 debut, As Tears Go By, and his name has become synonymous with Hong Kong’s auteur cinema in critical circles worldwide. With a collection of ten features to date, Wong has been the subject of three book-length studies in English, two monographs and numerous critical essays, not to say regular reviews in printed and electronic media in different languages.2 This proliferation of writings on Wong testifies to his status as an auteur of Hong Kong cinema and world cinema as a whole. Peter Brunette, for example, sees in Wong’s films the ‘future of cinema’, while Ackbar Abbas, writing more than a decade ago, already gave credit to Wong’s idiosyncratic rewriting/destabilizing of genre that makes him a representative ‘Hong Kong filmmaker’.3 Wong’s credentials as Hong Kong’s unique ‘auteur of time’ are convincingly argued in Stephen Teo’s study on Wong, from his early stints as a television script-writer to his latest Chinese-language film, 2046 (2004). Teo’s book contextualizes Wong’s work within the Hong Kong film and television industries, noting the multiple influences from local genre films, Western cinematic traditions, and in particular Chinese and Latin American literature.4 Shelly Kraicer, commenting on Brunette’s and Teo’s works, notes that while Wong’s films are no doubt amenable to the ‘internationalist’ approach of (art) film studies (c.f. Brunette), the richness and complexity of Wong’s cinema, and by extension much of Hong Kong cinema, cannot be fully grasped without accounting for the historical context from which Wong’s films emerge, both as a continuation of the genre-steeped tradition and as a departure from it.5 Wong’s background as a television script writer and his continuous involvement in commercial projects 21

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speak volumes about the blurry line between arthouse and commercial cinema in Hong Kong. Indeed, Wong’s career path shares a lot in common with the Hong Kong New Wave, whose emergence in the early 1980s formally (and formalistically) gave birth to what Kraicer calls a ‘home-grown authentic genre’ that co-existed side-by-side with artistic melodrama, satirical comedy, and political commentary.6 These varied interpretations underscore the mutual embeddedness of local sensibilities and ‘internationalist’ aesthetics in Wong’s work. From the early films to the latest, the perennial themes of frustrated love, time, memory, and nostalgia have sustained a haunting presence in Wong’s cinematic imagination. His postmodernist aesthetics—the fragmentation of time, memory, and narrative structure, and the emotional intensity invested in the cinematic image that frequently jettisons storytelling—is nonetheless traceable to an urban sensibility nurtured by the experience of growing up in a colonial city which ‘is not so much a place as a space of transit’.7 In Wong’s films, his fascination with the urban landscape is manifest in stunningly original images in which the city mutates in a fascinating variety of tones and textures, his characters embodiments of the lost or displaced affect trying to reconnect past and present in a labyrinthine urban dreamscape in which they are perpetually caught. No doubt these qualities have global resonances (albeit mainly in arthouse circuits), but it is also true that this globality has a local origin: the time-bound specifics of colonial history, and the end of that history in 1997. Intensely personal and yet subtly allegorical, Wong’s films bear the imprint of the anxieties and disorientation of the (ex-)colonial city trying to come to terms with its identity, or lack of one thereof, at a critical historical juncture. In this way they also epitomize the cinema of Hong Kong, and perhaps Hong Kong itself, as a point of intersection, between global currents and local realities, city and nation, ‘high art’ and popular culture, affections and disaffections, memory and the loss of memory. In Wong’s films, one sees a creative symbiosis of local subject matter and a ‘universal’ film style that nonetheless borrows heavily from local genre films. Among the perennial themes of time, memory, and the impermanence of human relations, time is always the central obsession and propellant of the main action, or more frequently action-as-stasis. From the young rebel Yuddy in Days of Being Wild to the nameless lovelorn cops in Chungking Express to the melancholy middle-aged swordsman Ouyang Feng in Ashes of Time, to name a few, Wong’s characters indulge themselves in obsessive reveries as an alternative to living in the present. This nostalgic impulse is present in much of Wong’s work, in which

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time is deliberately fragmented into blurry images so that time itself becomes an expression and agent of subjectivity in its most vulnerable and fluid form. While these motifs are always interlocked and hardly exist in isolation in Wong’s filmic universe, in his more recent films nostalgia assumes more intriguing properties. In the Mood for Love and 2046, Stephen Teo points out, form a trilogy of ‘nostalgia films’ about the 1960s together with Days of Being Wild.8 While nostalgia is the defining ‘mood’ in these films, nostalgia also stands on its own as a subject, as the film self-reflexively contemplates the nature of its own nostalgia, which in turn is woven into the broader cultural imagination of the local in the post-1997 era. In the last two nostalgia films, Wong’s interrogation of generic modes, this time the wenyipian (or roughly called Chinese melodrama), takes the form of a profusion of signs, colours, and objects that constitute a certain ‘period code’ through which nostalgia is powerfully evoked in the film image. If, in his earlier films, the study of genre involves ‘destabilizing the clichés’,9 that is, a playful distortion of conventions to obtain a ‘new practice of the image’, I argue that Wong’s cinematic re-creations of 1960s Hong Kong in Mood and 2046 extends this deconstructive impulse and turns nostalgia into a field of interrogation by an aesthetic of visual indulgence, a strategy that works to critique the nostalgic as a predicament of the present. Situating Wong’s films within the cultural nostalgia that has swept through Hong Kong and parts of China in the 1990s, the rest of this chapter will show how this critique undercuts not only the characters’ indulgence in time past, but also the nostalgic desire aroused in the audience by the carefully designed mise-en-scène, characterization, and cinematography. I propose to read Wong’s films less as ‘nostalgia films’ than as ‘films about nostalgia’, in the sense that they recast the nostalgic within an original film medium that goes beyond the nostalgic. In this respect, the post-nostalgic imagination in Mood and 2046 provides a vantage point to approach Wong’s ongoing dialogue with the local cultural imagination oftentimes couched in an internationalist cinematic form. The rich and tantalizing visual texture of the two films, moreover, serves as a prologue to the discussion of intertextuality and self-referentiality in the production of the local in the following chapters.

Nostalgia in 1990s Hong Kong films Prior to the handover, Hong Kong filmmakers sought to capture the elusive, fin-de-siècle qualities of the colonial city. The distinctive texture

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of the city as a fluid, mutant, dizzying postmodern space is the hallmark of Wong Kar-wai’s films, in which identities and subjectivities are in a constant flux. In Chungking Express/Chongqing senlin (1993) and Days of Being Wild/A fei zhengzhuan (1990), for instance, repeated references to specific dates and times heighten the tension between the characters’ desire to hold on to their memories and their subconscious fear/anxiety of remembering. As a ‘poet of time’ and Hong Kong auteur, Wong is also a ‘director-flaneur’ fascinated by the complex and problematic global space of Hong Kong.10 History, in Wong’s cinema, is situated within the fissure of remembering and forgetting, or exists in a void that annihilates all effort to locate time.11 Sometimes classified under the ‘second wave’ of the Hong Kong New Wave, Wong’s thematic preferences are traceable in the works of his immediate predecessors in the 1980s, in whose works new interpretations are given to the past/present, nation/city dynamics; for instance, Tsui Hark (the Once Upon a Time in China series), Ann Hui (Song of the Exile, 1990), and Yim Ho (Homecoming, 1984), and fellow ‘second wave’ director, Stanley Kwan (Rouge, 1987; Center Stage, 1992). During the 1990s, nostalgia films were a new fad in the mainstream market. While most are commercial productions capitalizing on the political uncertainty and mounting anxiety of their audiences, their creative and playful engagement with the past as a collective imaginary has achieved some unexpected results. Instead of a ‘faithful’ representation of the past, films such as 92 The Legendary La Rose Noire (Jeff Lau ChunWai, 1992); Rose, Rose, I Love You (Jeff Lau Chun-Wai, 1993); and He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father (Lee Chi Ngai and Peter Chan Ho-sun, 1995) seek to appropriate the imaginary landscape of popular Cantonese cinema of the 1960s and 1970s through parodies of well-known genres.12 In fact, the first two films cited above overtly play with subject matter, setting, and characterization to recall popular Cantonese films of the sixties, characterized by formulaic plotlines, exaggerated acting, onedimensional characters, and hyperbolic coincidences leading up to a happy denouement. In their original form, these earlier films had been immensely popular with local audiences by offering them momentary flights from reality at a time when the conditions of life were generally harsh, and entertainment was either lacking in variety or too expensive for the majority of the working class. The 1960s also saw the emergence of a new urban sensibility and increased openness to Western cultural influences. These early transitions to a modern way of life was reflected in the urban comedies and ‘youth musical films’ (gewu qingchun pian) during this period,13 from which a new generation

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of superstars emerged. These young super-idols (including the all-time favourites Josephine Siu Fong-fong, Pauline Chan Po-chu, and Sit Karyin) became household names, attracting hordes of fans wherever they went. Interestingly, rather than a reinterpretation or remaking of earlier films, it is the screen personality of the flesh-and-blood superstars that the later ‘adaptations’ are after. Instead of fictional characters, what confronts the audience are the familiar public personas of film stars from the bygone days, as the younger artists put greater emphasis on impersonating their predecessors than on making serious sense of their dramatic roles. Not surprisingly the adapted screenplay has this ‘metafictional’ dimension built into it at the conceptual level. Film scholar Luo Feng (Chan Siu-hong/Chen Xiaohong) has rightly argued that these contemporary imitations of earlier genres are intent more upon ridicule than paying tribute to an earlier generation.14 This kind of playful mimicking is unique to Hong Kong, for strictly speaking none of the above examples can be categorized as a remake of an earlier work. In fact, at least two (92’ The Legendary La Rose Noire and He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father) present a parade of trademark characters and dramatic elements from the entire repertoire of Cantonese comedy and melodrama. In this regard, the breaking down of differences between fictional characters and real-life actors/actresses is a phenomenon unique to the Hong Kong nostalgic wave not found elsewhere. (For example, instead of having fictional names, the characters are named after the older actors, and their dramatic appearances are carefully culled to create comic versions of the real.) Very often, the parodied versions of the actors/actresses themselves are the biggest selling point of these films, and their success is judged by how far the younger generation can ‘copy’ the ‘originals’. The nostalgic world as reconstructed in these films is doubly removed from the empirical, lived reality of the past: it is in fact a simulacrum of a previous simulacrum inhabited by imaginary and idealized characters, who nonetheless seemed to enjoy a continued existence outside the silver screen as flesh-and-blood actors. While these adaptations can be easily dismissed for being frivolous and opportunistic, their emergence and popularity (as judged by the profusion of imitative works in the market) in the last decade of the twentieth century bespeaks the relationship between nostalgia and the anxiety over loss of memory and identity during the years of political transition.15 These nostalgia films hence serve as a contrastive reference to the post-nostalgic in Wong’s films and those discussed in the following chapters. It must be pointed out, however, that the nostalgic and the post-nostalgic are not treated as pure period

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markers but different manifestations of, and reactions to, specific historical, social, and economic situations. Not only can they co-exist at any single point in time, but also dialectically in any single text. In this study, the post-nostalgic indicates a continuation, revision, and transformation of some of the more intriguing traits of earlier style and conventions, a phenomenon that invites further reflections on Hong Kong cinema, and the prospects and perils faced by local filmmakers trying to negotiate their future in the local, national, and global arenas.

Nostalgic text/desire, nostalgia as text/desire The above subheading refers to two possible interpretive frameworks for the 1960s trilogy. These two frameworks are present in various degrees in existing critical studies of In the Mood for Love, explicitly or implicitly. Whether one sees the film as a nostalgic text (hence a representational relation between text and desire), or attends to the textuality of nostalgia (a construct, or an effect of textual production), nostalgia is generally seen as a function of lost time, love, and memory, that is, nostalgia as both the ‘signified’ or manifest content and a vehicle for a certain (impossible) desire, whereas the latent potential of the film’s selfreflexive engagement with nostalgia as both text and desire, something that amounts to a self-parody, remains underdeveloped. For example, Peter Brunette’s study gives a detailed account of the films’ aesthetic features, especially the innovative use of music, lighting, editing, and framing devices that elevates Wong to the status of an auteur of world cinema. Brunette’s discussion of the motifs of time, memory, and the impossibility of love sees nostalgia and desire as a kind of universal human predicament that Wong has powerfully communicated in visual form. His observation is well validated in the detailed visual analysis, but what is of interest here is that this argument itself is also couched in a language that is no less nostalgic than the film in question: Individuals have always suffered, and they always will, and this is a secret that all of us know and could, ourselves, tell the hole in the wall. . . . The longing, the desire that will never be satisfied . . . But now that’s something bigger than any one of us.16 The ‘universality’ of nostalgia is given a more contextualized reading in Stephen Teo’s study, which is more grounded in the sociohistorical contexts of the 1960s films, revealing deeper cultural roots traceable to the

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director’s childhood experience as a young immigrant living in a community of fellow Shanghai émigrés. Teo traces the genealogy of Mood in both Western and Chinese cinema, noting particularly the film’s affiliation to early Hong Kong and Shanghai films of the 1940s, for example An All-Consuming Love/Bu liao qing (1947) and Song of a Songstress/Tianya genü (1948) starring the sing-song star Zhou Xuan; and Fei Mu’s masterpiece, Spring in a Small City/Xiaocheng zhi chun (1948), all classic melodramas of the period. The film’s Chinese title Huayang nianhua also is a direct reference to Zhou Xuan’s 1948 theme song, Huayangde nianhua.17 This cultural lineage is well-explored in Teo’s critical appreciation of the film’s ‘enthusiasm for nostalgia’, which infuses the film’s use of repetitive visual motifs, such as food and clothing, mise-en-scène and visual composition: the real theme behind all that food is nostalgia: the different types of food being eaten at different times and seasons mark not only time but a remembrance of time . . . what we have eaten . . . stir our fond memories of the past as much as do the exposed brickwork, the cobblestones, the mouldy walls, the posters disintegrating on concrete pillars that we walk past day after day. Herein lies the essence of repetition.18 Similar views on the film’s treatment of time past are noted in Chineselanguage reviews on Mood. Luo Feng, for example, detects a ‘fetishistic’ impulse in Wong’s ‘formalistic spatial design’, which in itself is a ‘collage’ of different period signs and symbolisms from the 1930s (Shanghai) and 1960s (Hong Kong), all in the service of projecting the director’s nostalgia for lost time.19 To many Chinese critics nostalgia communicates specific cultural and historical meanings; this is especially true as the objects that saturate the screen—images, costume, human bodies, and even sound bites—evoke memories of bygone eras. The 1960s, the films’ explicit time past, was a time of transition, and the year 1966 (where the film ends, for the time being) saw the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China and subsequent anti-government riots in Hong Kong in 1967. The chaos and uncertainties led the colonial administration to implement a series of economic reforms instrumental to the city’s rapid modernization in the 1970s. (This portion of Hong Kong’s history is discussed in more detail in relation to Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes in Chapter 2.) More importantly, as recent scholarship on Hong Kong history indicates, the 1960s was the city’s formative stage, paving the way for the emergence of a

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local consciousness in subsequent decades.20 More than just a prologue to the 1970s, the 1960s saw the emergence of a ‘Hong Kong ethos’ that gradually replaced the more traditionalistic attachments (dependence) on linkages to China.21 Looking back from the vantage point of the present, historical writings on the 1960s give a picture quite different from that in Wong’s films. The above examples support a dynamic image of change and progress amidst conflicts and contradictions, of the fading away of certain elements of traditional Chinese culture in favour of a modern, Westernized lifestyle accompanied by a forwardlooking cosmopolitanism at a time when social and cultural ties with Mainland China gradually retreated to the background. The changing waves of fashion give further evidence to these transformations. The late 1960s saw the eclipse of the cheongsam/qipao and ‘saam fu’ (meaning shirt-and-pants, a traditional two-piece outfit) as the dominant code and its eventual replacement by Western-style designs. This new code of fashion is featured in the so-called ‘youth films’ from the decade, where the ‘young and rebellious’ are seen dressed in fancy T-shirts, shiny leather shoes, and tight-fitting pants as they frequent dance parties and nightclubs, while professional suits and skirts are showcased in popular melodramas and comedies featuring an emerging white-collar middle class. Filmic representations of this new urbanism abounded in the local cinema, and new stars were born to embody this Westernized, if not rebellious, outlook of this era.22 This new urban youth culture is also the backdrop of Days of Being Wild, the first of the 1960s trilogy, where Leslie Cheung plays the emblematic ‘Chinese James Dean’. Curiously, in Mood and 2046, costume design seems to have favoured a more conventional, though no less gorgeous, style, featuring an array of exquisite cheongsam tailor-made to replicate the ‘authentic’ Shanghai cut, just as Wong made repeated references to the films and material culture of pre1949 Shanghai. One plausible reason is that the films resemble Wong’s maturing vision, as the young rebels and their wasted passion give way to a more sober middle-age sensibility.23 Given the heavy investment in re-creating a sense of ‘pastness’ by mixed references to different time periods, arguably Wong’s films are not just about the 1960s , but a ‘collective memory’ of a certain imaginary past that Hong Kong, at the turn of the twenty-first century, has lost and dearly misses. This imaginary past is not to be taken negatively as being unreal or false consciousness, but positively as a constituent of the social imagination in reaction to a present situation that one cannot yet fully grasp; this past, as I argue below, becomes a parable for a future imagination whose real implications are less promising than the official promise of ‘one country two

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systems’ would have it. (More than coincidentally, Wong said on one occasion that 2046 is also a film about promises.24 ) As such, Wong’s films can also be read as (self-)critical comments on the cultural nostalgia of the 1990s. In Mood and 2046, objects, as period signs, provide a grid for the viewer to search for affective links to the past, or more precisely an idea of time past, since even those who were born too late to claim first-hand experience can participate in this mood-creation thanks to the recent nostalgic wave mentioned above. One can say that the film has succeeded in creating a nostalgic effect in the viewing process: by careful design the film offers a nostalgic mode of relating to the fictional universe. Hence, instead of seeing nostalgia as the intended or manifest content, I suggest that, in Mood and 2046, nostalgia is a self-reflexive construct that facilitates an analytical scrutiny of its own subject, a tactic very much in line with Wong’s deconstruction of cliché in his earlier films. Wong has characteristically mobilized intertextual resources of varied origins to obtain the ultimate signified, the nostalgic image/film. The films’ mixed references to the 1960s (Hong Kong) and 1930s/1940s (Shanghai), moreover, suggest that they are not mere products of nostalgia, for they also self-consciously refer to a pre-existing nostalgia from the standpoint of the present—the nostalgia for pre-1949 Shanghai among the Shanghai émigrés in 1960s Hong Kong (which came back as a referent in the cultural nostalgia in the 1990s). This nostalgia for Shanghai/China as the lost homeland is also noted in the Mandarin films of the period.25 Given the complex intertextuality of nostalgia referenced in the film, it can be argued that as a reworking of the romantic melodrama, the two films also meta-textually evoke the ethos of the local film culture of the 1960s, which itself was indebted to an earlier era of Chinese cinema. The film’s remembrance of time past, thus, reflects an imagined relation between artefact and history—and the affect associated with the artefact-as-history. In this regard, Wong Kar-wai is probably the preeminent master of the artefact as a filmic medium, for in Mood and 2046, animate and inanimate artefacts are invested with great emotional power and historical significance. Here also lies the clue to Wong’s self-reflexive engagement with nostalgia and the post-nostalgic imagination that this study seeks to unveil: within the fissures of colonial and national histories, and the temporal-spatial displacements that result, the local cinema has reinvented itself as form of visual history. Unlike the documentary as ‘visualized history’, this visual history is a dynamic register of codes, styles, and images that help to recall and critically reposition the historical in a popular and highly

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idiomatic visual medium. It is, I believe, one important contribution of the local cinema to the historical imagination of Hong Kong against the grain of a de-historicized nostalgia that always ends up elsewhere, for example a Shanghai that never really existed in 1960s Hong Kong, and the official (clichéd) story of an ‘economic miracle’, a linear progression from rags to riches culminating in the political homecoming of 1997 (c.f. Chapter 7).

In the Mood for Love: Role-play and nostalgic citation One way to understand the nostalgic image in Mood is to examine the kind of intertextuality at work and revisit the idea of role-play, a thematic element that inform many existing critical interpretations of the film. In brief, Wong Kar-wai’s play with role-play is made explicit through a complex doubling: Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and So Lai Chen (Maggie Cheung) move into adjacent rooming apartments on the same day. After a series of chance encounters in the crowded apartment where barely a few words and glances are exchanged, affection develops between Chow and So when the two begin to playact the affair between Chow’s wife and So’s husband. The conspicuous absence of Chow’s wife and So’s husband, except for a few brief back shots and off-screen lines, helps focalize and condense the dramatic tension in Chow and So and their make-believe playacting. Chow and So’s relationship is complicated by a simultaneous desire for each other and for being ‘not like’ their disloyal spouses. Instead of giving in to their desire, the undeclared lovers take refuge in a surrogate union: co-authoring a martial arts novel. Knowing that So will not divorce her husband, Chow leaves for Singapore to take up a journalistic job. The pain of unrequited love finally brings Chow to the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, where he pours out his secret into a hole in a temple wall. Wong’s play with understatement and ambiguity through ellipsis and inconclusive scenes provokes a parallel desire in the viewer to figure out what ‘really happens’, that is, whether the two actually consummate their love, a scene obliquely suggested but never shown. The role-play, thus, motivates the narrative, while the doubling effect of playacting motivates the viewer to participate in constructing the ‘missing’ scene (‘Did the two consummate their love?’). This is a well-calculated suspense, but for a film in the traditional wenyi category Wong seems to have taken suspense beyond its normative limit, by not satisfying the curiosity and desire of the viewer for an ‘answer’ to the central enigma.

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Indeed, this suspense virtually spills over into the sequel, 2046, which will be discussed in the next section. The second level of role-play is intertextually grounded in the film’s self-reflexive citations of other texts. The most explicit use of intertextuality is the citations from literary works. Apart from the influence of Western literature on the structure of Wong’s films, Mood intermittently quotes passages from Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s fiction, Intersections (Duidao, from French ‘tête-bêche’, meaning ‘head to tail’) not only as explanatory notes but also as the conceptual core of the film itself: I think tête-bêche is not only a terminology in philately [referring to a pair of stamps in which one is printed upside down] or a literary technique—it is also a kind of film language, that is, the intersection of light and colours, sound and picture. Tête-bêche can even be the intersection of time.26 Two layers of role-play, textual and intertextual (one can say diegetic and non-diegetic), open up the possibility of reading the film itself as a citation constituted by a cacophony of objects, signs, and images suggestive of a bygone era. (Note that this is also a highly selective image of mixed temporal and spatial references. This tête-bêche motif also recalls the upside down image of a Hong Kong street scene in Happy Together, as a projection of the homesickness of Tony Leung’s character.) This perhaps explains why Wong’s films have always been characterized as being ‘unfinished’, like an ‘endless sprawl’ that leaves as much emptiness as it fills up screen space with details created by colour and light.27 Apart from this unfinishedness as a schematic design befitting the film’s postmodern appeal, the use of citation invites further reflection on the dialectical relation between nostalgia and the cinematic representation of nostalgia. The film’s self-referential intertextuality betrays an implicit metafictional, and meta-critical, use of nostalgia projected through multiple ‘intersections’ of times and images on-screen. Commenting on the use of everyday details in Mood, Rey Chow discerns a more subtle trait in these ‘reminders of a bygone era’, noting that ‘these ethnographic details constitute a kind of already-read text’ (italics added).28 In the film, the meticulous details that make up Wong’s replica of 1960s Hong Kong—the coiffures, fashion (the cheongsam, or qipao in Mandarin), the radio broadcast, newspapers, popular songs by Zhou Xuan and Nat King Cole, as well as public spaces such as the restaurant, newsroom, street corners, and taxi-cabs—fill up the visual field to the point of saturation. This profusion of objects from the past is

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partially the effect of cinematography: the extensive use of close-ups and medium close-ups, slow motion, tight framing, and silhouetted lighting and colour scheme amounts to a close-reading of the material texture and cultural fabric of the bygone era projected through the impressionistic lens of the camera. One obvious example is the sensational appeal of So’s body-hugging cheongsam in a mesmerizing variety of colours and floral patterns. Few who have seen the film would fail to notice this central icon. Technically, So’s cheongsam is the primary clue to temporal shifts between scenes that otherwise would look like mere repetitions. Commenting on the importance of fashion codes in Mood, Pam Cook argues that ‘[the cheongsam’s] power lies in the way it encapsulates past, present and future in a single image, resolving irreconcilable social tensions and contradictions in much the same way as myth’.29 This ‘mythical’ quality lies in Maggie’s dress code: her outfits are careful replicas of the 1930s Shanghai style created by a reputed tailor.30 The cheongsam, as a temporal sign, embodies Wong’s reflections on time, and change in time, for it functions both as a nostalgic object (a fashion code of a past era, something frozen in time but has come back to life in the retro fashion of the present), and change (a marker of temporal flow within the film narrative). The cheongsam, too, is as a metaphor for the city itself, a seductive body couched in colourful, mesmerizing fabric, blooming in evanescence. Arguing against the general perception of verisimilitude of Wong’s reinvented nostalgic world, Rey Chow emphasizes the ‘defamiliarizing’ and ‘aestheticizing’ effect of the quotidian in the film, noting in particular its emphatic use of slow motion, dramatized body movements and the daily ritual of cooking and eating; instead of being a realistic portrayal of a bygone era, the everyday in this film ‘points rather to a familiar cliché, namely, the fundamentally unfulfilled . . . nature of human desire, to which history . . . becomes subject and subordinate’.31 Chow’s reading places the film in the category of the 1990s nostalgia films, in which the past, as an image-commodity, is dehistoricized in its global circulation, so much so that the ‘most local details’ are transcoded into ‘vague generalities’.32 From the look of the film, it is quite true that the past thus reconstructed is not exactly a copy of the good old days, but a defamiliarized and aestheticized vision made up of already-read texts in various written, visual, and material forms. On the other hand, if we shift the focus from what is represented to the processes of representation, that is, the camerawork, editing, as well as sound and lighting, a different interpretation of the nostalgic image becomes possible. I would

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call it a technique of denaturalization through self-conscious aesthetic indulgence, which is explained in more detail below. Framing and close-ups Using medium and medium-long shots mainly for establishing mood and setting, the camera persistently pursues the characters’ subtle emotional changes and facial expressions in close-ups and medium closeups. The close-ups, too, capture the characters in isolation even though they are in the company of others. As we watch them move in and out of overcrowded apartments and offices or in conversation, the on-screen space is curiously imbalanced: on the one hand, the characters’ faces are prominently displayed, but on the other hand the camera deliberately positions them either on the far left or on the far right, leaving a large area of ‘empty space’ on-screen. This framing method is repeatedly used in rendering dialogues between two characters. Where two-shots are used for establishing a scene, the camera favours close-ups on a character facing the extreme left or right of the frame. As one party talks, the other remains off-frame. Instead of creating an illusion of continuity through two-shots and eyeline matches, visual imbalance interrupts the dialogue as a means of communication. This happens when Chow speaks to his colleague Ping in the newsroom early in the film. A variation on this visual trick is seen in the numerous conversations in the narrow passages inside the rooming apartments. Usually, one character is seen in profile facing an opened door, the wall and door frame occupying/blocking one half of the screen so that the interlocutor remains unseen. This kind of framing has a disorienting effect on the viewer, as the speakers on-screen are seen staring into the out-of-field or some visual obstacle, or facing a direction contrary to what is suggested by the establishing shot, a far cry from the customary shot/reverse shot composition. The unnaturalness effected by the use of framing, while emphasizing the impossibility of communication, unsettles the continuity of our vision by shattering the unity or wholeness of a scene. What we see, then, is largely an effect of the skewed perspective created by the camera’s manipulation of cinematic space, which in this film tends to yield not to our desire but to the camera’s own. In the film, close-ups and framing do not reveal as much as they obscure, but impose on us a denaturalized vision of parts, rather than wholes. The overall effect is a dramatization of the camera’s own subjectivity, and its power to select and frame what is perceived to be real, as an independent consciousness that glides through time and space.

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Camera movement The camera as a hidden persona is reinforced by downplaying point-ofview shots, which would have engendered alternative ‘viewing subjects’. As the viewer is given the sole privilege of sharing the camera’s perspective (sometimes from under a bed and behind street corners), he/she is interpellated into a voyeuristic position as the characters’ personal and intimate secrets are revealed. Within this denaturalized, voyeuristic vision, the reality of the past is subject to an aesthetic metamorphosis, so much so that the collection of nostalgic objects and characters, like the play-within-the-play of love and betrayal Chow and So try to re-enact, are de-realized into eye-pleasing artefacts. The film’s deliberate cropping out of Chow’s wife and So’s husband from the frame is a brilliant move to emphasize skewed emotional relations, as their ‘formidable absent presences’ remain in the consciousness of the main characters throughout the film.33 The close-ups and off-focus framing, ironically, conjures up a nostalgic world whose reality rests upon our desire to see what is not there. This play with presence/absence echoes the processes of ‘hallucination’ and ‘reverse hallucination’ Ackbar Abbas observes in Hong Kong’s visual culture in the 1980s and 1990s, a problem of vision and visibility that Wong’s films repeatedly address.34 If the nostalgic, as projected image, is a symptom of hallucination (seeing what is not there), then Wong’s meta-textual/meta-fictional approach to the hallucinated image here initiates a reverse hallucination, by distracting, if not forbidding, us from seeing (completely) what is there. Reverse hallucination is most vividly present in the oft-quoted scene where So Lai Chen walks up the spiral of stairs leading to Chow’s hotel room. The scene is one of the most sophisticated examples of ellipsis and slow/stop-motion editing in Wong’s films to dramatize a character’s complex psychological states and inner conflicts. A series of jump cuts shows So walking up the stairs from different angles, while the back-and-forth movement of her feet is edited in a dance-beat sequence, dramatizing not only her hesitation but also the yearning and desire behind the hesitation. The camera then cuts to a brief high-angle shot of Chow waiting anxiously in his darkened room. After these forgoing shots have prepared us for their eventual meeting, the camera cuts to their parting, swiftly concluding the scene with a back-tracking shot of So walking down towards the retreating camera followed by a freeze-frame. This shot sequence, probably the ‘signature’ of the whole film, is a prime example of how the film disrupts narrative progression and frustrates our desire to see more, to go behind the scene to find out what has really happened.35

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In Mood, as in 2046, camera movement turns space into sheer affect, a psychological rather than a physical entity. One good example is the use of panning. On several occasions, panning is used as a transitional device to create an emotional connection between Chow and So. Panning is also used in a scene when the two are seen working intimately on Chow’s martial arts fiction. The camera pans across the room to show multiple reflections of the characters in the mirror. Rendered without diegetic sound or dialogue, the background music serves as an emotional marker and dictates the basic rhythm of the action on-screen. In a different scene where Chow and So meet in a Hong Kong-style steak house, the camera shows the characters in profile, sitting face-to-face. Maintaining the same angle, the camera alternates between close-ups on Chow and the dishes on the table. A short pan to So breaks the monotony of the one-sided view of Chow, but in the process the camera ‘inadvertently’ sweeps past So and swiftly swings back to refocus on her, creating a slight blur as it moves back. A similar pattern of panning and close-up shots is used in an earlier meeting between the two in the same setting. This playful use of the short pan certainly has an improvisatory quality, as if the camera was participating in (eavesdropping?) the conversation like a third party, constantly trying to fix and adjust its focus as the dialogue unfolds. The persistent close-up shots, again, make it almost impossible to view the scene in its wholeness, replacing the objective distance of the two-shot and the shot/reverse shot with a visual intimacy bordering on the erotic. The animated use of the camera is complemented by a different technique, that of the static, empty shot that usually accompanies an emotionally charged scene. The finishing shot can rest on a street corner deserted by the lovers, a lonely street lamp against a rough stone wall, old adverts melting on concrete pillars, or the spiraling smoke of a cigarette dancing to the rhythm of the background music. It is as if the camera is in no hurry to follow the characters or further develop a scene (by a transition, for example); rather, by indulging in the lingering melancholy of a deserted scene it submerges the viewer in its own reverie, endowing the empty shot with a nostalgic aura more for its own aesthetic pleasure than for narrative continuity. For a director known for his postmodernist style, Wong Kar-wai’s treatment of the nostalgic image in this film begs the question of historicity, that is, the degree to which the film is about a past era, or whether it is a collage of images, signs, and objects that constitute our imagination of the past. Nostalgia as text/desire/intertext also invites reflections on what critical positions, if any, are made possible. Here it is important to

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look beyond Wong’s overtly nostalgia films to gauge the director’s more complex mediation of the nostalgic. Both Ackbar Abbas and Stephen Teo have pointed out Wong’s close connection to Hong Kong’s genre films, noting that almost his entire corpus is devoted to the reworking of genre, and in each case the genre concerned is given fresh and thought-provoking interpretations.36 This aesthetic inclination is akin to some of his Western counterparts whose reworking of genre ‘does not demythify the original [but] utilize original forms for critical oppositions or displacements’.37 The fact that the nostalgic image is not completely demythified in Wong’s films, hence retaining the aura of the coded image, endows the film text with a double register; the latent tension between two possible readings, I believe, is what makes his films an intriguing yet pleasurable adventure. If we read it as a nostalgia film, Mood is no doubt a product of the director’s ‘mood of love’ for Hong Kong in the 1960s, a period of great emotional import to Wong as a Shanghai immigrant-turned-Hong Kong director. Yet, the authenticity of the represented past is fractured by the camera’s indulgence in its own aesthetic pleasure. The film thus effects another doubling: it tenderly evokes the bygone era in all its nostalgic glamour in order to repossess a certain mood of the past, that is, nostalgia as the signified or manifest content; at the same time, the pastas-artefact is anchored, and slowly dissolved, in a host of images and texts, creating a language through which an imaginative engagement with history is articulated. Nostalgia, as an image, is held not exactly in awe but in tension with its own inauthenticity, as the film enters into a dialogue with its own nostalgia. Seen in this light, Wong’s revisitation of the 1960s differs from most other nostalgia films from the late 1990s in at least one important way: the assemblage of period objects and personas in Wong’s film aims not at a parody of the originals for comic relief or a sentimental return to the past; rather, it creates a stylized image as a specimen of a cultural nostalgia that is intimately personal and collectively shared at the same time. The specimen, it follows, is subject to the camera’s scrutiny. The film spectator’s imagination of the 1960s, activated by the profusion of past signs, inevitably becomes part of the scrutinized (inter)text.

2046: Parallel time-spaces As a sequel to Mood, 2046 created its own legend even before it was first screened at the Venice International Film Festival. Not only did Wong miss the deadline for submission but when the film was premiered it was

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still a ‘work in progress’.38 During production, one of the main characters, Japan’s no. 1 teen idol Takuya Kimura, complained about Wong’s improvisational working style and threatened to walk out. Granted that the two films were made almost at the same time, the over-drawn production schedule put exorbitant demands on the lead actors, especially Tony Leung, as he was asked to play ‘the same man in a different way’. The difficulty of rendering two ‘similar yet different’ interpretations of the same character at the same time is complicated by the playacting in Mood, where Chow tries to imitate So’s husband. Be it a coincidence or not, the anachronism in the film’s production echoes the thematic of temporal disjunction in the narrative, which is then played out in the mise-en-abyme structure of story-telling—the film’s main narrative is punctuated by scenes from Chow Mo Wan’s science fiction, 2046 (and its sequel 2047), that serve as a projection (if not confession) of Chow’s repressed memory and emotions. As the last instalment of Wong’s 1960s trilogy, 2046 has been read as a meta-criticism of Wong’s corpus, with frequent allusions to the earlier films from As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild to Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love.39 It is also Wong’s most overtly political film today, with the film’s title literally referring to another ‘deadline’ for Hong Kong, the last year of the first 50 years of Chinese rule, during which Hong Kong’s status quo will remain unchanged (wushinian bubian, or literally ‘no change for fifty years’), a promise made by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and subsequently stipulated in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the political fate of the ex-colony. Thus the film’s symbolic reference to the past is twofold: it is a re-examination of the 1960s and a ‘time odyssey . . . looking at the future from the vantage point of the 1960s’.40 As a sequel to Mood, 2046 nonetheless has its own (and very different) structure of meaning: the 1960s is used as a vantage point to imagine a distant future that only obtained historical significance two decades later, when the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong’s future began in the early 1980s. On the other hand, the narrating present, 1999–2004 (when the film was made), makes its oblique presence felt through the allusive double-reference to the 50-year promise, 2046 (the title of the film and Chow Mo Wan’s novel). If nostalgia in Mood is understood as a disguise for the critique of the nostalgic embedded in the complex fabric of inter-texts, in 2046 nostalgia takes the form of a temporal implosion, by which I mean the past, as an obsession or fetish, is turned into a futuristic myth in the fantasy world of Chow Mo Wan’s serialized science fiction, in which a lone traveller (Kimura) falls in love with an android (Faye Wong) on an inter-galactic train on

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his way back from ‘2046’, a place where one can recover lost memories, and where no one else before has ever returned. Indeed, the overlapping meanings of the number 2046 mirror the complexity of the film’s narrative structure and use of nostalgia. While intertextual references and meta-criticism constitute a ‘summation’ of the director’s ‘lyrical melancholia’ and the ‘sum and substance’ of his previous feature films to date,41 the political allegory boldly uncovers a collective nostalgia for Hong Kong’s ‘pre-postcolonial’ history that was given an extended lease on life for another 50 years, or what Wong calls ‘changeless time’.42 Time, it seems, takes on a much more explicit and historically and politically grounded signification in this film than Wong’s previous films. It seems as if Wong, at this point of his own cinematic journey through time, has reached a synthesis of the two sides of his artistic persona: the philosophical aesthete touched by the tragic human condition, and the social and historical subject trying to grapple with the pains and contradictions of his time. In the film, Chow Mo Wan, still engrossed in past regrets, also wants to take refuge in changeless time. In order to hide his pain he has turned himself into a different person, from the reticent and shy husband in Mood to a dandy and womanizer in late 1960s Hong Kong. We are told that in Singapore he has had another lover, Su Lizhen (Gong Li), the Mandarin equivalent of So Lai Chen, a charismatic professional gambler who helped him to win back the money for his return ticket to Hong Kong. Knowing that Chow was still in love with the other So Lai Chen, she rejected his offer to ‘leave with him’ (a line repeated in Chow’s fiction). Returning to Hong Kong, Chow begins a non-committal relationship with a nightclub hostess, Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), his neighbour and occupant of room 2046, the same number as the hotel room where Chow and So once spent their most intimate time together in Mood. Disillusioned by Chow’s refusal to commit, Bai Ling later leaves Hong Kong for a job in Singapore (repeating Chow’s movement in Mood). Meanwhile, Chow finds himself intrigued by another woman, Jingwen (played by Faye Wong/Wang Jingwen), but she is in love with a Japanese boyfriend Tak (also played by Kimura) despite her father’s objection. As if cursed by fate, Chow begins another platonic relationship, this time with Jingwen, who also becomes his writing buddy like So before. In 2046, these complicated romances are the raw material of Chow’s science fiction, in which he projects his own frustration and unfulfilled desire into Kimura’s lone traveller character and the female androids played by none other than Faye Wang, Carina Lau (whose brief appearance as Chow’s old acquaintance in the opening scenes subtly recalls

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her role in Days of Being Wild), and for one split-second shot Maggie Cheung. The film narrative progresses along intercutting scenes of Chow’s love affairs and his ongoing sci-fi, ‘2046’. The juxtaposition of retro late 1960s Hong Kong with futuristic sci-fi inserts not only plays up the artificiality of both, but also creates a double referencing of the two fictional universes. Symbolically, Chow’s fiction posits the future as a repository of memories to be reclaimed, hence ‘changeless time’ as a resistance to the transience of love and human relationships in the present. However, given the multiplicity of meaning attached to the futuristic time-space ‘2046’, it would be an oversimplification to read Chow’s attempt to project his present stasis into the future as an assertion of the power of the imagination to overcome life’s tragic losses; nor is it simply Chow’s (and vicariously the director’s) poetic lament of the inevitability of such losses. If the over-determined signifier ‘2046’ is the result of an intensely personal nostalgia, it also alludes to a collective memory of Hong Kong’s past that may not correspond to the actual historical circumstances and experiences of the Hong Kong people, who never have been given a say as to what they would like to see unchanged, or changed, for the better. In a different context, Vera Dika qualifies the represented past in a 1970s nostalgia film, American Graffiti, as ‘a simulacral image, referring to a lost time, to past images, and to its own status as a commodity sign’. What’s more, comments Dika, ‘[t]hrough this particular re-creation of the past, and the undeniable pleasure of reexperiencing it, [the film] subtly confronts a generation with its moment in history’.43 Dika’s observation also illuminates the kind of nostalgia evoked in 2046. If Chow Mo Wan’s fictional 2046 is a symptom of a present stasis, Hong Kong’s 2046 is not necessarily a blessing of any given sort. Although the 1984 Joint Declaration stipulates ‘Hong Kong’s previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years’, the neutralizing vocabulary used in the official document, such as ‘inhabitants’ and ‘residents’ instead of ‘people’ and ‘citizens’, has raised critical concerns. On the ambiguity of the term ‘life-style’, Matthew Turner writes,

What is the Hong Kong life-style? . . . does life-style suggest . . . the subjective texture of identity? . . . Or is life-style like fashion, changing from moment to moment? Since no society could ‘remain unchanged for fifty years,’ how will social change be legitimized? At the heart of the agreements on Hong Kong’s future lies a slippery neologism which may be interpreted to mean almost anything.44

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In a fantastic twist, Wong’s film poses a related question in kindred spirit: Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention. They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody knows if that’s true because nobody’s ever come back. This line by Chow Mo Wan’s fictional narrator is a direct comment on China’s promise to the Hong Kong ‘inhabitants’. To the extent that ‘recovering lost memories in the future’ is a fiction, 2046 alludes to a political myth that legitimizes a condition of stasis (wushinian bubian). This, I believe, is the fiction/myth that the film’s critical engagement with nostalgia seeks to demystify, displace, and resist by reworking familiar referential frameworks through which conventional meanings are destabilized and transformed into something else. In Mood, as we have seen, what Rey Chow calls ‘ethnological reminders’ are replicas of historical artefacts; in 2046, two or more referential frameworks—the textual and the extra-textual, or the fictional and the meta-fictional—are mobilized to create an internal montage that ‘rupture[s] an established coded system, the sign itself’.45 This in part is achieved by the multiple register embedded in the number 2046 (a film, a novel, a place, a room number, and a time in future). This density of meaning is complemented by another aesthetic indulgence, the resounding musical notes from Bellini’s opera, Norma, which adds allegorical weight to Shigeru Umebayashi’s heart-rending original score. Amy Taubin notes that the opera tells the tale of a high princess who is ‘torn between her loyalty to her people and her love for a leader of the occupying Roman army’, which ‘parallels the political tensions between Hong Kong and China’.46 This is not to say that 2046 is a political film; rather, politics is a catalyst for deeper reflections on personal and collective destiny. The internal montage of parallel times and parallel universes functions like a distorted mirror held up to the smooth surface of reality: Chow Mo Wan’s affected tranquility and nonchalance, the evasiveness and detachment of the film’s narrating/viewing present, and a mythical future stasis. Ironically, that future, like the canned pineapples in Chungking Express, has an expiry date, rendering what may happen afterwards even less promising. Perhaps this is why Chow’s fiction necessitates a sequel, ‘2047’ (Chow’s room number), in which Kimura’s lone traveller and Faye Wang’s android are able to find short-lived comfort in a passionate embrace before the android’s fateful decline. This is another instance of ‘love at last sight’ similar to

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the fin-de-siècle condition in the pre-handover years. In 2046, time is experienced in a loop: past, present, and future are entwined and convoluted in their respective stasis, as history threatens to repeat itself, a repetition (Wong’s favourite visual and narrative schematic) that ironically reminds us of the danger of ‘changeless time’. Arguably, the film’s treatment of nostalgia is diametrically opposed to that in Mood: the earlier film is presented as a self-conscious artefact to create a nostalgic effect in the audience, arousing both critical and uncritical pleasure at the same time. The memory at stake belongs virtually to no one— not the characters, and not exactly the viewers, but an assemblage and disassemblage of past codes and style that exposes the artificiality, and vulnerability, of nostalgia. 2046, on the other hand, takes on the ‘artificial memory’ of Mood to create a double narrative—the futuristic past in Chow’s fiction vis-à-vis the futuristic present in Wong’s film. As a sequel to Mood, 2046 is a more complex film in its treatment of time: by taking the audience on a virtual journey into a paradoxical ‘futurepast’ as a distorted mirror of ‘changeless time’, it is both a summation of Wong’s cinematic career and an exhaustion of the very nostalgia that saturates the filmic universe and the viewing present. This exhaustion is subtly expressed in the delayed reaction suffered by the androids when the train passes the symbolic zones ‘1224/1225’ (i.e. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day). According to the minder on the train, in time androids will lose their ability to give instant emotional responses, a sign of physical decay. Delayed emotions, it seems, concludes our journey into the future-past of 2046, for it sums up the film’s examination of nostalgia as a time-travel to revisit the past with an emotional debt long overdue, something that may no longer be meaningful once its historical moment is over. (‘Love is a matter of timing. It doesn’t work if it is too early or too late’, says Chow.) If nostalgia is less about the past than a present lack, the future-past of 2046 can be read as a parable: Chow Mo Wan’s 1960s brings the viewers into direct confrontation with their own historical moment; it seeks to confront them with their own (affected) complacency with the present by fracturing/disturbing the collective nostalgia for time past and the equally fictive (mythical?) ‘history of the future’, that is, a 50-year changeless time.

Conclusion: Points of departure My reading of Wong Kar-wai’s two recent nostalgia films has sought to establish several vantage points to approach the post-nostalgic imagination in Hong Kong cinema, which now has entered the zone of

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changeless time. First, the cultural nostalgia of the 1990s has undergone subtle transformations in the cinematic reworking of old styles and codes; as a subject of representation, nostalgia carries meaning beyond its manifest content and meaning, reflecting a meta-textual/metacritical consciousness in the visual language and film narrative. Second, the post-nostalgic has a tendency towards intertextuality, that is, a selfreflexive use of pre-existing texts and conventions, both as a tribute to the local cultural tradition and as a means to capture the elusiveness of the local. Third, the post-nostalgic is inherently border-crossing in nature; it is neither a convention nor a style, but a mode of cinematic imagination running through both arthouse and commercial films. Finally, as the following chapters will show, genre and genre conventions have shaped the ‘cinematic recovery of lost memories’47 in Hong Kong films—in the conscious or subconscious drive to retain and reconstruct personal and collective memories by reworking pre-existing visual codes and images, and by capturing and transforming the changing and disappearing urban spaces. Wong’s films exemplify the way in which the past as a nostalgic image/text is being reinscribed in a discourse of the present and the future. If embedded in the post-nostalgic is the temptation to look back at what ‘would have been’, the ‘post’ here implies a desire to translate what is lost into a continued questioning of what is and what will become. As we shall see, across different genres and subject matter, Hong Kong films exhibit a tendency to use past codes and styles to reconstruct cinematic memories in refreshingly and sometimes problematically new ways. These films and their creators chart a broad spectrum of the local film industry and differ widely in style and purpose, but it is precisely their differences that speak volumes about what they have in common.

2 Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung

The 1990s saw the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong and the city’s accelerated development into a ‘global city’, where Western and Chinese capital vied for both profit and prestige in the run-up to 1997. This prospect and the accompanying social and political misgivings provided a frame of reference and subject matter for some filmmakers to reflect on issues of local history and identity. As I have pointed out in the ‘Introduction’, the search for a local identity has largely remained an unfinished project. In the post-1997 milieu, ‘Hong Kong identity’ is still debated in film criticism and critical writings on Hong Kong as an indicator of the territory’s, and the film industry’s, ongoing negotiation with China and the socioeconomic transformations brought on by globalization.1 The complexity of local identity articulation in Hong Kong is effectively summed up in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s study on the global city with reference to Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999): unlike most other post-colonial cultures, the lack of a ‘native place’ (xiangtu) as a stronghold for resistance has left the old cityspace being the only possible ‘native place archetype’, which also necessitates a remapping of ‘native place’ on to the larger geopolitics of global space.2 In this connection, recent theorizations of contemporary identity politics have shed light on the constructed nature of all identities, and Judith Butler’s idea of ‘performativity’ has further put gender and other identity norms into question.3 Inasmuch as identity has always been a slippery term whose meaning is always subject to negotiation, in this digital age it is increasingly a mass-mediated conglomerate of signs and images disseminated through transnational communications networks. It is beyond the scope of this study to offer an analysis of how digital media nowadays have created, shaped, and commodified various types of identities, and whether globalization has (not) undermined more localized forms 43

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of identity politics in historically underprivileged sites such as former colonized and Third World societies. As far as Hong Kong and its cinema are concerned, this over-determined term today lies not in whether a ‘Hong Kong identity’ has existed, disappeared, or will come into being by discursive consensus, but in a new problematic of the local in the cultural imagination, not in the sense of a positivistic self-assertion as in localism, but of a constructivistic, non-essentializing use of images as a form of historical and cultural critique. This problematic of the local is also a critical response to the fin-de-siècle scenario triggered by the ‘1997 issue’ and the crisis of disappearance, and the concomitant quest for cultural identity as a resistance to disappearance (by ‘re-colonization’?) that underlies the nostalgic imagination in Hong Kong cinema and cultural productions since the mid-1980s. Rather than reiterating what the local is by revisiting familiar formulations of instability, hybridity, and marginality, it emphasizes the polyvalence of the term, that is, how different meanings of the local are generated in various instances when it is invoked, and what implications for the cultural imagination will result from these contending visions and narratives of the local. All this, of course, cannot be taken for granted, since the history of Hong Kong cinema is itself a product of conflicting social and cultural hegemonies under which the local is always deprived of specificity. But the handover endowed the recent portion of a century-old historical tale with a special flavour mixed with nostalgia, political anxiety, and a disturbing sense of impermanence, all attributable to an apocalyptic apprehension of the end, a fin-de-siècle sentiment that fueled the imagination of the local, or what it means to be local. As 1997 approached, some filmmakers began to turn their attention to the marginal communities and alternative spaces of the city to capture the rhythm and texture of city life undergoing major social and economic transformations, for example Derek Yee Tung-sing’s C’est la vie mon chéri/Xin bu liao qing (1992) and Ann Hui’s Summer Snow/Nüren sishi (1994).4 The portrayal of everyday life in these movies goes beyond social commentary, a trait inherited from television docu-drama in the 1970s, to focus on issues of subjectivity and historical agency. If, in Benedict Anderson’s often-quoted words, the nation is an imagined community, then identity, too, is an act of the imagination, which by extension is an act of reckoning with its elusiveness, if not ambivalence when engrossed in national and party politics. The versatilities brought on by globalization have further unsettled old forms of national imagination: now the nation is no longer contained within geographical boundaries, but is dispersed into pockets of diasporic localities with overlapping and

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contending interests, affiliations, memories, ideological orientations, and even lifestyles and customs that are not necessarily regulated by well-defined national traditions.5 Hong Kong and its cinema present a case of overlapping and contending national, (post-)colonial, and transnational interests and practices within a highly compact social space. Approaching the issue of identity in terms of the problematic of the local, I intend to explore through the works of Ann Hui (Ordinary Heroes/Qian yan wan yu, 1999) and Fruit Chan (Little Cheung/Xilu Xiang, 1999) internally dispersed and variegated localities as embodiments of a new historical subjectivity rooted not in the meta-narratives of nation and decolonization, but in the social and cultural imaginations of the almost ‘forgotten’. In particular, I look at how filmic representations of space can generate such imaginations as they reflect on ‘disappearance’ as both a cultural symptom and a cultural practice; on what remains possible to the imagination of the future when nostalgia is passé; and what comes after anxiety when loss has become cliché. A decade down the road, the Hong Kong way of life has changed in ways that seem to concur with pre-handover apprehensions of ‘a future undoing of its past achievement’;6 yet, this changed reality lacks the aura of distance (in time and space) and is devoid of the lure of the by now over-sensitized cultural nostalgia of previous years, precisely because the anticipated future has crossed the temporal buffer zone. Hong Kong cinema, like the city itself, can no longer claim the privileged future anterior point of view. This change also necessitates a reassessment of the aftermath of this allegorical future: if pre-handover nostalgia refers not to history but the disappearance of the present as/into future-history, the post-nostalgic has the advantage of a critical hindsight accompanied by a self-reflexive consciousness. This critical hindsight can be located in Hong Kong’s social realist cinema, a tradition that can be traced back to early Chinese cinema since the early twentieth century. In Hong Kong, social realist films with strong moral and political messages lost their popular appeal during the early 1970s to lighter and more upbeat entertainment such as kung fu, action, and urban comedy. However, a new stream of social realist films sprang up in the late 1970s, culminating in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema in the 1980s. It is now a well-known fact that the New Wave marked the beginning of Hong Kong’s arthouse cinema, and their artistic explorations into local subject matter with contemporary relevance are powerful articulations of a local subjectivity unprecedented in the history of Hong Kong cinema at that time. The intellectual outlook of New Wave films anticipated the ‘second wave’ directors such as Wong Kar-wai and

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Stanley Kwan.7 In Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung, this social realist perspective is at the service of the filmmaker’s desire to re-examine the local in the absence of the future anterior. As we shall see, the filmmakers’ identification with the local is complicated by their identification of the local as a specific social group whose existence is threatened by vested political and social interests. In these films, the construction of historical and social space as a form of collective memory and resistance to disappearance reflects this complex relationship between the local as subject and the local as a subject of representation. If the critique of the nostalgic in Wong Kar-wai’s films (Chapter 1) takes the form of a critique of the image as cultural self-indulgence, in Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung this critique is articulated through their dissonance with the official image of Hong Kong and the concomitant ‘economic miracle’ narrative. In the two films, a variety of historical ‘actors’, real or fictional, form the basis of a counter-discourse vis-à-vis official and elitist representations pre- and post-handover.

Ghosts of the past: Nostalgia and the old city revisited In a study on local history writing in Hong Kong before and after the ‘1997 divide’, Jeremy E. Taylor identifies a cluster of texts that he calls ‘topographical histories’, a mixed genre of anecdotal essays, gazetteerlike narratives, photograph albums, and so on, that ‘take their premise locality and topography’ in depicting the city’s history.8 Taylor’s reading of these texts helps unravel an alternative dimension of narrativizing the city’s past that goes against the discourse of the nation which tends to erase all traits of historical, cultural, and ideological difference in characterizing the ex-British colony as an essentially Chinese city. More specifically, topographical writing ‘focuses primarily on the city’s built environment and streets for its expression’ and has indirectly revealed the unique relation between urban geography and the city’s identity.9 These ‘other’ historical narratives are not rigorous historical scholarship, but an integrated form of personal memoir, fiction, and gazetteer writing. The old streetscape that these narratives seek to preserve is very often heavily invested in nostalgia that points directly towards the ‘non-national’ past of the city.10 This nostalgic reconstruction of local histories through subjective re-visitation of old streetscapes underscores a general anxiety over the voraciousness of a national narrative that threatens to submerge all local memories into its homogenizing discourse of race (Chineseness) and unity. It is therefore no coincidence that in other realms of social life, mini-discourses have sprung up before

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and after 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s ‘return’ to China, to negotiate, in different forms and perspectives, a local sense of identity that befits the city’s unique historical experience. The cityspace as a repository of local articulations and contestations of identities has inspired new readings of Hong Kong’s urban landscape. Ackbar Abbas’ theorization of Hong Kong’s colonial space identifies three key features of the city’s architecture, namely, a capacity for foreign influence, constant rebuilding, and hyperdensity. With the exception of a few ‘architectural showpieces’, however, ‘the presentday form of the urban vernacular presents us with a visual anonymity that spreads to most parts of the city and deprives it of architectural character. Yet . . . the Anonymous may be the most articulate and significant of all.’11 Michelle Huang traces the relation between the forces of globalization and cinematic representations of the urban space as a site of cultural critique and resistance.12 Cultural historians, on the other hand, have discovered how historical landmarks were connected to the power dynamics between the colonial administration and local elites since the early days of British rule.13 These and other writings reveal a much more complex historical situation embodied in the lived environment of Hong Kong, and thus problematize any straight-forward characterizations in popular media images and official representations. The architectural space in Little Cheung and Ordinary Heroes displaces two official images of the city: (1) the tourism-board image of ‘the city of lights’, the oriental Manhattan, or ‘Asia’s world city’, and (2) the complementary postcard image of ‘old Hong Kong’, a sanitized and no less exoticized construct to promote tourism. As part of the government’s self-promotion campaign, these two diametrically opposed images conjure up an ultra-modern city with a cultural heritage and ‘trademark’ culled in Orientalist language, but history seems to be lost in a vacuum: between the Oriental Manhattan in the twenty-first century and the nostalgic recollections of rickshaws and fishing boats is a void, a silence that betrays the formulaic and simplistic grand narrative of Hong Kong history as an economic ‘miracle’, a rags to riches transformation from a fishing village to a world-class city.14 The city is sketched in quite different strokes in Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung: ultramodern architecture and supermalls give way to congested boat homes and matchbox-like lower class neighbourhoods as an organic part of social and cultural memory threatened by material and symbolic erasure. The symbiotic relationship between the city and its inhabitants, especially the marginalized and downtrodden, revises the narratives of colonial modernity and national reunification by reinscribing these disappearing

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figures as historical subjects. The reconstruction of the cityscape, which effectively brings in contradictory historical times and spaces, constitutes a visual mode of remembering that informs the vision of the present.

Little Cheung: City narrative at the ground level Little Cheung is the second instalment of Fruit Chan’s ‘Hong Kong Trilogy’ together with Made in Hong Kong/Xianggang zhizao (1997) and The Longest Summer/Qunian yianhua tebie duo (1998). Released in three consecutive years starting from 1997, these films capture the complex texture of Hong Kong’s social margins, a lower class life world of the disenfranchised that is far from homogenous. Made in Hong Kong is a sad tale of three lower class youths driven to tragic ends by the prejudices and negligence of society, while The Longest Summer traces the footsteps of ex-Hong Kong British troops struggling for a living after their discharge from the colonial service. Compared to the bleakness and cynicism of Made in Hong Kong and Longest Summer, Little Cheung presents a more communal and down-to-earth picture of life in a lower class neighbourhood. Little Cheung is the child protagonist, the son of the proprietor of a Hong Kong-style deli commonly known as caa caan teng (cha can ting in Mandarin) in Portland Street, Mongkok, one of the busiest commercial districts dotted with old and new shopping malls, cinemas, hawkers, sundry stores, eateries, nightclubs, and brothels. Mingling among the dilapidated vernacular buildings and old shop fronts are the homes of shop owners and workers in the same area. Together they constitute what can be conveniently called the ‘street community’ or ‘street habitat’ that characterizes the livelihood of a significant proportion of ordinary Hong Kong people. In the film, the street community has developed its own hierarchy of power and unofficial codes of practice that have been upheld by the inhabitants for generations. As a long-time resident in the neighbourhood, Cheung has made friends with a large number of people as a part-time delivery boy and earns precious little from his customers. Little Cheung’s street world presents the local space from the perspective of an insider. From the very beginning, the film assaults the viewer’s senses with densely packed scenes of the Portland Street market, using Cheung’s voice-over to introduce us to a bread-and-butter, hustle-bustle world: ‘Money is everybody’s dream’, Cheung informs us in the opening scene, fully embracing this characteristic Hong Kong ethos. Cheung occupies a marginal position vis-à-vis the adults and other figures of

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authority (his father, the street’s elders, and the hooligans), but his marginality also enables him to play a border-crossing role: among his good friends (and fans) are the subalterns of the street community, for example prostitutes, street hawkers, ethnic minority workers, and illegal immigrants. Watching their daily interactions, the audience is guided by this ‘childish’ perspective into the inner landscape of the city. It is neither Oriental Manhattan nor a government-sponsored ‘heritage walk’. Juxtaposing the old neighbourhood with occasional shots of the better-known metropolitan Hong Kong, the subtle demarcation of social and cultural boundaries becomes apparent. The ultra-modernity of the metropolitan global space, as Michelle Huang has remarked, is out of reach for the ordinary folks, among whom are legal and illegal migrant workers on underpaying jobs, a far cry from the professional managerial staff of multinational corporations primarily for whom this global ‘monumental’ space has been created.15 These boundaries are somehow reproduced within the street community, where migrant workers and illegal immigrants are never truly integrated into world of the locals. As the narrative proceeds, a more complex and heterogeneous world is revealed. The street as a local (unofficial) geographical and social unit has its own power structure and social hierarchy similar to that of the traditional village community. But it is never static: change is registered in the comings and goings of different ethnic and migrant groups (Filipinos, Southeast Asians, and Mainland Chinese); while the succession of generations poses a steady threat to the delicate power balance of the community and its time-honoured communal bonding among the inhabitants. Consistent with Fruit Chan’s preoccupation with the urban locale, Little Cheung presents a familiar yet often neglected vista of the city. The street world itself emits a distinctive local flavour not because of its Chineseness, but an inchoate mix of social classes and ethnic groups. Little Cheung, being the young master of his father’s restaurant, has the privilege of being a veteran member of the established street community. According to this community’s miniature rule of sovereignty, the current leader is Uncle Kin, an elderly restaurant owner who used to have a crush on Cheung’s Grandmother and still cares for her. This gives Cheung and his father some extra protection from extortion and bullying by the hooligans led by Kin’s eldest son. Little Cheung’s attachment to Ami, the Filipino maid, is an indirect comment on the typical Hong Kong nuclear family, where parents usually work full time, leaving the care of their children to domestic helpers hired from the Philippines or Indonesia. In an ironic twist of the mother–child relationship, the

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film has Little Cheung roaming the streets to look for Ami, and finally reunites with her in the middle of a huge Filipino religious gathering in Central, a Sunday morning phenomenon quite uniquely Hong Kong. Within its compact locale, the film throws in a high density of signs and images to allude to the sociopolitical context prior to the 1997 handover, intercutting scenes of everyday commotions with news footage of the Sino-British negotiations, real-life celebrity gossip, and the increasing public concern over the influx of illegal Chinese immigrants. The larger historical frame, however, is not meaningful to the street community as if granted. In the film, the relevance and significance of this larger frame of reference is seen and felt through the reveries of Cheung’s Grandmother and Cheung’s friendship with Fan, a nine-year-old illegal immigrant from Mainland China. The film’s main action follows Cheung’s daily delivery itineraries, his friendship with Fan, and his failed attempts to reunite with the older brother he has never seen. His Grandmother’s recollections serve as a link between past and present until her death, which coincides with the death of a real-life celebrity, the ‘king of charity and Cantonese opera’ San Ma Sizang/Xin Ma Shizeng (also known as Tang Wing-cheung or Brother Cheung), and Hong Kong’s reunification with China. The street world in Little Cheung is created as a mode of remembering that also locates the act of remembering in the present. Like Grandmother, it is a repertoire of past memories kept alive by the everyday activities of shop owners, hawkers, labourers, local bullies, pimps, and prostitutes. This compact street world is complete with details as the camera follows Cheung on his daily errands through the back lanes and alleyways of Mongkok. Probably due to his early training with the Hong Kong New Wave,16 Fruit Chan’s films often contain a good facility for social criticism. In Little Cheung, the quest for social meaning is realized in the integration of character and setting. Throughout the film, characters are frequently framed in long and medium shots against matchbox-like vernacular buildings, hawker stalls, and labyrinthine back alleys, while the modern skyline and architecture in the same area are carefully avoided except in a few well-planned shots. Indeed, the disappearing architectural spaces of the old city occupy a central importance in Fruit Chan’s films, which he admits is due to the inspiration he gets from lower class neighbourhoods.17 In Little Cheung, the Portland Street community presents us with a collage of objects from bygone days; for instance, Grandma’s vernacular apartment features an array of treasures of old: an antique radio and a fuzzy black-andwhite television, old albums filled with vintage photos, and a worn-out,

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timeless-looking rocking chair. As a monument to time past, Grandma is almost never seen outside her apartment until towards the end of the film, when she walks down with great difficulty upon hearing the news of Brother Cheung’s death. A more mobile extension of Grandma’s antique collection is Cheung’s over-sized bicycle used for everyday deliveries, which is becoming a rarity in urban areas today. Cheung’s mobility is echoed in the thriving presence of human characters, whose on the minute alert to television news returns contemporary significance to old signs and objects. An ironic contrast is created when the weight of everyday trivialities fall upon the relatively light sketches of political events leading up to the July 1 handover. While public worries over the political future of Hong Kong keep flooding through television broadcasts, the street world stays tuned on what it intuitively reckons as worthier headlines: the impending death of Brother Cheung and the escalating scandal between his wife and children over his estate. Fruit Chan wittily summarizes this almost uncanny political apathy in the words of Ami, the Filipino caretaker when she talks to her country folk on the phone: ‘You know when [Brother Cheung] dies he will get more attention than [when] Deng Xiaoping died’. Michelle Huang considers this displaced comment as a deliberate centering of the regional character of Cantonese opera symbolized by Brother Cheung, and also a key to Fruit Chan’s local ‘myth-making’.18 The juxtaposition of Ami on the phone and Brother Cheung’s black-and-white TV clip on a split screen not only legitimizes Ami’s ‘foreign’ perspective, but also obliquely illuminates the irony behind the locals’ muddled priorities. The story of Brother Cheung’s family scandal and the story of Hong Kong’s return to China seem to be contending for the street’s attention on the many TV screens foregrounded in the film’s mise-en-scène. The crowds gathering in front of the television gradually takes on totemic significance, making visible the film’s political message behind this obsession with celebrity gossip: the disproportional public attention paid to a dying Cantonese opera legend reveals not public confidence in the two governments’ goodwill and commitment to Hong Kong’s longterm well-being, but self-abandonment of the disempowered masses as a result of 150-years-long ‘freedom without democracy’, which is also guaranteed to continue in Deng Xiaoping’s promise of wushinian bubian or ‘no change for fifty years’ (Chapter 1). Little Cheung, on the other hand, is a keen audience of Grandmother’s stories about her youthful days in Cantonese opera and an imaginary romance with Brother Cheung, feeling as if he was re-living a special part of the old woman’s past. This cross-generation sharing gives the film its most

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intimate moments, like a shelter against the harsh realities of the outside world, as we watch Grandmother and Cheung, once joined by Fan, sharing past secrets accompanied by Cantonese opera music coming through Grandmother’s antique television and radio. In the midst of, and in sharp contrast to, all the ‘hard talk’ about politics and economics, the street world is generating its own counter-narratives, a kind of ‘street talk’ that authenticates the sentiments of the common folk far better than any political speeches and joint declarations. It encapsulates the politics of everyday life, within which history is lived without foregone conclusions. In Little Cheung, temporal and spatial changes are registered in the endless stream of Cantonese opera soundtracks and clips from early Cantonese films on Grandma’s television. The audience hardly misses a chance to watch with Grandma her favourite Brother Cheung films whenever we see her. The significance of the ubiquitous television screen in this film is twofold. First, this intertextual frame of reference situates the film within the popular cultural history of Hong Kong. Cantonese opera was once a major genre in the local film industry ever since it was pioneered by Lai Man-wai (Li Minwei) in the 1930s.19 Cantonese filmmaking since the early twentieth century has undergone many ups and downs, and its dynamic and competitive relationship with Mandarin cinema parallels the political tug of war between China, Taiwan, and the colonial government in Hong Kong.20 The film’s title, Little Cheung, is a direct reference to a 1950 Cantonese film, My Son A-Chang/Xilu Xiang in which Bruce Lee, then a child actor, plays a street-smart boy who relies on his wit and tricks to survive the perils of an exploitative society. A clip of this much older film is actually shown on Grandma’s television towards the end of the film to reinforce the symbolic bond between Cheung and the Bruce Lee character. The overlapping signification of Brother Cheung and the two Little Cheungs—what appears to function like triple-framing—points towards the film’s intertextual selfreference: three years after the handover, it seems, Fruit Chan offers his own version of Little Cheung as a site of collective remembrance within the continuum of the city’s cultural memory. The repeated shots of people gathering around the television inside local eateries reflect the nature of this memory: in a city where digital media has created an instantaneous culture, news is consumed like fast food; in effect, the television/film screen becomes an imaginative space where a kind of collective cohesiveness is enabled and maintained. A spectacular tribute to Cantonese opera and Cantonese cinema appears in the scene where Little Cheung openly defies his father, who forces

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Cheung to stand outside the family restaurant after taking off the boy’s pants (punishment in public being a common practice in traditional Chinese family/school education). Anguished, humiliated but refusing to back down, Cheung sings in a defiant but emotionally charged voice Brother Cheung’s classic Cantonese opera song. The camera stays on Cheung’s fragile body as he slowly turns towards the camera (audience). At the peak of his performance21 Cheung, facing the camera in a fullfrontal shot, urinates in pouring rain as if Heaven, too, is in sympathy for the boy. This declaration of Cheung’s independence is visually compelling, as the camera moves from a low angle shot to a full frontal, confronting the viewer with the violence of the father. The song Cheung has chosen tellingly suggests the allegorical meaning of this scene: it is a song about a blind beggar reflecting on his father’s admonition not to bear grudge against a mother who abandoned him at an early age. Whether this lament of orphanhood refers to the experience of colonization or to a more disturbing sense of alienation after reunification with the Motherland is not clearly spelled out,22 but the pathos sustained throughout Cheung’s performance belies Cheung’s, and the city’s, predicament. Symbolically, this scene legitimizes Cheung as the true heir of his Grandmother’s memory, and the cultural legacy she comes to represent. The pathos of orphanhood and abandonment implied in this scene is sustained in contradistinction from the political apathy of the street community, whose disproportional enthusiasm for TV gossip seems to work well as an over-compensation. While the television as a symbol of the modern media-saturated society is a primary vehicle for the dissemination of news and entertainment, the two roles of the television as a source of information and fast food are repeatedly juxtaposed in the film’s mis-en-scène, until the deaths of Grandma and Brother Cheung on the eve of the handover. This harks back to the discussion of nostalgia in the previous section. The difference between Little Cheung and the nostalgic films mentioned above lies in the use of nostalgia as a culturalhistorical frame of reference outside the mainstream political discourse of the time. It is important that the film is not just about the adventure of Little Cheung but is primarily told/viewed from the perspective of the child protagonist, whose unintentional misinterpretation of signs and meanings emanating from the adult world reveals the absurdities and contradictions of everyday life. From this perspective, the relationship between the street world and the world ‘outside’ is complicated by Cheung’s occasional misreading/subversion of the street world’s hierarchy and code of conduct. In a scene bordering on a carnivalesque

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reversal of power positions, Cheung takes revenge on the hooligans by pissing into their drinks and manages to get away unscathed. In another scene, David, the hooligan leader, is seen enjoying his icy lemon drink at an outdoor food stall with his underlings. The gang is temporarily distracted by a beautiful woman passing by. Cheung, looking down from the balcony of his prostitute friend’s apartment, seizes this opportunity to drop a used tampon into his glass. David of course fails to turn his head back soon enough to discern the changed colour of his lemon tea before he gulps it down. Allegedly, he falls ill soon afterwards and never fully recovers. Rendered in a series of jump cuts and slow motion, this comic episode delivers the joke in a rhythmic, almost celebratory manner. In a slow motion close-up shot, the camera playfully prolongs the tampon’s descent into David’s drink as if inviting the viewer to savour the mischief befalling the hooligan at a leisurely pace. The daring imagery of a blood-soaked tampon falling into a glass turns a tabooed feminine object into a phallic image of toxic intrusion, instantly debilitating the culprit (menstrual blood here works like black magic on its victim). These comic moments inject an element of fantasy into an otherwise realistic portrayal of grassroots life in the city. They may sound unconvincing, but the hyperbolic quality and the readiness to sacrifice verisimilitude for comic relief are very much in line with the tradition of filmmaking in Hong Kong since the early days of Cantonese cinema. Realistically speaking, these hilarious incidents can only be made credible in a setting like the Portland Street market, where a tiny block of vernacular building is shared by an inchoate mix of users at any given time of the day. Indeed, Cheung’s characterization reminds the audience of the street-smart child-protagonists in earlier Cantonese films whose only means of survival is their own wit. Yet, Cheung’s world is also radically different from his predecessors’: his journey of self-discovery goes far beyond the struggle-for-survival motif to reveal a more complex set of social and cultural relationships that have come to define the local experience of ordinary people in late colonial Hong Kong. So much has been said about the past and the present. What about the future? While Little Cheung looks back into Hong Kong’s pre-handover years for clues to its changing identity, the film’s ending offers an ambivalent and obliquely satirical view of the future that parodies the handover celebrations and problematizes the notion of national identity: a group of primary school children attend a morning assembly in their school’s playground. Dressed in white shirts with red neckribbons, they sing the national anthem as they solemnly observe the flag-raising ceremony. As the camera pans across the assembly, the

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children’s diligent but clueless faces display neither emotion nor understanding as the flag slowly rises against a downcast sky. At the same time, the solemnity of the flag-raising ceremony is undermined by the awkward lecture by the class teacher on the meaning of the five-star symbol on the Chinese flag. Reciting from memorized notes in a monotonous, lack luster voice, her speech is as unconvincing as it is out of place with the surrounding environment. This cynical view of the post-handover situation is a direct comment on Hong Kong’s problematic identification with China, characteristic of the city’s ambiguous relationship with the Chinese nation in its century-long colonial history.23 Like the school assembly, the ex-colony’s political return is a ceremonial and technical necessity, but the transition is not yet complete at the psychological and intellectual level. In this sense, the ceremony, like the handover itself, is formality without substance, conformity without conviction. The crisis of identity is poignantly expressed in a scene showing Cheung and Fan shouting at the top of their voices, ‘Hong Kong belongs to us!’, as they look over the Victoria Harbour, eager to muffle the other’s voice. This scene is perhaps the only one set in a touristy spot of the city, vividly reproducing familiar views of Hong Kong’s waterfront and skyline at a distance. At the same time, this scene conjures up a visual contrast that works to undermine the vista of promise and hope by juxtaposing the distance and magnitude (unreality?) of this hope with three vulnerable child-figures. The sight of the frail bodies leaning on the stone benches of the harbour front promenade crying out loud for a sense of belonging seems to suggest a lack and a gap rather than fulfillment. The subconscious contention between the children for a sense of ownership suggests that, their mutual good will and friendship aside, the collective pronoun ‘us’ has different meanings to the two friends. While Fan, an outsider, is making a deliberate and difficult effort to make herself at home in a hostile and still foreign city, Cheung aspired to becoming his own master in his native town. The word ‘us’ (wo men) is therefore equivocal in nature, its articulation underscored by an invisible barrier between the two interlocutors and the ‘native places’ each represent: Cheung is eager to assert his heritage as a Hong Konger, while Fan envisions a new beginning in her adopted hometown in future. This difference in self-perception is so deeply rooted in the collective historical experience that the barrier between the two friends (peoples?) cannot be overcome easily by innocent friendship and good will. The vulnerability of this relationship is carried through to the end: Fan is taken away by the police, Cheung hops on his bike trying to catch up with the police car, in the hope that he could bid farewell and,

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more importantly, make amends. A series of long and medium shots reveal Cheung on his oversized bike, cutting every possible corner in the back lanes to race the police car. The child’s skinny figure is pressed against the matchbox-like buildings as he rushes haphazardly down the narrow passages, his face mixed with anxiety and regret. Unfortunately, Cheung keeps chasing after the wrong vehicle. At this point Fan takes over as the voice-over, and ends her narrative with a lingering sense of disillusionment and alienation. As in Chan’s other films, alienation and abandonment both preconditions and pre-empt the search for meaning by young people and those living on the social margin. Their stories confront mainstream society with its hypocrisy, self-deception, arrogance, and cowardice, showing how a shared inertia to bury unpleasant truths result in collective amnesia, which at least in part explains why political apathy is often used to excuse draconian governance. Little Cheung takes an insider’s look at the heterogeneous space of the margin and reveals a dynamic life-world not of rickshaws or skyscrapers, but of ordinary people and everyday objects on which social and cultural memories can be anchored. From Chan’s cinematic perspective, the street-world, as a vantage point of history, is a new mode of remembering and an antidote to the homogenizing discourse of nationalism and reunification.24

Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes: The silences of history Forgetting and remembering are constituents of the nostalgia critically revised in Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes. This film can be read as the city’s rite of passage from youthful idealism to the sober present. The main story takes place during the late 1970s and the 1980s, a period of economic transformation and political transition, ending in the wake of the June 4th Tiananmen Incident in 1989.25 The narrative interweaves the flashbacks and voice-over of two key characters who look back to earlier times from the vantage point of the 1990s. In re-telling the story of a group of social activists, the film seeks to interpret the social and political forces that shaped the destinies of individuals who came of age during the 1980s, and how these individuals eventually came to terms with the pressing socio-political realities of their time. A broader theme built into these personal histories is the problematic between city and nation. As a British colony located on the southern border of its historical ‘motherland’, Hong Kong’s position in Chinese history is at best ambivalent, if not embarrassing. Its ‘double marginality’ vis-à-vis both the colonial master and China has had a tremendous impact on

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the territory’s cultural development.26 In Ann Hui’s film, the series of events leading up to the public outrage at the June 4th military crackdown can be read as a prologue to Hong Kong’s coming to terms with its own historical destiny in full awareness of this ‘double marginality’, registered in the clashes of political ideologies, conflicts of values, and the growing pains of a younger generation of educated elites and social activists as they negotiate their identities both inside and outside the political establishment. My reading of Hui’s film focuses on the multiple displacements effected by the film’s representation of space and history. I look at how the film shifts the terms of reference from dominant narratives of history to marginalized personal memories, which are paralleled by the film’s representation of the city as a subaltern space that no measure of well-meaning political idealism has ever managed to reform or improve. Ann Hui’s take on the city, I argue, bespeaks the dilemma of a self-reflexive intellectual filmmaker trying to ‘speak for the masses’. In Ordinary Heroes, the time frame of 1979–1989 recasts Hong Kong’s recent past against the dominant discourse on this crucial decade in Chinese history, which saw China’s re-emergence on the stage of world politics beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy in 1978, and the beginning of a new phase of nation-wide modernization. The 1980s encapsulates the renewed hope in China’s economic and political progress, which came to an abrupt halt in 1989. On the other hand, standard narratives of Hong Kong history often credit this crucial decade as an important phase of Hong Kong’s economic take-off and subsequent rise to an international financial centre in Asia. As a response to the outbreak of anti-government riots in 1966–1967, the British government adopted a more tolerant and socially responsive colonial policy in order to redirect public attention to domestic social and economic development in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the leadership of Governor Sir Murray MacLehose (1972–1982), the first governor elected from the democratic camp in Britain, major reforms in social welfare, public housing, and education were implemented to restore the public’s faith in the political system and to defuse social tension and anti-British sentiments among the working class and young people.27 The 1980s saw the rise of Hong Kong to dynamic global city, accompanied by substantial improvement in public education, employment, and overall living standards. Ann Hui’s film fills in what this narrative has omitted: the marginalized groups whose livelihood has remained more or less static throughout this era of social and economic progress. Interestingly, Hui deliberately plays down the significance of 1997 in shaping the course

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of events. Instead, the China factor is reintroduced through the dismal lives of the fishing community and the so-called ‘boat brides’ (Mainland wives of local fishermen who were refused legal abode by the colonial government), culminating in a public mourning for June 4th victims. This recasting of the recent past that displaces the China-focused narrative is complemented by the film’s representation of the urban space. Ordinary Heroes recreates the ambience and ethos of the city in the late 1970s and 1980s through the stories of four characters. Sow and Tung grew up in boat families and became close allies to Yau, a student activist turned legislative councilor, and Father Kam, an Italian cleric influenced by Maoist thought. They are brought together during the Boat People Incident of 1979.28 An early scene at the Yaumatei typhoon shelter strategically introduces the main characters and subtly demarcates the different social spaces they each inhabit in a well-designed shot sequence. After a few establishing shots of the fishing community and the commotion of public demonstrations at the pier, the camera slowly closes in on the child Sow kneeling in front of a funeral alter on which are placed photos of her family. Hundreds were killed in a fire that incinerated dozens of boat homes. Beginning with young Tung’s point-of-view shots, the camera gradually expands its vision to capture other characters in a picture befitting the clashes between generations, social groups, and moral and political beliefs. Symbolically, embedded in this picture are the differential power positions assigned by class: Yau at the centre appears as the voice of justice and reason, but his impatient tutoring of the ‘unenlightened’ masses betrays an arrogance that will become more visible later on. Father Kam comes into the picture from the lower right, singing and playing a guitar on a small boat, a typical ‘man of the people’ image he carries through to the end. (These two fellow activists turn out to be contrastive models of political action in and outside mainstream politics.) Around these two focal points are boat families and fire victims engrossed in traditional rituals. Visually, this early scene subtly demarcates the internal divisions along class and gender lines (the protestors and leaders are predominantly male) within a local community typical of the tension-prone Hong Kong society in the late 1970s. The concluding shots of this scene further problematizes the political idealists’ assumed position of superiority by an ironic mix of incompatible social practices infiltrating into one another. The chasm between the intellectual elite and the ‘silent masses’ they vow to protect is vividly presented: in slow motion, strips of spiritual money float across a smoky screen; a fade-in of paper deities briefly appears before it dissolves into a long shot of Yau and a group

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of clueless protestors barely able to read their lines, the spiritual money still visible in the sky. This shot sequence is accompanied by a diegetic sound track, mixing Yau’s voice shouting through the loudspeaker and traditional funeral music from nearby boat homes. This cacophony of images and sounds conjure up an historical image of a particular social milieu in late 1970s Hong Kong, magnifying the clashes between the lower-class mobilized by committed intellectuals and the colonial administration represented by the then Royal Hong Kong Police. The social and political divide is further complicated by internal divisions among the activist group made up of left-leaning intellectuals, a Maoist Italian cleric, the marginalized fishing community, and later on husbands demanding right of abode for their Mainland wives. A more direct political statement comes from the intercutting scenes of a street drama about a real-life activist and steadfast Trotskyite, Ng Chung-yin,29 whose story bears witness to the ideological conflicts and in-fights in the leftist camp in the 1960s, which the film suggests was the reason for their eventual break-up and oblivion. The intermittent inserts of Ng’s play also serve as a critical commentary on the differences between two generations of the local educated elite: Ng’s generation embraced a clear sense of national identity and patriotic mission (anti-British colonialism), whereas Yau and his peers display a closer emotional attachment to the city as their hometown. In the new generation’s agenda, nationalism in the form of anti-colonial rule has largely disappeared, replaced by a deeper commitment to local welfare and social progress. This early exposition helps anchor the film’s spatial representation within a set of social parameters. Almost all the shooting locations are in poor neighbourhoods: the typhoon shelter, boat homes, public housing estates, temporary settlements, homeless camps under a busy flyover. These spaces cut a broad spectrum of Hong Kong’s underbelly, a subaltern space characteristically absent from the city’s public images. The only exceptions are a few scenes of public protests in front of the Legislative Council in Central and the now dismantled Star Ferry in Tsimshatsui. This choice of setting is a practical necessity, since it is difficult to re-create the cityscape of twenty years ago in many parts of the presentday Hong Kong, a city known for rapid urbanization and redevelopment. Strategically, these dilapidated neighbourhoods are foregrounded as the key sites of struggle against collective amnesia, as the film’s intertitles ‘To Forget’ and ‘Not to Forget’ explicitly point out. As a director known for her social commitment and sympathy for women oppressed by patriarchal power,30 Ann Hui has made Ordinary Heroes to speak for the voiceless masses, whose existence and struggles cannot comfortably

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sit with the success story of a booming and upwardly mobile metropolitan city. In the film, a sense of betrayal and futility saturates the images of poverty and social injustice captured in snapshots of the city stripped of its usual metropolitan aura: impoverished and hazard-prone boat homes, dying drug addicts and homeless people in makeshift card-box dwellings, dilapidated tenement buildings and a line-up of disillusioned activists and ex-patriots. Repeatedly, and sometimes in quick succession, these images fill up the screen, and much screen time, like a collection of exhibits on display, as if the filmmaker is trying to make an imprint on our visual memory that will last longer than the time of viewing. Much in line with her docu-drama credentials, Ann Hui blends in real and fictional news footage, black and white still shots, scenes from another street drama, and a film-within-the-film interview between the actors and the director herself. Slightly off-coloured and grainy in texture, these documentary fragments carry the immediacy of reportage, like a series of images culled and reassembled from historical archives in order to shed light on the present moment. If Ordinary Heroes stands as a fictional memoir of a bygone era, the film narrative reorganizes fragments of the larger ‘social text’ to obtain critical meaning. As an historical docu-drama, Ordinary Heroes does not seek political participation as its characters do; rather, it sets out to test the fundamental beliefs and moral calibre of its fictional characters as historical metaphors. Father Kam, a localized foreigner, had to leave the territory when tension was building up between him and the Catholic Church due to his controversial politics. Sow and Tung are neither political idealists nor social elites. Quietly observing and supporting their respective ‘hero’, the two youngsters aspire to finding a purpose and vocation in life, a new horizon from which they can transcend their class constraints and thereby assert themselves through social participation. Yau begins as a socially committed university student who tries to bring his beliefs into practice by joining mainstream politics. He becomes, in the end, an elected member of the Legislative Council (now Legislative Assembly) working his way up the political ladder. An idealist turned seasoned politician, Yau remains a split figure in his public career and private life. Lacking moral courage to face up to his flaws yet unable to completely reject his past ideals, Yau remains haunted by a guilty conscience and a sense of impotence, which climaxes when Beijing’s military crackdown in Tiananmen Square left the entire Hong Kong public paralysed in anger and disbelief. Precisely because of his being a disappointment even to himself, Yau is a convincingly realistic character living through the dilemma and inner conflicts of a well-meaning intellectual trying to prove himself in the political establishment.

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In Ordinary Heroes, Yau represents a new generation of the educated elite, those who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As some critics have noted, Ann Hui’s final treatment of the complexity of Yau’s character is far from sympathetic: seeing no way out for his pent-up anger and frustration, he rapes Sow in his own office just when the woman is leaving him. Running away from Yau in deep agony, Sow is knocked down by a car and loses her memory as a result. This scene casts Yau in an extremely negative light. He admits feeling like a ‘bad guy’ compared to Kam’s selfless sacrifice. Portrayed as an ambivalent character trapped in a dead-end in all aspects of his life, Yau’s political/sexual power and disempowerment are almost concurrent, culminating in the final rape scene. The parallel between the June 4th military crackdown and sexual violence throws as much light on Yau’s character as on his complicity with the system of power that characterizes both the British and the Chinese regimes. Ending a long, strained relationship with sexual violence and memory loss may well be seen as a projection of Ann Hui’s own political disillusionment and scepticism. At the same time, the film’s political meanings are to be found in the private realm of individual experience. The tortuous relationship between Sow and Yau and her subsequent refusal to play the mistress signify as much the shattering of hope in the hero figure as her gradual discovery of her own subjectivity, which remains in conflict with the role of a sexual/social victim imposed by Yau and the institution of power he has come to symbolize. From the very beginning, the film locates the voice of history in Tung, Sow, and intertextually Ng Chun-yin in a dramatized autobiography. The young people’s voice-over narratives provide key anchor points for narrative unfolding. Unlike in a nostalgic reminiscence, the past as memory recalled is constantly interrupted by Tung and Sow’s perspectives in the present. In the film’s opening scene, Sow, dressed in a hospital gown, runs down an underground tunnel as if she was haunted by a ghost; when she suddenly comes to a halt and turns back to face the camera, the close-up shot reveals an eagerness to confront the monster behind her. A number of Ann Hui’s films deal with the issue of forgetting. Memory loss is frequently used as a pretext for a soul-searching journey in which memory is never taken for granted. Many characters in her films are haunted by memories of the past, but the act of remembering always results in conflicting claims and interpretations. Even in Hui’s light-hearted supernatural thriller, Visible Secret/Youling renjian (I) (2001), characters are haunted by a ghost seeking revenge for his death, but the only person who can see the ghost has lost her childhood memory. While the scariest moments of this supernatural thriller are often

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defused by comical twists, memory loss and recovery remains a central concern in Visible Secret: the ghost realizes that his revenge has been meaningless when the heroine finally remembers the real cause of the tram accident that decapitated him some fifteen years ago. In a more sombre tone, national and personal histories have created an insurmountable barrier between mother and daughter in Hui’s Song of the Exile/Ketu qiuhen (1996), in which reconciliation is made possible only when the daughter re-visits her mother’s past (the misunderstanding and discrimination suffered by a young Japanese woman married to a Chinese man) and realizes, for the first time, both of them are in fact fellow exiles in the long journey of life. In Hui’s films, the past always comes back to disturb the precarious equilibrium of the status quo and forces a confrontation with repressed memories. In Ordinary Heroes, Sow is a victim of sexual violence and social injustice, but she is also the agent through whom hidden truths are recalled. The personal stories presented do not come to any solid conclusions about the politics or morals each represents. Rather, the film poses questions about whether, and how much, social justice for ordinary people is achieved after all the turmoil and personal sufferings. With the exception of Kam,31 the other two intellectual figures are confronted with a choice between self-marginalization and self-betrayal. While Yau moves on in his political career, the memory of Ng Chung-yin the idealist is retained in a post-humus street drama. The film’s treatment of Ng’s fragments shows the same sensitivity towards space and its relation to voice and memory: bit by bit throughout the film, the camera reframes his performance to reveal more and more of the surrounding off-stage, which turns out to be the Temple Street public night market in Kowloon, a lively conglomerate of hawkers, fortune-tellers, as well as professional and amateur performers. The last time the street drama appears coincides with Tung’s return to Hong Kong, Sow’s car accident, and the military crackdown in Beijing. For the first time Ng’s drama is integrated into the film’s diegetic space as Tung walks through the night market in search of Sow. This scene visually and spatially links together Sow’s rape and memory loss, the dwindling voice of the political idealist, and the tragedy of June 4th. The political symbolism is imbued with a sense of futility and angst that cannot be easily dispelled by any amount of public protest. The most politically charged episodes are perhaps those relating to the Tiananmen tragedy. In fact, the film’s final scene shows Tung attending the annual Tiananmen commemoration in Victoria Park. In slow motion, the hand-held camera moves with the footsteps of those

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attending the event, as people lay their white candles on the muddy ground. The movement halts as the camera slowly moves up to reveal Tung’s face in profile in a close-up, as he lays his candle on the ground. The film ends with a freeze frame on Tung. It is understandable that the tragedy has left a great impact on a majority of Hong Kong people, and to this day annual gatherings are still held to commemorate the students who were killed fifteen years ago. It is perhaps for this reason that Ann Hui resorts to a fusion of her subjects by subtitling the final part of her film ‘Not to forget’, when collective memory and personal memory are simultaneously evoked and funnelled into a final tribute to the martyrs of the June 4th crackdown. Such a twist in the narrative direction, however, weakens the film’s cohesiveness by overtly replacing the ambiguities and complexities of local/national and personal/collective and subsuming the former terms under the banner of collective mourning. This setback aside, Ann Hui’s take on the 1980s can be read as an indirect tribute to the ‘ordinary heroes’ who have provided substance to her work, a leitmotif similar to Fruit Chan’s in Little Cheung. In fact, Hui herself has admitted in an interview that her interest in politics grows out of a ‘sense of duty’.32 In Ordinary Heroes, she tries to evoke the ‘spirit’ of an important era of Hong Kong’s coming of age. To evoke the mood of an epoch by piecing together disjointed memories is far from being epic (recall the very different historical dramas from Mainland China in the same period). The film’s Chinese title has quite honestly confessed its sober ambition: qian yan wan yu, thousands and thousands of words, but something is always missing. Unlike the more sensational nostalgic movies that saturated the local market at that time, the past in Ordinary Heroes has more to offer than nostalgia; it is a self-reflective critique of the Bildung of a generation. This critical impulse echoes Hui’s autobiographical documentary As Time Goes By (Qu ri ku duo, 1997), in which Hui and her friends relish memories of their college days. Despite their Westernized upbringing, the act of ‘talking about oneself at the age of fifty’ (wushi zhishu) is a very Chinese form of self-examination. The Chinese title phrase, qu ri ku duo, is borrowed from a famous classical poem by Cao Cao in third century AD, in which the poet laments the transience of life as his army is getting ready for an important battle. Ann Hui and her fellow classmates represent a broad profile of Hong Kong’s educated elite, and are familiar names to the Hong Kong people. Made and released in 1997, the film complements Ordinary Heroes as a personal memoir of the same era. In Ordinary Heroes, the dominant narratives of history, that is, China’s re-entering the world stage, Hong Kong’s rise from rags to riches, and the

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fin-de-siècle imagination triggered by the 1997 handover, are displaced by stories of individuals on the verge of oblivion. If ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ (borrowing Spivak’s caustic remark), Ordinary Heroes could well be a cinematic reflection on this dilemma: the self-consciousness of an intellectual-filmmaker of her predicament to ‘speak for the masses’, and the simultaneous desire to ‘let them speak’, for ‘[r]epresentation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish’. The film, and Ann Hui herself, illustrates this dilemma and its promises.33 Speaking through its own images, the city as a subaltern space is re-constructed as social memory, in a film narrative that self-reflexively critiques its own intellectual roots.

Conclusion In Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung, we have discerned a more down-toearth local temperament. Their reconstruction of urban space restores a certain degree of continuity between past and present as two mutually reflective time-spaces. These films seek out their historical subjects among the silenced and marginalized obscured by popular images of metropolitan Hong Kong. Fruit Chan uses the street-world and the perspective of a street-smart boy to articulate his vision of the city, a versatile and sometimes bleak picture of a grassroots community and their way of coping with political and social change. The city seen from ‘ground zero’ effects a counter-narrative to the solemn political event of reunification, generating its own ‘street talk’ to reinterpret history and reality, a collective ‘speech act’ that eclipses the grand narrative of metropolitanism and nationalism. Ann Hui’s film reconstructs the city as a space of the subalterns whose stories question the educated elite’s legitimacy to ‘speak for the masses’ by revealing the ideological and moral blind spots of its self-representation. This self-reflective mode of remembering is akin to the social realist cinema of earlier decades; with critical hindsight, post-fin-de-siècle, Ordinary Heroes problematizes the local by de-essentializing the official narrative of the city, using the voices of two down-trodden youths and an ostracized activist to destabilize the elitist discourse of political idealism, just as the subaltern space of the city speaks out against collective amnesia. In a similar vein, in Fruit Chan’s film the local exists in the popular cultural traditions symbolized by Cantonese opera and Cantonese cinema as lived experience rather than heritage exhibits; but the local is also defined by its elusiveness, in the ever-changing ethnic, social, and mini-political

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constituencies of the street world, where the ‘untold story’ of the cosmopolitan global city unfolds. Unlike the nostalgic, exoticized localism and the stylized allegorical locale that distinguishes the popular nostalgic and gangster/kung fu genres of the late 1980s and 1990s, Little Cheung and Ordinary Heroes make use of nostalgic reminiscences to reinscribe historical ‘others’ as historical subjects. Ann Hui’s nostalgia for the ‘age of idealism’ leads not only to a critique of the later decades but also an ironic self-questioning of political idealism. Fruit Chan’s nostalgia for the communal grassroots ethos and vernacular lifestyle inspires an updating of the street kid figure as a son and heir of the local tradition. In upholding the margin as the centre of historical unfolding, both films have risked a degree of romanticizing their subject (c.f. Chapter 7). Sow’s recovery, Tung’s return to social service, and Father Kam’s Sunday Mass at an outdoor food stall feel too contrived a ‘happy ending’. In Fruit Chan’s film, the happy-go-lucky street world seems a little too happily immune from outside threats. As cinematic remembrances, however, these are sincere efforts to articulate a local consciousness by revisiting the lived experiences and imaginations of time past. This aspect of the social realist cinema, as we shall see, is also found in mainstream commercial films. It seems, for a doubly marginalized post-colonial city like Hong Kong, the imagination remains the most effective tactic for self-preservation.

3 Allegory, Kinship, and Redemption: Fu Bo and Isabella

Macau,1 a former colony of Portugal within less than an hour’s journey by ferry from Hong Kong, had been a Portuguese settlement since 1557.2 To this day, this long legacy of European settlement and colonization is still visible in city’s architecture, the street names, and the Macanese population. Though not as dominant as English in Hong Kong, Portuguese still finds nominal usage in official titles, public documents, and institutional names. Part of the legacy of Portugal’s colonial rule is the Catholic Church, which remains the largest religious establishment, though, as Christina Cheng reveals in her illuminating study, indigenous religious traditions and cultural practices have created a ‘cultural Janus’ that is far more complex than existing stereotypes and assumptions can explain.3 Like Hong Kong, the majority of the population in Macau is Cantonese-speaking Chinese, and Hong Kongers have long been regular patrons of the city’s casinos and holiday resorts. Notwithstanding its geographical and cultural affinity to Hong Kong, and despite its frequent appearance in Hong Kong films, Macau is rarely treated as a subject on its own. In Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, for instance, the Portuguese colony is a refuge and temporary exile for the heroine’s grandparents, who eventually return to ‘New China’ before the Cultural Revolution. The Longest Nite/An hua (Yau Tat-chi, 1998) is a gangster film set in Macau with strong allegorical references to Hong Kong. In Exiled/Fang zhu (2006), Johnnie To (Yau’s mentor and action auteur) uses a bloody battle between Hong Kong and Macau triads on the eve of Macau’s reunification with China in 1999 to underscore the existential and moral crises of both places before and after the change of sovereignty (Chapter 4). This chapter focuses on two films by younger directors who began their filmmaking careers in the 1990s. Fu Bo (Wong Ching-po and Lee 66

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Kung-lok, 2003)4 and Isabella (Edmond Pang Ho-cheung, 2006) are set in Macau in the last days of colonial rule. Both films display a penchant for visual manoeuvring in the creation of mood and atmosphere. In Fu Bo, the thin line between life and death is transgressed in the macabre images of executions, autopsies, and triad violence that have become a way of life for its characters, while Isabella’s romanticized rendition of Macau’s colonial cityscape endows the crime-stricken city with a controlled sentimentalism bordering on the lyrical. These contrastive images of Macau, nonetheless, carry within them a fin-de- siècle flavour pregnant with nostalgic overtones: Fu Bo features a Portuguese character (the prison cook) who acts in a priest-like manner and speaks alternately in Cantonese and Portuguese; Isabella makes direct references to the uncertainty and social turmoil in precisely the last forty-seven days before the handover to Mainland China. Both films foreground morally and psychologically tarnished characters: corrupt cops, criminals, prostitutes, and traumatized individuals persecuted by their guilt-ridden pasts. Stylistically, both Fu Bo and Isabella are more concerned with style than plot integrity, a feature that dismays some reviewers yet absolved by others.5 This ‘primacy of the image’ over narrative may not have been perfectly mastered by the young directors, but the common pursuit of an expressive visual schema in handling setting, characterization, and subject matter suggests something more than a directorial exercise. Emerging from the film texts is a desire to address a perceived impossibility of narrative coherence in the worlds portrayed. The existential landscapes in the two films are manifestations of this desire and the limitations to its fulfilment. Both films exhibit a conscious borrowing of popular genre elements in mise-en-scène and choreography, yet the revisitation of the last days of colonial rule in Macau in these films goes beyond nostalgia to expose an existential crisis that pervades the present. In Fu Bo, crisis is articulated through the invocation of an allegorical landscape in which the tensions between past and present, memory and forgetfulness, father and child, human agency and a certain notion of providence play out in an intense human drama. Isabella on the other hand exploits the fin-de-siècle splendour of the end of colonial history to project a romantic(ized) vision of the father–child relation as a means to survive in a chaotic and morally bankrupt world. Both films draw upon kinship as a site of conflict and the resolution of conflict, where redemption is sought with varied results when all other spiritual means for transcendence have failed. I seek to uncover the existential crisis that haunts the film narrative, and to suggest why this crisis forges a kind of kinship between Macau and Hong Kong in the two cities’ post-colonial present.

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Mortal spaces: Fu Bo Fu Bo consists of three connected story strands leading up to the execution ground and the autopsy room: a mortuary assistant’s daily routine of dissecting and stitching up human bodies, a gangster’s violent killings leading to mental breakdown, and a prison chef’s interactions with inmates on the death row, culminating in a cannibalistic ‘last supper’ offered as a last wish granted. The primary setting is the mortuary where the clinical procedure of autopsy is repeatedly and analytically displayed. The film’s interest in mortality and the legal and illegal institutions through which mortality is managed and processed requires a convenient and convincing setting where these elements are all present. Since Hong Kong has long abandoned capital punishment, Macau offers the necessary social and institutional parameters for a story about mortality to unfold. Practical factors aside, the Portuguese colonial enclave is filmed in retrospect: the story goes back to the final days of colonial rule in Macau to seek out the socio-political dimensions of this ‘crisis of mortality’, something like a universal tragic fate at the end of times. By confining its main action to the mortal spaces of the mortuary and the prison, punctuated by fragmented scenes of brutal murder and brief outdoor excursions, Fu Bo presents an allegorical landscape where scenes of killing, human disembodiment, and the everyday ritual of eating go hand in hand, where mortality is confronted head-on in a professional, business-as-usual manner. The bleakness, and insignificance, of human existence is visualized in the macabre images of mutilated bodies and human organs, a key visual motif of the film. Characters in Fu Bo, consciously or subconsciously, react in different yet equally bizarre ways to extreme violence that defines their everyday existence: Fu (Liu Kai-chi) takes refuge doing his ‘dirty job’ inside the mortuary and virtually insulates himself from the outside world; the nameless prison chef (Jacob Mense) devotes himself to preparing elaborate last meals for death-row inmates and recording their stories; Giu, the contract killer, makes perfect the art of torture and murder but inevitably falls victim to his own guilty conscience. Different from Ann Hui and Fruit Chan’s social realism, Fu Bo’s cinematography and narrative structure do not prioritize verisimilitude, favouring instead expressionistic sketches to capture extreme psychological states and hallucinations. This probably has to do with the necessity to improvise on a small-budget project shot in DV.6 The overall effect evokes a vision of Macau as a space of inner chaos for which the occasional excursions into an idyllic ‘outside world’ only help to

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intensify the characters’ sense of alienation and entrapment. Such a nightmarish vision of the colonial city on the eve of regime change might well be a continuation of similar sentiments in pre-handover Hong Kong through displacement. Yet, the link between pre-colonial Macau as a displaced imaginary and post-colonial Hong Kong as a lived reality is more complex than a direct nostalgic projection, for the film was made well after the political handovers (Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999), and the economic depression and crisis of public governance before and during the 2003 SARS epidemic had greatly depreciated Hong Kong’s privileged position over Macau. Curiously, it was also during these years of great turmoil that Hong Kong cinema began to take its (ex-)colonial neighbour seriously as an entity in itself, something like its ‘equal’ in post-colonial times. Fu Bo (and Isabella) treats Macau as a parallel universe in which the Hong Kong imagination seeks out an alternative narrative to its own—incoherent though it remains. This narrative allows for a renewed engagement with the historical condition of the fin-de-siècle not as unique but universal, in the sense that (colonial) history is always entangled histories. Here also lies the importance of kinship: the problematic relation between father and child in the two films shed light on the conflicting claims on identity. In Fu Bo, the fathers’ blood-stained hands are directly linked to mental collapse, neurosis, and the breakdown of kinship; its replacement by the dubious connections between the prison chef (the priest figure) and the inmates is undermined by the moral ambivalence of the cannibalistic feast. (In Isabella, on the other hand, kinship is less as a product of biological lineage than circumstance and personal choice.) The plot of Fu Bo follows a circular pattern: the opening scene shows a prisoner in orange uniform, leaning on the wall of a dark and gloomy prison cell, his back facing the screen. The voice-over is rendered in Portuguese, the subtitle of which is withheld until much later in the film. A series of jump cuts knit together the execution of prisoners, an execution-style gang murder, and the masked face of what we know later to be the central character Fu, holding a surgical knife ready to cut into something off-screen. These interlocking scenes of the prison, the execution ground, and autopsy in the mortuary anticipate the revelation of the stories of Fu, Giu, and the prison chef. The spaces each inhabits are linked by the circulation of bodies: death-row inmates, gang murder victims, and those who handle dead bodies in the mortuary. The different stories of Fu, Giu, and the prison chef are connected by their proximity to death. The ending reveals the identity of the prisoner facing the

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wall, as the English and Chinese transcriptions of the chef’s voice-over appear on a darkened screen. The extensive use of dissolves and fades renders these disconnected spaces visually fluid and interchangeable. The smudginess created by over-exposed and under-exposed colours infuses these spaces with an oppressive eeriness in sharp contrast to the consistently and almost deceptively bright outdoor scenes occasionally thrown in. In the prison, the mortuary, and the apparently ubiquitous underworld, the main characters’ professions are seen as different stages of a system of disposal—the triads run an uninterrupted supply chain of dead bodies for final discharge by the mortuary staff. The leading character prefers to be called ‘Fu’, a pseudonym taken from his profession, the so-called Fu Bo’s or mortuary assistants. Always carrying the air of an experienced, no nonsense old-hand, Fu appears to be emotionally detached from the hideous tasks he carries out on order every day. The film repeatedly shows Fu quietly doing his job: dissect dead bodies, take organ samples, and stitch up cuts. As the lead actor, Liu Kai Chi’s low-key and controlled performance compellingly portrays an agonized and conflicted individual behind a mask of indifference, struggling in his disintegrating inner world to maintain his sanity. His indifference is soon undercut by shots of his wandering in a park, languidly looking at young couples and children walk past. Soon we learn that Fu is divorced, his wife is a prostitute and he never gets to see his son until the boy’s body is laid on the autopsy table, awaiting final discharge by his father. Unlike the graphic horror of the previous autopsy scene, Fu’s final on-screen operation borders on fantasy: the already over-exposed whiteness of the autopsy room is further magnified to produce a surrealistic space in which a blinding whiteness dominates the visual field. In slow motion, Fu is seen working at an empty operation table, as the little boy happily chases after bright orange ping-pong balls (echoing the death-row inmates’ uniform) bouncing all over the place. The ending shot of the scene shows Fu in a medium close-up, an enigmatic smile gradually emerges on his face as he looks down at the child’s body off-screen. It is as if a ritual has been performed, and Fu, being both the exorcist and the accursed, has performed the final rite of redemption, both for his son and for himself. Viewers may find this denouement for Fu puzzling or even dehumanizing. Not so if it is read symbolically, that is, as the culmination of Fu’s traumatized existence. It could be argued that, in this episode, the real horror lies not in the graphic details of cutting up bodies, but in the complete turn-around from one extreme to another—from extreme agony to nearly transcendental calm—within minutes. Fu, after some painful effort, manages to

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suppress his natural human instinct and emotions and turns back to his detached, impersonal, efficient, impeccably clear-cut professional self. Instead of a final outburst or breakdown, as would usually happen to a psychologically repressed character, Fu seeks to transcend his repression by turning the autopsy into a ritual. The irony of redemption-in/through-death is repeated in the other two story strands. The Portuguese prison chef is required to take last orders from inmates before their execution. In preparing the meals, the chef would take notes of their final confessions. The numerous conversations between the chef and the prisoners cast him in a very different light from what we usually expect. His sympathy, or indeed empathy, towards those facing death and his determination to grant last wishes effectively turn him into a priest figure. In the film, he is forever the quiet counsellor. His voice-over narration poses questions about sin and human existence without necessarily answering them. The morbidity and grotesqueness of the prisoners’ confessions are matched by the chef’s undeterred desire to grant the sickest of all last wishes: a feast of human flesh. Unlike the graphic details of the autopsies, this cannibalistic feast is only implied, when the chef asks another inmate if he is willing to ‘go’ two days earlier. This plot detail is significant for its cynicism and ambivalence: here we have a priest figure preparing a cannibalistic last supper, but this time it is not the symbolic body of Christ being consumed, but another human being in flesh and blood. The biblical/spiritual prototype of the priest is therefore displaced by a cannibalistic impulse, revealing an existential wasteland in which spiritual meanings are lost in the endless recycle of human bodies. Death, it seems, draws the common equation of all that exist, and the lifeless bodies of the dead are neither sacred nor profane: redemption comes through the contentment of the final moment, and only in death can this moment be made eternal. Giu, the hitman, attains a similar redemption as he diligently (and quite happily) kneels before the shooting squad. Throughout the film, he has been suffering from schizophrenic fits of extreme violence and self-condemnation. His mental breakdown is punctuated by shots of nightmare in which he revisits scenes of murders, and his last ditch attempts to seek salvation through religion. In an ironic twist, Giu’s meeting with a Catholic priest in shot/reverse shots is mapped onto Giu’s conversation with his boss-as-priest/God: Giu: Why do people die? Priest: Because they have sinned/[Boss: Because they have sinned.]

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Giu: What sin have they committed? Priest: They did not obey God, therefore they have to die/[Boss: They did not obey Me, therefore they have to die.] Giu (raises his hand, pointing a finger at the ceiling): So, you mean He has also sinned, don’t you? (Cut to the priest’s terrified face before Giu takes out his gun and shoots randomly at the furniture and decorations behind him.) This unexpected outbreak of violence contrasts sharply with Giu’s otherwise morbid serenity when carrying out his various assignments. Previously we have seen him leisurely eating cup noodles next to a gutted man in a pool of still-warm blood. Giu’s schizophrenic split is confirmed by the concluding shot of the church shooting scene: in two superimposed slow motion shots we see Giu and his duplicate image walk out of the church in opposite directions. Giu’s mental illness reaches a breaking point after he kills Fu’s son. The film’s treatment of Giu’s psychological and mental states is fragmentary and scattered, so that Giu’s role resembles that of a chorus to the existential wasteland outside the mortuary. Giu’s characterization epitomizes the corrupt forces of the underworld in Macau. Organized crime reached an alarming state shortly before Macau’s handover to China, a period when cross-border crimes were escalating. The threat to public security in the pre-handover period began to trigger widespread concern and the new Macau SAR Government, under the China-backed first Chief Executive and local tycoon Edmund Ho Hau-wah, made tackling security problems the top priority of government objectives in his Policy Address in 2001. While the situation has improved since he took office, the government’s enthusiasm for the ‘liberalization’ of its ‘gaming business’ (an umbrella term including casinos, grey hound racing, horse racing, and lottery) has virtually turned the economy into a conglomerate of casinos run by local and international operators.7 While it is uncertain whether economic revival brought on by the internationalization of casinos (being the biggest tax payers and employers) has a direct bearing on the reduction in crime rates, it certainly has a homogenizing effect on social life, in a society where everyday activities—jobs, entertainment, and the use of public spaces—are perfunctory to one unifying theme: the city of gam(bl)ing, in which value is equated with revenue, thus making Macau a diligent child of China’s ‘socialist capitalism’ in the twenty-first century. Indeed one can hardly miss the rhetoric of prosperity-cum-unity and the patriotic subtext in Ho’s vision for the future:

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In response to the trend of economic globalization, we shall give priority to strengthening regional cooperation. We have always had the support of our Motherland, whose economy has been enjoying robust growth and has achieved basic prosperity. Indeed, the all-out support of the Central People’s Government provides the strongest guarantee for our development. (Policy Address, 2001) Ho’s speech also underscores the HKSAR government’s favourite slogan: ‘Backed by the Motherland, Looking to the World’ (beikao zuguo, mianxiang shijie). In this light, Giu’s story carries the film’s central social message: institutional excess, symbolized by official and unofficial ‘mortal spaces’, is complicated and accelerated by the conflation of value and revenue, means and ends. This is further visualized through the functional overlap of God/godfather and Church/prison. The film’s vision of the city runs counter to the rosy picture portrayed by both governments; it reveals a space that has been hidden and repressed by the upbeat rhetoric of unity and prosperity. Giu’s gradual decline therefore can be seen as an intensification and externalization of the inner decay of these mortal spaces. Several details related to the food motif capture the ennui that runs through the film. The scene in which Giu leisurely savours a bowl of instant noodles in front of a mutilated victim dying in a pool of blood recalls an earlier scene where Fu expressionlessly eats from lunch boxes full of greasy meats and animal organs in the autopsy room as he tutors a young apprentice. The cinematography employed is the same as that which sustains the spectral eeriness of the mortuary: the lighting gradually brightens through a series of dissolves during their conversation. In glaring white light, the two figures (in white uniforms) also dissolve slowly into the white wall in the background. Visually, their bodies become indifferentiable from the wall while their disembodied faces look like decorative masks floating on the white backdrop. The symbolic significance of the mortuary, the primary setting of the film, is evident in the use of lighting, camera movement, and colour schemes that defines the film’s visual style. The autopsy room is uncomfortably lit in white light, its ghastliness further accented by the colour contrast of close-up shots of blood flowing down the drains. The oppressive, almost claustrophobic, isolation of the mortuary staff is rendered in several long takes where a tracking camera follows the mortuary assistants as they carry dead bodies through dark, meandering corridors. A thick, crimson red is occasionally spotted in scenes where Fu’s terrified young apprentice is seen alone checking the corpses. These visual motifs

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effectively create an infernal-like vision that works surprisingly well with the horrific scenes of murder and autopsy, a quality quite common in horror films. No doubt the directors have lavishly exploited horror conventions in mise-en-scène and shot compositions, but the social and political underpinnings of the genre, that is, the articulation of a deeply held but unacknowledged crisis,8 are equally relevant. As an existential wasteland, the mortuary is on the receiving end of social and political excesses. Filmed and released in 2003, this vision of Macau on the eve of regime change rings true to many viewers, Hong Kong and Macau alike, still in the grips of the SARS epidemic. Indeed, the aversion to outdoor scenes and the minimalism in the use of backdrop characters speak volumes about the resounding sense of emptiness and angst felt by many in those years. As mentioned above, the circularity of death from execution to disposal is reinforced by frequent intercutting of scenes from the three main story lines. This pattern is also reflected in the alternate patterns of over-exposed and under-exposed shots, and glaring white and dark red colour schemes, creating a series of visual cycles both connecting and demarcating the prison, the mortuary, and the shooting ground. In the end, the film returns to the beginning shot of the prisoner facing the wall: it is Giu before his execution. The chef/priest’s voice-over, now rendered in Cantonese, appears in both Chinese and English on screen: ‘Many people exist in shadows, never entering the light; then, there is only one step between life and death.’ This last statement by the priest figure (a killer nonetheless) brings neither catharsis nor poetic justice, but an oppressive discomfort, as the priest, too, cannot but ‘exist in shadows’—he is mostly seen in the dark jail and the execution ground. The only exception is when he is out on an errand to get ready for the cannibalistic last supper. To him, as to all, life and death are always one step apart. If this last statement is intended to be a sermon of any sort, the religious message is lost in the moral ambiguities of the priest. The film’s vision of Macau’s fin-de-siècle condition thus is more than just a nostalgic echo of what Hong Kong used to be a decade ago; the configuration of the city as a montage of mortal spaces, fractured selves and broken families precariously held together in a fragmented narrative suggests not a nostalgic imagining of what used to be, but unnamed horror of what has become. The short-circuiting of historical (narrative) continuity is metaphorically articulated in the relationship between father and son: Fu, who lives forever in the shadow of his father (a forensic doctor and mentor of Fu’s boss, Dr Lee), cannot fully function as a father himself. The film makes this point poignantly by

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disallowing Fu from meeting his son until the boy’s body is laid before him on the autopsy table. In the words of Dr Lee, the boy ‘didn’t manage to make [Fu] change before he died. This was his biggest regret’. In many Hong Kong films in the 1980s and 1990s, parent–child relationship is an expression of the anxiety of returning to the Motherland, and by extension an identity crisis encompassing generational conflicts, self-sacrifice, and the clash between traditional and modern values.9 In Fu Bo, while Fu as a son recalls a similar pattern of parent–child conflict, a new problematic arises as Fu, as a son, becomes a father. The film does not offer much detail concerning Fu’s failed marriage and his withdrawal except his passive acceptance of misfortunes, focusing rather on the consequence of his defeatism. As a symbolic character Fu’s son has only a few brief appearances. There is, literally, no interaction between parent and child in the narrative, not even a negative one. In essence, Fu, as the disgruntled son in the past, fares even worse as the father in the present. Dysfunctional patriarchy, it seems, concludes this bleak representation of the father figure, and the film triplicates this bleakness in the three male leads: the chef, Giu, and Fu. As parent–child relationship is also central to Isabella, it is useful here to briefly summarize the critique of the father in Fu Bo, in which three father figures personify three dimensions of the spiritual crisis of the mortal spaces. For Fu, it takes the boy’s violent death (he’s muffled and cut through the throat) to reunite father and son through the bizarre ritual of autopsy, while the chef/priest takes refuge in satisfying the perverse appetites of death-row inmates before they head for the execution ground. Giu in his delusion defies God and kills his godfather, and in death he relinquishes his role as parent. It is important to note that these fathers have little in common with the conventional patriarch who embodies both the persistence of tradition and its inevitable erosion/replacement by modern values. Fu, Giu, and to a lesser extent the prison chef are themselves prodigal sons of a disintegrating social/moral order. The film’s treatment of these grown-up sons thus goes beyond the formula of alienation-conflict-reconciliation (c.f. the teacher–pupil duo in kung fu movies, and Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands/Tui shou and A Wedding Banquet/Xi yan), but mediates between empathy and ambivalence.10 Whether one interprets the ending of Giu, Fu, and the chef’s stories as redemptive or cynical, there is little hope of leaving the mortal space of the prison, where all three stories attain at best a discomforting denouement. The religious message of the chef’s final meditation, in this light, sounds too contrived and superficial an effort to dilute the bleakness of the film’s macabre images.

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Read contextually, the dysfunctional father as both victim and agent of mortality could also be a radical statement on a perceived condition of existence shared by many in and around 2003. As one local critic has commented, by the end of 2003, Hong Kong films seemed to have relinquished its ‘local flavour’ in order to tap into the Mainland market, a phenomenon made more pervasive by the ‘Closer Economic Partnership Agreement’ (CEPA) signed between Hong Kong and China in the wake of the SARS.11 A breed of ‘impotent males’, says another critic, defined the Hong Kong film scene in 2003. While the multiple political, economic, and public health crises seemed to have announced the death of the ‘Hong Kong way of life’, the sense of gloom intensified with the tragic deaths of two legendary Hong Kong pop-culture icons, Lesley Cheung and Anita Mui in the same year. The cinematic demasculinization of Hong Kong men, it seems, is symptomatic of the lost pride and injured ego of the city as a whole.12 Countering this statement is the view that ruptured masculinity is the result of female empowerment, as more and more independent modern and martial arts women began to popularize Hong Kong screens, an effort by filmmakers to attract female audience to the theatre.13 While these observations primarily concern romantic comedy and the action film, in Fu Bo there is a tendency to outplay this patriarchal anxiety not by the ‘death of the father’ in favour of female empowerment, but by equating the father to death (all three male-leads are butchers on the literal and symbolic levels, and one of them is executed). The film’s critique of the father begs the question of its gender politics. As the film progresses, the rather superficial portrayal of women becomes obvious. There are only two female characters in the film, Fu’s wife and the nameless prostitute whose role is mainly that of a corpse except for one brief scene in Fu’s flashback. Both women are sex workers and both play a part in Fu’s misfortune. Fu’s anger and disgust at a cop who throws malicious insults at the prostitute’s dead body during an autopsy contrasts sharply to his subdued agony at the sight of his son’s corpse, revealing his need for a surrogate for emotional expression. In this scene, the helpless and silent body of the woman lies naked on the autopsy table like a court exhibit crying out for its vindication. The camera cuts between the cop pacing up and down the room and Fu’s anguished face while keeping the woman’s body in sight. In this and a subsequent scene, several high-angle shots capture the woman’s bruised body in full, followed by close-up shots of Fu cutting and stitching up the cuts. Fu’s brief conversation with the woman in flashback reveals the woman’s request for a ‘whole body’ in future, which means she knows

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what fate will befall her, but has no way out. In Fu Bo, both women and children are powerless victims of a corrupt and chauvinistic sociopolitical order. Curiously, the film’s disempowerment of women and children also works to feminize the dysfunctional fathers when they, too, surrender to this order. The institution power given to them has turned them into living dead, and it is this very power that undoes the ‘fathers’ it begets. On an intertextual level, Fu Bo re-examines the narrative of the rebellious son since the Hong Kong New Wave and brings it forward to the existential wasteland of 1999/2003; the obsession with death and male impotence is characteristic of the social sentiment and cinematic imagination of the time; and the drama of lost potency set on the stage of pre-handover Macau tellingly suggests a common ground (fate) after the handover, which saw the eclipse of Hong Kong’s social and cultural superiority, together with its rebellious spirit, in the post-CEPA years.

Eros and ethos: Isabella In Isabella, Edmond Pang’s treatment of Macau on the eve of the political handover goes down a different path. Beginning exactly forty-seven days before the handover, the film tells the story of two drifters separated by age and gender. Ma Chun Shing (Chapman To Man-chak), a middle-aged police officer, is accosted by a teenage girl named Cheung Pik Yan (Isabella Leung Lok-sze) at a time when he is caught up with a series of police corruption scandals. After spending a night with a prostitute at home Shing wakes up to find Yan eating instant noodles in the living room. Yan keeps following Shing, giving him hints that she might be his illegitimate daughter. While incest is more a gimmick in the film to heighten suspense and sustain an atmosphere of erotic decadence, through a series of mishaps Shing and Yan find in each other strength and compassion to take responsibilities for their own lives. This rather straightforward plot would have made for a transparent moral lesson, but Isabella strays quite far away from cinema verite. Pang’s effort to go beyond moral education of his characters is evident in the romanticized vision of the colonial city, idealism in characterization, and self-conscious play with style, coincidences and intertextual references, all of which endow the film with a fairy tale-like quality. The film’s interest in sensual details at times can obscure its more thoughtprovocative elements. This aspect is not missed by critics pondering whether Pang is more concerned with stylistic flourishes than engaging thought through story-telling.14 In following the sojourns of Yan and

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Shing across Macau’s historic cityscape, the camera offers up colourful vignettes of the city’s colonial-style architecture and touristy scenery as if the city was blessed by an eternal summer, night and day. As a young director reputed for his penchant for commercial genrebending in such films as A.V./Qingchun meng gongchang (2005), Men Suddenly in Black/Da zhangfu (2003), and You Shoot, I Shoot/Mai xiong pai ren (2001), in Isabella Pang shows a determined effort to establish his arthouse credentials.15 There is, for instance, a tendency to eroticize and romanticize the incestuous relationship between Shing and Yan, an orphaned teenage girl and femme fatale-wannabe, while Yan is also seen as a redeeming force in Shing’s life. The ambivalence and vulnerability of their affectionate connection is visualized through a warm colour scheme (a combination of red, yellow, and bright green tones) occasionally punctuated by touches of darker shades and silhouettes. Compared to the claustrophobic spaces of mortality in Fu Bo, space in Isabella has an expansive and idyllic quality enlivened by harmless, though calculated, coincidences and comic reversals. For example, when Yan and Shing are out looking for Yan’s puppy (named after her mother, Isabella), Yan catches sight of a little girl walking with a dog at a distance, and soon realizes that Isabella has found a better owner. Yan resists the temptation to claim ownership; instead, after a passionate embrace, she bids farewell to the pet and the child. This scene takes place in a deserted alleyway on a bright summer day. The idyllic tranquillity of the mise-enscène temporarily insulates the two girls from the outside world as Yan quietly accepts the fate of losing Isabella, who so far serves as a living memory and link to her deceased mother. This brief episode turns out to be a turning point in the relationship between Yan and Shing, as Shing, perhaps still unaware, begins to take up his new role as a father. As the narrative unfolds, Shing’s fatherly self elevates him from a corrupt past to embrace genuine compassion. Close to the end, we see Shing looking into a mirror. He soon shaves off his moustache, his face revealing a calm composure. Beardless, Shing’s face emits a youthful air not seen before. Dressed in a clean suit for the first time in the film, he quietly rubs his face against Yan’s shoulder as they ride off to the court on a motorcycle. It seems that Shing and Yan’s roles have reversed once again—this time the father is in the care of the child. The concluding shot of this scene shows a pad of tears left on Yan’s shoulder. A smile on Yan’s face suggests she is aware of her new role in this relationship. The separation of father and child recalls Yan’s encounter with her puppy and its new owner much earlier on, but the overlap is more than a mere parallel. Yan’s rubbing her face against the puppy is repeated in Shing’s similar

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gesture, but in both scenes Yan is the centre of gravity, as a maturing youth who has learned to accept the pain of losing a loved one to a better course. Renewal, it seems, is always premised on a bitter-sweet goodbye. The director’s sense of humour in playing up the visual pun of the father/puppy notwithstanding, the father being compared to a submissive, child-like ‘puppy’ also reunites him with the real Isabella (Yan’s mother) he deserted some eighteen years ago. In Isabella, the creation of the idyllic, fairy-tale landscape in the film is complemented by elements of comic romance. Almost standard features in Hong Kong’s action films, comic moments are usually inserted into high-octane action sequences through body movements and gestures, in-jokes, slapsticks, and black humour, reflecting an influence from earlier Cantonese cinema and Cantonese opera. In Isabella, the romantic tale between Yan and Shing is placed within a pseudo-police and gangster back story that propels the main action, from Shing’s initial moral bankruptcy to redemption through compassion, courage, and self-sacrifice. Yan’s initial appearance as a deviant youth and her deliberately contrived pretence as seductress and femme fatale enable many scenes of comic reversals. For instance, in a series of disconnected scenes Yan plays out her fantasy as Shing’s true love. In an attempt to persuade Shing’s numerous girlfriends to leave him, Yan assumes the air of an experienced woman as she lectures the others about life’s priorities. These shots are shown in sequence, each showing Yan acting out the same role as if they were discarded scenes or rehearsals. Dramatic irony is magnified since Yan’s secret is known to the viewer, and the self-reflexive artificiality of Yan’s role-play draws as much attention to her defiant immaturity as to the complex feelings of a teenage daughter towards the father. All this points to a conscious design by the director to align Shing and Yan, despite their age gap, in the same idealism associated not with childhood innocence but adolescence, symbolized by Yan’s slender body and budding sexuality quite explicitly conveyed in the numerous medium- and close-distance shots that emphasize the youthfulness of her face and body, especially her legs and feet. In one scene, Yan and Shing are seen walking along the waterfront chatting and teasing each other. The camera cuts from a medium tracking shot to a low-angle shot horizontal to the ground, showing Yan and Shing’s feet in plastic slippers. Shing walks off-screen to make space for a closeup on Yan’s feet, one of which is struggling to get back into a loosened slipper. All the while, their tête-à-tête goes on as background voice, but visually the bare legs and feet of Yan occupy the foreground, looking both sensuous and vulnerable. There are, as one critic comments, erotic

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overtones in the portrayal of Yan and her ambivalent attachment to Shing, an eroticism motivated by sexual fantasy of middle-aged men.16 This reading reveals another dimension of the film’s idealized vision of Macau: this idealism has to do with a deeper-running anxiety of the (male) subject caught up with an impending doom. As in Fu Bo, police corruption and involvement in triad-related crimes and violence are rampant in pre-handover Macau, and Shing as a smalltime cop deserted by both his police and triad associates epitomizes the uncertainty and demoralization of the colonial administration and Macau’s society as a whole on the eve of regime change. But unlike Fu Bo’s claustrophobic vision of mortality that envelops all, Isabella opts for comic reversal, a conscious artistic effort to lift its socially and emotionally doomed characters to an imaginary realm of summer romance, albeit one that is only partially insulated from intrusions by the much harsher realities of adulthood. Such a vision is indeed artificial, and the camera is fully aware of its presence as a guiding lens in numerous tracking shots, long takes, and wide-angle shots of Yan and Shing roaming deserted streets, alleyways, and beachside walkways of the city, whose old-style colonial architecture and cityscape emit a nostalgic flavour through the reflexive rays of sunlight in the day and chiaroscuros at night. Pang’s genre-bending interests make their imprint, too, in this style-conscious film. The characterization of Shing as a corrupt cop running out of luck and the back story of police corruption and illegal arms trade provide ample space for staging scenes of bar fights, secret meetings, backdoor bargaining, and chase-and-runs throughout the film. Generic conventions are also playfully engaged in the dialogues between Yan and her high-school classmate and admirer, in which Yan rather childishly imitates the speech and behaviour of a young triad as she speaks about the imaginary affair and elopement with Shing. Arguably, the configuration of Macau as a fin-de-siècle city is informed by a dual vision of doom and redemption through comic reversal, which can be seen as an artistic temperament inherited from Hong Kong’s commercial cinema tradition, especially romance and gangster films. While Pang’s Macau has been compared to Wong Kar-wai’s 1960s Hong Kong (which is also a version of pre-1949 Shanghai), the film’s most overt nostalgic reference to a bygone era—the 1980s—is Anita Mui’s early Canto-pop hit, ‘Dream Pal’ (Mung boon/Mengban), a song Yan sings from time to time in memory of her mother, Isabella, who allegedly was a fan of Mui. A big hit in its time, the song is about lost love and the memory of that loss in medium dance beat. The choice of this particular

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song by Mui might well be a tribute to the queen of Canto-pop whose premature death in 2004 had been described as symbolic of the ‘end of an era’ by the local media. In the eyes of many Hong Kongers Mui remains the biggest icon of Hong Kong’s popular culture in the 1980s, and the reference to her song functions as a temporal and emotional link between Yan and her mother, Shing and his ex-lover, Shing and Yan, Shing and his own younger self, and perhaps the director and his own adolescence. In a scene when Yan and Shing are half-drunk dining at a local street stall, a nearby radio begins to play this song. Yan rises from the table and begins to dance and lip-synch Mui’s voice. A relatively light and non-sentimental piece from the golden era of Canto-pop and its biggest teen icon at her prime, ‘Dream Pal’ highlights the adolescent quality of Yan and Shing’s deepening bond while recalling the heyday of Hong Kong’s popular culture. This scene is tellingly followed by Shing teaching Yan an ad hoc lesson of the art of ‘cracking bottles’ on the heads of opponents during a fight, a direct reference to a ubiquitous feature in local gangster films. What accounts for the polar visions of Macau at a critical historical juncture in the two films? Do these contrasts also allow for a complementary reading of the fin-de-siècle imagination at the ‘end of history’? How do we understand the nostalgic invocation of Macau’s colonial cityscape in Isabella and how does it compare to the mortal spaces in Fu Bo? The contrastive visualizations of the city in the two films, as noted above, are informed by the common plot element of kinship embedded in the father–child relation. In Isabella the father–child relation is a redemptive force, while in Fu Bo it signifies the breakdown of kinship as a result of social and psychological disintegration; in both films the nature and meaning of kinship is not seen as mere blood relations but an act of will or the absence of will that may or may not be defined or contained by social/familial norms. In Fu Bo autopsy is ritualized as a bridge between the dead and the living, as a final tribute to the abused bodies of crime victims. Fu’s calm composure and ambivalent smile after his son’s autopsy implies neither redemption nor transcendence, but sublimation of otherwise blocked feelings and emotions. Little in the ending of the film suggests that things will be better; the rather lame sermon projected on-screen in the last shot reads more like an indirect admission of the exhaustion of positive energy, for having literally rejected the authority of the father and spiritual transcendence symbolized by Giu’s final acts, the sermon is left with little meaning. While Fu Bo’s critique of the father reverses the conventional representation of the patriarchal structuring of the father/son duo by looking

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at the afterlife of the disgruntled sons as failed fathers in middle age, Isabella restores an ageing father’s youthful energy and dignity through a comedy of errors, that is, by giving him a daughter that is not his biological offspring just when his life is falling apart. As the story unfolds, the power relation between Yan and Shing is also reversed, too, as Shing falls more into the role of the child in need of Yan’s nursing. After the opening bar fight recalling the Hong Kong gangster film, Shing’s role as a corrupt cop under siege by both sides of the law is gradually eclipsed by his new role as a novice in parenthood brought to confront the child within, and by a past he seems to have forgotten. Seen from this angle, Isabella, otherwise a drama of human relations, is akin to the Hong Kong action films discussed in the next section, in which the conventional cop- or gangster-hero undergoes a dramatic and critical reinvention. One can say that Isabella represents a selective hybridization of conventionalized cinematic vocabularies in Hong Kong cinema and probably a way-station in a young director’s journey of self-discovery, as Pang, too, seems to be making a conscious transition from the mainstream commercial cinema to more experimental films.17 Kinship, thus, runs through the two films not as something natural but, in Judith Butler’s words, performed.18 It is, therefore, an articulation of a subjective selfpositioning that reflects a certain social, cultural, and political stance. To take this line of logic further, the very discourse of kinship in the two films can be read as a wry comment on the meta-narrative of panChinese nationalism propagated by the Chinese and local authorities, an official ideology well-captured in the oft-quoted jargon, ‘blood is thicker than water’ (xie nong yu shui), an emotionally charged expression of patriotism based not on legal status or conviction but on race. The blood-stained hands of the fathers in Fu Bo and the surrender of the father’s authority through comic reversal in Isabella articulate alternative imaginations of kinship, whether positively or negatively, that call for a rethinking of the validity and implications of the official discourse.19 Curiously, both films play down on the role of the mother, by relegating her either to the stereotypical role of the victim or to a name-pun and memento that motivates the comedy of errors. I have mentioned how Fu Bo’s female stereotypes work to ‘mirror’ the impotence of the male characters. In Isabella, the ‘name of the mother’ is central to the identity confusion between mother and daughter, and also between the fictional character Yan and the real-life actress Isabella Leung on the part of the viewer, thus creating a circular movement of erotic desire within and outside the film text. The empowerment of Yan from an orphan exposed to sexual exploitations in a patriarchal society to an

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independent, motherly figure is hung in precarious balance with her role as an object of desire and redemptive angel to Shing. This aspect of the film has raised critical concern over its misogynous and opportunistic treatment of women that is much harder to defend than the female stereotypes in Fu Bo. Whether a guilty pleasure or not, the film’s gender politics is symptomatic of a fin-de-siècle vision in retrospect, in the sense that the post-handover contemplation of the end of history in light of a cop’s mid-life crisis ineluctably duplicates the gender politics reminiscent of popular genre films in the 1980s and early 1990s, which usually favour predominantly masculine values.20 Seen in this light, Isabella, like its subject matter (a city going through a kind of mid-life crisis), is also a work in transition; it borrows, updates, and revises pre-existing representational modes to construct a vision of the (post-)colonial city as an orphan trying to redefine its own lineage. The ambivalence and categorical confusion of Yan and Shing’s relationship, therefore, can be better understood as the result of this transitoriness.

Conclusion In much of Hong Kong’s popular cinema, Macau is usually featured as an offshoot of the heroic action of Hong Kong characters. Fu Bo and Isabella are films made and released after the financial crisis that greatly damaged Hong Kong people’s pride and confidence in their city’s past achievements, especially when compared to Macau which had apparently outperformed Hong Kong since reunification.21 This closing gap between the two cities provided the impetus for a kind of congeniality in the collective imagination in the two films. Both films retain features and motifs reminiscent of Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, that is, gangster threats and violence, police corruption, comic romance (in Isabella), and most of all masculinity in crisis, which is articulated through a gender politics that seeks to expose and/or salvage a father caught up in mid-life crisis. Kinship, or the father–child relation, is a site where all these various elements and forces are played out: Fu Bo’s mortal spaces are filled with macabre imagery, whose real terror lies in the psychological disintegration of individuals who cannot free themselves from a certain past. In the case of Fu and Giu, their sins are not forgiven (at least not by themselves) but sublimated in their final acts of submission—Giu to the executioner’s gun and Fu to his own surgical knife. Isabella, on the other hand, relieves Shing from his guilty conscience through comic reversal, which is made possible partly by a plot twist late in the story, and partly by a suspension of disbelief, a

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tacit agreement between the film text and the viewer on the desirability of a happy ending in the form of a socially acceptable heterosexual romance, be it real or imaginary. The resulting contrastive landscapes of Macau embody precisely two distinct ‘authorial intentions’ in their treatment of a common theme. In both films, kinship is at risk. The extreme alienation in Fu Bo and the idyllic romance in Isabella represent two responses to the crises of the fin-de-siècle and the nostalgic impulse thus triggered. The very choice of setting may be seen as a transposition of the nostalgic to another space, when the nostalgic is no longer chic in one’s hometown; yet, in both films Macau is not Hong Kong’s Other, but has a history of its own that is equally perplexing and scriptable. The different visions of Macau in these films prompt further reflections on the changed perception of relations between the two cities; their respective pasts, presents, and futures have to be rethought, too, on a coeval basis.

Part II Schizophrenia, Amnesia, and Cinephilia

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4 Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie To’s Urban Legends

This chapter, together with Chapters 5 and 6, investigates the changing aesthetic of Hong Kong’s action cinema. In particular, it examines the recent productions by Johnnie To and his Milkyway Image Productions as representatives of a new aesthetic of police and gangster films, a major branch of Hong Kong’s action cinema since the 1980s. While the action film has played a central role in the internationalization of Hong Kong cinema since the days of Bruce Lee, the 1980s saw the emergence of a new type of action aesthetic that is closely connected to the political events leading up to the territory’s reintegration with Mainland China, an aesthetic steeped in a ‘crisis consciousness’ triggered by the awareness of impending doom and the fragmentation of time-honoured beliefs and traditions that used to inspire the cinematic imagination of kung fu and wuxia films. This new aesthetic is epitomized in John Woo’s ‘cinema of crisis’,1 which persistently portrays Hong Kong as a lawless city where violence and bloodshed erupt at random at any moment. As Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar observe, in John Woo’s films ‘Hong Kong is a city beset by extreme lawlessness and graphic violence’, where ‘[c]ompeting regimes of justice merge’.2 Such a vision of the city on the verge of a material and cultural disappearance is symptomatic of a nostalgia for the lost time and lost values of the traditional jianghu, the idealized world of the wuxia where good and evil have relatively well-defined parameters, and the heroic virtues of loyalty, brotherhood, and justice are actively engaged in the resolution of conflicts and restoration of the moral order. While John Woo’s ‘hero film’ has played a key role in shaping Hong Kong action cinema thematically and stylistically, from the mid-1990s on there have been major revisions to the flamboyance and romanticism of Woo’s aesthetics. In this regard, Johnnie To is arguably the next action film director to ascend to the status of an auteur after Woo with a corpus 87

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of works that exemplify a deconstructive aesthetic as they revisit the genre’s legacy. Existing writing on To’s work gives credit to his ability to balance aesthetic innovation with commercial considerations, especially his effort in reinvigorating the action genre through self-reflexive parody and experimentation.3 This chapter examines manifestations of the postnostalgic in To’s action aesthetic, that is, a critical re-engagement with time past through displacement and reinterpretation of generic conventions. My discussion is organized around three inter-related traits of To’s work: (1) the eclipse of the individualistic, romantic hero by the professional ethic of the group that emphasizes flexibility, mobility, efficiency, and the protection of the group; yet this kind of ‘corporatism’ is also shown to be vulnerable and problematic; (2) the construction of an urban space where order and chaos are purely contingent and coincidental, where human agency is less defined by individual (heroic) qualities than by desire and circumstance; and (3) the de-rationalization of both the group and the hero’s existential and moral claims through a ‘negative fantasy’ in which heroism is synonymous with madness. To’s use of the urban space echoes that of Ann Hui and Fruit Chan in its frequent invocations of historical and personal memory; yet To’s artistic vision also generates nuanced references to certain fantastic and romantic elements of Hong Kong’s action cinema. The mix of cinematic realism and fantasy thus conjures up a unique film city—an existential landscape in which the parameters of action, and lack of action, are redrawn. In the following, I begin by situating To’s films within the permutations of the action film as a struggle with its own memory, both in the form of an emotional attachment to the local cultural tradition and an astute awareness of the genre’s need to reinvent itself amidst changing conditions of the local film industry. The changing facets of the action hero provide a vantage point for an assessment of To’s nuanced relationship with the local filmmaking conventions. More specifically, I take a closer look at the two poles of To’s vision of the group in The Mission/Qiang huo (1999) and Exiled/Fang zhu (2006), which raises the possibility of reading To’s ‘break’ from the past as a dialogic gesture that seeks out new ground not by resolving, but embracing ambivalences and contradictions. This preoccupation is staged in a different register in PTU (2003), in which the group’s activities are used as anchor points for the camera to map out a defamiliarized urban space as a mode of visual cognition through which the city returns in the form of familiar signs in a new configuration, hence resisting disappearance. The last film

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discussed is Mad Detective/Shen tan (2007), another breakthrough from the stylistic experiments since Mission. My reading of To’s films suggests that action, and the attributes of heroism thereof, is produced out of the tensions between cinematic nostalgia and contemporaneity, between a sense of identity anchored in the local filmmaking tradition and the urgency of self-reinvention against the chaotic flux of the present. The radical re-envisioning of the hero and heroism as a form of madness, seen in this light, sheds important light on how much this tension has impacted the creative minds of the Milkyway crew.

Heroism, group identity, and ‘corporatism’: The Mission and Exiled From the mid-1990s on, many Hong Kong action films have shown a growing interest in probing the limits of 1980s-style heroism popularized by John Woo, who has come to represent the so-called ‘hero films’ in Hong Kong cinema since A Better Tomorrow/Yingxiong bense I & II (1986, 1987). Woo’s ‘cinema of crisis’ signifies an important landmark in the development of the action genre, and by extension an aesthetic response to the versatile political and social realities of Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s closely associated with the nostalgic, finde-siècle apprehension of the ‘end of (colonial) history’. However, since the mid-1990s there have been efforts by other Hong Kong filmmakers to downplay the heroic prototype in favour of less idealized, more psychologically and morally conflicted characters struggling to survive the challenge of the moment. The countdown to the change of sovereignty further facilitated this critical reflection as filmmakers sought to look beyond the 1997 deadline for new articulations of the local. Meanwhile, the decline of the local film industry beginning in 1993 continued throughout the decade. Market depression deepened as a result of the Asian financial crisis in 1997–1998, and the already pervasive pessimism grew more pronounced during the SARS pandemic in 2003. Thus the mid-1990s to the first half of the 2000s was a time of enduring crisis for both Hong Kong society and its cinema, a time when filmmakers struggled to maintain morale and creativity in local productions.4 As far as the action film is concerned, there was an obvious effort to reinvent itself through a self-reflexive revisiting of its own legacy. These explorations into new possibilities were also a function of the shortening life cycle of popular trends in the mainstream cinema5 and the domination of Hollywood productions in the domestic market. The deconstruction of the hero and heroic individualism (e.g. Wai Ka-fai’s

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Too Many Ways to Be No. I/Yige zitou de dansheng, 1998) undermines the agency of the central characters in controlling their own fate. A shifting emphasis from the individualistic hero to the group was also an emerging trend that gained momentum in the wake of the new millennium. In this ‘deconstructive’ aesthetic, loyalty to an entrenched patriarchal tradition, usually symbolized by a father figure, is replaced by a more dynamic, forward looking, and flexibly managed collectivity defined by a relational network, or the group (e.g. Gordon Chan’s First Option/Fei hu, 1996, Johnnie To’s Lifeline/Shiwan huoji, 1997, and The Mission, 1999). Johnnie To’s Milkyway films offer a palette of such deconstructions.6 For example, Expect the Unexpected/Feichang turan (1998) subjects a team of police officers to a cruel twist of fate. Lifeline is entirely devoted to the creation of a group identity (firemen) as an embodiment of the heroic in everyday life without any resort to the good/evil binary. The group is a professional unit, a collective ‘whole’ bonded by a certain work ethic, be it strictly or loosely defined. In these films, crises are moments that put the group as a whole to test. In Expect the Unexpected the group falls apart when it is engrossed in a gunfight completely unprepared by a heavily armed gang, while Lifeline celebrates the group spirit only in a low-keyed and matter-of-fact ending, when the fire-fighters are ordered back to their duties in heavy rain not long after a heroic rescue mission. Inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, To experiments with a kind of ‘motion in stillness’ in The Mission.7 The film privileges the group (five bodyguards) over the authority of the father figure (the triad gang boss), as it evolves from an emotionally detached mechanical operation into an organic community bonded by a deep sense of brotherhood. On the other hand, their professionalism (visible through the immaculate dark suits and extremely efficient, target-oriented teamwork) opts for flexible solutions to defend the status and authority of the boss without obeying his order to execute one of their own (see below). This flexible ‘group philosophy’ extends further into To’s later police stories, PTU and Breaking News/Da shijian (2004), and gangster films, Election/Heishehui and Election II/Heishehui zhi yi he wei gui (2005, 2006). In these films, the group, be it a police unit or a triad society, exhibits a corporate spirit that emphasizes the need to survive in an increasingly versatile, crisis-stricken, and business-oriented world. Here, heroism is repeatedly sidestepped by professionalism, emphasizing self-/group preservation, operational efficiency, and shrewd and unscrupulous decision-making. If the Woo-style hero film dramatizes the heroic act as a spectacle in and for itself, in To’s films there is a movement away from

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action-as-spectacle to action as a part of, if not subsumed under, an unfolding psychological drama. Stephen Teo (2007) observes important changes in the hero figure in To’s films, from the ‘fatalistic hero’ who seeks out his vengeful destiny to a more problematic type characterized by physical and/or psychological disabilities. Calling To an ‘uneven auteur’, Teo sees in the filmmaker an urge to go in different directions that both enriches and impairs his art.8 To’s ‘unevenness’ obviously is behind his binary vision of the group in The Mission and Exiled, the latter being a stylistic and thematic elaboration of the earlier film. My analysis of the two films below demonstrates how these films represent the two poles of To’s still evolving vision of the ‘group hero’. In these films, I argue, the repetition of visual and thematic motifs works towards a mutual critique of the respective vision of the group and its moral and symbolic meanings each film seeks to articulate, and eventually undermine.

The Mission If Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was a key inspiration for The Mission, especially the controlled and stylized choreography of the shooting scenes, hence ‘motion-in-stillness’, the film also shows a high degree of self-awareness in adapting the visual language of Kurosawa to reenvision a specific local terrain, the jianghu (underworld), reworking the themes of brotherhood and loyalty within a patriarchal hierarchy in a contemporary urban setting where male bonds are more defined by team spirit rather than pre-determined by some higher moral or social order. As mentioned above, the flexible group philosophy outsmarts the patriarchal law of the (god)father Lung (Eddie Ko) when he orders the execution of Shin (Jackie Lui Chung-yin), a junior member, after the latter’s affair with his wife has been exposed. In the tradition of the jianghu, such transgression is a cardinal sin for which death is the non-negotiable penalty. However, in To’s film the godfather, though commanding respect in general, is a patriarch not quite well in command of things. From beginning to end he is under attack by unseen assassins at the same time his sexual power is being eroded. In the film, Lung’s gang leader image is dented by acts of weakness and domesticity: he is seen hiding inside a refrigerator during a shootout and making coffee for his bodyguards in the morning. These softer edges perhaps explain why his has been a target of sabotage by Fat Cheung (Wong Tin-lam), a senior member and co-founder of the triad society. To protect himself and hunt down the culprit, Lung calls upon his former

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number-one aide, Curtis (Anthony Wong Chau-sang), to head a team of five bodyguards. It turns out that Curtis, a low-keyed and cool-headed character, becomes the true mastermind behind the scene: he successfully mediates tensions among his subordinates, build a cohesive and highly organized team out of rivals, and finally rescues one of his own by outwitting his boss. Teo remarks that Curtis, though a role model for his teammates, is also a ‘feminine’ figure, an attribute subtly suggested in his passive submission to a wrongful accusation and beating by his own man, Roy (Francis Ng). Ironically, Curtis’ feminine virtues save the group from disintegration and eventually consolidate his leadership. Loyalty in this film is less a marker of absolute difference between the good and the bad, the traitor and the betrayed than a flexible code of practice that aims to dissolve tension and crises, and to create a ‘win-win situation’ for all. Instead of celebrating lone heroes, the film’s interest is more in tune with the evolving male bond, which resembles that of a Boy Scout or youth soccer team, a motif to be repeated with a nihilistic twist in Exiled. Mission’s lightest touches are found in a scene where the five bodyguards, all professional hit men on duty, start a paper soccer game to kill time as they wait rather impatiently outside Lung’s office. The pleasure of this 1.5-minute scene for the viewer is both visual and psychological. On the one hand, the scene is a carefully choreographed performance by the actors. It shows, within a very compact space (a narrow passageway in the boss’ office), the guards kicking a paper soccer ball back and forth with exceptional skill and precision. Body movement here is restricted to kicking and holding the ball, while the bodyguards remain immobile in their respective positions throughout. Except for a couple of close-ups on Curtis and Roy, the scene is primarily captured by a static camera placed close to the ground. Completely without dialogue, the ‘soccer game’ visually echoes the gunplay sequences that immediately precede it. On the other hand, the incongruity between the guards’ mission, the mundane office setting, the appearance of the bodyguards (all in immaculate dark suits and shiny leather shoes), and the frivolity of the soccer game provides temporary comic relief from the tension of the main action. This scene also is significant to the film’s diegesis, for it marks the completion of the team by showing an almost seamless integration and cooperation among the guards, with Curtis overseeing the whole process as their coach and caretaker. More importantly, the visual overlap between the soccer game and the gunfights serves as a footnote remark on how the aesthetic of the two can be interpreted through a ‘boy-scout’ thematic.

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Though less elegant and formalistically conceived than other action sequences, the soccer scene is a stylistic analogue to the ‘shopping mall scene’ (the film’s centrepiece gunfight) that immediately precedes it. Escorting Lung back home from office, the five guards and some unknown hit men cross-fire inside a deserted shopping mall. Instead of explosive action, To keeps body movement to the minimal. This is a technique that To would repeatedly employ in his subsequent films, and one that fully exposes his preoccupation with the tension between action and inaction, and the visuality of stillness as a form of action. Other than stylistic considerations, the absence of dialogue reinforces the deepening bond of the guards, who can now act in unison in complete silence. (As we shall see, in Exiled, To seems to be working with a ‘split consciousness’. The stylized gunplay and controlled tempo of Mission alternates with improvisatorial acting/directing in developing a scene.) This boy-scout thematic, however, also exposes its own gender politics—by revealing the way in which male bonds operate in a sexless, claustrophobic world that excludes non-members, especially the other sex. Laikwan Pang observes that this bond is broken by the intrusion of the femme fatale figure, the wife of the boss.9 In a patriarchal order, sexual transgression is not to be tolerated; yet, the punishment is not equally apportioned, for in Mission only the woman is executed, not her male co-defendant. Perhaps this drawback in the film’s gender representation is a reflection of how a certain ‘generic imagination’ operates in To’s creative dialogue with conventions. In Mission, as well as his other ‘all-boys’ films, women are usually relegated to stereotypical roles and are usually treated as obstacles or threats to male bonding. However, just as To has subtly displaced some feminine traits on to the character of Curtis (and the godfather) in Mission, his awareness of this ‘gender imbalance’ is made more emphatic in films that showcase powerful women as active agents taking charge of their own lives, thus initiating what Pang calls a new phase of Milkyway’s woman-centred films (mainly urban romance) as a response to changing audience demographics and to a possible ‘exhaustion’ of creativity in the male-oriented action films.10 An exception in this category, however, is noted in Breaking News, where the heroine, a woman superintendent played by Kerry Chan, is portrayed as a cool-headed, no-nonsense career woman who outsmarts all her male peers in playing the corporate game. In an almost fantastic register, To has his heroine mastermind a massive media event to turn into a publicity victory a badly handled mishap involving a few armed Mainland criminals. Yet, To’s more ‘experimental’ films remain

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focused on the dynamics of male bonding, a subject which continues to inform his more ‘auteurist’ work in the post-1997 period. While scepticism towards gender stereotyping may not be easily dispelled, a self-reflective/self-reflexive critique is noticeable in the boyscout ethic of the group movies. This critique also works on the intertextual level. Teo’s analysis of the film shows that To’s self-awareness of his ‘mission’ explains the tendency towards ‘meta-criticism’ in his films, hence the built-in extra-textual self-references to and critical rethinking of genre conventions and themes, such as violence, masculinity, and the nature and purpose of action.11 In this scene the action takes place in an empty shopping mall, but ‘action’ is limited to subtle body movements: the gunmen remain virtually immobile, making only slight adjustments to their posture as they hide behind pillars most of the time. The whole scene is rendered through alternating medium shots and close-ups. The medium shots capture the topography of the gunfight as the hit men, as a group, freeze, aim, and fire at precise angles. The close-ups on the guards and the assassins give further accent to the individual poses, emphasizing intensity and concentration rather than action per se. Visually, this scene resembles a multi-player video game, positioning the viewer more or less like an anonymous player off-screen (though rather passive without a gun); yet the camera movement allows us an omniscient view of the topography of the gunfight as it pans and cuts between the gunmen, both the camera and the players displaying a high degree of self-awareness of the act of shooting as performance. The mise-en-scène thus exhibits an intricate geometry of the gunfight, the spatial constraints of the shopping mall arcade being manipulated to such an extent that the form of the fight and the form of the human figures become the very content of the narrative. This and other highly stylized action sequences constitute the key visual motif of the film, infusing the narrative with a kind of theatricality to be taken up in two subsequent films discussed later in this chapter, Exiled and PTU. This also is part of To’s continuous effort to create a new cinematic vocabulary that synthesizes old and new forms. Apparently a brief ‘time out’ for the guards and the audience, the ‘soccer scene’ lets loose a spirit of the group as an all-boy team, a recurrent motif in To’s later film, Exiled. It not only prefigures the ‘happy ending’ and the triumph of the group, but also casts a different light on their mission, for it is not so much about serving a righteous course as about playing a good game that everybody enjoys. Indeed, the parallelism of the soccer game and co-ordinated gunplay in the shopping mall enhances the metaphoricity of both—they are part of

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the film’s rhetoric, a conscious play with semblance and dissemblance on that very same stage of action-in-inaction. Can this be understood as the film’s lighter ‘mission’ as well? By diffusing allegorical heroism into more or less identical constituents of a professional unit—we can call it a troupe of professional hit men-as-players—the new To-style action-drama elevates visual pleasure to a thematic level through an eclectic and self-conscious play with pre-existing and emerging signs and references in contemporary visual culture. Exiled Released in 2006, Exiled tells the story of five hit men balancing the impossible demands of loyalty, brotherhood, desire, and individual survival. The story takes place in Macau on the eve of the ex-Portuguese colony’s return to China in 1999. This choice of setting strongly echoes Fu Bo and Isabella, which, as suggested in Chapter 3, may be a signal of a changing perception of Macau in Hong Kong’s cultural imagination. Stylistically and thematically varied, these films show an interest in Macau as a city in flux, something like a shared history between the two ex-colonial cities. Although this is not To’s first film to have a Macau element (c.f. The Longest Nite/An hua, a.k.a. Dark Flowers, 1998), Exiled is more clearly a re-staging of To’s group aesthetic in Mission in a different setting. At first glance the film recalls Mission in some significant ways. The beginning of the film is actually a continuation of where Mission leaves off—Blaze (Anthony Wong) is under his boss’ order to eliminate a traitor, and the hit men who subsequently appear are played by almost the same cast with the exception of Shin, now replaced by Wo (Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai). Thematically, there is emphasis on the collective identity of the group, the conflict between group survival and loyalty to a patriarch figure (the godfather) who can kill at will or whim, and the homosocial male bond threatened by a subversive female figure: Wo’s wife, Jin (Josie Ho). Although To has employed what he calls a more ‘liberal’ approach in Exiled, saying at an interview that he has shot the film ‘without a script’,12 the opening sequence of the hit men’s encounter contains explicit references to their ‘look’ in the previous film: their dark suits and trench coats, slow-paced and rhythmic body movements, conscious posing before the camera are typical of To’s group-protagonist. As in Mission, the movement of the group is laid out in a geometrical pattern, captured here in high-angle and tracking shots at varying degrees and distances that position these dark figures against the architectural contours of historic buildings, deserted streets and boulevards, and carefully partitioned interior spaces in multi-coloured tones.

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The opening scene has two hit men, Tai (Francis Ng) and Cat (Roy Cheung), knocking at the door of an old apartment. The brief conversation between Wo’s wife and the two men asking to see Wo in reverse shots is followed by a parallel sequence, in which two other hit men, Blaze and Fat (Lam Suet), repeat the same ritual in almost identical manner. The two pairs meet downstairs, exchange glances, and stop under a tree. The short dialogue that follows establishes their antagonistic positions. Blaze’s pair is out to kill Wo on an execution order, while Tai vows to save Wo at all costs. It transpires that the four men were childhood friends and under the employ of Boss Fay (Simon Yam). This encounter is interrupted by Wo’s arrival. Wo, Fai, and Blaze walk into the building in silence and start a gunfight almost immediately. The choreography of the gunfight recalls the shopping mall scene in Mission with a difference. While each party occupies a specific spot in the mise-en-scène, slow motion is used to space out the three men as they shoot at their targets at much closer distance, utilizing doors, curtains, and partitions as shields. There is also a more emphatic use of gun smoke to obtain a hazier image, an obvious departure from the crisp, clearly delineated contours of Mission. However, the topography of the gunfight remains a central preoccupation of the camera, which cuts between different positions to follow the bullet tracks, fully aware of the dramatic tension and excitement created by spatial constraints. This sensitivity towards space, especially compact indoor space, and movement in and across space harks back to earlier kung fu and martial arts films that To was first trained in. In this scene, however, To’s camera is not pursuing the acrobatic skills of the fighters-in-space as usually seen in standard kung fu movies, but the image of a fight launched in an empty apartment that offers virtually no protection or way out. This intention is made apparent when the three men equalize the number of bullets in their guns, a gesture that contradicts their ‘mission’: to kill and to survive the killing. Yet, their action is in tune with the soccer scene and the rule of fair play. Considering this unrealistic ‘game’ is also motivated by the players’ childhood friendship, the ensuing gunfight enacts the tension between nostalgia for lost innocence and the simultaneous desire to finish the game with no foul play. To’s aesthetic imprint is hard to miss in this first gunplay in the film. The staging presents the gunfight within a geometrical pattern that calls attention to itself, enhanced by a bold colour scheme and soft lighting; the curtains, interior walls and surfaces are in various shades of green and yellow, which change in tones at different angles under dim indoor lights. This set design and lighting recall the shadowplay vignettes in PTU and Mission.

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Working through the constraints imposed by the setting, the camera is an active agent laying out the spatial relations between the characters, and between characters and objects, especially the curtains, panels, and doors that define the layout of the apartment. It is no coincidence that To constructs another gunplay scene in much the same way: seriously wounded, Wo and his four friends confront Fay again in a fatal crossfire inside a makeshift clinic of an underground physician. As an image, the gunplay embodies To’s idea of action, which relies more on re-composing visual data in the mise-en-scène than on explosive acts or gestures. Indeed the example of the gunfight inside a ‘bare-bone’ apartment illustrates the nature of this image—it can mutate into something else in no time. Immediately after the gunfight we see Wo and the four hit men moving, repairing, and making furniture in perfect unison, virtually ‘replacing’ the disharmony of the gunfight with the harmony of domesticity. Like the soccer scene in Mission, the moving-in sequence is filmed without dialogue. This sense of harmony is reinforced when the sworn brothers pose in front of a camera for a group photo in a shot that overlaps two time frames: an old photo of five teenage boys superimposing on their adult selves in the present. Once again the reconciliation establishes the group as a unit and their emotional ties. Read against the boy-scout configuration in Mission, this episode of five grown-up men resuming their childhood bond reveals a slightly different dimension of To’s cinematic nostalgia: the group’s team spirit here is conditional upon the starker realities of the corporate underworld. The evocation of a John Woo-like brotherhood with deep personal roots is carefully bracketed by the operational logic of the triad organization. Their reprieve from its cruelty is, therefore, short-lived. This process of the image’s mutation from antipathy to empathy, order to chaos marks the two poles of the film’s narrative, not in a linear progression but as two opposing forces catching up on each other, hence the other meaning of ‘exiled’ implied in the typography of the film’s Chinese title: a period sign is inserted between the two characters to underscore this movement (fang—to set free, and su—to go after). The narrative revolves around the effort of the group to find ways to save Wo and get away from Fay, who now decrees all be executed. Wo is fatally wounded in a multi-party gunfight, and dies shortly afterwards. Running for their lives, the four men hit upon an unsuccessful armed robbery and pick up the leftovers: a truck loaded with gold some corrupt Portuguese officials are trying to smuggle out of the colony. However, just as they are rejoicing at their good fortune, the group is lured back to the lion’s den to save Jin and her baby, who allegedly have fallen

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into Fay’s hands. The final showdown ends in a messy, absurdist gunfight in which nobody comes out alive, except Jin, her infant son, and an unnamed prostitute who takes away a bag of gold. The twists and turns of events provide ample diegetic space for the development of the fang-su motif, from which we see not just the volatility of man’s fortune but also a certain binary vision of the group within To’s aesthetic of order and chaos; it is also through this binary vision that Exiled enters into an interesting dialogue with Mission. My concern here is the visual dynamics that subject the group to the dance of fortune; the tragedy that results is therefore a very different experiment on collective identity and heroism from Mission. The two films, taken together, seem to suggest To’s as yet unresolved vision of the group as a site for exploring the possibilities of heroism and its demise. In the following I will show how the binary works within Exiled, and between Exiled and Mission to further illustrate this duality in To’s cinematic imagination. Apart from sharing almost the same cast and characterization with its predecessor, Exiled incorporates other elements to inject a sense of chaos within a stylized and controlled visual framework. On the one hand, the film uses a series of set pieces such as the opening scene of the hit men’s encounter to replicate the ‘look’ of the professional group on duty. On the other hand, these showcases lose their balance, or ‘coolness’, when tension builds up and chaos and bloodshed take over. Instead of staging a well-orchestrated shooting game performed by professional hit men, in Exiled the fight scenes are visually quite messy, not just because of the much darker lighting and the ubiquitous gunsmoke that blur our vision. In fact, the choreography very often highlights the panic and disorientation of the group. In these gunfights, shots are frequently fired without a clear target. As characters are constantly reacting spontaneously to contingencies, the motion-in-stillness of Mission gives way to ‘motion-at-random’, which seems to echo the randomness of fortune, an existential condition underscored by the group’s resignation to fate when they resort to throwing coins to decide what to do and where to go next. Instead of having a clear sense of mission, the characters here are thrown into circumstances not of their own choice and completely out of their control. What they can rely on, it seems, are instinct and impulse. According to To, he has adopted a comparatively more spontaneous style in directing this film to let loose the energy of a real-life boy scout, as the five male actors have become good friends during the shooting. He even asked the actors to improvise in some key scenes, providing only a basic synopsis and staging requirements.13 This improvisatorial

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method is employed at the beginning of the finale, when Tai, Blaze, Cat, and Fat, like a bunch of drunken teenagers, walk into the hotel where Fay and his gang are waiting. It is also visible in the more light-hearted scenes where the hit men throw sexual jokes at one another like teenage boys enjoying their freedom away from home. While To calls this an ‘intuitive’ approach (sui yi), I believe what he means is actually managed chaos, for the unpredictability of the acting is calculated into the film’s aesthetic vision of the unpredictability of life and the absurdity of violence as a means to an end, or an end in itself. When the group jump and dance into the death trap that they should have been able to avoid, their bravado is soon undercut by the violence that ensues. The aimless shooting by men in desperation no longer serves the course of vengeful justice; rather, justice, sought through violence, is as gratuitous as violence itself. To’s handling of the finale, as managed chaos, denies the efficacy of the collective hero that Mission seems to have fostered by revealing the absurdity of violence and the mortality it brings about. The film also incorporates the element of child-play, in the form of a romantic hero-drama performed by some real-life/fictional boy scout, but the plot follows a less benign logic than in Mission. The work of coincidence suggests a much less uniform group, but one at the mercy of Fortune. Teo’s reading of the film’s ending concludes that the death of the group and all the gangsters involved signifies the ‘end of masculinity’ effected by the film’s critique of (male) violence.14 Whether or not masculinity has ended with the massive deaths of men in this film has to do with how masculinity is understood and interpreted in its multifarious representations, filmic or otherwise. Indeed, action cinema has a proclivity towards certain forms of masculinity, such as the Western ideal of manhood in Hollywood movies, or what Kam Louie calls the wu or martial hero in the Chinese tradition, or more recently a mix of both wen (cultural accomplishment) and wu.15 Be that as it may, a consensus on masculinity certainly exists in the utilization of a developing male bond among real-life actors in the making of the film. As the actors have admitted, they have injected a lot of their off-screen friendship into the acting, a method encouraged by To himself to capture the childlike innocence of the protagonists. The result is a symbiosis between onand off-screen acting: both the hit men and their real-life counterparts are products of a collective imagination of maleness to be enjoyed, like a party, and reiterated in both life and art.16 Could one say that the making of a film provides a context, and also a pretext, for re-enacting a form of male bonding otherwise suppressed in

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real life? The film has given these actors a lot of free space to explore adolescent male fantasies. The scene showing the group wandering aimlessly in the forest reveals the deep structures of a shared social imagination, which is channelled through an oral display of sexual fantasy: Fat: ‘How much is a ton of boobs?’ Curtis: ‘Depends on how you weigh it. How about using your mouth?’ Fat: ‘I’ll use my hands. One for each side!’ Later on, this juvenile temperament is choreographed into the final gunfight, when the four men play another kind of soccer using an empty softdrink can. In slow motion, the can is kicked and headed from one player to another, a gesture in defiance of the group’s doomed fate. This portrayal of the hit men as adolescent males getting lost and going wild in a jungle adventure reveals another subtext: at the heart of Exiled is a game not yet finished in Mission. However, Exiled pushes the imagination of the group hero to another extreme. Before they die, each hit man smiles in a close-up, as if to conclude in unison ‘game’s over’. Their final group picture is ejected from a photo booth, followed by a fade into the old photo of the five boys, also smiling at the camera. Not only is the ‘happy ending’ in Mission replaced by an absurdist crossfire that annihilates all, but the group’s heroism is shown to be a juvenile game, socially and culturally co-opted in nature.

PTU: The crime zone revisited If Mission, PTU, and Breaking News are the ‘unofficial trilogy’ of To’s group movies,17 PTU presents an interesting case study as a mid-way exercise that builds upon the group theme and formal experimentation in Mission and anticipates the kind of corporatism he further developed in Breaking News. More importantly, in PTU formal experimentation results in a distilled image of the urban landscape from which a postnostalgic imagination emerges to capture and re-envision the local, an experiential space within which the nostalgic is reconfigured as part of the film’s deconstructive aesthetic. A distilled image of sight and sound The story of PTU takes place within one night shift of a Police Tactical Unit (PTU) squad in Tsimshatsui, one of the busiest commercial and shopping areas in Hong Kong. The narrative consists of three main

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strands: a police investigation into the murder of a gangster leader nicknamed Ponytail; the search for a lost gun by a criminal investigation division officer Lo, and his fellow PTU officers; and the PTU’s investigation of a series of vehicle break-ins in the area. As Lo believes that his gun has been stolen by Ponytail’s men, he switches his mobile phone with Ponytail’s in the hope of tracking down the hoods, inadvertently attracting the suspicion of his superior, Leigh Cheng. The PTU squad, led by Mike and Cat, covers up for Lo and as a result gets involved in the gun search. Throughout the film the camera follows the excursions of the three parties—Lo, the PTU squad, and the murder investigation team— into obscure corners of the district. As they keep crossing paths with one another, the three lines of action converge in a crossfire in which the PTU squad, a criminal investigation team, two gangster heads, and four heavily armed Mainland Chinese criminals fire at one another during an accidental encounter. My interest here is in how, and to what effect, the camera indulges in the police on the beat—who resemble what Michelle Huang calls ‘walkers’ in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express18 —and the act of walking, as a means to exploring the city at night by using defamiliarizing techniques, so that the familiar urban space of the ‘crime zone’ becomes strange. PTU mediates cinematic nostalgia and an awareness of its own contemporaneity. This inevitably works to circumscribe the nostalgic through a defamiliarizing re-imagination of the urban space. PTU is arguably the most representative example of To’s fondness for the city at night so far.19 The entire action takes place in one night, and the visual composition of the night city is carefully manoeuvred to create an eerie, surrealistic dreamscape with little resemblance to the clichéd nightlife image of Hong Kong. What immediately strikes the viewer is emptiness: the usual crowds have disappeared, and for the better part of the film the city is devoid of a human background. In fact, the mise-en-scène strictly limits our vision to the activities of the police by doing away with the multitudes, a far cry from many quick-paced action films where high-speed chase and crossfire take place amidst busy traffic on crowded streets for maximum thrill and sensation. Deserted by the masses, the city broods in a resounding emptiness as the drama unfolds, while the frequent use of wide-angle shots further extends the perceived space and distance of movement as the cops patrol the streets in a tightly controlled rhythm. The manipulation of spatial perception is further enhanced by the use of sound and lighting. Watching the film, our attention is repeatedly drawn to certain magnified diegetic sounds—footsteps, doors, beacons, telecommunications devices—as either markers of the main action or the potentiality

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of action, whereas the usual humming background noise is effectively subdued. A good example is the shot where Ponytail’s body is being carried away in a casket. The sounds of police communication devices and the medical crew’s footsteps are so magnified that other diegetic sounds are virtually submerged. As the crew move slowly across the screen, the background lighting darkens, leaving the police minivan in spotlight at the centre before a complete blackout. In this and many other scenes, our sense perception is geared towards the silence that envelops the action on-screen. Rather than reinforcing cinematic verisimilitude, this ‘sound-image’, together with the alternate blue/white lighting, provides the basic rhythm and ambience for the action to take place, and an audio-visual grid for the walkers—and viewers—to navigate the topos of the city. The film’s filtering out of the familiar in this visual mapping is also noticeable in the absence of the signature skyline with its ultramodern architecture, a favourite backdrop of many Hong Kong action (and non-action) films (e.g. John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs trilogy, and To’s own Running Out of Time I and II.) Instead of tracing the skyline as an image of the city threatened by a crisis of disappearance, and hence a nostalgic yearning for lost times, PTU takes the alternative path to study the city at the ground level: the back streets, an old-style café, a local eatery, a videogame arcade, and old rundown buildings. As the police-walkers stroll the streets in search of Lo’s gun, the camera, following their footsteps, not only sketches the contour of the night-city but also transforms its texture in the process. As an exercise in formal experimentation, To’s reconstructed crime zone borders on the theatrical. In the scene where Lo meets Ponytail’s father, Bald Head (Lo Hoi-pang), in the hope of finding his gun, Ponytail’s crew, naked and heads shaven, are locked up in tiny iron cages as a punishment for failing to protect their leader. The whole scene is designed like a stage performance: the minimal props leave a broad empty space in the middle with the lighting-accented cages on two sides. After a brief dialogue with Lo, Bald Head strikes his hammer repeatedly against one of the cages while the naked man inside cries out in pain and terror. As we watch Lo walk out of the unit, the sound of the hammer and Bald Head’s ominous voice are still echoing in the background. While graphic depiction of physical torture is a stock in trade of local gangster films, this scene presents torture as a carefully choreographed ritual, emphasizing the visuality of torture as part of the cinematic language with a generic pedigree.

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Stylization, it seems, is central to the film’s visual mapping. In a stairway scene, Mike leads his men up an evacuated building to check out Ponytail’s accomplices in their hideout. The PTU squad moves slowly upstairs in a highly rhythmic and coordinated pattern to the tune of the synthesizer sound track, their flashlight signals going on and off in the dark. Visually, the whole scene is choreographed like a stretched-out dance sequence; without dialogue, the viewer’s attention is effectively focused on the body language of the police officers. In Hong Kong action films, the staircase is a preferred setting for pursuit and raid scenes where action stars display their extraordinary acrobatic acumen. In PTU, the staircase is transformed into a space of suspense and circumspection, revealing the psychological tension of the cops caught in the midst of great uncertainty. Conscious posing is also evident in the film’s emphasis on the body language of ‘cool’.20 A good example is the long shot of the PTU squad coming out of a back alley. In their accustomed slow and measured steps, they stop and spread out horizontally under the bright yellow neon sign of Tom Lee Music (a local signpost’ in the area) as if to pose for the camera before they walk into the foreground and out of frame, one by one, their silhouetted figures standing in sharp contrast to the neon sign above. Shaped by their respective spatial settings (a narrow staircase and a camera-enhanced outdoor location), these stylized performances display an affinity to the adroitness in the utilization of space for maximum visual expression in Hong Kong films while giving new inflections to conventional practices. If the controlled and measured tempo of the police-walkers enables the camera to indulge in a nostalgic revisiting of the night-city, the resulting dream-like vision suggests a self-imposed circumvention of its own nostalgia. As a distilled image, the city beckons for recognition as tokens of familiar signs are folded into a defamiliarized dreamscape that defies accustomed perception. The displacement of the familiar into the unfamiliar also challenges the viewer to look for similarities between the two contrastive perceptual realms. The frequent references to street names and local signposts, both visually and in dialogue, evoke memories of the local by providing a fictionalized topographical index to the cops’ itineraries. In its distilled form, the city becomes recognizable through the camera’s (and our) active decoding of its self-effacement. This déjà vu, or feeling of revisiting a scene from the past in the present, is recovered from what Ackbar Abbas calls the déjà disparu in 1980s– 1990s Hong Kong film culture: ‘a handful of clichés . . . a cluster of memories of what has never been . . . an inability to read what is given to view’.21 The sense of tension is reinforced by the time factor: the PTU

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squad has to find the gun before daybreak. Thus, despite the camera’s slow-paced visual mapping, beneath the police-walkers’ calm composure is a heightening sense of urgency and anxiety. They are literally ‘running out of time’ (a recurrent motif in Running Out of Time and Breaking News). If the surrealistic image of the night city has the qualities of a dream, there is also a tacit understanding that this dream will end, or disappear, with the night. In between a flaneur-like movement over space and relentless temporal flow, the film seeks out the symbolic potential of nostalgia by dissolving the components of the past into its own film medium that goes beyond the nostalgic. The productive tension between the déjà vu and the déjà disparu in PTU is where the post-nostalgic imagination emerges as an effort to mediate between a desire for some anchorage in the past, hence an identity derived from a sense of place and its cultural imaginations, and a desire to dislodge itself from the ‘handful of clichés’ in order to imagine what is.

Loss and absence: Citing the heroic PTU is among To’s hybrid creations that defy strict genre definitions by mixing elements of drama, action, and the kind of dark humour that characterizes Hong Kong’s popular cinema. If, in John Woo’s cinema, space is a spectacle born out of a spiritual force moving dialectically towards an ultimate transcendence in the form of a hero’s sacrifice or redemption,22 in PTU the deserted film city is a stage where heroism, and the moral package of knight-errantry, is re-examined through a different lens. Referring to Hong Kong films in the 1990s, Linda Lai remarks that nostalgia is the desire to recover a ‘lost sense of moral community’.23 From a different perspective, Rey Chow locates this nostalgic yearning for lost time (and space) ‘in the intertextual relations of the past and the present’.24 In Hong Kong’s action cinema, nostalgic intertextuality is most vividly present in the adaptation of martial arts gallantry in hero films. Filmmakers in the mid-1990s usually recast the heroic within an ironic, self-referential narrative. But parallel to this rebellious aesthetic is also an awareness of its connection to the older tradition, a formative influence that gave Hong Kong action film its initial generic hallmark, and to whose visual aesthetic the later films frequently refer to.25 Such intertextuality is discernible in PTU’s deconstruction of the conventions of policiers. Unlike many of its predecessors, the film’s break with the past goes beyond parody and mockery of the hero’s machismo. Instead, it relies more on exploiting the image of uniformed police to destabilize

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the boundaries between good and evil, order and disorder, and finally the apparently incongruous narratives of heroism and corporatism. The film begins with Lo’s missing gun and ends with his finding it when he slips over the same banana skin for the second time in a back alley. Although sloppy and incompetent, Lo is the centre of gravity of the film’s main action. His blunders not only motivate the action but also directly lead to the climactic gun battle, where two teams of police officers open fire with armed criminals, and two gangster bosses kill each other in a cowboy-like duel. If possession of a gun is a symbol of power, Lo’s missing gun justifiably removes him from the privileged position of power. The missing gun in PTU can be read as a self-reflexive reference to To’s earlier film, A Hero Never Dies, in which the Leon Lai character says, ‘God is he who has the gun’, which in turn is a variation on a line by Mark (Chow Yun-fat) in A Better Tomorrow: ‘A god is someone who can control his own destiny.’ Teo revises this motto into ‘A hero is he who has the gun’.26 This reference to the gun, or more precisely the possession of one, is not only central to the identity of the hero but also to the moral universe that the hero strives to uphold against evil enemies. In PTU the missing gun does not so much signify the urgency to reinstate the hero’s power as distract the police officers from their presumed missions. Even Lo himself is misled by Bald Head (whom he believes has taken his gun) into facilitating Bald Head’s revenge on Eyeball (whom Bald Head believes masterminded Ponytail’s murder). From beginning to end the missing gun functions more as a decoy than a vehicle of power through which justice can be served. It seems in PTU To has selfconsciously revised his (and Woo’s) motto: ‘Both the hero and the gun are tokens of mischievous Fortune.’ By establishing Lo as a loser and black sheep of his group at the outset, To retains a comic dimension typical of the black humour of Hong Kong action films while at the same time inserting an ironic comment on ‘cool’ in the film narrative. As an attribute of the image of the hero (individual or group), ‘coolness’ is undercut by its ambivalence as a signifier of the heroic. Throughout the film we see the coolest cops inflict physical torture on their targets as a routine practice. On the other hand, the film carefully avoids any direct portrayal of gangsters seriously doing their business. (They eat, play videogames, pour yellow paint onto Lo’s car, and beat him up without inflicting fatal injuries.) Most of the time they are either ripping each other off or being ripped off by the police—those who have guns. If there is a trait of heroism remaining it exists in a highly negotiated form—the PTU leader Mike, who at the very beginning admonishes his

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subordinates to observe the code of conduct: ‘Anyone wearing the uniform is one of our own.’ Apparently a straight forward and somewhat clichéd dictum on loyalty and brotherhood, it becomes more problematic than it seems as the film proceeds. As early as in the opening scene Mike’s remark is undercut by Cat’s more pragmatic rejoinder: ‘Whatever happens nothing beats returning home safely.’ Sitting on facing benches on the police truck, Mike and Cat are already positioned to represent different values, and different interpretations of what it means to be ‘wearing the uniform’. The second and last time this line is reiterated Mike’s voice is replaced by a much disliked orderly, who turns the hero’s logic against itself: the uniform is not about covering up for an individual at the expense of the group, but the other way round. Surprisingly, the most looked-down-upon member of the team manages to change the course of events—Mike finally backs down, and the whole team heads for the shooting ground. In sharp contrast to Lo’s, Mike’s image comes closest to the coolheaded, intelligent, and unflinching cop-hero ready to violate any procedural guideline to protect his men. However, he is not a conventional hero, for his action lacks the moral stature typical of the accustomed roles of a good cop (or good gangster). Throughout the film, Mike, as well as his team, is often cast in shadows. In the scene where Mike tortures a young hood in a videogame arcade, a low-angle shot shows Mike in full command, but half of his face remains shaded. Later on, the camera shows Mike addressing his squad in a close-up, but his authority is marred by the front lighting that grossly flattens his features. These portraits of the hero invite comparison with those of Lo, the anti-hero. On at least two occasions Lo is given a well-defined closeup that draws attention to his vulnerability: when he tries to bargain with Bald Head in the latter’s headquarters, and when Lo runs away in terror from the violent shootings in the end. The first scene, rendered in alternative close-ups of the two characters, subtly sketches Lo’s helplessness and fear at the sight of Bald Head torturing the young hoods in iron cages. In the second close-up, Lo gives the most emotionally intense and human performance: shot in slow motion, the scene emphasizes his bandaged, panic-stricken face as he cups his ears, screams in panic, and flees for his life. In the end, Lo’s street-smart philosophy saves the day of the police teams when he advises Leigh to cover up her cowardice during the shooting: ‘Fire a couple of shots, Madam—it will look good in your report.’ If Mike’s solemn declaration of brotherhood in the name of the uniform (a visible form of power like the gun) harks back to lost times and lost values that no longer apply, Lo’s remarks suggest how these

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values can be recuperated under a different rubric. Ironically, Lo’s rather unheroic flight leads him to the missing gun: a moral failure turned into a victory of a different sort, occasioned by chance and sheer luck. In PTU, Hong Kong is a ‘clockwork metropolis’27 where human agency is a function of contingence and circumstance rather than heroic intent. Marginal characters out of nowhere (e.g. the pre-teenage biking boy who steals coins from parked cars and the harmless-looking Mainland criminal who runs into Lo at the phone booth right before the gun battle) can be the ones who pull the strings of a heroic drama—an absurdist police story rewritten into the official account of the night’s events. Before the police crews disappear into the depths of the night, Lo, Mike, and Leigh respectively dictate their reports orally. Their interwoven lines match perfectly to create yet another image of police chivalry—a series of blunders skilfully crafted into a well-orchestrated (co)operation in which ‘good’ eliminates ‘evil’. This self-reflexive testimony can be read as the film’s ironic comment on the aesthetic of the gun, which is given full expression, John Woo style, in the grand finale. The use of slow motion, highly stylized body movement, and the miracle of blood spurting criminals firing back several times before they fall dead—all these are conscious encodings of the hero film popularized by Woo’s cinema. However, the spectacle is out of proportion with the reality of its aftermath. The absence of the conventional hero in this spectacle of gunfire and his replacement by Lo as the centre of gravity suggest that the visual codes of the hero film are less required by the plot than a kind of citation, a tribute to an origin and a witty exploitation of its signifying potential. The self-referential happy ending short-circuits the visual logic of the hero film by foregrounding the fictionality of heroism (a nostalgic intertext in Rey Chow’s sense), for embedded in the co-authored police report are two mutually incompatible narratives: heroic action and corporate wisdom. In an ending shot, instead of in opposite positions as before, now Mike is seated next to his teammate Cat on the truck as he reconstructs his account of the team’s activities of the night. This, I think, is the last stroke of dark humour played upon the cops. If, as To says, Cat is only a housewife figure whose only concern is to go home safely,28 it is her housewifely logic that Mike succumbs to, a difficult but necessary choice between two possible narratives of loyalty and brotherhood. If postmodernist culture has a tendency towards ironic, self-reflexive transgression of boundaries to reveal the overdetermined nature of signs and meanings, PTU can be regarded as a postmodernist decoding and recoding of pre-existing genre conventions. It can be read

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against the local film culture since the 1980s in terms of a post-nostalgic re-engagement with earlier texts through stylization, intertextuality, displacement, and citation. What emerges from the film’s visual mapping is a defamiliarized ‘dream city’ where the action cinema’s own legacy is reconfigured in the process of self-transformation.

Mad Detective: Which ghosts to exorcise? The Chinese title of the film, Shen tan, invokes the figure of the gifted detective: blessed with a super-sharp mind and a charismatic, sometimes eccentric, personality. Indeed, this shen tan persona has figured frequently in popular fiction, films, and TV programmes.29 Other similar constructions include shentong (a gifted child), shenyi (a physician with magical powers), shen lai zhi bi (a marvellous manoeuvre with the pen), gui fu shen gong (super-human skills and workmanship). On the other hand, the Chinese character san (meaning ‘god’) in Cantonese slang sometimes implies a slightly deranged mind, as in san ging (shenjing in Mandarin), meaning crazy or craziness. For a local audience, the first impression at seeing the film’s poster, one in which the main character, Bun (Lau Ching-wan) sits dejectedly on a chair against a wall of newspapers, his head heavily bandaged, might be that the film promises a new take on the shen tan prototype. But, how far will it go? One is prompted to ask, could a shen tan be literally mad? The opening scenes seem to encourage a mixed decoding: a junior officer reports duty at the Kowloon West District Crime office, asking to see his new supervisor, Bun. Then we see Bun slash a hung-up pig with a chopping knife in his office, lock himself up in a suitcase, and order a subordinate to roll it down several staircases inside an old building. Bun gets out of the suitcase, bruises all over, and calls for an immediate arrest of the murderer. Cut to newspaper headlines about Bun’s marvellous victories. Within the first two minutes of the film Bun is portrayed as a kind of hero, a tough, daunting, slightly eccentric yet capable guy who relies solely on intuition rather than the intellect to solve murder cases. But this conclusion is premature, we soon realize, when Bun cuts off his right ear and hands it to a retiring senior officer as a farewell gift. The graphic portrayal of Bun’s self-mutilation overturns any possible assumption that the mad detective would conform to our idea of shen tan. Our curiosity is then piqued and redirected towards something else: if he is clinically mad, what is he going to do next, as the hero of the film? How will the story go on? Why is he mad? What makes him a shen tan, after all?

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The pathology of heroism Psychotic heroes are in no short supply in horror, action- and psychothriller films; some of them are provocatively charismatic (e.g. Anthony Hopkin’s Dr Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, Kevin Spacey’s religious fanatic-cum-serial killer in Seven, and Stephen Chow’s lunatic ghost-buster in Jeffrey Lau’s Out of the Dark/Hui hun ye, 1995). But still we can call Bun an unprecedented hero: he is a police officer, he is a good guy, and he is literally insane right from the beginning. Indeed, the film tries to convince us that he is a hero because he is insane. Soon after the brief opening scenes Bun becomes an outcast: he is no longer in the police force due to his mental illness, his police-officer wife has left him, and he keeps talking to imaginary ‘ghosts’ as if they were real. When his behaviour is challenged by his (imaginary) wife, Bun retorted, ‘This is a talent!’ (the ability to see the demons inside human beings). At this point another question presents itself: is Bun a fictional character coming from ‘nowhere’, a phantom without a history, or is he a new incarnation of some prior existence? It would be futile to look for a prototype in the romantic/tragic hero (Chow Yun-fat in John Woo and Ringo Lam’s films), or in the no-nonsense, street-smart cop (the Jackie Chan or Sammo Hung type), or in the cool-looking police officer, bodyguard, or professional killer (the Jet Li type). Upon a closer look, one can trace his genealogy among the ranks of To’s crippled/compromised heroes, such as those in Loving You/Wu wei shen tan (1995), A Hero Never Dies/Zhen xin yingxiong (1998), Running Out of Time/An zhan (1999), and The Longest Nite (Lau stars in all these films). As one of To’s favourite actors, Lau has not appeared in To’s more recent group films. Lau’s best performances remain with his re-interpretation of the pathological hero. As Teo notes, Lau personifies the ‘softening of the macho hero’ in To’s corpus by playing more ‘volatile and edgy’ characters.30 Thus, Lau’s acting talent is best utilized in more individualistic and eccentric roles. This recalls the film Loving You, in which the shen tan character has lost his sense of taste and smell (hence wu wei, or no taste/smell). Tracing this cinematic lineage, Lau’s casting as To’s latest version of the shen tan is no coincidence. In Mad Detective, the shen tan has not only lost some bodily functions but also some mental ones as well. While his supernatural vision amounts to a kind of clairvoyance, Bun remains an ostracized figure troubled by his own inhibitions. He is expelled from the police force and divorced by his wife. Among the ghosts he sees, the only one that he does not see as a ghost is his wife, an imaginary persona that has

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little correspondence with his wife in flesh and blood, except that they look the same—most of the times. Bun’s talent, thus, is also a congenital disability that condemns him to a perpetual exile from any form of social institution. As an ostracized and disempowered figure (most tellingly the dispossession of the gun and police ID), Bun’s ambivalent status as a hero is visualized through his appearance. From beginning to end, Bun is dishevelled, head-bandaged, and badly beaten. In sharp contrast to the cool male figures in Mission, Exiled, and PTU (and also to other pathological heroes such as Andy Lau in Running Out of Time or Louis Koo in Thowdown/Roudao longhu bang, 2005), Bun’s image is closer to Lo’s in PTU, who is sloppy, head-bandaged, and badly beaten throughout the film, and both are dispossessed of a gun. If we revisit the genealogy of the wounded hero in recent Hong Kong action films, Bun’s psychological and physical impairment seems to be a radical degeneration of the species. Indeed, the list of crippled/compromised heroes in these films runs much longer than the few examples cited above. Other representative cases include the psychologically troubled cop-figures in Benny Chan’s Divergence/San cha kou (2005), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs/Wu jian dao trilogy (2002/2003), and Confession of Pain/Shang cheng (2006). In these films, physical injuries, where they are emphasized, very often are manifestations of psychological or mental disorders, which in turn are symptoms of memory malfunction (Chapter 6). Far from being stereotypes, these crippled heroes nonetheless share a common trait: instead of belonging to a group, they are loners pursuing some truths or ideals that may or may not exist. In this respect, they are comparable to the romantic-idealistic hero, or the knight-errand character, who despite their physical, psychological, or moral short-comings remain steadfast in the pursuit of truth and justice, even though it might be the result of a distorted vision of self and reality. In Hong Kong’s action cinema, be it the kung fu and wuxia or contemporary hero films, the knight-errand figure embodies two levels of nostalgia: first, a yearning for a lost cultural and moral order associated with an imaginary China;31 second, especially in contemporary hero films, a fin-de-siècle sentiment befitting the mood of a pre-postcolonial Hong Kong. In post-colonial Hong Kong, however, these forms of nostalgia no longer provide the kind of relief or consolation as they once did, and conventional modes of the heroic imagination have been subject to radical revision. Likewise, these new prototypes are presented as anomalies in the family of conventional heroes. In Mad Detective Bun is an anomaly of anomalies. While in most other cases the mental or

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psychological disorder can be explained by a previous cause (e.g. childhood trauma, loss of loved ones, guilt, etc.), Bun’s abnormality seems to be genetic, if not metaphysical. There is no explanation for his madness, except that it is an inborn talent. Diegetically this works well to justify the supernatural dimension of the film, to allow us to see the same ghosts as Bun does, a privilege not accorded to the other characters, thus establishing some form of identification that is otherwise blocked by Bun’s insanity and decrepitude. His madness also guarantees his expulsion from the institutions of power associated with the hero: the police, the triads, and the family. Thus, Bun virtually has much less (if any) recourse to traditional forms of masculinity than his counterparts. His wound, as such, has no history, and no personal memory can explain its origin. In this light, Bun’s shen tan character is a radical break from the two forms of nostalgia mentioned above, more radical than the kind of critical engagement we have seen so far in To and Wai’s work, especially since his heroism is not just a symbolic wound, but diegetically a clinical case of schizophrenia. To more fully grasp the postnostalgic imagination in Mad Detective, a closer look at the intertextual dimension of the film’s aesthetics is in order.

Paradoxical vision Subsequent to the stylistic revision of Mission’s action choreography in Exiled, Mad Detective departs further from the controlled and stylized presentation of action in favour of random and gratuitous violence. This changed visual style is necessitated by the film’s schematization of madness in characterization and narration. Instead of indulging in a well-crafted, geometrically laid out topography of gunplay, thus effecting a panoramic, and almost omniscient, point of view in the viewer, on many occasions we are given a series of disconnected shots in quick succession which emphasizes the result of a killing or attack. (The only exception is the finale, which will be discussed later.) A vivid example is an initial chase and murder scene in a dark forest. Throughout the sequence we can only afford intermittent and partial sights of three silhouetted figures running amidst dark bushes, and it is only much later that the missing pieces are recalled in the memory of the murderer, mediated through Bun’s vision. Instead of wide-angle shots and styleconscious set pieces, the cinematography here relies more on medium and medium-close-up shots to foreground facial expressions and capture the psychological undercurrents of the characters. As a result, the cityscape is drastically different from that in the three films discussed

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above. Devoid of the vast and empty urban spaces that draw attention to themselves, the city is mainly seen through the eyes and action of the human characters, especially Bun’s. Unlike the minimalist interior space in the other three films, the city seen through Bun’s surrealistic lens is full of human apparitions, a well-populated place where the hero is the unwelcome stranger. This realignment of perspective, while imposing limits on what we see and know of the unfolding events, enables the film to engage us in a paradoxical vision that alternates between madness and reason, fantasy and reality, and the natural and the supernatural. The film’s repeated emphasis on Bun’s decrepitude as a result of his metaphysical talent, moreover, establishes the mad detective as anti-rational and self-destructive. He is diametrically opposed to two inter-related realms: the rational human world and the inherently split and schizophrenic human psyche visualized as ghosts (the inner demons). This sceptical take on human nature and its social manifestation complicates the notion of madness: is it about seeing ghosts or not? Is truth a matter of public consensus or something that is regardless of belief or disbelief? The film plays with a number of paradoxes that put Bun in an adversarial position to the world around him. Simply put, these paradoxes are: to see the truth is to be mad (like Bun); to be sane and rational is to yield to one’s inner demons (the rest of the cast/world); thus, heroism is a form of madness holding itself up against the world of reason. If we allow the self-mutilation act (in which Bun cuts off his ear as a farewell gift to the retiring boss) as a tribute to the traditional hero ‘who doesn’t have a ghost’ (xin li meiyou gui), Bun’s extreme behaviour is also an expression of loneliness, moral exhaustion, and desperation. While he seems to have established a kind of blood tie with his boss, this exemplary good cop (who represents a passing generation) can only return this favour with a look of incomprehension. Symbolically, Bun’s selfmutilation at this early stage of the film fosters a negative display of the hero’s body—a violated male body—which remains a horrific sight throughout the film. While in action cinema injured male bodies are not uncommon, usually they signal a transition from an impeccable to a compromised condition and a passage to the next stage of conflict, or better self-knowledge. As such, bodily injuries or disfigurements are bound by limits, both in screen time and in location, or they remain scars to reinforce the pathos of the heroic act.32 Yet Bun differs from the usual cast of injured heroes: he is subject to consistent physical abuse, most of which is self-induced, and he seems to derive a sense of masochistic pleasure from the process.

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Throughout the film we see Bun re-enacting violent crime scenes by playing both the criminal and the victims, to the extent that he buries himself in a forest to the point of near suffocation. In another scene, Bun urinates at the legs of Ko (Lam Ka-tung), whom he believes is involved in the case of a missing police officer and his stolen gun. After a good while of beating by Ko, Bun kneels in a pool of blood, picks up his prosthetic ear, and tries to stick it back to its place. This pathetic sight of the hero in a completely defenceless situation without any precedent of chivalry or display of kinetic potency (c.f. Chow Yun-fat’s Mark in A Better Tomorrow) works at two levels. First, it turns Bun into a passive victim of physical violence, a literally disarmed ex-police officer tortured by his schizophrenic vision in extreme isolation from the social world. On the other hand, this grotesque image of the hero forces the viewer to adjust our expectations of what constitutes an action hero, that is, we have to accept what he is and who he is and to see what he sees. In the scene just mentioned, we share Bun’s unusual vision as well as the wicked humour behind his mischievous act, for what Bun/we see standing next to him is not Ko, but a young lady dressed in an executive suit and skirt. When I was watching the film in a theatre, the audience murmured in surprise before they broke out into laughter at a point-of-view shot showing Bun looking down at the lady’s skirt as she urinates like a man. We do not see the penis, which is supposed to be hidden under the skirt, but this shot has already served its purpose. Bun’s attempt to provoke a suspect to catch him by surprise is understandable, but the way he goes about it has more to do with his psychotic impulse than this serious purpose. When he is urinating towards the young lady (one of the seven ghosts inside Ko), the camera, in a low-angle shot, reveals the wicked pleasure on Bun’s face as he swings his lower body to and fro in a weirdly erotic, deviant, and self-indulgent manner. The explicitness of this gesture may encourage a psychoanalytical reading of its homoerotic implications and the playful engagement with notions of castration and phallic fantasy. Indeed, as suggested above, male bonding in To’s work simultaneously borrows from and self-reflectively criticizes convention, and some To films have tried to reduce gender bias through independent and powerful female characters. In this film, the gender issue is once again brought on trial. The female ghost not only possesses a penis, but she is also the mastermind of all the ghosts. Intelligent, unscrupulous, and charismatic, she is the one to give orders to kill or not to kill. All the female ghosts in the film are given the talent of persuasion; their voices thus are the locus of evil. While the seven ghosts inside Ko pay lip service to the seven deadly

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sins (c.f. Seven), the female ghosts do resemble Eve in the Book of Genesis, the temptress that initiates the Fall. At a TV interview, co-director Wai Ka-fai said that he wanted to use women as the voice of reason to make a difference from conventional gender stereotypes. Interestingly, this well-intentioned reversal of perceived gender roles serve to complicate the paradoxical structure of the film by associating women with a form of reason—instrumentalism—that ultimately brings down the hero and the truth he preaches. Ultimately, the femme fatale corrupts, her perversion symbolized by her hidden penis. As she conquers by corruption, the only incorruptible soul has no place in the world except the space of madness. In the film, Bun the mad detective is recruited by his ex-junior colleague, Ho (Andy On), to help track down a corrupt cop who apparently has murdered his colleague and used the latter’s gun in a number of robberies. Friendship develops between Bun and Ho, but it soon collapses as Ho gives in to his own ghost, a terrified teenage boy, soon after losing his gun (which Bun has taken). Throughout the investigation, Bun plays the visionary who directs his young disciple Ho on the path to finding the truth. Unfortunately, Ho cannot share Bun’s vision, and when his inner child takes over, he kills his mentor in panic during a standoff with the true murderer. Much in keeping with To and Wai’s scepticism towards the police, in Mad Detective the police force is a hotbed of corruption and power abuse. The professional ethic is no different from that in PTU: the protection of self- and group interest. It is what drives Ko to murder his colleague to stop him from reporting an error, and the same impulse motivates Ho to kill Bun and cover up his crime by manipulating the evidence after the shootings. During the shootout, the four characters, Bun, Ho, Ko, and a Southeast Asian man who has taken the lost gun, play hide-and-seek in a warehouse. Under dim lighting, Bun fights Ko’s seven ghosts moving in unison. The sense of duplicity and fragmentation of personality is magnified by mirrors on the walls. Such a sight is visually disorienting, as the screen is saturated with human figures reflected through the mirrors, until after the four characters have shot down their own images one by one. The shootout, in essence, is a duel between two visions of reality, two worldviews and two systems of values. As the film’s finale and the most elaborate gunfight sequence, it offers nothing like the refined, wellorchestrated gunplay aesthetic of Mission or the self-reflective citation in PTU. The labyrinth-like warehouse assisted by rapid cuts, dim lighting, close-ups, and mirror reflections reveals a more complex topos than the colourful interiors in Exiled. While Exiled presents the final shootout

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mostly in medium-long and high-angle shots to render the gunplay as an aestheticized and hyperbolic performance, in this film the choreography and camerawork concentrate more on building up the sense of inner chaos and restlessness. The crosscutting between Bun’s point-ofview shots and what can possibly exist in reality further plays up the tension between the two incompatible visions. When all the mirrors are shattered, we remain torn between two possible illusions. Sadly, when Bun, shot through with bullets, lies dying on the floor, he sees the last ghost in his life: a smartly dressed executive-looking woman emerges from behind the child Ho, advising him to finish off his mentor and ‘make up a convincing story’ in his report. The camera slowly pulls up and away from the scene. The film ends with a long take. A highangle shot shows Ho and the three corpses lying around him. Slowly and meticulously he tries out different possibilities of planting the guns into the dead men’s hands. We do not know what story he will tell, or whether his story will get him the promotion he wants, but by turning the body of the hero into a mere piece of (tempered) evidence to cover up a hideous crime the film seems to have exorcised its own ghost: the haunting presence of heroism. Before pulling the trigger at Ko, Bun argues with himself: ‘Don’t shoot, or you will be no different from the others . . . . But I’m human, too. Why should I be different?’ As Bun gives in to his human self, he is shot by Ho. This is the only time we see Bun ‘plays god’, using a gun to ‘take control of his destiny’. As in PTU, the missing gun motif in Mad Detective works to expose the vulnerability of those who have guns and hence demystify the gun as a power symbol. What matters, after all, is how the story is told, and whose voice does the telling (c.f. PTU). If Bun’s dilemma, that is, to kill or not to kill, symbolizes the moral struggle that often accompanies a hero’s decision, his final removal/replacement by Ho—the policeman, the child, and the unscrupulous schemer—invalidates the hero’s subjectivity in making a rational and moral choice. If Bun is a hero, his values and beliefs are equated with madness; if Ho is evil, he is also a child of reason; reason, in turn, is a pre-condition of the schizophrenic reality that Bun tries to rectify, and from which he remains in perpetual exile: all these paradoxes re-assert themselves in the film’s cynical denouement.

Conclusion In this chapter I have traced the development of a new aesthetic in the action cinema of Hong Kong exemplified by the work of Johnnie

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To and his Milkyway team. We have seen how the reinterpretation of heroism and its legacy in Hong Kong cinema has led to a number of revisions in the cultural imagination of the action hero, and hence the set of moral values the hero embodies. While in films such as Mission, Exiled, and PTU a new group consciousness emerges as an alternative to the romantic, individualistic hero, a closer examination of these group movies reveals the nuanced and far from unified cinematic responses to convention. Between Mission and Exiled is a pendulum-like movement between order and chaos, discipline and passion, professionalism and child-play. In PTU, cinematic nostalgia manifests itself in the postnostalgic reconfiguration of the urban space as a stage where the old teachings of loyalty, brotherhood, courage, and righteousness are misquoted in a fictive police report. In Mad Detective, the lone hero takes the pathological heroes in contemporary action films to a logical extreme, equating heroism to madness. At the same time, the tragic end of the mad detective and the dubious triumph of the ghost-infected young cop keeps the tension between madness and reason alive: Bun’s death may signal the death of the hero/god, but the final high-angle shot of Ho tempering with the dead bodies betrays a cynicism towards the present, and perhaps a suppressed nostalgia for what has been, or not. The postnostalgic, once again, has to be sought amidst the wavering shadows of history within the consciousness of the present.

5 The Kung Fu Hero in the Digital Age: Stephen Chow’s ‘Glocal’ Strategies

In the previous chapter we have examined the way in which the ‘new Hong Kong action film’ has transformed certain stylistic and thematic patterns to update and critically re-engage the local in contemporary cinematic parlance. This chapter continues this line of inquiry by extending it to a related sub-genre, the comic kung fu film. I will anchor my discussion on two recent works by Hong Kong’s number one comedic actor-director1 Stephen Chow, namely Shaolin Soccer/ Shaolin zuqiu and Kung Fu Hustle/Kung fu. Chow is well known to the local audience for his consistently hyperbolic, farcical screen persona. To the extent that Chow’s career as a comedian has been built upon his travesty of social norms, especially those regarding graphic depictions of bodily excesses and the creative deployment of archaic Cantonese linguistic markers, puns, and in-jokes, the popular appeal of the king of comedy has been confined largely to Hong Kong and other Cantonese-speaking communities in the region. More recently, especially after Shaolin Soccer, Chow is better known to audiences in Mainland China. Chow’s recent breakthroughs on the international markets signal a conscious self-transformation of the actor-director, and hence the different strategy of embracing the local popular culture—his all-time favourite and inspiration—in order to go beyond the geographical and linguistic confines of the local itself. As suggested by Davis and Yeh (2008), as Asian cinemas are more and more globalized, and as the modes of film production are becoming more and more transnational and transcultural, Chow is among those East Asian filmmakers who embrace what is called a ‘new localism’ that ‘employs source material grounded in local genres, stars, styles and cross-media alliance [that] are endogenous 117

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to East Asian popular culture, updated and raised to higher quality levels’.2 Insofar as Chow’s films have always been intertextual in the sense that they self-consciously refer to a long tradition of comedy, kung fu and martial arts films in Cantonese and Mandarin cinema, and very often Chow’s own works, Chow’s localness has to be understood within this intertextual frame of reference. Moreover, when this same local tradition is absorbed into the mainstream global cinema, a new transnational visual vocabulary emerges, thanks to Chow’s conscious effort to play down context-specific Cantonese puns and gags in the dialogue and a highly ingenious appropriation of digital technologies and computer-generated image (CGI), arguably the most transnational/translingual visual medium, in hybrid reimaginations of his favourite local legends. In this connection, it is justifiable to understand Chow’s localness as a form of symbiotic cinephilia, a desire to reincarnate into one’s favourite screen personas in a highly idiosyncratic yet recognizably nostalgic style. One only needs to recall Chow’s tireless effort to re-stage cinematic legends in his own works, from witty caizi (talented man of letters) in Lawyer Lawyer/Suan si cao (1997) and Flirting Scholar/Tang Bofu dian Qiuxiang (1993) to the Monkey King in A Chinese Odyssey/Xiyouji, from a sinicized James Bond in From Beijing With Love/Guo chan 007 (1994) and Forbidden City Cop/Da nei mi tan 008 (1996) to the famous young scoundrel Wei Xiaobao, in Royal Tramp/Lu ding ji (Parts 1 and 2, 1992), adaptations from Jin Yong’s martial arts novel of the same title. One can say that Chow’s comic persona is always already an intertext of multiple origins, East and West, while his signature nonsense gags (‘mou lei tau’ in Cantonese) are variably lauded and dismissed as a symptom of, and satire on, Hong Kong cinema’s anti-intellectual culture. Amidst criticisms and praises, Chow’s latest efforts in blending the local with the regional and the global yield more than box-office payoffs. The international success of Shaolin Soccer and later on Kung Fu Hustle provides a much needed launching pad for the home-grown comedian to access the ‘global popular’. In the following, I attempt to first situate Chow’s films within a transnational network of Chinese martial arts and kung fu cinema and its global transformations in recent years (Context 1 and Context 2), followed by an examination of how intertextuality is creatively employed in these films in which the nostalgia for old form is contained in a cinematic medium that celebrates crossbreeding of cultures, images, and cinematic technologies in its global trajectory.

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Context 1: The transmigration of martial arts aesthetics in global visual culture The international circulation of martial arts films has a long historical trajectory. From the first efforts of Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers’ in the 1960s to break into the Western world, the genre gathered a cult following in the North American and other overseas markets. When the legendary martial arts superstar, Bruce Lee,3 broke into the US and other Western markets with Enter the Dragon, the term ‘kung fu’ was used to distinguish the Hong Kong-style action cinema that emphasizes shortdistance combat and fast-paced fist and leg movements.4 As a sub-genre of the Chinese martial arts film, kung fu, a term couched in Cantonese, signifies a regional character closely associated with the Hong Kong cinema. Leo Hunt (2003) writes, If the wuxia swordplay film can be seen as a Shanghai émigré, then the kung fu film originates in Hong Kong, in the black-and-white exploits of mythical southern heroes like Fong Sai-yuk/Fang Shiyu and Wong Fei-hung and a tradition of charismatic stars . . . Of the two sub-genres [i.e. kung fu and wuxia], kung fu is both the more local and the more global.5 The historical trajectory of wuxia films and Bruce Lee-style kung fu films (and the later comic kung fu sub-genre initiated by Jackie Chan) has been well documented and discussed by film scholars elsewhere.6 These early arrivals at the international film scene set the stage for the genre’s transformation in both their native place and the transnational networks of filmmaking. Against this background, the martial arts film has been transformed from a local cultural phenomenon to a transnational one, although, as many film critics and scholars have pointed out, Chinese cinema has always been transnational in nature due to the undeniably Western import in the very practice of filmmaking itself.7 In this process of transformation and transmigration, cultural and socioeconomic mechanisms in the local and international arenas play an important role, such as the expansion of the Hollywood dream factory into the Asia markets, and the increasing internationalization of filmmaking through accelerated movement of talents, technologies, and capital across regional and national boundaries. It is beyond the scope of this study to encompass the complex topos of the global cinemascape. For the purpose of

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my discussion, it suffices to point out that the border-crossing activities of popular cultural products, images, and ideas facilitated by the forces of globalization have created the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new visual culture that is subject to constant adjustments, appropriations, and re-appropriations by the so-called ‘cultural brokers’ within the culture industry itself. These cultural brokers, as Yomi Braester (2005) has observed of Chinese filmmakers nowadays, have to find their own niches not only by means of their artistic talent but also entrepreneurial skills to negotiate successful deals with local and international sponsors.8 As far as cinema is concerned, cultural brokerage is a mixed blessing, since it always involves succumbing to the demands and constraints—whether commercial or ideological—of the biggest players in the field, that is, mega-studios in Hollywood, as well as the wavering policy prerogatives of local authorities. Their complicity with political and economic regimes of powers notwithstanding, these new martial arts films also contribute to the generation of a new visual vocabulary that distinguishes them from their predecessors, and it is through this ability to make use of, appropriate, and reinvent a hybridized (westernized) form of an originally local popular tradition that these films gain global currency in the international mainstream. According to Leon Hunt (2003), critical approaches to the genre usually fall into two broad categories: (1) the spectacle of the body (favoured by Western critics), and (2) ‘identity’ and ‘traditions’ (favoured by Asian critics).9 While this Western/Asian critical divide is not always so clearcut, these two approaches are generally adopted by film scholars and critics writing on martial arts and action films. Hunt also notes that both approaches assert different claims of authenticity, that is, the authentic Chineseness and martial arts skills of the hero on the one hand, and the authentic body-as-spectacle projected on-screen on the other. Indeed, the interest in action/motion/body as spectacle in the Western cinematic tradition has had a long history since the 1950s.10 Extending Tom Gunning’s observation of this historical development in action cinema to the 1990s with reference to the latest trend-setter, The Matrix trilogy, Ndalianis comments that ‘the motion of the body . . . has shifted to the stylistic tools of the cinema body, as sound, editing and cinematography combine with the muscular, hyper physiques in breathless displays of hyperkinetic motion’, and as ‘games of sight and motion incorporate a more literal embodiment of . . . “the frenzy of the visible”’.11 Scholars of Hong Kong cinema, on the other hand, have written extensively on the cultural nationalism and identity politics inherent in Bruce Lee’s kung fu films, as well as references to Chinese philosophy

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and aesthetics in King Hu’s wuxia (swordplay) films.12 However, the so-called spectacle of the body, or body-in-motion, in the wuxia and kung fu film is always overdetermined in its signification. Li Siu-leung, for instance, remarks that kung fu’s ‘dilemma of representation’ originates from the tensions between ‘the tradition and the modern, the mimetic and the non-mimetic modes of discourses [that] are coexistent and co-extensive in the filmic imaginary’, giving rise to the ‘incoherence, contradictions and instabilities of its meanings in circulation’.13 Tracing the trajectory of the heroic masculine body of Bruce Lee setting out to redeem China’s national pride to the pensive, perplexed, and sometimes passive figure of Wong Feihong (Jet Li) in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China/Huang Feihong series and the popularity of Jacky Chan-style action films sporting contemporary, international settings, Li sees the ‘disappearance of “kung fu” and the emergence of a more universal action choreography that disseminates transnationally’, that is, the ‘ “kung fu-action” a la The Matrix’.14 In fact, it was Tsui Hark’s revival of the genre through Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain/Shu shan (1979) that signalled the transition of the aesthetic of martial arts films from an emphasis on the representation of ‘real kung fu’ to the so-called ‘wire fu’ and special effects-enhanced action choreography. The replacement of the authentic hero-body as spectacle by the authenticity of spectacle-asspecial effects is epitomized in Tsui’s Once Upon a Time in China 3, whose success signals a shift in audience expectations and the popularization of technology-enhanced special effects in martial arts films.15 The disappearance of the martial arts film and its hero into special effects and CGI in the process of the genre’s globalization, however, is complex but not complete. The Matrix-style kung fu is certainly making its transnational tour, as evidenced by a great number of recent productions ranging from wuxia, costume drama, to epic war films. Yet, neither kung fu nor wuxia in relatively more indigenous forms has disappeared altogether: in the last few years we have witnessed a series of local and international blockbusters in these categories, from Crouching Tiger and Hero to Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. More important, the above highly selective review of critical studies on martial arts and action cinema in both East and West suggests that the line between the two approaches to the martial arts film is gradually eroded by shifting ideological affiliations and changing dynamics of transnational filmmaking. What is beginning to disappear, it seems, is the authenticity of the action hero(ine) as real-life martial arts experts, and the culturalist and nationalistic messages this persona embodies. This disappearance is further accelerated by the use of digital technologies in

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the cross-cultural (re-)appropriations of visual style and choreography, or what is now known as ‘cyber fu’. If, in The Matrix (1999), Keanu Reeves’s Neo exclaims ‘I know kung fu!’ simply because he has downloaded a computer program that enables him to defy the laws of physics in the computer-generated world of The Matrix (the virtual society generated by computers), it is the ‘virtual camera’ created by the Wachowski crew16 that performs the action for the actors; more precisely, the virtual camera transforms the illusion of the superhero into our vision of reality. Unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, which is more of a playful study and experimentation with the genre, The Matrix trilogy, especially the first two episodes, distinguishes itself with a generous use of quotations to create a visual language that approximates, if not surpasses, the real; hence it makes no qualms about reduplicating the genre’s classic moments in virtual reality (e.g. the combat scene between Neo and Morpheus inside a martial arts studio) by combining the choreography of Yuen Wo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragons, and Kung Fu Hustle), one of Hong Kong’s best talents, and top-notch CGI personnel in North America and Europe. In the series, not only a variety of fighting styles are freely adopted with little reference to their regional affiliations in the local tradition,17 but the questions of causality, probability, and reality (questions that sometimes discredit the martial arts film in the eyes of some Western audiences and even fans disappointed by the overuse of wirework instead of ‘real action’) are pre-empted by the perfection of The Matrix as the ultimate hyperreal—the virtual reality that is more real than the real—as a totality in itself.18 It is, indeed, a ‘perfect illusion’ that plays upon our dystopian fear of a futuristic, post-human society where humans are rendered powerless preys by all-too-powerful machines, which for many is all-too-probable. The phenomenal success of Neo and The Matrix Trilogy worldwide not only becomes ‘the life’s work’ of the Wachowski brothers, as evident in a series of follow-up online and video games that extends the films into still more dimensions of the viewer’s sensory perceptions,19 but also opens up a new range of possibilities for the cinematic reinvention of the action/martial arts hero and a new form of martial arts film that draws upon the matrix of global visual culture the genre itself has helped to create. For one thing, the hero’s real-life credentials in martial arts are no longer the most important qualification of his authenticity on-screen. Both filmmakers and their audiences seem to have entered into a tacit agreement on the suspension of disbelief. This is made possible, or palatable from the action-fan’s perspective, by the ubiquity of CGI and other digital

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technologies in everyday life—TV programmes, animation, computer games, advertising, digital imaging, and other forms of digital media that have infiltrated many aspects of contemporary life. Leon Hunt (2003) has effectively summarized the versatilities of the ‘age of digital reproduction’ in these terms: Hollywood action films have frequently appropriated the ‘look’ of Hong Kong films; Hong Kong films have, in turn, drawn on the stylizations of computer games and vice versa; martial arts films and games have both incorporated aspects of Japanese Manga (comics) and anime (animation), again in a mutual exchange.20 It is, after all, a familiarity with speed and other spectacles of virtual reality that generates expectations of the same, at least in our perceptual reality. The result, then, is an ‘invitation . . . to participate on a sensory and perceptual level and become involved in a cinema that seduces us with its numerous spectacles’.21 Thus we watch Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and Zhang Ziyi perform high-tech digital stunts in high-speed flights and deadly combats while comfortably conceding to the fact that they, like Keanu Reeves’s Neo, are not the masters of old. What authenticate our experience as spectators are virtual camera-generated special effects as spectacle, and the viewer’s proclivity towards a digital visual culture that equips them with the necessary vocabulary to access the ‘cinema body’ of the action film in the twenty-first century. The digitized cinema body, it seems, has come to represent an emerging global visual culture; while digitized aesthetics gives the new martial arts film its global currency that sails through the critical divide and off to the vast and uncharted territories of the ‘global popular’.22 It is also this cinematic body and its digitized aesthetics that Stephen Chow creatively adopts and appropriates to internationalize his comic kung fu films in the process of the Hong Kong comedian’s ‘glocal’ self-reinvention.

Context 2: The critical reception of the new martial arts film Martial arts films, especially those films that have made inroads into the North American market in recent years, have drawn both praises and scepticism from critical circles: these films are generally praised for their aesthetic merit, but a lingering sense of uneasiness still persists towards the ambiguous politics and ideology that underscore (if not undermine) the films’ aesthetic accomplishments. For instance, while

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Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger is recognized for its subtle feminist intervention into stereotyped gender representations23 and sensitivity towards the complexity of the diasporic imagination of China,24 some critics are sceptical of its authenticity as a Chinese martial arts film, and of Ang Lee’s explicit intention to ‘make a Chinese film for an international audience’.25 A similar controversy also plagues the critical reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero, which has been held suspicious for its apparent ‘fascism’26 and complicity with the reunification rhetoric of China under the guise of historical drama; on the other hand, the film has been praised for its mythical qualities comparable to Homeric epics;27 its political and ideological ambivalences have also been read as an implicit critique of the homogenizing impulse of a totalistic regime and an inevitable outcome of the pragmatics of filmmaking under the globalizing production logic of Hollywood.28 On the other hand, martial arts films from Hong Kong are less beleaguered by this kind of politically sensitive interpretations. Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004) are more sympathetically treated as what they are: action comic flicks with a distinctive Hong Kong flavour (in particular the tributes to Bruce Lee and early Cantonese and Mandarin kung fu/martial arts films) mixed with creative references to Hollywood classics, such as The Matrix and the sci-fi genre.29 Though Chow’s indulgence in chop-socky silliness has met with more stringent criticisms from viewers who are far from impressed by the actor’s trademark nonsense gags30 and verbal/physical vulgarities at the expense of plausibility and plot coherence, review columns in the United States in general give a thumbs-up to the fantastic visual spoofs that Chow is seen to have superbly mastered. Below are a few examples gleaned from media reviews in the United States: the cast of Hong Kong actors is comic perfection . . . The computerenhanced stunt work is astonishing, but it’s Chow’s ability to find the humor in his flights of fancy that’s truly distinctive. (Diones, May 23, 2005, p. 25) Does the plot spin out of control? You bet. But dumb fun this smart is a gift. (Rolling Stone, April 21, 2005, p. 124) Kung Fu Hustle defies all laws of gravity in its pursuit of thrills and laughs—and it’s so disarmingly eager to please that only a stone-faced kung fu purist could object. . . . Chow’s martial-arts movie is exuberantly silly. (Ansen, April 18, 2005, p. 53)

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If winning awards at international film festivals is any indication of a film’s global popularity at all, Chow’s two ground-breaking hybrid comic kung fu cum adventure and romance films have set a new record for the martial arts genre as a whole: in 2005, Kung Fu Hustle came away with best picture awards at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) and the Golden Horse Awards (Taiwan), and was showcased in the Cannes and Sundance film festivals in the same year; in China, its box office revenue (165 million RMB) was only second to Hero; in Hong Kong, it was the highest-grossing film of the year (60.6 million HKD/7.8 million USD), slightly above Chow’s previous record-setter, Shaolin Soccer (60.7 million HKD in 2001). Together with Shaolin Soccer, the film was among the few Chinese productions that topped the Japanese blockbuster charts.31 Shaolin Soccer also won a Blue Ribbon Award for best foreign film in Tokyo in 2003, and a Golden Bauhinia Award for best director and best picture in Hong Kong in 2002. The splitting of glory among Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle (best picture) and two regular arthouse favourites—Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (best actor/actress/art direction/cinematography) and Derek Yee Tung-sing’s One Night in Mongkok (best director/screenplay)—at the 2005 HKIFF further attests to the crossover tendency between arthouse and commercial films. As Meaghan Morris (2004) suggests, action cinema, especially Hong Kong-style kung fu cinema, partakes of a ‘transnational imagination’ in the making of a global popular culture.32 By pointing out the trajectory of the contemporary martial arts film in the local and international markets and the critical responses triggered by its globalizing impulse, I want to draw attention to Stephen Chow’s glocal strategies of reinventing himself: a creative morphing of local elements and more universally decodable visual codes by subscribing to and parodying the new aesthetic of martial arts films, a genre originated in the Chinese popular and cinematic tradition; and how his films partakes of the post-nostalgic imagination of Hong Kong cinema through a continuous engagement with the dynamics between the local and the global. In this process, Chow, like other Hong Kong filmmakers, has to adjust to the increasing stakes of the nation as an important partner and market. His films, like other new martial arts films produced in the last ten years, constitute a potential site for generating a visual language amenable to the regional and global economy of cultural production/consumption. In Chow’s films, the nostalgic impulse registered in the numerous intertextual references to earlier films and popular traditions is creatively transformed and placed in a dialogic relation to contemporary elements in the creation of a new-style kung fu vocabulary. My intention is not to

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disregard the ideological dimension of cinema, or cultural differences and specificities per se; rather, I want to show how these differences and specificities are skilfully employed and transformed through the image-making mechanism of cinema, aided by the proliferation of digital media and CGI technology in everyday life that allows for multiple encodings and decodings, and thereby becomes intelligible to viewers in different localities. Stephen Chow’s films remains insightful as long as they illuminate the complex exchanges and processes of negotiations between an artwork, its creators, and various clusters of audiences that actively participate in making meaning in the global mediascape. In the following, I examine how kung fu is re-engaged in what I call the ‘digital imaginary’ of Chow’s new martial arts films, and show how this digital imaginary enables the creation of ‘virtual bodies’ that perfects the martial arts ideal of the human body, just as what we have seen in the perfection of Neo’s body in The Matrix. I further argue that Chow’s martial arts endeavours are more than just parody or appropriation of a Western model (which is already a hybridized visual mix), but a product of a cinephilic intertext, something amounting to a postmodern pastiche or ‘remediation’33 of pre-existing images circulating within increasingly digitized visual cultures of our times.

Kung fu in a hybrid medium: Shaolin (+) Soccer Throughout his career in local television and cinema, Stephen Chow has demonstrated a penchant for mixing cinematic codes and linguistic nuances old and new. His films have always been intertextual in the sense that they self-consciously refer to a long tradition of comedy and kung fu films in Cantonese cinema, and very often his own works. It is within this intertextuality, and the ‘need for the . . . film to retain the link to the object of parody’ that Srinivas locates the ‘production of the local’ in Chow’s corpus.34 Ironically, when this same local tradition is absorbed into mainstream global cinema, Shaolin Soccer acquires a new transnational accessibility that was not available to Chow’s previous films. In fact, it was the international success of Shaolin Soccer that paved the way for the more self-conscious attempt in Kung Fu Hustle to play down context-specific Cantonese puns and gags in the dialogue to cater to non-local audiences. Yet, the success of both films lies not in the aversion to, or suppression of, the local, but in making effective remediation of certain local elements that have already become a kind of freeware in the global cinematic cyberspace. On the other hand, Chow’s films make explicit references to their Hollywood counterparts that results in

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a comic pastiche of styles, a formula that enables the hitherto Cantonese ‘king of comedy’ to make the necessary crossover to the international arena. Here I am primarily concerned with the film’s code-mixing strategies in the creation of a hybrid visual and kinetic field—kung fu soccer, symbolically prefixed ‘Shaolin’, as a cultural marker, whereas ‘soccer’ signifies a site of transnational cultural consumption and negotiation that has been gaining in popularity and ideological significance with China’s increasing investments in national and international sports such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games. The film’s main action largely follows Chow’s rags to riches formula: unemployed ex-Shaolin disciple Sing is discovered by a crippled ex-soccer star, Fung (nicknamed Golden Leg), who wants to use Sing as his final trump card to win back his lost fortunes in the sports business. Sing vows to use soccer as a means to revitalize Chinese kung fu and its spiritual values in a world (read: China) conquered by the brute forces of materialism. In order to win in the national soccer tournament, they set off to recruit Sing’s former Shaolin buddies—the sixiongdi—to build a dream team of kung fu-soccer players. In the process, Sing develops an affectionate relationship with a girl, Mui (Zhao Wei), who happens to be a Wudang tai-chi wizard, but who is forced by circumstance to work for her abusive aunt making and selling mantou (Chinese steamed buns). The evil character is Hung (Patrick Tse Yin), who controls the country’s soccer games, and was behind a foul play in which Fung’s leg was permanently handicapped, partially due to Fung’s willingness to throw a game for cash. Sing’s Shaolin team fights a deadly battle with Hung’s Evil Team, and their victory is guaranteed only when Mui uses her magical tai-chi powers to defeat the chemically enhanced Evil players. After their victory, Shaolin kung fu takes on a new meaning in the modern world, as men and women in all walks of life seem to have integrated kung fu into everyday activities. As Stephen Chow’s first self-conscious and successful attempt to break into the international market, Shaolin Soccer has more to offer than Chow’s signature ‘mou lei tau’ comic gags and social satire crystallized in his underdog screen persona. In this film, satirical in-jokes are still employed for comic effects, but the language (including corrupt pronunciations and parody of stock phrases from old Cantonese films) is carefully blended into the dialogue to ensure that local eccentricities and idiosyncrasies would not jeopardise comprehension by non-Cantonesespeaking audiences. At any rate, these in-jokes, while remaining a source of pleasure, no longer form the substance of Chow’s comedy in this film. What matters more is the deployment of traditional elements

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of kung fu within a contemporary, forward-looking urban setting— Shanghai in the twenty-first century—that seems to have no place for history. Yet, to see Shaolin Soccer as a nostalgic revivification of past ideals will risk losing sight of the more complex negotiations between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in Chow’s film. Indeed, the centrality of kung fu (as seen in the title word ‘Shaolin’ and the repeated references to Bruce Lee) has to be understood within the context of soccer, a foreign sport that connotes both ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ in China, and the hybrid, anachronistic cultural and visual intertext that makes the formula ‘Shaolin (+) Soccer’ possible, and bankable, in the local and international markets. This kind of cultural/visual morphing, at the same time, is perfected by the use of digital technologies, a crucial element that underwrites the film’s global appeal. Adopting a relatively simple story-line with minimal yet effectively executed plot twists, Shaolin Soccer’s main action develops primarily around a series of soccer matches leading up to the National Cup Tournament play-off, which is also the climax of the film. The only major detour is the romance between Sing and Mui, which provides the otherwise all-boys story with an affectionate edge. Mui’s presence also symbolizes the complementarity between the two most distinguished branches of Chinese kung fu: Shaolin (the legendary birthplace of Chinese kung fu) and Wudang (the origin of taiji quan, or tai-chi). If, in The Matrix, the actualization of the fantasmatic potentialities of kung fu has to be justified through the diegetic staging of technology as a major thematic/narrative component, that is, the computer program that creates, literally, the (virtual) reality of kung fu, in Shaolin Soccer, and later on Kung Fu Hustle, the fantasmatic is taken for granted, as a lived cultural tradition (Shaolin and Wudang martial arts) and popular imagination (folklore, cartoons, and cinema). The suspension of disbelief here is complete with the authentication of two key words: ‘Shaolin’ and ‘Wudang’, which allude to not only the long tradition of martial arts training in Chinese history, but also that of Chinese martial arts films, popular fiction, and cartoons that form a significant part of the local popular culture of Hong Kong and other Chinese communities. Thus, the use of CGI in the film serves a more limited purpose: instead of being an overarching presence that authenticates and rationalizes superhuman power, it is primarily a tool to enhance the visuality of the traditional martial arts ideal, and to make it ‘more real than the real’, at least perceptually, which is not radically different in purpose from the use of more conventional special effects such as wiring, slow motion, cranking, and constructive editing, techniques that have been

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exemplified by Hong Kong action choreographers throughout the last four decades. While The Matrix (and the computer program of the same name) as simulacrum operates diegetically to rationalize and legitimize the fantastic spectacle of the body, simulacrum also operates non-diegetically as a source of fascination. Read metaphorically, the spectacular fight scenes and the perfection of the martial arts imaginary in the trilogy exemplify Hollywood’s transnational cultural logic: download pre-existing elements from a local genre, enlist top-notch special effects personnel from around the world, and deploy local talents behind the scene (in this case the Hong Kong action choreographer, Yuen Wo-ping) to reproduce/reinvent signature scenes, all in the service of a filmic imaginary of a post-human technological empire run by machines. On the other hand, this preoccupation with perfect simulacra also enables the perfection of martial arts aesthetics through a seamless merge of Hong Kong-style action choreography with digital technology. The convergence of martial arts choreography and digital technology in the cinematic spectacle is most evident in the creation of virtual bodies, which refer to both human bodies and other inanimate objects performing intelligent actions. In Shaolin Soccer, virtual bodies are deployed less to create seamless harmony between the human body of the hero and his latent superhuman kinetic power. Instead, the special effects performed by the virtual bodies of the Shaolin sixiongdi dramatize the tension and incongruity between the apparently decrepit and dysfunctional human bodies and the kinds of stunts these visually unappealing bodies can perform. One can say that this is a digitally enabled visual gag, which will work without pre-existing cultural knowledge or even cinematic exposure. With the exception of Sing and Fourth Brother ‘Lightning Hands’ (the film’s Bruce Lee-incarnate), all the other sixiongdi are either out-of-shape middle-aged men or grossly overweight. However, within the world of the film, the tension between the real and the virtual does not discredit the kung fu of these characters; rather, it reinforces the magical dimension of the martial arts tradition, not as something scientifically proven, but as a cultural imaginary produced by this tradition and popularized by the tradition of filmmaking. This perhaps explains why Chow has no sympathy for non-magical manipulations of the human body: the Evil Team, under the direction of Hung, obtains superhuman powers by injecting a ‘scientifically proven’ potion (probably from the US), and is eventually annihilated by Mui’s majestically executed tai-chi. ‘Shaolin Soccer’ thus functions also as an oxymoron: the film utilizes the ‘magical

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realism’ of digital technologies as a means to frustrate the utilitarian ‘will to power’ of modern science. It seems Stephen Chow’s film has opened up a new possibility to address the predicament of martial arts in modernity noted above: the martial arts imaginary can indeed find a place in modernity, or postmodernity for that matter, through the perfection of its aesthetic ideals by the latest digital know-how. The film’s choreography gives full credit to this new martial arts aesthetics. The six brothers—Iron Head, Iron Shirt, Hooking Legs, Lightning Hands, Might Steel Leg (Sing himself), and Light Weight—are given ample screen time to demonstrate their highly specialized skills on the soccer field. The most dramatic sight is perhaps the weightless leaps performed by Light Weight, the youngest brother who is pathologically obese due to a chronic eating disorder. Indeed, in almost every match, the brothers are given several medium-close-up shots that capture their virtual bodies in the most impressive forms. A memorable scene comes from the Shaolin Team’s very first match with a notorious amateur team known for foul play and violence. After having suffered serious injuries inflicted by the opponents, epiphany dawns on the six brothers. The camera first gives a shot to Sing’s speechless face; then cuts to Sing’s point-of-view shot in deep focus, showing the other sixiongdi literally frozen in their classic kung fu postures not unlike those found in comic books and ‘scared scroll’ training menus. What happens afterwards is a spectacle of virtual bodies flying, soaring, and somersaulting in midair as they topple their opponents within seconds. In the film, soccer matches turn into martial arts action sequences enhanced by extravagant digital graphics; even the soccer ball catches fire and swirls up ripples of grass as it shoots through the air. Such a flamboyant visual language is a mesmerizing display of the power of digital graphics to transform our sense of the possible, and in this respect Chow is also indebted to other sources, such as Japanese magna and anime, most obviously the magna and TV animation series Road to Dream/Zuqiu xiaojiang, a great hit for many years since its first screening in Hong Kong in the late 1980s.35 Such a dizzying array of visual and cultural references characterizes the digital imaginary of Chow’s films. Such an undertaking betrays a conscious effort to adapt a distinctive sense of locality to a much broader and culturally and linguistically diversified audiences both within and outside the Chinese-speaking world. This being said, it must be noted that Shaolin Soccer remains a distinctly ‘Hong Kong-Chinese’ film, in the sense that it makes an effective crossover between a variety of context-specific cultural elements at the

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textual, linguistic, and cinematic levels, and more universal ones, resulting in a hybrid cinematic medium that re-engages the martial arts tradition as a cultural imaginary that has become part of a global visual culture embraced by a wide spectrum of audiences worldwide. This is perhaps Chow’s hidden message when quoting Bruce Lee, his long-time idol, in his films. In Shaolin Soccer, Fourth Brother is played by Chan Kwok-kwan, a Stephen Chow-regular known for his mimicry of Bruce Lee in comic roles. Throughout the film he plays up Bruce Lee’s body language and signature facial expressions (such as the deviant smirk) to foreground the inspiration behind the scene. When he has to be carried away after being incapacitated by the Evil Team’s foul play in the final match, the whole team salutes in front of the camera to pay respect to the legendary hero: Fourth Brother: I’m sorry. I have to take a break. Sing (saluting): It’s okay. Your body is leaving us, but your spirit will be with us forever. Bruce Lee, metaphorically, becomes one of the virtual bodies and a source of inspiration for the Shaolin Team, but this time he is not fighting Japanese or Europeans invaders, but an evil Chinese businessman and the corrupt social institution that backs him up in modern times. On this note, I now turn to Kung Fu Hustle, Chow’s second martial arts film, and his first collaboration with a major Hollywood studio, Columbia Pictures.

Postmodern pastiche: Kung Fu Hustle The success of Shaolin Soccer helped launch Chow’s international career. He was able to attract investments from Mainland China’s Huayi Brothers (who produces Feng Xiaogang’s popular hesuipian or Chinese New Year films) and Columbia Pictures in Hollywood for his next project, Kung Fu Hustle, which turned out to be an even bigger sensation than its predecessor. The increase in production budget translated to a more polished script and storyline, more expensive set designs, better postproduction work and more visually accomplished special effects. At the same time, the involvement of transnational capital also necessitates a further re-packaging of Chow’s public persona from a localized Cantonese comic actor-director to a more ‘Chinese’ character with an international appeal. But the prefix ‘Chinese’ as it is applied to Chow has a different inflection from such well-known figures as Ang Li and Zhang

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Yimou, whose Chineseness is shaded by their nuanced relations to and portrayals of a cultural China as an embodiment of aesthetic visions and/or ideological critique. It also differs from the Chinese action hero personified by Jet Li and Jackie Chan, whose international careers are largely built upon their on-screen identities as Chinese kung fu experts finding employ within the mainstream Hollywood action genre.36 Kung Fu Hustle, observes Davis and Yeh (2008), also signals Chow’s further extending his localism to a mega-generic aesthetic, blending traditional martial arts and melodrama with Westerns, musicals, and animation.37 Against the background of established models and accelerated cultural traffic on global screens, Chow’s self-reinvention in Kung Fu Hustle signals a new turn in transnational Chinese-language film. In the film, Cantonese is the primary Chinese dialect spoken by most characters, despite the fact that the film is set in 1930s Shanghai. As in Shaolin Soccer, references to the Chinese martial arts tradition abound; what’s more important is the proliferation of citations from both the textual (especially Jin Yong’s martial arts novels) and cinematic sources of this tradition in a context more attuned to the nostalgic Shanghai gangster films that used to populate local screens in the 1990s. Added to Chow’s favourite intertextual play is the reconstruction of Pig Sty Alley as the film’s central setting, a direct reference to an early Mandarin film from the 1950s, The House of 72 Tenants, which was subsequently remade by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers in the late 1970s.38 In this regard, Chow’s ‘replica of a replica’ intricately situates his film within the historical trajectory of Chinese cinema, in particular the bilateral traffic between Shanghai and Hong Kong.39 Gary Xu rightly points out the significance of this replica, which goes beyond quotation to reveal Chow’s more serious side: sympathy for the underprivileged and marginalized in an exploitative society.40 This critical edge calls to mind the social realism of Fruit Chan and Ann Hui in their portrayals of the underbelly of metropolitan Hong Kong (Chapters 2 and 7). Frequently outshone by Chow’s penchant for comic extravagance, social criticism remains a leitmotif in his films, a trait inherited from a long tradition of realism in Chinese cinema. In the film, Shanghai is visually split into two drastically different worlds: the prosperous, decadent urban centre filled with casinos and nightclubs, and the run-down and congested neighbourhoods inhabited by social outcasts (a visual contrast also noticeable in Shaolin Soccer’s contemporary Shanghai). Throughout the film, Chow’s critique of this social and economic divide is carefully built into the comic action that gives prominence to underdog characters as the ‘people’s heroes’. To the extent that Chow draws so heavily on the textual

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and cinematic sources of the local popular culture, the questions remain how these elements are mapped onto the more universal topos of a martial arts film targeted for international markets, and what kind of martial arts imaginary emerges from this endeavour. To a lesser extent than in Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle still plays with archaic linguistic registers and Cantonese in-jokes, but these contextspecific elements do not interfere with comprehension of plot and action, and on the whole the jokes translate reasonably well in Mandarin Chinese. Some gags might be a little diluted but these imperfections are compensated for by the characters’ hyperbolic acting and body language. Indeed, Kung Fu Hustle demonstrates a sharp awareness of the importance to foreground certain local elements by careful visual translation in order to speak to both local and non-local (or non-Cantonese) audiences. This kind of translation across cultures, as I have suggested above, is closely connected to the increasing presence of the digital media in everyday life, which in turn has nurtured a global visual language that makes such films as The Matrix successful worldwide. This process is noticeable in Shaolin Soccer, and is accelerated in Kung Fu Hustle. Its multiple citations of both Chinese and Western sources, an ingenious mix of visual registers, create a cinematic spectacle that is strangely familiar, tantalizingly archaic and yet fashionably contemporary, a postmodern pastiche that playfully re-engages the past in nuanced configurations of fragmented times and spaces. In Kung Fu Hustle, Chow’s parody of The Matrix amounts to a carnivalesque comic reversal of the cool, offering a flurry of middle-aged, floppy, out-of-shape male and female bodies made to soar, spin, swirl, and somersault in mid-air, complementing the frequent display of memorable fighting styles of various schools of Chinese kung fu. One example is the highway chase scene early in the film, where Sing (played by Chow), a good-for-nothing hooligan, is pursued by Helen, the landlady of Pig Sty Alley, after a flopped murder attempt. Audiences who have watched The Matrix would not miss the humour conveyed through the visual incongruity of character and setting: the sloppy and badly beaten Sing and the burly landlady (in pyjamas and sandals, a cigarette dangling from her mouth) performing a high-speed, life-threatening chase on their imaginary motor-cycling leg-wheel. The chase sequence also borrows heavily from animation, which results in a double-quotation and an indirect comment on the original. Other obvious quotations from The Matrix are found in numerous combat scenes, most notably in a near-replica of the so-called ‘Burly Brawl’, in which Neo fights against the invincible agent Mr Smith and his army of

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clones in a deserted residential compound. In Chow’s film, the enlightened Sing, now equipped with superhuman power, performs a similar solo fight against the Beast and a hoard of tuxedoed gangsters, virtually replicating Neo’s performance as the gangsters are kicked, punched, and swished off into every corner of the Pig Sty Alley compound in all imaginable directions. This scene leads directly to the climax, when Sing soars up to the sky to ready himself for the final strike, Buddha’s Palm. High up amidst the clouds the Buddha’s image appears, as if to anoint his new disciple to carry out an unfinished mission (left by Bruce Lee?) on earth. This ending may seem gratuitous even within the context of comic kung fu, and harks back to much earlier Cantonese martial arts films in the black-and-white film era, when the supernatural was still a common device. What emerges from these creative adaptations, or re-appropriations, however, is not merely generic assemblage, but an aesthetic that bridges what is real, that is, authentic martial arts tradition in the popular cultural imaginary, and what is virtual, that is, the actualization of the fantasmatic potentialities within that imaginary. Until the grand finale, the film devotes much of the screen time to showcasing the extraordinary power of six retired martial arts experts, Landlord Paris’ Tai-chi, Landlady Helen’s Lion Roar, Tailor’s Iron Fist, Donut’s Hexagon Staff, and Coolie’s Twelve Kicks. Fellow residents of Pig Sty Alley, these characters have been pursuing a relatively low-key life among the city’s outcasts to stay away from enemies in the jianghu (an imaginary space of wuxia where good and evil follow their own codes of honour). Sing, in this part of the film, is a good-for-nothing hooligan and gangster-wannabe who instigated the fight between the kung fu masters in Pig Sty Alley and the Axe Gang led by Sum. After an initial brawl, Sum kills Tailor, Donut, and Coolie with the help of two top killers, the Harpists, while Paris (Yuen Wah) and Helen (Yuen Qiu) are seriously injured in a fight with The Beast (Leung Siu-lung), a psychotic killer hired by Sum. Sing’s awakening takes place only when all the legendary masters have had a good share of impressive show-off, and show-down. He saves Paris and Helen in a last minute change of mind. Fatally wounded by The Beast as a result of his chivalry, Sing accidentally acquires superhuman power under the care of Paris and Helen, and finally defeats The Beast and wipe out the Axe Gang. This array of kung fu masters with recognizable genealogies in the local popular culture is complemented by a density of special terms and names from Cantonese films and martial arts novels (e.g. the Chinese names of Paris and Helen are Yang Guo and Xiaolongnu in Jin Yong’s The Legend of the Condor Lovers, and The Beast is Huoyun xieshen [meaning fire-cloud evil god], a

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well-known figure in a series of black-and-white Cantonese films in the 1950s, which in turn were drawn from ever earlier local cartoon comics). In the film, Sing acquires his secret powers unknowingly as a child not from real masters, but from a kung fu comic book41 procured from a vagabond peddler. His attainment of superpower and spiritual enlightenment is a process of seeing/witnessing his (cinematic) elders fight for justice. This kind of downloading martial arts, not by technological mastery but cultural immersion, can perhaps be read as a morphing of Hollywood and the Hong Kong popular cultural tradition in the re-conceptualization of cinematic/cybernetic kung fu. The final twist of the plot, however, reasserts Chow’s connection to the local: the same peddler approaches another little boy to sell his antique-looking secret manuals. This time, the boy is sceptical. The peddler, in a close-up facing the boy (also the audience), fans out a dozen other such manuals for the boy/viewer to choose from before the film ends with a blackout. This could be another visual gag Chow plays with the viewer, local or not, to ground him/her within the same imaginary space/text of Chinese kung fu. While the ubiquity of CGI in Kung Fu Hustle transforms the sloppiest bodies into superhumans, it also redefines the ideal human body and its kinetic potentialities within the martial arts imaginary. Critics elsewhere have noted that the cast of ex-kung fu stars in Kung Fu Hustle represent a direct homage to the action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s (Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Leung Siu-lung). Yet, visually, when these stars are presented on screen our attention is drawn, ineluctably, to the disparity between their past and present personas, and we cannot help but feel the imprint of time on their over-sized bodies, wrinkled faces, and balding heads. (This alternative star cast is a far cry from the figure of Jade Fox, played by Zheng Pei-pei, the Queen of Martial Arts in the 1970s, in Crouching Tiger, who has largely stayed in shape and dignity in the film, and therefore remains an authentic emblem of the genre.) In Kung Fu Hustle, the nostalgic pathos of a faded aura is invoked and dispelled, at least temporarily in the visual schema of the film, when we see these ageing heroes soar, leap, spin, and fly through buildings and obstacles in a fantasy feast of special effects and booming background sound and music reminiscent of earlier martial arts films. One could say that this kind of self-referential casting has a demystification effect, but on the other hand the mystique of kung fu is reinscribed in the film’s digital remastering, or restoration, of the compromised human body and its ‘unfitness’ back to its ideal condition of fitness that defies the tyranny of time. Kung fu, after all, is always about subjecting the

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body to rigorous training to attain fitness; moreover, the need to make the Chinese fit, and thus shatter the humiliating label of the ‘Sickman of Asia’, is the most memorable message passed on from Bruce Lee’s films. Although this intertextual dimension of the film is only available to Chinese audiences and those familiar with the genre and its history, the visibility of special effects, and the unpretentious exploitation of textual and intertextual incongruities in staging the fight sequences involving these characters, put them in the ranks of other virtual bodies in the global digital imaginary, albeit in a playful, comic vein. Virtual bodies, as it were, signify the convergence of the ideal human body in action with technology that makes that ideal possible. In the process of transformation, Bruce Lee’s nationalistic hero may seem passé, and yet his spirit (re. Sing’s line quoted above) has reincarnated into Chow’s underdog scumbag going through a spiritual enlightenment that enables him to ride the tide of a global digital invasion in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to delineate the intertextual links in Stephen Chow’s transnational martial arts films, which make thematic and visual references to earlier works in the local popular traditions and to their hybridized, technology-saturated contemporaries epitomized by The Matrix. The two poles—the spectacle of the (cinematic) body and the identity of the martial arts hero—are, in terms of the digital real, morphed into one. Through the conscious staging and aestheticization of digital technologies, the ideal body’s potentialities in the martial arts tradition are realized. In this new aesthetic, the spectacle can take the form of the idealized virtual body brought into existence by digital technologies. In this context, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle embody the creative tension between martial arts as a form of popular cultural imagination rooted in the local textual and cinematic traditions, and the necessity for the local to reclaim a space within the global through self-reinvention. As my analysis of the two films have shown, Chow’s use of code-mixing and the heavy reliance on digital graphics have not made kung fu disappear. Instead, digital technologies are the agent through which self-reflective citations from local sources are morphed into a cinematic spectacle that pays tribute to the local, albeit in different tones and registers. In this respect, Chow’s films betray a selfawareness of their own cinematic nostalgia—a nostalgia for the local in the form of the martial arts ideal and the numerous cultural texts and images that have enriched and perpetuate this ideal; at the same time,

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cinematic nostalgia—as cultural memory—becomes the very substance of a hybridized global visual vocabulary through which the local is given new and changing articulations. Before this book goes to print, Chow’s career has already taken another turn. His latest Chinese New Year film, CJ 7 (Changjiang qihao, 2008), was a No. 1 hit during the peak public holiday season in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Backed by US and Mainland funding, this film amounts to a Chinese version of Stephen Spielberg’s E. T. In this film, Chow vacates the centre stage completely to an eight-year-old child, Xu Jiao, a girl whom Chow casted to play the role of his son. Chow’s fatherly figure stays on the sideline throughout this story of childhood adventure into the sci-fi world, but his underdog persona has also matured, from a detestable scumbag to an impoverished single father who tries to give his son the best education only the richest can afford. The sci-fi motif spices up this otherwise melodramatic narrative with frequent comic send-ups, chance encounters, and surprise fantasy scenes involving the child and his extraterrestrial friend, CJ (a tiny stuff-toy-like animal with magical powers). This film may be a signal of Chow’s inevitable turn away from his local persona and the acting style that bears his personal imprint, as CJ 7 seems to resonate more with the melodramatic moralizing ethos of Mainland Chinese films than with the irreverent, flamboyant Hong Kong comic cinema that Chow has come to represent. Yet, in a very subtle way, we still hear little echoes of the Hong Kong voice—the skinny, resilient child who vows to defy unjust authority and fight for justice in an exploitative, materialistic world (here the setting has moved to modern-day Beijing) vividly recalls not only Chow’s younger self, but also his predecessors in My Son A-Chang starring the child Bruce Lee, and Fruit Chan’s adaptation of this figure in Little Cheung. In CJ 7, Chow once again demonstrates his penchant for intertextual play, mixing cultural codes and references to satisfy yet another cinephilic dream—to re-enact his favourite screen roles, albeit vicariously this time. One can only wait and see how far Chow can take his cinephilia as he navigates the uncharted waters of global cinema in the years to come.

6 Karmic Redemption: Memory and Schizophrenia in Hong Kong Action Films

In Chapter 4, we have seen how Johnnie To and his Milkyway Image team seek to articulate and transcend the perceived crisis of identity through a post-nostalgic engagement with local cinematic conventions, and thereby redefine action and heroism in terms of theatricality, stasis, and conflicted psychological states of morally and/or physically compromised characters. To’s work replaces individualistic heroism with a flexible group ethic that, in its darkest manifestation, eliminates the hero (e.g. in Mad Detective). This chapter takes a closer look at the pathology of heroism in the light of an emerging trend in Hong Kong’s action cinema, that is, the obsession with memory1 and the failure of memory to access or understand the real, resulting in a dramatic change in the figure of the action hero, usually a cop or a cop-like character with similar attributes. This trend can be traced back to relatively less commercially successful films prior to 1997; however, films embracing certain alternative traits of the hero seem to have gained a much firmer foothold in mainstream cinema in the last six or seven years. Immediate precedents to Mad Detective can be found in several high concept productions, for instance The Infernal Affairs trilogy (Andrew Lau/Alan Mak, 2002–2003), Confession of Pain (Lau and Mak, 2006), and Divergence (Benny Chan Muk-shing, 2006). Lau and Mak’s star-studded trilogy made the first breakthroughs in box-office revenues in the midst of a prolonged economic recession made further worse by the SARS pandemic. The films’ success in the domestic and Asian markets led to a Hollywood remake by Martin Scorsese, The Departed (2006), winner of Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2007. As more and more Hong Kong action films have found niches in global distribution networks and international film festival circuits, Hong Kong action flicks are increasingly popular with world audiences not merely as pure spectacles of 138

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violence and mesmerizing action sequences but self-conscious works of art.2 In this connection, the more accomplished works tend to show a strong tendency to revisit genre conventions through creative adaptation and transgression of visual and thematic codes. These efforts can be seen as a correction to the sheer sensational appeal of their more conventional counterparts.3 This chapter is concerned with how memory and identity are intertwined in the cinematic imaginings of the pathological hero, and how contending visions of the urban space respond to and comment on the kind of cinematic nostalgia that informs each work. Beginning with the use and perversion of memory in Infernal Affairs, particularly in part 2, I will further examine how memory, identity, and history interlock in an individual’s traumatized perception of self and reality in Confession of Pain. Far from exemplary of the conventional masculine ideals, the central characters in these films are victims of a memory malfunction that effectively turns the present into a frenzied re-enactment of an imagined past. From gallantry to despondency, from physicality to pathology, the new hero-prototype redefines action as a kind of self-delusion, a pathological act that, by looping time into a perpetual ‘past–present’, nullifies the meaning of action and heroism, the stock in trade of a major genre of Hong Kong cinema itself. Seen in this light, the hero’s schizophrenic tale betrays an identity crisis inherent in the film narrative—a crisis rooted in the anxiety of memory malfunction, and the fear of losing history to a schizophrenic temporal disorder superimposed on a reality that calls into question its own authenticity. In the light of the greater availability of critical studies on the Infernal Affairs trilogy, my discussion on the Infernal films will focus on some unresolved questions about memory, history, and nostalgia in the trilogy and how they are given new inflections and contemplation in the two directors’ subsequent work.

The Inferno of no rebirth The Chinese title of the trilogy, Wu jian dao (Mandarin) or Mou Gan Dou (Cantonese), refers to the Avici hell in Buddhism, meaning ‘continuous hell’, the worst of the eight hells where sinners are condemned to endless suffering. All three instalments use visual and verbal references to Buddhist sutras at the beginning and the end as if to offer a key to understanding the meaning of the moral tales embedded in the film narrative. This direct reference to Buddhism betrays the filmmakers’ intention to guide the viewer towards a philosophical reading of the ‘deeper meanings’ of the all-star genre films. On the other hand, using

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the Buddhist notions of hell, retribution, and reincarnation as thematic pointers appealed to the pathos of the Hong Kong society at large, at a time of massive unemployment, rampant personal bankruptcies, and widespread political discontent. The SARS epidemic in early 2003 and the social malaise that followed further eroded the public’s confidence in the new HKSAR Government’s ability to cope with the mounting crises. Thus, the catchy title wu jian dao/mou gan dou not only gave the films an upmarket image but also echoed public sentiments of the time, when Hong Kongers were gripped by the fear of a clear and present danger: an economic apocalypse hastened by a deadly virus. This dual allusion to Buddhism and a crisis-stricken present provides the main thrust for the films’ main action. In Infernal Affairs, duality manifests itself in various ways in narrative structure, characterization, and cinematography, giving rise to a schizophrenic universe in which the hero acts out his accursed destiny. Ever since its first instalment hit the big screen in 2002, Infernal Affairs has attracted the attention of film critics and scholars, whose work has provided important insights into its artistic merit and ideological significance as an allegorical tale about post-colonial Hong Kong.4 Critical studies on the trilogy have rightly attributed the hero’s schizophrenia to two different yet inter-related causes: (1) the conditions of postmodernity (characterized by the Deleuzean ‘non-place’ and the omniscience of digital surveillance not far from Baudrillard’s society of simulacra); and (2) the predicaments of a post-colonial society caught up with crises of history and identity, especially when that identity is in conflict with national identity.5 So far the most comprehensive study is Gina Marchetti’s Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs—the Trilogy (2007), which tackles the complex meanings and visual language of the films by locating the multiple intersections between the film text, local filmmaking practices, and the cross currents of global film culture. These inter-related aspects of the trilogy encapsulate the psycho-social dynamics of post-1997 Hong Kong and the way popular cinema speaks to the moral and political predicaments of the ex-colony, which, by 2003, seemed to have fallen from the ‘rooftop’ of its past glory (the rooftop being the most memorable postmodern non-place and a main stage of drama in part 1). The glossy, postmodern look of the films, especially parts 1 and 3, also demonstrates how local filmmakers have tried to adopt a globally accessible visual language to make a high concept film for the international markets. The trilogy’s conscious references to the gangster/police conventions and use of religious/moral and political allegories, Marchetti remarks, foster a link between nostalgia (the

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evocation of a past system of codes and values) and the urgency to transform nostalgia into something bankable (a transnational cultural product).6 My interest in the trilogy, in particular part 2, has more to do with nostalgia as a meta(con)text, that is, the recycling of past images as a measure to fill a ‘memory gap’ of the present, thus begging the question of its creative transformation and critique of both the past and the present. Inasmuch as Benjamin’s angel of history is propelled forward in time while insistently gazing back at the ruins of the past, the trilogy provokes reflections on the cinematic use of memory and history through a contradictory movement in time, giving rise to a temporal disorder that renders human action futile. In this light I propose to read the trilogy’s schizophrenic use of the past as both a textual and extra-textual indicator of a failed nostalgia under a dual compulsion to recall and to forget. It is also within this temporal disorder that schizophrenia—symptomatic of a state of being in postmodernity and a pathological condition in post-coloniality—attains critical meaning as meta- and inter-text. My concern here is how, and why, obsession with memory is so often articulated as a psychological symptom of the hero7 trapped in a self-created schizophrenic temporal (dis)order, so much so that the hero’s schizophrenic universe becomes the worldly equivalent of continuous hell, the Inferno of no rebirth. This reading also favours an understanding of nostalgia as not (just) a symptom of late capitalist society but a complex engagement with local histories and memories as possible sites of resistance against the loss of history.8 As we shall see, the trilogy aspires to but does not fully realize this possibility, which remains the substance of an open dialogue in the filmmakers’ subsequent work, Confession of Pain. While Infernal Affairs is widely received as a trilogy, as a unit the films were largely the result of commercial serendipity characteristic of most serialized productions. This being said, the narrative attains internal coherence nonetheless through the filmmakers’ effort to develop the untold stories of the first film in the pre-/sequels, which include going back in time to the 1990s, when the triad mole Lau Kin Ming (Andy Lau/Edison Chen) and Chan Wing Yan, the undercover cop (Tony Leung Chiu-wai/Shawn Yue), embarked on their respective journeys of no return. Infernal Affairs 1 has all the trappings of a high-concept film equipped with expensive set designs, high-tech props and an all-star cast, lending the film a crisp, polished outlook; Infernal Affairs 2, the ‘pre-quel’, revisits the 1990s, which technically imposes a different set of criteria on the choice of location, costume, props design, as well as the use of historical references to confer a sense of authenticity or

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verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is not a pre-requisite for a filmic return to time past; but in Infernal Affairs 2 it is a strategy to invoke déjà vu. This return to a past era, as we shall see, reveals yet another kind of stasis that inflicts the film’s grasp on both the past and the present. In part 2, nostalgia as an intertext and meta(con)text sheds light on the underlying schizophrenia that structures the trilogy. Before turning to this central concern of the present chapter, it is useful to spell out the terms on which this nostalgia will be explored: the good guy as a cinematic construct and a site of contested memories and identities, the use of the 1990s gangster film as an intertextual referent and the reproduction of Hong Kong’s political fin-de-siècle as an allegory of a present impasse, and the hero’s purloined/perverted memory. Indeed, these nostalgic codes are not separate but intertwined manifestations of a fractured frame of reference, a fracture that nonetheless has been successfully packaged into a popular cultural product for mass consumption.

The good guy and his perverted double In keeping with the high concept, the story of part 1 is relatively straightforward and easy to follow: an undercover police officer Yan and triad mole Ming keep chasing each other as they carry out the orders of their respective bosses. In the process, the good guys and the bad guys on both sides get killed, and finally the cop and the mole confront each other at gunpoint on the rooftop of a high-rise commercial building. The denouement takes place as the trio come down in an escalator. Yan is shot by Ming’s accomplice in the police force, who in turn is killed by Ming in order to keep his secret. As the filmmakers have admitted, the very idea of two opponents switching their identities comes from John Woo’s Face Off, but the later film does away with the unconvincing face-switching surgery.9 Unlike in John Woo’s films, however, the heroic ethic of the good guy (haoren or hou yan in Cantonese) in Infernal Affairs is neither an uncontested quality nor an unambiguous moral code. Throughout the trilogy, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are more a matter of professionalism and institutional allegiance. Such a trait is evident in the young Yan (Shawn Yue) in part 2, whose eagerness to prove his loyalty to the police force is premised upon an idealized identity—the good cop. In the film, this identity serves as a refrain rather than a subject of inquiry; in effect, tacit knowledge on the part of the characters as well as the audience is implied, as the main characters struggle to claim ownership of it. Yan’s attempt to ‘be a good guy’ results in the deaths

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of his biological brother, his brother’s family, and the dissolution of the clan. The film, deliberately or not, downplays Yan’s conflicted feelings towards his brother in favour of a relatively smooth action of sabotage. Indeed, as a refrain, the ‘good guy/cop’ is reduced to a floating sign attached to nobody. In part 1, Yan and Ming are seen as both enemies and psychological twins, each being split figures as a result of their infiltration jobs. While this doppelganger motif is not new to the action film, the trilogy, by uniting the two inside the mind of a schizophrenic villain trapped in a labyrinth of glossy surfaces precludes the possibility of self-knowledge, allowing only a duplicity in which the role model is murdered for a second time, in the figure of another cop-figure, Superintendent Yeung (Leon Lai Ming), who, ironically, brings the villain’s wrath upon himself by reiterating the same refrain, ‘I’m a cop.’ While both Yan and Ming pursue the image of the good guy at all costs, Ming represents a subversion and perversion of this prototype. A triad mole embracing a flexible ethic, his play-acting eventually converts him into a believer in the ‘good life’ a police inspector apparently enjoys (i.e. affluent and respected middle-class professional). Thus, his desire to become a good guy is less of a moral conviction or repentance in the traditional sense of the word than a pragmatic change of course. In the films, Ming is always dressed in immaculate, well-cut suits. As a man of good taste, he is also a connoisseur of high-end hi-fi products and the latest electronics gadgets. Ming’s very idea of the good guy, too, reflects a certain naiveté and superficiality—throughout the film he remains a consumer of surfaces (or images) with doubtful integrity, a fashionable yuppie surrounded by trendy and tastefully displayed tokens of pleasure (which are many in his well-decorated, generic new home, another non-place). To Ming the postmodern bourgeoisie and corporate technocrat, righteousness and loyalty are strategies to maintain the status quo—an upright appearance that necessitates brutal elimination of any traits of an unwanted past. Ironically, it is Ming’s perversion of the image of the good guy that defeats/destroys the corporate technocrats in all three films. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Hong Kong action films from the late 1990s on have privileged professionalism over heroism, and corporatism or flexible group identity over the ethos of heroism (as we have seen exemplified in Johnnie To’s films). This desire to reinscribe the heroic by displacing certain generic elements while injecting new ones is also present in the Infernal Affairs trilogy. First of all, the flexible group identity is seen as both contingent and fragmentary: police superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) masterminds the murder of Ngai

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Kwun, the gang leader, thus triggering a series of vengeful killings on both sides. Inevitably, Wong himself falls victim to his own conspiracy. Similar to To’s films, the group is identified by how they look: always immaculately dressed in suit and tie, they resemble the modern-day bureaucrats in full command of the latest communications technology. However, in Infernal Affairs the group is seen as a site where even the new collective collapses over the ruins of heroic individualism. Whereas To’s films show an interest in remapping Hong Kong’s cityscape in surrealistic sketches and panoramic views, Alan Mak’s camera favours the so-called ‘non-places’ that effectively can be anywhere in the world and also a liminal space connecting heaven and hell.10 In part 3, the liminal space of the rooftop and the mirror-like windows around it give way to the computer screen used by both Ming and Superintendent Yeung, his archenemy and self-projection, to spy on each other. It is also in this final episode that the theme of fragmentation is followed through in the mental breakdown of Ming, which the film attributes to guilty conscience after Yan’s murder. (Yan re-appears in this film anachronically as an apparition and Ming’s alter ego.) Schizophrenia, in this film, is not only a metaphorical description of a state of being in postmodernity, but a pathological condition rooted in the perversion or malfunction of memory. In part 3, Ming manages to access (actually purloin) Yan’s memory through the computer records kept by the psychologist Dr Lee who was also Yan’s undeclared love. His obsession with the memory of the dead, we are told, is the root cause of his schizophrenic disorder. Ming thus begins to act out Yan’s unfinished job—to track down on ‘himself’, whom he now conflates with Yeung. This final twist in the narrative introduces a new element into the police/gangster convention. Instead of standing as conventional good guys representing the same heroic values on both sides of the law, the psychological twins merge into one person as a schizophrenic symptom, thus beginning a new kind of story: the gangster who is a fake hero now seriously wanting to take the hero’s place, to become the hero by usurping the hero’s memory. Ironically, technology—the computer archive—serves as the site where memory and identity are preserved and perverted. The films’ play with identity overlap and the schizophrenic split of the self is a new interpretation of the good guy (hero) and the cultural meanings and values associated with this figure. Throughout the trilogy, the refrain ‘I am a cop’ is a nostalgic reminder of an ideal identity that aligns the police officer with the good guy, a prototype that recalls the traditional hero or knight-errant. As the plot unfolds, the assertion ‘I am a cop’ is used to signal a moral choice, and for Yan this involves

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assisting in the murder of one’s own kin. While there is nothing new about making personal sacrifices for upholding an heroic ideal, betraying one’s own brother—bonded by blood and by oath—is a cardinal sin that goes against the ethos of the local police/gangster convention, in which the moral struggle/ambiguity of ‘sacrificing one’s own kin to serve the course of justice’ (da yi mie qin) is usually framed within a relatively stable binary of good (the hero) versus evil (the villain), or else the sacrifice would serve the cause of the hero’s redemption/forgiveness (as in Leslie Cheung and Ti Lung’s characters in A Better Tomorrow). In part 3, when Yeung refuses to let Ming go on the same grounds, it unleashes Ming’s repressed memory and his much darker self. Ming starts shooting randomly around, instantly killing Yeung with one shot through the forehead, repeating the same ritual of Yan’s murder in part 1. In Ming’s deluded mind, Yeung is not only a substitute for his darker self but also a reincarnation of Yan. Interestingly, the film’s treatment of Yeung’s character is deliberately ambivalent. As an overbearing, undaunted police officer, Yeung’s unscrupulous approach to tracking down his opponents puts him among the ranks of the corporate players in Johnnie To’s films. More importantly, Yeung’s liaisons with Mainland authorities represented by the equally ambivalent figure Shadow/Shen (Chen Daoming), purportedly a government agent, arouses more suspicion than respect or pity for this potentially heroic character.11 In the trilogy, both the good cops and the gangsters are all victims of a new breed, the schizophrenic hybrid, whose frenzied desire to become the ideal hero turns him into a more dangerous kind—a parasite of identities and memories.

Nostalgic intertext: Gangsters in the 90s In part 2, time goes back to 1991 to revisit a crucial historical moment leading up to the political handover on July 1, 1997. The revisitation of time past thus requires a different visual style that matches the reverse temporal shift. In part 2, this shift is registered through the spatial coordinates apropos to the ethos (or pathos) of the 1990s. In part 2, the space of action shifts from the glossy offices and rooftops to shadowy back alleys, sidewalk footstalls (‘dai pai dong’ in local currency) along congested streets, old shop fronts and run-down buildings, all of which are familiar landmarks in the Hong Kong police/gangster film of the period. Visually, part 2 stands out as a memory recall—intercontextually speaking—as it vividly recreates a cinematic ambience that harks back to the previous decade. As a spin-off, the story neither continues the main action of the first film nor foresees the events in

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the third. Compared to the other two instalments, Infernal Affairs 2 closer resembles the 1990s gangster film, providing a rich palette of gunfights, violence, bloodbaths, intrigues, quick action, and emotionally charged scenes of police-gangster stand-offs. The use of colour, too, differs from the cool, metallic greyish-blue tone in parts 1 and 3. What distinguishes this film from its 90s-predecessors is the conscious foregrounding of historical time as a non-diegetic self-reference. Throughout the film, temporal markers constantly appear as intertitles, reminding the viewer not only of the temporal flow of the main action but also the extra-textual historical events that help shape collective memory of the bygone era. References to mass emigration, political uncertainty, and the July 1 handover abound in part 2, recalling the same obsession of Hong Kong films in the 1990s. Such a shift in temporal references can be explained by the need to produce a pre-quel with newer and younger faces (teenage heartthrobs Shawn Yue and Edison Chen play young Chan and Lau, respectively) while preparation work for part 3 was underway. Given the time of production and release, it was also strategically sound to make a film about the 1990s, when Hong Kong was passing through a double threshold: the end of the colonial rule and the Asian financial meltdown. At the time of the film’s release in December 2002, the general public was still gripped by the traumatic consequences of the Asian financial crises and accelerating social discontent. Understandably, a popular film recalling a pre-existing nostalgia for the loss of an imaginary ideal—an affluent, modern, and relatively stable society (colonial HK?), would effectively draw the masses back to the long abandoned theatre. It is therefore not far-fetched to characterize Infernal Affairs 2 as a nostalgic film, in the sense that it visually re-creates a past life world and self-consciously distances itself from that past by using time markers to emphasize its (and the audience’s) ‘presentness’. This nostalgic sentiment is captured in a scene where Ngai Wing-hau (Francis Ng), Ngai Kwun’s eldest son and successor, proposes a toast to his father’s glory in a typical ‘dai pai dong’ setting, dramatized by a slow tracking-out shot and a freeze frame. As Marchetti has noted, this scene allegorizes the loss of ‘the world of the local, unlicensed, “unofficial” economy of Hong Kong under colonial rule [that] ends at the dai pai dong.’12 More importantly, the 1990s is used as an historical context to portray another ideological battle: between two generations of police officers, and two generations of triads (with Ming standing as the arch-culprit), and the mutual entanglements of both. The ending of the film shows, first of all, the passing away of the Ngai family and the disintegration of the old underworld regime, replaced by a new

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conglomerate represented by Sam (Eric Tsang) and Ming, both of whom are loners with no family ties in Hong Kong. It further figures Ming, then a young and promising police officer, getting through his promotion interview confident and suave. This crucial transition is rendered in jump-cuts showing Ming replacing the old police badge with a new one on the eve of July 1, 1997, while Wong nails Sam’s ‘most wanted’ photo on to his notice board to replace Ngai Kwun’s. These thematic and visual overlaps, as some critics have pointed out, have political overtones.13 My concern here is that cinematic nostalgia operates in the trilogy, intensifying temporal disjunctions as the narrative return to time past compels a return to the visual codes and motifs of the previous decade that, in parts 1 and 3, are either absent or de-emphasized. Obviously, part 2 self-consciously refers to the 1990s as time past, not just by anchoring its narrative within the larger historical framework but also by evoking the widespread sentiments of the fin-de-siècle on the eve of the handover. As a pre-quel, part 2 can be seen as an extra-textual flashback or ‘exterior analepse’ in Gerard Genette’s terminology, which ‘jumps back to a time period prior to and disjunct from the moment of the narrative’s beginning’.14 Here I would like to add that temporal disjunction works intra-textually (within the trilogy) and intertextually (between the trilogy and the generic style it refers to). But unlike in Johnnie To’s PTU, cinematic nostalgia here does not challenge the viewer to remap or re-/decode the topography of the urban space as a resistance to disappearance. Instead, the recycling of the past serves mainly as catharsis, by re-staging, but not necessarily reworking/reinterpreting, traumatic personal and collective memories. The mutual implication of the political institution (the Hong Kong Police Force) and the triads, then, is less a daunting political commentary than a quotation of pre-existing apprehensions among the Hong Kong public.15 As a mega-flashback in itself, Infernal Affairs 2 engages with cinematic nostalgia as a technical manoeuvre, but the kind of nostalgic investment in the 1990s-style gangster film does not lead to the kind of critical engagement with history or the present as is evident in To’s films. As Turim argues, flashbacks usually terminate at precisely the point at which they much be sealed off, in which the imperatives of fixing interpretations and reaching judgments must be imposed. Made aware of the past, the spectator is freed to forget it once again. This symbolic order vacillates between knowing and forgetting, the shifts determined by the positioning of the spectator within the structured operations of narrative temporality.16

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What is being ‘sealed off’ at the end of Infernal Affairs 2 is perhaps the memory of defeat, reinforced by SP Wong’s confession ‘I’ve lost’, in the double sense of losing his best friend and colleague in a bomb explosion, and losing his confidence in himself as a good cop. His confession is paralleled by a scene where Sam, on the verge of tears, puts down the photo/memory of his wife (Carina Lau, whose murder is masterminded by Ming) and, in slow motion, marches triumphantly into a ballroom to join the reunification celebrations. If these ending shots, intercepted by news footage of the handover ceremony, invite the spectator to choose between knowing and forgetting, between remembering the past and celebrating a new beginning, its presentation of the end of colonial history is filled with mementos gleaned from popular cinematic and mass media images of the fin-de-siècle. To the local audience, these images, in both their original and recycled forms, are perhaps too familiar to thrill. History, it seems, returns as cliché, something Ackbar Abbas reckons that virtually ‘make images disappear’.17 If disappearance is an attribute of nostalgia,18 then the historical imagination as it appears in Infernal Affairs 2 is yet another example of such nostalgic disappearance, more so due to the benefit of critical hindsight that the film has not quite put to effective use. The kind of nostalgia it does evoke thus succeeds as a retro Hong Kong gangster film, but fails as a critical reinvention of the past. I am not complaining the film’s lack of historical reflectiveness; rather, this lack can be understood as an indicator of an underlying helplessness symptomatic of the film industry, and of the local society at large, on the eve of another collective disaster, the SARS. Perhaps this is why the film’s ending acknowledges the dilemma of the exasperated ‘Hong Kong subject’ (police officer Wong together with the lost course he has pursued), caught between remembering and forgetting in face of an uncertain ‘future’ (i.e. our recent past), all done in the shadow of a materialized present that seems equally unimaginable.

Schizophrenic hero/villain and purloined memories Commercial incentives aside, the fragmented narrative of part 3 works effectively to mirror the mental disintegration of Ming, the last remaining good cop from part 1. It also gives the audience almost direct access to Yan’s (surrogate) memories, which have become like a purloined text circulating in Ming’s, and partially our, schizophrenic fantasy world. This convoluted process of ‘memory by proxy’ visually places the audience in the point of view of the hero/villain as he goes about hunting down the remaining moles in the police force, culminating in the final

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showdown with Yeung and his own fateful collapse. The temporal shifts also legitimize the repetition of key scenes that may or may not have taken place in the past, raising the stakes for the viewer’s decoding amidst a plethora of plausible clues. The act of decoding in part 3 is premised upon a triangular reflexive framework that involves Ming, Yeung, and the viewer. As Yan’s memory by proxy, Ming not only has the privileged access to the past but is also given the status of a story-teller, the ‘eye’ behind the images and a bridge between past and present. From start to finish, our decoding follows Ming’s intricate network of surveillance devices set up around Yeung, who in turn has also done the same to Ming. The unfolding of the plot, as a result, is largely reliant on images and data passing through the multiple hidden cameras, computer monitors, and audiotapes. Visually, this network of surveillance becomes a site where Ming, Yeung, and the spectator exchange glances with one another. In a scene where Ming stares intensely at a monitor in his office, Yeung looks into the screen as if addressing Ming (and also the viewer) directly and knowingly in person. As we look into the double-frame on the screen via Ming’s point of view, Yeung’s gazing back at the camera betrays our complicity with Ming. Ironically, Ming’s perspective is already split between vision and delusion, between his suppressed memory of his own past and his parasitic memory of Yan. By luring the viewer into Ming’s surveillance activities and purloined memories, the film fosters an affective connection between the viewer and the character, a connection premised upon our tacit complicity with the schizophrenic as spectators of real and imaginary events. This connection is occasionally disturbed by Yeung’s involvement in the spying game, and is finally broken when Ming, in an attempt to prove Yeung guilty of collusion, inadvertently exposes his true identity by turning on the tape recording that contains his own secret conversations with Sam, his former master. If nostalgia in Infernal Affairs 1 has to do with the lost ideal of the good cop/good guy in the popular cinematic imagination, the nostalgic is translated into a set of media images and visual codes in the making of a film about a previous era (the 1990s) in Infernal Affairs 2, which amounts to reducing history, and historical memory, to a repetition and a cliché. In the final instalment, nostalgia manifests itself once again as a quest for a lost/non-existent/fake identity through the schizophrenic’s usurpation of the memory of the dead. Although commercial serendipity has played a role in the creative process of the trilogy, the film texts, whether taken independently or as a whole, participate in the deconstruction of the good cop/good guy dyad. In part 2, its nostalgic

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imagination of a previous era comes close to a tribute to its predecessors in the 1990s, but it stops short at a critical engagement with old form and motifs. The failure of the nostalgic (i.e. the return to history as cliché), together with the failure of the hero’s memories, comes full circle in part 3, when Ming’s fantasized heroic universe breaks down into hallucinated image fragments and perverted memories. Understandably, the film portrays schizophrenia as a symptom of memory malfunction and failed nostalgia; it is also a psychological/existential condition that not only affects the psychotic hero as spectator, but also becomes part of our experience as the spectator of his vision. If, as Marchetti has pointed out, Ming as the chameleon and the last man standing is a representative of post-colonial Hong Kong,19 he is also a figure of the film itself—a schizophrenic mind/text trying to crossover from one life/context to another, to reincarnate into something different by hybridizing images old and new.

Confession of Pain: Memory, retribution, and redemption If cinematic nostalgia in Infernal Affairs goes down the perilous path of the schizophrenic hero, in Confession of Pain memory is equated with trauma and a catalyst for the hero’s demise. This later film by Lau and Mak follows the doppelgangers motif in Infernal Affairs, starring Tony Leung and Kaneshiro Takeshi as character doubles, Inspector Lau Ching Hei and ex-cop turned private detective Bong, respectively. In their own ways, Hei and Bong are haunted by their traumatic pasts. Hei witnessed the brutal murder of his entire family as a child, and Bong remains guilt-ridden after his girlfriend Rachel’s death. Hei devoted his life to revenge, while Bong persists in finding the truth behind his girlfriend’s suicide. Right from the beginning the film sets up these doubles as contrastive characters, Hei being the cool-headed police officer leading an apparently well-off and happy family life (the ‘afterlife’ of Ming in Infernal Affairs?), while Bong slips into alcoholism and remorse, unable to get over the tragedy he feels responsible for (Bong’s dishevelled appearance and erratic behaviour, too, reminds us of the darker side of Yan.) The two’s forked paths converge when Bong, hired by Hei’s wife, Susan (Xu Jinglei), gets involved in a murder investigation. Instead of pursuing the usual ‘whodunit’ plot, an early exposure in story-telling reveals Hei as the brutal killer of his father-in-law, his mens rea still unknown. Thus from the onset the film has prepared the audience for an eventual confrontation between the doubles, and laid the groundwork for an elaborate mind game between the two.

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In a less intricate way than in Infernal Affairs, the doubles motif serves as an external projection of the hidden persona within the main characters.20 The potential similarity between Hei and Bong is suggested at the very beginning of the film, when Hei admonishes Bong to be more patient and tolerant towards his loved ones. Hei also teaches Bong his theory on alcohol during a night surveillance operation: ‘Do you know why alcohol tastes so good? . . . Because it is hard to swallow.’ That same night after the operation, Rachel commits suicide and Bong becomes an alcoholic soon afterwards. While alcoholism seems to suggest the difference between Hei, a cool-headed and self-disciplined man, and Bong, now an emotional wreck engrossed in a hopeless search for truth and redemption, it also brings them closer when Bong takes up alcohol as a reminder of Rachel’s suicide, a memory that is also ‘hard to swallow’. Interestingly, Susan, ever since her father’s murder, becomes Bong’s fellow drinking buddy. The two frequently drink at Susan’s home as they discuss Bong’s latest discoveries about the murder. A brief shot of Bong’s inner thought draws him closer to his mentor: drunken and sliding down on a street, Bong fantasizes himself trying to suffocate a man with a pillow in a hospital intensive care unit (indeed we are never quite sure whether he has actually attempted this murderous act). Much later we learn that this man is the father of Rachel’s aborted child. If, in the film, alcohol tastes good because it is hard to swallow, drunkenness then is not a means to self-hypnotize or to forget about the past, but a fetishistic ritual through which bitter memories are recalled and savoured, in the full extent of their bitterness. Throughout the film, Hei repeatedly speaks against his friend’s addiction, but his advice never goes beyond lip-service. Hei’s indifference borders on coldbloodedness when he knowingly allows Susan to help herself with the cellar while secretly putting tranquilizers into her meals every night. Later on we also learn that Susan was initiated into drinking by Hei’s curt philosophizing. Towards the end of the film we learn that Hei is actually the false name he adopts to protect himself from Susan’s father, Wong Yun Shing, an ex-gangster who killed his entire family in Macau twenty-some years ago. Symbolically, drinking connotes a sense of disillusionment and despair, and a desire for an alternative way out of an unwanted existence. It is also the agent through which Bong, Hei, and Susan are bonded in their pursuit of truth and justice outside the political institution. As a private detective, Bong remains unlicensed and goes about his business in a carefree and erratic manner. Susan’s distrust of the police investigation draws her to Bong as the only hope of tracking down the

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true murderer and finding out the truth about her father’s past. Finally, Hei, completely disillusioned by the collusion between triads and the police, takes justice into his own hands. Ironically, he is (mis)guided by his sense of justice to model his modus operandi after his enemy, inflicting extreme physical pain by striking repeatedly at the victim’s head. His hatred leads him on to kill his wife, whom he wrongly assigns the guilt of her father’s crime. All three betray the same distrust of the established order, and in their searches for a better solution elsewhere they are enwrapped in a zero-sum game. Compared to Infernal Affairs, the overall thrust of Confession of Pain is not as obsessed with (at least not explicitly so) the dissolution of an ideal identity (together with the moral economy that supports this collective imaginary) that may not have existed. Rather, the use of memory in the film, especially the failure of memory to redeem the past, gestures towards a nihilistic despair and a vision of human destiny as a hermeneutic circle, one that renders human action futile. This deeply disturbing vision of human existence not only inflicts the characters and the film narrative but is also integrated into the visual language of the film. The camerawork and mise-en-scène help to position the audience at a higher level of perception, not to substantiate our superiority as (omniscient) spectators, but to implicate us within the same visual field that engenders despair and nihilism. Moreover, the film frequently refers to familiar images of the city as if to encode its filmic space within the local cinematic convention. This self-reflexive cross-referencing conjures up an urbanscape quite different from the postmodern non-place in Infernal Affairs. Shunning the ‘any-space-whatever’ of the trilogy, this later film by Lau and Mak sketches out an urban topography from a repertoire of templates—the skyline, the Peak, bird’s-eye view night scenes, flyovers, backstreets, and vernacular buildings, and so on, as if to provide us with a spatial reference for its ultimate confession. A closer look at certain visual motifs will illustrate how the film problematizes memory and identity in relation to the hero’s tale of revenge, and how the urban space itself is subject to a nostalgic imagination befitting the film’s dialogue with its own memory.

Framing the hero The film’s opening scenes introduce us to the two male-leads, Hei and Bong, first through a binocular vision of Bong drinking in a pub, followed by a cut back to Hei putting down his binoculars. These shots establish the relationship between Hei and Bong as fellow police

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officers on a night mission, and also Hei’s status as the senior colleague overseeing the operation.21 Throughout the film, repeated close-ups of both characters set up a contrast between Hei—always alert, reticent, and expressionless, and Bong—always dejected and sentimental. Early on in the film, Bong’s story is told through Hei’s voice-over, but Hei’s credibility as story-teller soon vaporizes with the murder scene, shown in black and white twice as Hei’s flashback sequences. From then on the film realigns the power balance between the two, which increasingly shifts towards Bong as he, unknowingly, begins to track down his best friend, whose real motive behind the killings remains unknown until the end. Although the camera frequently shows Hei’s face at close distance, it does not encourage the viewer to identify with this character, who remains distant and detached from his surroundings. His detachment is reinforced by his tinted glasses, which virtually prevents direct eye contact and thus blocks out any attempt to establish affective connection. For the better part of the narrative, Hei the murderer remains an enigma to Bong and his wife. Our early knowledge of his crime, however, places us at a slightly more advantageous vantage point but still offers no clues to who he is and why he kills. To some extent, being an orphan, Hei seems to fit the bill of a lone hero seeking justice on the margins of the law, but his cold-bloodedness and sheer lack of interest in anything other than preying on his victims draws him closer to the classic psychotic killer. This association is suggested in the sequence where Susan is haunted by an unidentified stalker at her home. Although the face of her would-be attacker remains unseen, Hei’s sudden appearance on the scene and the way he manipulates Susan’s fear into a cause for medication strongly links him to the incident. The cinematography complements this association by a consistent framing pattern: a ‘door eye’ medium shot of Hei’s shadowy figure outside his own home links him to the arsonist who later attacks Susan and Bong. In the early murder sequence, a low-angle medium shot in black and white frames Hei in a position of attack, his hands high up holding a metal decoration piece which he momentarily strikes into his victim’s head. In the course of covering up his crime, Hei kills his apprentices in a habitual and systematic manner, which is repeated for the last time when he drugs his wife and sets her up for a gas explosion (thus materializing the hero-arsonist doubling). All these murders are presented in a crisp, methodical, and matter-of-fact style, reminiscent of the serial killer stock in many a Hollywood slayer films. The film’s cinematography thus shows an obvious intent to distance the viewer from Hei, although he is persistently in the

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foreground in many key scenes. Instead of encouraging an affective connection between the viewer and the hero, the close-ups and the murder sequences reveal a psychotic behind the hero’s enigmatic face. The tension created between Hei’s sober and detached demeanour and the brutality of the murders is magnified by an extra-textual factor, the expectations aroused in the viewer by Tony Leung’s star persona. As Stephen Teo remarks, Leung’s ‘casting against type’ as a corrupt police officer and ruthless killer in Johnnie To’s The Longest Nite challenges the audience’s expectation that ‘[Leung’s] character would naturally be the hero’.22 Similarly, in Confession of Pain Leung’s villainy cautions against pre-existing assumptions about the meaning of ‘hero’, especially since the audience’s memory of Leung as the good cop was still fresh from Infernal Affairs. This contrastive cross-referencing of the hero’s images is complemented by the final confession scene, which can be seen as the culmination of the above-mentioned framing devices. Sitting side by side with Bong on a bench outside the hospital where Susan, suffering from fatal burns, is hanging on to her life, Hei is agonized by what he has done to his wife, who he admits is undeniably his family. Hei’s confession, a potentially redemptive moment, is stripped of emotional force as the camera remains distant and uninvolved. Throughout the whole scene Hei keeps his head low, avoiding eye contact with Bong and the camera/audience. At the end of his confession, we see a tear running down his nose, but from start to finish his facial expression remains obscure. It seems the camera has deliberately stayed aloof, leaving Hei alone in his self-remorse in an almost disinterested manner. Soon after Bong has left, a long shot shows Hei rushing back into the hospital after a quick exchange with a nurse. Then the camera cuts to Susan’s room. In a high-angle shot we see Hei mournfully staring at his wife’s corpse before the camera cuts to a medium shot showing Hei about to shoot himself with a handgun. This could be a good chance to rehabilitate Hei as a moral being in repentance. Yet, once again the camera pulls away, and cuts to a reverse long shot from outside the window when the gun is fired and blood splashed on to the glass. Deprived of the tragic grandeur of heroic redemption, Hei’s suicide reminds us of his problematic relation to physical and moral power symbolized by the gun (c.f. Chapter 4). Throughout the film, Hei is never seen in possession of a gun until the suicide scene. Indeed, he kills not with a gun but with sharp objects struck repeatedly into his victims’ bodies. The gun, it seems, signifies not his power or moral calibre but his demise. Thus, instead of empowering the hero, the film’s choreography and camerawork systematically disempower him as he goes down the path of self-destruction. The futility

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of Hei’s revenge is magnified by the brisk conclusion of his story: the film tails off in a kind of ‘happy ending’, winding up this dark tale with Bong and his new girlfriend debating over future family finances. At this point the sound track reminds us of the time frame of the story: set between Christmas Eve in 2003 and almost the same time in 2006, the film concludes with a Christmas song celebrating eternal peace. This rather banal ending, by virtue of its banality, is as an ironic remark on the tragedy just transpired (expired?): if Christmas symbolizes a universal hope for peace, love, and redemption, Hei’s story is a rejection of this hope, and his memory is bound to be swallowed up by the festive spirit of the night.

Ominous locales Compared to the two moles in Infernal Affairs, Hei and Bong in Confession of Pain are less subject to collective codes of conduct than their own rules of honour. In this later work, the two directors steer away from making overt allegorical associations between the two heroes and the extra-textual socio-political realities; more importantly, the characterization of Hei and Bong eschews the abstract rhetoric of the ideal hero, which has a literal significance in Infernal Affairs. As doppelgangers, Hei and Bong are not so much (problematic) archetypes of good and evil but individuals caught up with inarticulate sorrows and inhibitions originated in their inability to come to terms with personal traumas. This perhaps explains why the film eschews the metaphorical settings such as the rooftop and glossy offices in Infernal Affairs, focusing instead on more concrete and identifiable locales. Nonetheless, the spatial coordinates in the film allude to another abstract presence: the city as an overarching, overseeing power that implicates those being watched and those watching. From the early shot of Hei’s binocular vision of Bong, the film frequently uses high-angle shots in both exterior and interior settings, capturing Hong Kong’s night scenes and the characters’ actions from a predominantly ‘top-down’ perspective. These high-angle shots not only create a sense of foreboding for the plot to unfold, but by bracketing the main action within familiar vignettes of the city these otherwise backdrop images also attain symbolic meanings: while the brooding camera parallels Hei’s predatory acts, visually it also becomes a ‘third eye’, witnessing but not interfering Hei’s violent acts of revenge. Such a top-down perspective, by distancing us from the characters, dwarfs the hero-in-action, leaving him alone in a labyrinth-like locale that offers little hope of a way out. The viewer, being interpellated

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into such a perspective, is neither omniscient nor omnipresence, but rendered impotent, in the sense that our emotional involvement in the tragic fate of the hero is short-circuited if not curtailed. How, then, do we understand the repeated shots of Hong Kong’s skyline and cityscape in the film? What do they tell us about the relationship between the hero and the urban space? Does this urban space articulate the hero’s, and the film’s own, ambivalence towards his/its identity caught up in an almost claustrophobic relation to the past? Although Confession of Pain is less epic in scale and ambition than Infernal Affairs in its portrayal of pre- and post-colonial Hong Kong, the historical returns at a slightly skewed angle through its visualization of the city, especially the skyline and the city at night. Here, the historical refers, diegetically, to the individual’s emotional attachment to a past that prefigures the present, and non-diegetically to a repertoire of images that are identifiably local. While, as has been mentioned, both Hei and Bong are traumatized figures who live the past as/in the present, the temporal loop within which they are caught (and their perception of time and space) is reflected in their affective connections with the urban space. The film’s key settings are: the bar, Hei and Susan’s new home, Wong Yun Shing’s mid-level apartment, and Bong’s home (all the above are interior settings); the waterfront, the skyline, flyovers, and motorways (exterior settings). While both Hei and Bong move between interior and exterior settings, Hei is more frequently situated indoors (except for a few scenes when he is out on his secret missions), and Bong has significantly more outdoor appearances. Here we may recall the scene where Kaneshiro’s character collapses in front of a 7-Eleven convenience store after countless rounds of whisky. This scene is an explicit reference to (if not conscious citation of) Kaneshiro’s performance in a much earlier film, Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1996), in which he plays a lovelorn cop preoccupied with memories of the girl who has left him. This intertextual link also recalls Tony Leung’s character in the same film, also a lovelorn cop obsessed with objects (mementos of lost love) in his cramped vernacular building apartment. While I do not intend to read these characters in the two films as strict parallels, this intertextual resemblance suggests a certain perception of the urban space (in both interior and exterior forms) as a vehicle of desire overloaded with obsessions and inarticulate desire accrued over time. While Chungking Express, for which Andrew Lau was also the cinematographer, deliberately eschews the clichéd images of the city by making the city hard to grasp,23 Confession of Pain reintroduces many such clichés, especially postcard-like images of the skyline and the Victoria Harbour in

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varied tints and shades. The visual manipulations gives accent to the plot: the skyline changes from its typical tourist-board appearance to bleaker tones to underscore an ominous moment; in some scenes, the sky is tinted yellow, as dark clouds gather and disperse in fast motion. This special-effect-enhanced vision of the city befits the darkness lurking in Hei, but the other way round is also true: Hei’s insidious crime is also infecting the city he is supposed to protect as a police officer. By contrast, Bong’s apartment overlooks the Victoria Harbour, and the view from his balcony is always clear and bright. (Bong, after all, is able to forgive his rival and come to terms with his past.) Character symbolism aside, these visual contrasts generated from the same space can be seen as the camera’s own obsession with a certain vision of the city, an urban imaginary that endows the city with an overseeing power co-hosting the drama with the human characters. This vision of the city as an abstract yet animated presence is nonetheless contained within recognizable signs, a visual vocabulary akin to the urban cinema of Hong Kong developed over the last two decades. In this respect Confession of Pain has given up the stylized abstraction of the non-place in Infernal Affairs 1 and 3, and also the crime-stricken hell in Infernal Affairs 2, since the jianghu or underworld, a cardinal marker of Hong Kong hero films, is conspicuously absent from the main action (except as a pretext for Hei’s revenge) in favour of recognizable spatial markers to invoke a sense of place. A nostalgic desire to monumentalize the city on the verge of disappearance, as in the films of the 1980s and early 1990s, cannot fully explain the significance of placing the film within a familiar urban locale. Instead, the invocation of the urban locale in this film creates a disjunction between its presence and its diegetic function. As another high concept film following the success of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, the story of Confession of Pain can be taken out of its immediate context easily, and conveniently, to reproduce a similar postmodern action-thriller in ‘anyspace-whatever’. The spatial references to Hong Kong and Macau as the ‘lost home(s)’ of the homeless hero are deliberate gestures that can be better understood as metaphorical references to an extra-textual reality, that is, Hong Kong in the post-SARS years and the filmmakers’ dilemma in making their heroes speak for their times. In a way, Confession of Pain approximates the sentiments of Chungking Express in its treatment of human relationships in the metropolitan city, aptly described by Ackbar Abbas as ‘proximity without reciprocity’, in the sense that the city and the people are ‘seen but not known’, a situation in which intimacy ‘takes idiosyncratic forms’.24 In Confession of Pain, this situation

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translates to a state of proximity without intimacy, at the level of the camera’s (and the audience’s) relationship with/distance from the hero, and the way in which it makes metaphorical reference to the ‘wounded city’, that is, shang cheng, the film’s title in Chinese. Spanning the years 2003–2006, the temporal frame of the story coincides with the city’s gradual recovery from the nightmare of the SARS pandemic, thus indirectly linking the personal tragedies to a collective trauma and memory of loss. While the film seems to be placing this burden of collective grief on Hei (‘Have you ever lost everything in one night?’), the ending denies its avenging angel the chance of a rebirth, but places this hope on the eventually tamed character Bong, who seems to have sobered up from a three-year-long drinking spree to embrace love and forgiveness. As I have mentioned before, the rather banal ending displaces the memory of Hei into a distant echo of Christmas blessings reserved for those who, like Bong, are ready to let go of a painful past. The banality of Bong’s new found romance parallels the equally facile portrayal of the relationship between Hei and Susan, which has dismayed some critics as being ‘superficial’ and unconvincing.25 Instead of dismissing this weakness of the film off-hand, it is possible to read it as a manifestation of a more general predicament—a deep-rooted scepticism beneath the budding optimism of the city in the post-SARS years. In this light, the down-beat banality may be seen as the film’s confession of its own dilemma, or defeatism.

Conclusion By subjecting its heroes under an impersonal, detached, and even judgemental camera, Confession of Pain is in dialogue with the Infernal Affairs trilogy as well as its other contemporaries, some of which have been discussed in the previous chapters. This intertextual dialogue is motivated by a persistent questioning of pre-existing modes of cinematic representation, the filmmakers’ awareness of their own implication in the making and remaking of such modes of representation, and in effect the displacement/deconstruction of the heroic prototype into fragmented, pathological, and even schizophrenic variants as a response to and comment on the cinematic imagination of the previous decades and the transitory present. Visually, the film returns to the local cityscape as the primary locale of personal/collective remembrance and incipient terror, but through distancing and effacement it also refrains from eulogizing the hero’s vengeful justice and his tragic downfall. Read intertextually, Confession of Pain comments on the filmmakers’ previous work and

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reflects on the dilemma of making ‘Hong Kong (action) films’ for a transnational market. Between Confession of Pain and the Internal Affairs trilogy is a dialogue on the nature of cinematic nostalgia and its continued relevance to Hong Kong cinema. That these films are authored by the same directors over just a few years suggests that the dialogue has yet to have a conclusion, and will continue to play out in Hong Kong films in the near future.

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Part III In and Out

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7 Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary

Since the earliest days of Hong Kong cinema, ‘China’ has been a material, cultural, and ideological presence. The local film industry’s long history of collaboration with its Mainland counterparts in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century,1 the ideological tugof-war among Mainland China and Taiwan in the British colony after 1949, and the film industry’s need for expansion into overseas markets, especially the Chinese-speaking world in Southeast Asia and North America, bespeak the ambivalence, or multivalence, of ‘China’ in the local context. As it were, the term designates not a monolithic entity but a polyglot of histories, cultures, and identities that characterized twentieth-century Chinese and world history.2 ‘China’ as such has been, and still is, a contested field, a site where artistic, political, and economic interests intersect in response to the historical vicissitudes of the times. This aspect of Hong Kong cinema has been fruitfully explored in recent critical scholarship. In a very broad and general sense, the ‘China factor’ is understood in these terms: (1) the historical connections between Hong Kong and Shanghai (China’s ‘film capital’ before 1949) and the interflow of capital, technology, and production and acting talents3 ; (2) the creation of an ‘imaginary China’ in Hong Kong cinema, especially the historical epics and martial arts films, in the works of émigré directors from Shanghai in the 1960s and 1970s4 ; and (3) new manifestations of this imaginary in film and television during the 1980s and 1990s, the years of political transition from British to Chinese rule, which also coincided with the emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave cinema, the accelerated internationalization of Hong Kong films, and ironically the rapid decline of the local film industry.5 The surge of critical interest in the Hong Kong—China dynamic in the last two decades or so not only testifies to the significance of the 163

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ex-colony’s own ‘obsession with China’ (to borrow C. T. Hsia’s oftquoted description of early twentieth-century Chinese literature), but also reveals a similar tendency among contemporary Mainland writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals in the post-Mao era.6 To begin with, the ‘China factor’ is the function of other geopolitical factors: colonialism, decolonization (which also implies a ‘reversion’ to an alien regime and the great uncertainties this triggers), and the awakening of a local consciousness just when the local is about to ‘disappear’: Ackbar Abbas suggests the discovery of Hong Kong as a subject of representation dates back to 1982, when the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made her first official to Beijing, where she inadvertently set the tone for the ‘1997 debate’.7 Since then, critical discourse on Hong Kong culture has furthered this discovery in an attempt to respond to and reflect on the nature of this new subject, to give it a name, an identity (no matter how slippery), and a place in history in the wake of its integration into the body politic of Mainland China. Seen in this light, since the 1980s, Hong Kong cinema as a major popular cultural medium and the critical discourse that has this medium as a subject of enquiry have formed a symbiotic relation through which the local cinema obtains new intellectual and historical significance. As two sides of the same current, they constitute a heteroglossic field, generating images and ways of understanding to grapple with an unprecedented historical situation and its aftermath, a ‘fate’ that seems to exceed available modes of representation, something that is always in the process of becoming. In pre-1997 parlance, this slipperiness is captured in the ‘future anterior mode’, the present projection of a future event in the form of the ‘future perfect tense’ in Hong Kong films from this period.8 Ten years down the road, what we are witnessing now is not only the ever looming presence of China as the new sovereign and economic heavy weight in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), but also the acceleration of centrifugal forces of globalization in both societies, leading to dramatic changes and realignment of interests at the local, national, and international levels. If, as Appadurai (1996) has convincingly argued, the ‘nation’ is to be understood as being dispersed into the global mediascape in myriad forms of regional, local, and translocal connections through the work of the imagination,9 the ‘China factor’ as it exists in the cinematic imagination of Hong Kong may justifiably be unhinged (but not necessarily cut off) from the geopolitics and rhetoric of the nation, decolonization, and reunification. This chapter situates itself within the continuum of critical reflections and local articulations to map out the China imaginary in a cluster of post-1997

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films. My aim here is not to conduct an exhaustive survey, but to shed light on how this peripheral imaginary has evolved since the handover. The films analysed in this chapter consist of both arthouse/alternative and commercial productions. Focusing on Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood, Hong Kong (2001), and Samson Chiu Leung-chun’s Golden Chicken (2002) and Golden Chicken 2 (2003), I pay attention to the construction of cultural imaginaries through the figure of the prostitute. The symbolic manoeuverings of this gendered metaphor in these films, I argue, simultaneously locate and dislocate the nation as a site where multiple histories and identities intersect and intertwine. These films also posit the figure of the migrant, including those who leave their hometowns and those who move but never truly depart, as the embodiment of the peripheral, which can no longer be located or placed. In these films, movement is a state of mind and a state of being characteristic of the post-fin-de-siècle condition.

The prostitute (1): The colonial city Golden Chicken and Golden Chicken 2 As a figurative construct the colonial ‘other’ as woman reveals the contradictory impulses of racism and sexual desire inherent in imperialist ideology. As a ‘desiring machine’ the colonial apparatus is possessed by a fantasy of inter-racial unions that is at once alluring and repulsive. In the words of Robert Young (1995), desire constitutes the ‘soft underbelly’ of colonial power relation.10 In Chinese film and literature since the early decades of the twentieth century, this gendered metaphor has been employed in a variety of ways to articulate the psychological complexities of the Chinese experience of (semi)colonialism, especially as a figure for the city of Shanghai under Western domination.11 Many contemporary representations in film and fiction take this metaphor further to probe China’s more recent experience of modernity, or postmodernity, that goes beyond the parameters of the colonial paradigm and to reflect on relations between gender and nation in the context of China’s ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi) in the global economy. These narratives usually posit the figure of the femme fatale or the seductress on whom the contradictions and psychological repercussions of China’s latest experiment with modernity are sketched.12 As far as Hong Kong is concerned, Shi Shuqing’s Hong Kong Trilogy/Xiangggang sanbuqu (1993, 1995, 1997) is so far the most ambitious literary work that encapsulates the city’s colonial history in the rags to riches success story of a prostitute who becomes a billionaire and founding legend of her illustrious family enterprise.

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Compared to Shi’s historical saga, Samson Chiu’s Golden Chicken and Golden Chicken 2 are much less ambitious. The two films focus exclusively on the life story of a small time prostitute, Kum, from the 1980s to around 2003, though in the sequel Kum, in her eighties, recalls fragments of her life half a century before. Although the city-as-seductress/whore has a certain pedigree in Chinese cinema and literature, the Golden Chicken films are unique in their outright political incorrectness and irreverence. Here the colonial city is not so much a femme fatale as a happy-go-lucky prostitute who never attains any material victory in her more than humble career. My interest in the films therefore is not to discover some meta-historical dimension of post-colonial cultural critique, or how they might fit in a certain grand narrative of ‘Hong Kong identity’; rather, these films are seen as tokens of the popular cinema’s reaction to specific social and political situations. I try to understand why, and to what effect, the ‘happy chicken’ functions as a repertoire of local memories rendered in a grassroots register to shed light on the social psyche after the political handover. (In Cantonese slang, chicken or gai means prostitute; the word ‘kum’ is the English slang for ‘orgasm’.) In Golden Chicken, the life story of Kum (Sandra Ng Kwan-yu) follows the plot of Hong Kong’s historical trajectory, from humble origins to prosperity to inevitable decline. Kum is a representative of the baby boomers born in the 1960s who came of age in the 1980s. This generation coincided with Hong Kong’s transformation into a modern city (c.f. Chapter 2) and constituted the broad spectrum of Hong Kong’s middle and upper-middle class thereafter. They are also the people who suffered a heavy setback during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. Kum’s characterization, moreover, alludes to a certain ‘Hong Kong spirit’ shared by the general public: she is a ‘professional’ in her trade whose inferiority complex adds fuel to a sheer will to survive, in good times and bad times. Eric Ma (2001) argues that this ‘Hong Kong spirit’ originates from a widely shared belief in the official account of Hong Kong’s success story favoured by both the colonial and the Chinese governments: from an obscure fishing village to a world-class metropolis and international financial centre. If this sweeping account of Hong Kong’s history has been adopted to serve the ideological agendas of the power that be, in Golden Chicken Kum’s world is undauntedly a stripped-down version of the other side of the Hong Kong stereotype: vulgar, materialistic, sexist, promiscuous, hedonistic, exploitative, uncouth, yet endlessly funny and indefatigable. In fact, this amalgam of politically incorrect qualities is nothing new to the popular cinema, and is always a cause for concern

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among its critics. However, I suggest that by playing up the stereotypical image of Hong Kong, Golden Chicken can also be read against the grain of the colonial/national narratives of ‘Hong Kong history’. The films make no qualms about the explicit identification between ‘golden chicken’ Kum and Hong Kong, precisely because Kum is a token of pride and a critique of the society that creates, exploits, and abandons her. Some critics have referred to Kum as a ‘concept chicken’, an experimentation with ‘Hong Kong movie character’ type.13 As such, the ‘concept chicken’ is also a vehicle for collective self-expression: linked by the pun in the title words, both Kum and the film texts assume multiple significations that draw upon official and unofficial self-representations of the city. The title gives prominence to the figure of Kum as a prostitute (gai or chicken) with a golden heart (‘Kum’ or gam literally means ‘gold’ in Cantonese). Contextually, ‘Golden Chicken’ also connotes prosperity and festivity, for buying golden figurines of the year’s zodiac sign during the Chinese New Year as a lucky charm is a long-time custom in Hong Kong. Thus the films’ title effects multiple allusions and connotations that foreground the heroine as the embodiment of the colloquial ‘Hong Kong’ voice. At the moment of its enunciation, the title gam gai already rings a bell among Cantonese-speaking audience not only as a thematic pointer, but also as a solicitation into an intimate linguistic community14 that cannot be placed comfortably within general categories of Chinese (national) or British (colonial) subjects. The difference between Hong Kong and China, moreover, is highlighted in the increasing competition between local club hostesses and those from the Mainland, who became a phenomenon in the early 1990s. These Mainland women are called ‘northern chicks’ (bak gu or beigu), a derogative local coinage for Mainland women in the sex trade in Hong Kong. Slightly tacky in appearance, their heavily accented Cantonese has become an unofficial ‘trademark’ that distinguishes them from their local counterparts. This linguistic disjuncture is made more prominent in the sequel, in the figure of Kum’s male cousin (Jacky Cheung), a Mainland Chinese immigrant trying to make his first pot of gold in the capitalist haven. It is significant that this character is called ‘Biu Go’ throughout the film (biao ge in Mandarin pinyin), which literally means one’s (poor) male cousin from the ‘north’, for ‘biu go’ or ‘biu ze’ (biao jie, meaning female cousin) were popular nicknames given to Mainlanders in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s. This largely condescending attitude towards the Mainland Other found its way into the film culture of the time, most notably in Alfred Cheung’s Her Fatal Ways series (1991, 1993, 1994), in which

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the Mainland woman police officer (played by Hong Kong TV star Carol ‘Do Do’ Cheng) receives a more positive treatment as an upright and ingenuous character endeared by the Hong Kong way of life. In Golden Chicken 2, Biu Go learns his trade through a series of trial and error, and finally transforms himself into an unscrupulous entrepreneur in China trade. At the beginning of the film, Biu Go, a Guangdong native, speaks a version of Cantonese that betrays his ‘foreign’ origin. His Mainland identity is emphasized in a series of language blunders that subject him to ridicule. For instance, when Kum confesses she has taken up part time work as a ‘fish ball girl’ (yu dan mui, meaning teenage girls working at sex establishments that, allegedly, offer only fondling service). Taking the term literally, he asks Kum to teach him how to do the trade (selling fish balls as a snack). Nonetheless, Biu Go’s entrepreneurial spirit is well-suited to the bread-and-butter culture of Hong Kong. Throughout his adventures in Hong Kong, and later on in China, Biu Go takes advantage of Kum’s affection on numerous occasions before he finally confesses his love at the moment of his extradition back to China on fraud charges. Symbolically, the relationship between Kum and Biu Go alludes to something like a failed romance between Hong Kong and China, as Kum is being used consistently as a means for realizing her cousin’s capitalistic dream. As a stereotype of the Mainlander in Hong Kong, Biu Go also embodies the ethos of China’s market economy and the nation’s aspirations for material success in the late twentieth century. Ironically, Biu Go is also a reincarnation of the Hong Kong stereotype: a die-hard opportunist whose only concern in life is money, and more money. While Biu Go is comparable to the host of Mainland Chinese characters in Hong Kong films from the 1980s onwards,15 his sojourn in Hong Kong brings out the unscrupulous capitalist within the country bumpkin from socialist China. In the film, Biu Go is always in transition, hopping from place to place, from one business adventure to another without any apparent goal or anchor in life except profit. If Kum is the grassroots version of the ‘Hong Kong Spirit’, Biu Go can be seen as the personification of China’s market economy in the post-socialist era, an expansionist force whose unstoppable momentum eventually derails its own steam engine. Here it is useful to compare Biu Go with another Mainlander character in Golden Chicken 1, the gangster Yeh (Hu Jun) with whom Kum has had a brief affair. Their encounter is occasioned by the gangster’s fall from power when he goes into hiding in Hong Kong. Kum generously uses all her savings to bail him out of disaster. In the end he returns Kum’s favour by crediting one million dollars into her

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account many years later. Instead of keeping the money, Kum again uses it to help a new acquaintance (Eric Tsang) on the verge of financial and emotional bankruptcy. In many ways, Hu Jun’s character is inspired by the Mainland gangster prototype in Hong Kong cinema with a positive twist. Good-looking and charismatic, his loyalty to Kum resembles the action hero in John Woo-style action films. As variations of the Mainland Other figure, the heroic gangster and the mercenary newcomer not only occupy two ends of the spectrum but also point towards the closing distance between Hong Kong and China, or the ‘Hong Kong man’ and the ‘China man’ in the popular imagination, for they both have inherited traits of familiar ‘Hong Kong’ characters. Kum’s relationship with men goes beyond dichotomy between city and nation in Golden Chicken 2 towards the broader horizon of the diasporic and the transnational in the figure of their son (who remains absent in the film) brought up by Kum’s client (Wong Yat-wah), an American-Chinese businessman. In Golden Chicken 2 Kum is able to meet with her grandson (Chapman To), in whom she confides the secrets of her past in an attempt to convince the young man of the importance of memory. Although the young man has neither knowledge nor memory of his biological grandparents, at the end of the film he takes home a long story of Kum’s life, which amounts to an unofficial oral history of Hong Kong, and is reassured of the importance of his own. This obvious effort to situate Kum at the centre of an evolving network of local/national/transnational liaisons, while laudable in its sincerity, is also the film’s major flaw. Compared to its predecessor, Golden Chicken 2 has lost the freshness and verve of the former precisely because of its obsession with the heroine as a witness of history. The film’s generic and marketing positioning renders any ‘serious’ philosophizing out of place and contrived. Interweaving newsreel and TV footage of important historical events, such as the 1987 stock exchange crisis, the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, the 1997 handover and the SARS epidemic in 2003, has been a common practice in Hong Kong cinema. Historical events are usually the raw material for social criticism in arthouse films (e.g. Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile and Ordinary Heroes, and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung and The Longest Summer), and we have seen how this ‘documentary drive’ has infiltrated mainstream productions in the discussion on Infernal Affairs 2 (Chapter 6). In Golden Chicken, a comedy-cum-farce, this direct treatment of historical anomalies in a docu-drama style serves more to dilute the effect of comic relief than sustain its upbeat, though naïve, simplicity. Despite these shortcomings, the two films as a whole succeed in capturing the pathos of the Hong

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Kong public through an almost transparent identification with the heroine, the ‘golden chicken’ whose resilience and simple-mindedness put to shame the numerous male characters who are but helpless victims of social and personal crises. As a self-consciously stereotypical Hong Kong-style comedy littered with sexist in-jokes, vulgarities, and bodily excesses that rival Stephen Chow’s nonsense gags, the Golden Chicken films offer a possibility of recuperating a local voice enmeshed in the language of the outcast through the figure of a ‘happy prostitute’. The films serve as examples of how ‘low’ cultural products appropriate the gendered metaphor in the colonial, and also the national, imagination and turn it inside out to articulate specifically local sentiments without over-indulging in sentimentalism. Filmed and released at a time when the territory was besieged by political, social, and economic crises, Golden Chicken’s farcical mock-seriousness comes close to a Brechtian distantiation by virtue of its campiness. The hyperbolic characterization, acting style, setting, plot lines, and the flashy 1980s costume are well-matched by the frequent use of diegetic Canto-pop music as period markers, while the song lyrics also reflect the emotional roller coasters of Kum (and most Hong Kong people) in times of prosperity and decline. This conscious quotation of previous styles can also be seen as a tribute to the achievements of Hong Kong in the 1980s, a ‘golden age’ when the territory’s cultural products took over Chinese communities in Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and parts of Mainland China. If the films’ frivolity and celebratory tone smacks of ‘grassroots anti-intellectualism’,16 we must not forget that the films’ production crew consists of members of the cultural elite who left the territory in the late 1990s and relocated back to Hong Kong afterwards to continue filmmaking. Their films frequently bear the imprint of the disillusionment and cynicism of the elite towards the new political realities of the ex-colony.17 In Golden Chicken there is also an underlying elitist romanticism in the portrayal of the lower class, most obviously in the figure of Kum, who is hailed as the ultimate hero and emblem of the ‘Hong Kong spirit’. She is also the sanctuary of many a lost (male) souls—these were the real beneficiaries of the economic boom in the previous decades who either fall into depression and nervous breakdown or attempt suicide in times of crises. Kum’s image as a ‘happy prostitute’ glosses over the harsher realities not only of women in her profession but also the social class she comes to represent. In Golden Chicken their upbeat and happy lives within an exploitative social system are taken for granted as a consolation to the majority of the well-to-dos. Such elitist idealization (or utilization) of the social Other as a means of

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collective self-articulation may sound gross in its lack of sensitivity, but on the other hand this ‘textual unconscious’ does reveal the complex and contradictory impulses of Hong Kong’s popular cinema (and a certain group of filmmakers) when coming to terms with the vicissitudes of history and its/their own identity, both as a product/producers of popular culture and constituents of a local voice at variance with the official discourses of colonization and decolonization. Before turning to Durian Durian and Hollywood, Hong Kong, I would like to consider the figure of the migrant in Golden Chicken, a motif also central to Fruit Chan’s films. Besides the obvious migrant figure Biu Go discussed above, Kum is also given the opportunity to emigrate with her American-Chinese client and her son, but she eventually decides to stay. In giving up her right as a mother in order to remain in a place that offers little hope for a better future, Kum resembles what Ackbar Abbas (via Deleuze and Guattari) calls the ‘nomad’, her ‘emigration’ is understood ‘not in the diasporic sense of finding another space . . . but in the sense of remaking a given space that for whatever reason one cannot leave, of dis-locating’.18 As a social outcast and gendered other, Kum’s life is by nature migratory, or ‘nomadic’, for she is ‘one who does not depart . . . who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or desert advance’.19 Her trajectory from a schoolgirl to nightclub hostess to masseuse to owner of a small cafeteria and finally a monument of the city’s collective memory can be seen as a process of migration, of ‘remaking’ or ‘dis-locating’ an unlivable social space to make it livable. Seen as an elitist projection of the local, Kum becomes a more problematic figure than the clownish underdog she appears to be. Not only is her nomadic impulse a sharp contrast to the rootlessness of the perpetual migrant, Biu Go, but her growing stature as the authentic voice of history offers more than a prescriptive ‘happy ending’ in a formulaic comedy. By identifying the local with a social outcast ‘who does not depart’, and by playing up the cultural, moral, and psychological differences between the migrant and the nomad, Golden Chicken’s Hong Kong story betrays the psychological impasse faced by the migrant who returns: the filmmakers themselves, as returning migrants, seek to rediscover the local through an imaginative commemoration. However, as producer Peter Chan Ho-sun (Chapter 8) admits in an interview, the experience of migration has weakened the sense of ‘home’ as relating to a place.20 This feeling of alienation and uprootedness makes the ‘local’ an elusive subject, something that has to be sought elsewhere, in dislocation. Perhaps this elusiveness of the subject being sought explains why a story commemorating the ‘Hong Kong experience’ has to be told

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at the grassroots level, and why this story is authenticated by the voice of a prostitute: they are the elsewhere/other seen from a cultural, social, and political vantage point that ironically reflects the position of the ‘self’, which also explains why the idealization of the other is inevitable in order to overcome psychological and emotional distance and the inherent ambivalence towards ‘identity’ per se.

The prostitute (2): Motherland and/as elsewhere Durian Durian As the first two instalments of Fruit Chan’s as yet unfinished ‘Prostitute Trilogy’, Durian Durian and Hollywood, Hong Kong trace the itineraries of two Mainland prostitutes in Hong Kong. Rather than as a metaphor for the (post-)colonial city, the figure of the prostitute in these films re-examines the image of the Mainlander in the popular imagination by subverting the stereotype of ‘northern chicks’. As Wendy Gan has pointed out in her book on Durian Durian, the film exemplifies the social realism of Fruit Chan’s oeuvre since Made in Hong Kong, and is a mature example of the director’s evolving style as an independent filmmaker consciously differentiating himself from the commercial mainstream, whereas the mix of fantasy and black comedy in Hollywood, Hong Kong demonstrates yet another conscious effort by Chan to resist being ‘pigeonholed’ into a certain category of director.21 Both films use the Mainland prostitute as the central character to forge a link between Hong Kong and China to reflect on the psycho-social dynamics between the two societies after the reunification. Both films probe the implications of reunification at the level of everyday life and the cultural perceptions and misconceptions that somehow short-circuit any attempt at genuine communication and understanding (a recurrent theme since Little Cheung 22 ). Timing-wise, the films tapped into the controversy over the increasing number of Mainland prostitutes in Hong Kong. When Durian Durian was released in 2000, Mainland sex workers were headline news in the mass media.23 No doubt, in the local imagination, ‘northern chicks’ have become a synonym for social predators, corruptors of the moral order, and most of all a serious social problem created by the loosening borders between the HKSAR and Mainland China. While the two films have successfully deconstructed this stereotypical image of Mainland women by foregrounding their heroines as complex and individualized characters pursuing their own destinies, the figure of the prostitute as

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an independent and progressive woman achieves more than a redress on social injustice, for her sojourn in and through Hong Kong unravels a series of questions about identity, history, and temporal-spatial dislocation as both Hong Kong and China seek to maintain a foothold in what Appadurai calls the disjunctive global space.24 If the ‘concept chicken’ in Samson Chiu’s films is a repository of local memory and history, hence the embodiment of the ‘Hong Kong spirit’, the Mainland women in Fruit Chan’s films remind us of the ineluctable entwinement of the two places in each other’s imagination of the future. Durian Durian and Hollywood, Hong Kong signify two different types of movements or migration that use Hong Kong as an intermediary for another journey into the future. Although in both cases Hong Kong is only a way station, a necessary stopover for capital accumulation, the stories differ significantly in their treatment of the central female character, hence their relationship to Hong Kong as a temporary abode. From this difference emerges a certain narrative that comments on not only the Hong Kong–China encounter but also the possibility of the local being doubly displaced or eclipsed by an expanding global space. The narrative of Durian Durian is neatly split into two halves: the first part tells the story of Yan (Qin Hailu), a young Mainland woman who comes to Hong Kong to work as a prostitute on a three-month permit; the second follows Yan’s journey back home, a remote suburban town called Mudanjiang (Mudan River) in northeastern China. The first part of the film sets up Yan as a typical, if not stereotypical, ‘northern chick’, as the camera follows her everyday itineraries in the notorious Portland Street neighbourhood in Mongkok, the busiest commercial district in Kowloon known for its inchoate mix of high- and low-end shopping and entertainment establishments (the same setting as in Little Cheung in Chapter 2). In this part of the film Yan is undoubtedly the epitome of the ‘northern chick’, from hairstyle, fashion taste, to body movement and her heavily accented Cantonese. Going in and out of hourly hotels to service an endless stream of clients, she apparently feels no qualms about her shady employment, and is immune from the jests and scorn thrown at her by both the locals and other newcomers to the city. As she walks through the same backstreet everyday, Yan catches the attention of Fan, the same teenage illegal worker from Little Cheung who has overstayed her entry permit. As their friendship develops, the film reveals a hidden side of Yan’s character. One long shot shows Yan stretching her limps against a wall in the back street very much in the manner of a professional dancer. This rare glimpse of Yan doing something other than what a typical ‘northern chick’ does is visually compelling, since

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the image of Yan as a female dancer stands out and apart from the bleak and oppressive setting of the back alley, a posture that is almost defiant and self-assertive. This shot of Yan as being different from the ‘northern chick’ stereotype is also a moment of insight for the viewer, who is invited to ponder what lies behind the mask of a ‘northern chick’; what life story or experience has led her on to a self-degrading existence in Hong Kong; and what will become of her when her return permit expires. These questions are soon answered in the second narrative. In a swift, one-shot transition, the camera takes Yan, and the viewer, back to her hometown Mudanjiang. The vast, frozen land dotted with isolated, run-down buildings and a bare minimal of social infrastructure sets up a dramatic contrast with the overcrowded, heavily built urban space of Hong Kong. This almost unmediated transition from Hong Kong to northeastern China is visually unsettling as it offers no ‘buffer’ of spatial movement (such as a train journey) to establish the change in setting. It thus reinforces the duality of Yan’s existence through the synchronicity of the two worlds she inhabits. This shot also hints at the psychological and social upheavals triggered by the accelerated human traffic across the borders. In a subsequent close-up shot we see Yan in her newly cut and straightened hair, her make-up free face looking crisp and fresh in the cold icy air. It is as if Yan has shaken off completely the paraphernalia of the ‘northern chick’, as if she is ready for a fresh start in her hometown with a full pocket of hard-earned cash. But, can she, really? Could the swift transition of landscapes and characterization be more insinuating and intriguing than what a redemptive homecoming might suggest? As Gan observes, Yan is ‘a representative of the disjunctures of identity in modern China’.25 She can no longer fit in her old community in Mudanjiang, not because her experience in Hong Kong has made her a different person, but Hong Kong, as she knows it now, is out of place with the imagination of ‘Hong Kong’ (‘the South’ as a future promise) shared by her fellow townsfolk. Returning home as a cash-rich ‘business woman’, Yan is greeted everywhere she goes by friends and relatives and is constantly pestered by people eager to learn the secrets of her success. Unable to tell the truth, Yan becomes more and more aloof and alienated from her own community. In the first narrative we see Yan walking from one hotel to another without care or concern for the harsh realities around her; in the second narrative, Yan walks from place to place without any clue as to where to invest her money. If Yan’s itineraries in the first narrative sketch an oppressive, dehumanizing urban space to which illegal migrants are confined, Yan’s roaming paths in the second

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narrative delineate ‘home’ as an open space where the returned migrant realizes she is not going anywhere. Her alienation and loneliness get more pronounced when her childhood friends are ready to ‘go South’ in pursuit of a better future. To Yan, she already has lived their future, but she cannot bring home the moral of the tale, or the immorality of the tale. Thus, to Yan, and probably to those who follow her footsteps, homecoming does not mean the end of migration, but an intensified sense of displacement in the same place, a different kind of nomadic experience in the sense that this ‘same place’ is turning into ‘elsewhere’. Yan’s journey to Hong Kong, it seems, has set her life in perpetual motion. Unable to make use or sense of the money in the bank (which is soon depleting with all the ‘welcome banquets’ and expenses of relocation) to cut out a new path to the future, Yan decides to take refuge in the past by returning to her long-abandoned profession in traditional opera. This anachronistic movement back to a previous state of being is registered in the final shot, in which the camera gradually closes in upon a traditional opera actress in a street performance, and finally reveals Yan’s face in a freeze frame. It seems that, for Yan, the only way to cope with an uncertain future is to ‘freeze’ oneself in the costume of the past. Her migration, after all, returns her to the same place, but fails to connect her to a future she has set off, and returned, for. By plotting the trajectories of Yan, Durian Durian sheds light on the changing relations between Hong Kong and China after 1997. By splitting the narrative and setting neatly between Hong Kong and Mudanjiang, Fruit Chan draws attention to the idea of the border, and also the film’s act of border-crossing. More importantly, the film’s trajectory urges a rethinking of post-unification Hong Kong–China relations by making subtle metaphorical references to the geopolitics of ‘one country, two systems’. If, in Durian Durian, the two places ‘are becoming one without an attendant sense of wholeness’,26 this lack of wholeness is best grasped by the film’s use of contrastive settings and characterization, as well as in the metaphorical use of the durian in its title and in the story itself. According to Fruit Chan, durians allude to the situation of Hong Kong, and more specifically the Portland Street neighbourhood, for ‘[p]eople who like it thinks it’s the greatest, people who don’t think it really stinks’.27 In the film, Mainland characters repeatedly express curiosity and disgust towards this exotic fruit from Southeast Asia, and its poignant odour is both alluring and repellent, just like the congested urban city in which they live. The durian’s association with the ‘South’ ties in most tightly with the geopolitics of ‘North’ and ‘South’ foregrounded in the film’s narrative and cinematography. Back

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in Mudanjiang, Hong Kong and Shenzhen are frequently referred to as ‘the South’ (nanfang), as opposed to ‘the North’ (beifang). Thus in the imagination of the people in Mudanjiang, Hong Kong exists as an undifferentiated elsewhere in the South, which in turn signifies a modern lifestyle, Westernized culture, material affluence, and opportunities to make quick money for the adventurous, all of which are lacking in their hometown. To Yan, the durian sent to her by Fan from Shenzhen is a reminder of her experience in the South, a token from the past that returns to haunt the present. Not only Yan but also her friends have no clue as to how this foreign fruit should be cut and consumed. Towards the end of the film, she is seen eating the durian alone, but her face does not show any obvious signs of either enjoyment or repulsion. It is as if she is reminiscing the past through the complex and contradictory flavours of the fruit, undecided about its ultimate meaning to her life. As an artist who has given up her profession for quick cash, Yan has diligently followed the famous and still valid aphorism of Deng Xiaoping: ‘to get rich is glorious’ (zhi fu guangrong), but the film also suggests that Yan, and those like her, is a victim of China’s glorious dream. Caught up with this dream in the wake of the new millennium, Hong Kong, like the durian, enters into the nation’s imagination of the future as a facilitator of capital accumulation. Ironically, this economic logic harks back to early colonial times, when the British government’s primary interest in opening up China was essentially trade and commerce.28 Through the figure of the durian, its transmission from Hong Kong to China and its association with the Mainland characters Yan and Fan, the film effectively weaves in the contradictions and psychological tribulations of those living under ‘one country, two systems’, a recurrent subject in Fruit Chan’s films since Made in Hong Kong. Seen in this light, the film’s English title, Durian Durian, reads like a footnote commenting on the uneasy reunion of Hong Kong and China under the dual political system. Thus, beginning with a local theme (illegal migrant workers in Hong Kong) in a local neighbourhood, Fruit Chan’s film eventually (or should we say inevitably?) takes us back to a ‘foreign’ place, the remote township Mudanjiang in northeastern China, in pursuit of a woman’s journey home. Ironically, the feeling of homelessness becomes even more disturbing upon her homecoming. Yan’s sense of displacement is profound: being homeless while one is at home. Yan’s tactic of dis-location, of reinventing a space for herself without leaving home again, is to return to traditional opera. If Durian Durian is a Hong Kong film about China, might Yan’s displacement, a result of migration and homecoming, be read as an echo of the equally disturbing sense of

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homelessness of an ex-colony trying to make sense of its own homecoming? Being homeless at home, being at home in homelessness: in the world of Durian Durian, the duplicity of home and ‘homeland’ is deeply ingrained at the core of ‘oneness’ at the political, social, and psychological levels. Hollywood, Hong Kong As the second instalment of the ‘Prostitute Trilogy’, Hollywood, Hong Kong tells the story of another Mainland woman (Zhou Xun) variously named Hong Hong, Dong Dong, and finally Fang Fang, who works as a prostitute in Hong Kong of her own accord in order to make enough money to further her ambitions. (It is no coincidence that the Chinese characters also form a pun on ‘dong fang hong’, literally ‘the East is red’, a symbolism of Mao Zedong and the Communist Revolution, and the title of a revolutionary song and film.) But unlike Yan, Fang Fang’s sojourn does not take her back to China, but to the United States (Hollywood). There is no explanation why she wants to go there, but the pattern of her migration, precisely because of its lack of a clear motive, alludes to the much broader context of Mainland Chinese migrants leaving their home country in search of a better life in the West. The satiric reference to Hollywood comments on the United States as the ‘promised land’ for many. Stylistically, this film departs from the realism of Durian Durian, blending sexual fantasy, dream scenarios, and grotesque images and symbolisms to explore the psycho-social dimension of yet another Mainland–Hong Kong encounter. The narrative revolves around a series of erotic/sexual liaisons between Fang Fang and three Hong Kong men: Boss Chu, his eldest son Ming, and a good-for-nothing young pimp named Keung who lives off his girl friend. Fang Fang’s exchanges with these men are interwoven with her innocent friendship with Tiny, a primary school boy and Boss Chu’s youngest son. The film establishes Fang Fang as the seductress tactfully casting her web of deception around her preys. To Keung, she is the sexy dream girl money can buy; to Boss Chu and Ming, she is an attractive, innocent ‘new comer’ who satisfies their sexual appetite; to Tiny, she is a true friend and ally to share happiness and secrets with. Except for Tiny, these unsuspecting males fall prey to her seduction one by one, but the film only reveals her real intention much later, when Chu, Ming, and Keung are blackmailed by a lawyer who claims that they have had sex with an underage woman no other than Fang Fang. In an attempt to unhook himself from the scam, Keung has his right hand cut off by gangsters hired by the lawyer, who presumably is one of Fang Fang’s ex-clients.

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Although the film posits a migrant character on the move, its setting and main action are restricted to a poor neighbourhood, Tai Hom Village, located on the edge of a new middle-class residential complex in the Diamond Hill district in Kowloon. The now demolished Tai Hom Village, a remnant of the oldest part of the area, had been populated by Mainland Chinese migrants from various parts of the country. Fruit Chan likens it to Hong Kong in the 1960s and the 1970s, a time when one could hear different dialects spoken by people in everyday life.29 Once again, Fruit Chan’s film takes us to an overlooked margin of the urban city and turns the margin into a critical edge that reflects back on the metropolitan centre much in the same line as his Hong Kong Trilogy, Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), and Little Cheung (1999). In Hollywood, Hong Kong, Tai Hom Village as a space of anomalies is most vividly visualized in the recurrent images of obesity and grotesque and deformed bodies. The film’s beginning superimposes close-up shots of obese human bodies and bodies of live and butchered pigs, subtly prefiguring Boss Chu and Ming’s fate as Fang Fang’s ‘meat dishes’. Similar imagery occurs frequently in the film, especially in the figure of Niang Niang, a sow for mating kept in Chu’s butchery-cumChinese BBQ meat stall. It is significant that Niang Niang (meaning ‘mother, mother’) in the film is meant to be the only ‘mother’ figure,30 and Fang Fang’s appearance in the film seems to fill this space after Niang Niang has gone astray. The association between pigs and men and the sexual connotations of the mating pig are reinforced by recurrent shots of piglets sizzling in the charcoal grill in Chu’s shop. As the film develops, the indulgence in anomalies borders on the absurd, when Tiny picks up Keung’s cut-off hand from an opaque plastic roof, buries it in a bucket of ice, and delivers it back to Keung. Keung’s ‘reunion’ with his hand turns out to be a mis-union, as the hand sewn back onto his arm is a left hand instead of right, which belongs to a truck driver who has been mistaken as Keung by the gangsters. As if the grotesque has not gone far enough, Keung’s deformation is given a further symbolic meaning: the tattoos on the two portions of his lower arm combine to obtain a new expression: ‘tiger head snake tail’ (fu tau se mei/hu tou she wei), which the director admits is his view on post-1997 Hong Kong. (In Chinese, the phrase means ‘thinking big’ without the ability to carry through to the end.) This political joke on Hong Kong’s post-reunion situation is further contextualized, and made more pronounced, in the configuration of the urban space. Throughout the film, Tai Hom Village stands in sharp contrast with the modern architecture right across the street. In the film,

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shots of the Hollywood Plaza, a middle-class housing complex towering over the haphazard, matchbox-like squatter homes of Tai Hom Village, draw attention to the social anomalies resulting from the government’s urbanization projects. Visually, the gigantic sign ‘Hollywood Plaza’ is like the spectre of modernization casting its relentless weight upon a virtually defenseless community. To the village inhabitants, Hollywood Plaza symbolizes the wealth and lifestyle they can only dream of, an alienating presence and a daily reminder of the internal boundaries within the same social space. Such an alarming contrast in social landscapes within the same neighbourhood, magnified by the use of camera angles and framing, reveals a social space that is almost schizophrenic: except for the prostitute Fang Fang, who somehow can afford to rent a unit there, we seldom see other characters cross the ‘borders’ of these spatial divisions. When Boss Chu, Ming, and Keung make their journeys across, it is either to deliver blackmail money to Fang Fang or seek her out for revenge. I have tried to delineate the schizophrenic social space in Hollywood, Hong Kong as the locale in which the problematics of movement, mobility, and migration are reconsidered. In the film, movement (an act of moving) and mobility (the ability to move) are cast in a disjunctive relation: characters are constantly in movement, but their mobility is largely restricted to everyday errands within the spatial confines defined by class. Another kind of movement at the background is the compulsory exit of village inhabitants in the wake of an urban renewal project, but we do not know exactly where these people will end up. In this respect, ‘movement’ can be the result not of freedom but constraints, or the lack of social mobility of those who are compelled to move (out). This immobility is figuratively conveyed in the obese human bodies and Keung’s crippled arm. If the film posits the locals as being immobile in their restricted movement over space, such immobility is juxtaposed by the prostitute’s mobility as a migrant who traverses vastly different and distant spaces with relative ease. As a figure in transit, her presence in these contrastive spaces is underscored by a determination to move on to the (presumably) ‘free’ space of Hollywood, United States. Significantly, we are led to believe that all the names she uses are fake. (Her deception subtly reveals the intention behind the name-pun, ‘dong fang hong’ mentioned above.) As the central character, Fang Fang is shrouded in mystique as both the narrative and the camera stop short at a more in-depth portrait of the heroine. Throughout the film we are confronted with images of Fang Fang seducing and manipulating her preys, but, unlike Yan in Durian Durian, we virtually know nothing about who she

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really is, where she comes from, and why she is willing to sell her body in order to go to Hollywood. Unlike Yan, who gradually wins our sympathy and respect, Fang Fang remains a wavering shadow, a phantom-like character. Like Yan, however, Fang Fang has mastered the trick of selfstereotyping by playing to the tune of the social and sexual imagination of the ‘northern chick’. As a migrant, Fang Fang is seen best able to exploit an unwelcoming milieu and turn it into an advantage to further her ambitions (whatever these may be). Her autonomy as the Mainland Other, however, cannot be taken for granted. Of all the three Mainland women in the film (the other two being an unlicensed Mainland-trained physician obsessed with her ever-frustrated ‘scientific’ experiments, and Boss Chu’s domestic helper who is killed accidentally after some unsuccessful sexual advances on her employer), Fang Fang is less the norm than an exception to the plight of Mainland women in Hong Kong. From the film’s treatment of these three characters a new perspective on the Hong Kong–China liaison emerges. The film’s abstraction of Fang Fang’s character might imply an inherent inhibition at the level of representation. By establishing Fang Fang as an enigma and juxtaposing her with the other two much older Mainland women, the film points towards an as yet not fully grasped vision of Hong Kong in China, China in Hong Kong, and an expansive global space symbolized by Hollywood (Plaza) that both places are trying to appropriate and make sense of. If a parallel can be drawn between Hollywood (Plaza) and a similar construction ‘California (Café)’ in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1996),31 Fruit Chan’s rendition of the global space is even emptier in substance and meaning, its function reduced to a signifier of an ‘elsewhere’ appended to the end of the film like a postcard image, for ‘Hollywood’ in the film does not even carry the ironic playfulness of California in Chungking Express, in which the spatial-temporal disjunction between the two spaces are underscored by the affective subtext of a developing romance between a lovelorn cop and a globe-trotting young woman. In Fruit Chan’s film, this affective link between the global and the local does not exist, except as an opportunistic (mis-)appropriation of a glossy ‘elsewhere’. Visually, both Hollywood and Hollywood Plaza appear as alien, distant, and devoid of life compared to the restless and disaster-prone Tai Hom Village. If Durian Durian offers a reading of China from the perspective of post1997 Hong Kong by linking the two places in a continuum of historical flux, thus postulating a complex vision of unity in duplicity, Hollywood, Hong Kong is even less cognate about this condition. Among the three

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Mainland women in the film only Fang Fang, the youngest and bestlooking of all, manages to break away from the social and geopolitical strictures of both China and Hong Kong to make her way to a vaguely understood ‘promised land’. Her self-assertion as a free agent pursuing her own destiny is subtly undercut in one scene, when she is brought to the verge of tears when her lawyer friend, in a matter-of-fact manner, refuses to accompany her to the States. Nonetheless, her enigma is reinstated by an inexplicable will to move on. Her mobility, though negotiated, is in direct contrast to the psychologically and physically crippled male characters who are always one step behind the game. Fang Fang, like Hollywood, is an object of (sexual) fantasy that ultimately flees their erotic gaze after robbing them of both money and pride. If, in Durian Durian, Yan represents the independent Mainland woman whose migration ends in a state of perpetual displacement in her own place, she and her south-bound friends also embody the shared predicaments of Hong Kong and China as ‘one country, two systems’. In Hollywood, Hong Kong, this linkage is weakened not simply by the absence of China in the film’s setting; more importantly, the figuration of the most formidable Mainland Other as an enigma and abstraction barely explained or ‘contained’ by the film narrative facilitates a reading of Fang Fang as a mutable and mutating force the frustrates any attempt by the male characters and by the film narrative to pin her down. This, perhaps, is why the film does not answer the questions it raises about its own heroine: who she is, where she comes from, what she is really after, and why Hollywood? The film stops short at suggesting what has become of her in Hollywood, whether her long journey from China to Hollywood via Hong Kong will have the same effect on her perspective on life and sense of identity, or whether there is a possibility of homecoming. At another level, the film does answer some questions about Hong Kong’s encounter with Fang Fang: all the leading male characters are left behind with psychological or physical wounds; even the truck driver, an innocent passer-by, loses his left hand out of sheer bad luck. In Hollywood, Hong Kong, the trial-and-error mode of experimenting with ‘one country, two systems’ gives way to a vision of the ex-colony as a way-station eventually abandoned as China furthers its global adventure, which in turn is decoded as a fantasy about elsewhere. With all its cynicism and black humour, the film has not negated hope completely. In Tiny we see a new way of inhabiting the schizophrenic space to negotiate the disjunctions of one’s social existence. He is the only local character who can bridge the distance between Tai Hom Village and Hollywood Plaza through innocent friendship. Such an easy

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‘solution’ to social and political chasms borders on idealism and oversimplification, but this idealism is also what Fruit Chan has been trying to come to terms with in his films.

Conclusion If, as Leo Lee remarks, ‘it takes the “other” to understand the self’ in the (post-)colonial city’s cinematic imagination of history,32 and if, prior to the political handover, ‘stories about Hong Kong always turned into stories about somewhere else’,33 in the four films discussed in this chapter, the predicament of ‘somewhere else’ and otherness prevalent in the cultural imagination of pre-1997 Hong Kong manifests itself in the figures of the migrant and the nomad, whose trajectories plot the ongoing negotiations between Hong Kong and China in the new realities of ‘one country, two systems’. In these films, the prostitute-as-migrant/nomad is both a metaphor for Hong Kong and China, or Hong Kong in China, and vice versa. In Golden Chicken, Kum as the embodiment of the ‘Hong Kong Spirit’ can be seen as a carnevalesque reversal of the logic of the colonial metaphor of the gendered Other, but at the same time the very conception of Kum as the ‘happy chicken’ also betrays the ambivalence of the returning elites towards their own narrative of ‘Hong Kong history’. The Mainland prostitutes in Fruit Chan’s films, on the other hand, revisit old stereotypes of the Mainland Other to explore the complex meanings and connotations of otherness in the configuration of Hong Kong/China imaginaries. While the migrants’ journeys query the efficacy of reunification as homecoming (in Durian Durian), they also project a rather bleak vision of both Hong Kong and China as the two societies are engrossed, and entwined, in their respective global dreams (Hollywood, Hong Kong). In Durian Durian, Hong Kong as China’s dream of the future is full of misgivings; in Hollywood, Hong Kong the ex-colony is further displaced into the margins of that dream, when Fang Fang takes off for the ‘real’ Hollywood, the abstract global space, leaving behind three crippled males in various forms of immobility. In Fruit Chan’s films, the China imaginary is dis-located into something like ‘Hong Kong’s cinematic imagination of China’s “Hong Kong imaginary” ’. In all four films, China is less a distant or estranged Other or the geopolitical power in the future (anterior) than a material presence interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. At the same time, through the figure of the prostitute (Mainland or local), Hong Kong’s otherness facilitates a self-reflexive interrogation of its historical becoming. These diverse cinematic journeys, after all, are united by a fleeting

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hope-in-despair: the self-assertion and optimism of Golden Chicken is self-consciously parodic and contrived, while Durian Durian and Hollywood, Hong Kong, by casting their heroines in a state of perpetual motion and homelessness, are sceptical of Hong Kong’s, and China’s, dreams of the future.

8 Outside the Nation: The Pan-Asian Trajectory of Applause Pictures

In the foregoing chapters I have examined the nuanced manifestations of the local and its continued negotiations with the national and the global in what I call the post-nostalgic imagination of Hong Kong films. This final chapter takes the present discussion further away from the geopolitical confines of the local and the national into the realm of regional flows and cross-cultural negotiations in what is now commonly known as pan-Asian cinema. It examines the way in which this mode of production has impacted on the form and content of Hong Kong films. Here nostalgia, memory, and local histories are seen through the broader context of intra- and inter-regional flows. Tracing the trajectory of Applause Pictures, a Hong Kong-based production company, I look at how the production of the local is implicated in the process of the transnationalization of cultural production, and how the China factor is being transformed in this very process. This chapter echoes Chapter 5, where I discuss Stephen Chow’s glocal strategies. While Chow’s repackaging of the local paves the way for internationalization, my discussion here puts a greater emphasis on the entwinement of modes of pan-Asian/transnational filmmaking and cultural imaginings arising from cross-border filmmaking.1 The globalization of Asian films through transnational co-productions and collaborations invites rethinking of the critical relevance of the local at a time when the local itself is endlessly being recycled into nostalgic ethnic commodities for global consumption.

Hong Kong/Asia/Hollywood: Applause Pictures Applause Pictures was founded by Hong Kong filmmakers Peter Chan Ho-sun, Teddy Chan, and Allan Fung Yi-ching in 2000, when Chan 184

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relocated his activities to Hong Kong after some short stints in the United States, where he directed the English language film, The Love Letter (1999) for Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKG. The idea of founding a ‘pan-Asian’ production company probably has its origin in Chan’s background: born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong, he took up film studies in the United States and returned to the territory to begin his filmmaking career in the early 1980s. Chan is well-known for his work in comedy and romance, having produced and directed local blockbusters such as Tom, Dick, and Harry/Feng chen san xia, He’s a Woman, She’s a Man/Jin zhi yu ye (1993) and its sequel, and the critically acclaimed Comrades: Almost a Love Story/Tian mi mi (1996), after which Chan began to launch his pan-Asian project through collaborations with regional partners in Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Singapore. Being a self-professed pan-Asian production company, the term ‘pan-Asian’ also reflects the founders’ vision of Asia as a regional platform connecting different centres of film production.2 Among the three founders, Peter Chan Hosun and Allan Fung Yi-ching have a long track-record of transnational filmmaking. Having studied, worked, and lived across Asia and North America, the filmmakers have the kind of cross-cultural exposure that helps situate their cinematic endeavours within a transcultural network. Over the years, Applause Pictures is among the most active companies in film collaborations in the region: based in Hong Kong with a network of operations and a pool of talent across East and Southeast Asia (South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Thailand), the company has also been cultivating partnerships in Mainland China (the China Film Group being the biggest player in the field, a conglomerate of former state-owned studios), whose increasing presence in the regional and the world markets continues to reshape the topos of transnational filmmaking. In 2005, the company formed a joint-venture, Morgan and Chan Films, with Hollywood’s Ruddy Morgan to further extend its international network. The above brief summary of the activities of Applause Pictures illuminates the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of pan-Asian filmmaking, which, to varying degrees, are common to most transnational operations, while the company’s ‘China connections’ sheds light on the historically and culturally specific conditions that help shape Applause Pictures as a pan-Asian Hong Kong enterprise. As Stephen Teo notes in his report on the recent ‘revival’ of Hong Kong cinema, co-productions with Mainland and Asian partners have helped rejuvenate the local film industry since 2000.3 The latest move of the company towards internationalization is evident of the increasing overlap between Asian cinema and Hollywood in the global mediascape. As a pan-Asian company based

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in Hong Kong, Applause Pictures embodies the interplay between more general conditions and context-specific elements within the field of pan-Asian filmmaking. After the implementation of CEPA and China’s accession to the WTO,4 many Hong Kong filmmakers and Hong Kongbased studios have stepped up their Mainland operations; at the same time, some have also started to make use of this ‘new China factor’ to reach out to audiences worldwide. The following discussion concerns two important aspects of Applause Pictures’ productions pertinent to my inquiry throughout this book: the use of nostalgia and memory as a resistance to or critique of the nostalgic impulse; and the changing form and content of the China factor in the cinematic imagination. Within this framework I will discuss the horror films Going Home/Hui jia (Peter Chan, 2002) and Dumplings/Jiaozi (Fruit Chan, 2004), both being a segment of the omnibus productions, Three/San geng and Three . . . Extremes/San geng 2, respectively, and two recent China-oriented productions, Perhaps Love/Ruguo ai (2005) and The Warlords/Toumingzhuang (2007). I will try to show how, and why, the China factor takes on different forms and meanings in these films, so that ‘China’ is better understood as a borrowed vocabulary interwoven into a cinematic text of multiple origins and inflections. The ultimate question, perhaps, is how these pan-Asian (Hong Kong) films negotiate with the more macroscopic reality of Hollywood’s increasing involvement in non-Western film industries.

Revisiting the China myth: Necrophilia and cannibalism in Going Home and Dumplings Horror films are among Applause Pictures’ earliest collaborative efforts carrying a pan-Asian label. It is also through these initial efforts that the company found new partnerships in Asia and, later, Hollywood.5 Since 1999, Applause has co-produced with its Asian partners a number of horror films. The best-known examples, to this day, are The Eye/Jian gui (Pang Brothers, 2002), which is rated much higher than its sequel, The Eye 2 (2004), and Three Extremes (2005), an omnibus project comprising three short films from Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, which is generally considered superior to its predecessor, Three (2003), a Thailand–Hong Kong–Korea co-production. Pieter Aquilia notes that horror and romance are ‘universally popular box office genres’ favoured by Asian co-productions with an eye on international markets.6 Indeed, the surge of interest in Japanese horror films since Ringu (1998) and its sequels across Asia has opened up new avenues for Asian horror

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worldwide. Little surprise, therefore, Applause would use horror as a launching board for its pan-Asian career. Generally speaking, Hong Kong horror is largely a domestic industry. Apart from the genre’s tendency to draw upon local ‘real life’ stories and ‘urban legends’ for maximum sensational appeal,7 most horror films suffer from shoestring budgets and short production cycles even by Hong Kong standards, a condition that greatly limits the potential of these films to appeal to non-local audiences who are unfamiliar with the local context, and those who are more attuned to ‘universal’ (Hollywoodstyle) plotlines and subject matter. Unlike its counterparts in Japan and Hollywood, where more established and sophisticated conventions and production modes allow certain horror films to cross over from B-movies to the realm of big-budget or art films with much greater international appeal (e.g. the works of David Cronenberg and Takeshi Miike), Hong Kong horror has largely remained a local phenomenon with a secondary export to Southeast Asia. Given the much more diversified audience profile and the need to accommodate a wider range of ‘local interests’ and expectations in the pan-Asian context, these domestic constraints have to be removed. My analysis below examines how some local factors are transformed or displaced in the making of Going Home and Dumplings, so much so that the remaining ones serve to reassert the films’ local-ness, a quality also favoured by the omnibus film form aimed to showcase ‘Asian horror’ bearing distinctive local flavours. Although the first omnibus horror, Three, was met with a mixed reception, the Hong Kong segment Going Home obtained a longer shelf life as the best of the three shorts. It was also director Peter Chan’s debut horror film. Chan took up the project when fellow director Samson Chiu left the team shortly after composing the story outline. Chan then reworked the script with co-writer Jojo Hui, changing two main characters’ background from Taiwan to Mainland China and restructuring the plotline to build a more complex human drama into the horror text.8 As a director famed for his romantic dramas and subtle treatment of social and personal relations, Chan was able to turn his first horror film into an engaging narrative whose gripping power relies not so much on the amount of ‘scare’ dosed out to the audience but on the gradual revelation of intricate psychological states against an atmospheric eeriness growing out of the circumstantial and existential crises of the main characters. All this, in the end, is tied to the film’s thematically revealing and ironic title words, ‘going home’. In a significant way, the strategic choice of setting (an evacuated ex-police dormitory) and Chan’s ability to blend elements of drama into more conventional codes of horror

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to dramatize the existential wasteland within effectively encode a local story in a universally accessible cinematic language, resulting in a film text amenable to culturally diverse modes of interpretation. This kind of hybrid film language is similar to what Jay McRoy sees in the horror films of Takashi Shimizu.9 These qualities are also found in Chan’s next omnibus project, Three . . . Extremes, for which he recruited Fruit Chan to shoot the Hong Kong segment. As has been mentioned in the previous chapters, Fruit Chan’s realist and socially committed style is more akin to the independent art film than any commercial genre, much less popular horror. Dumplings was not the first horror film directed by Fruit Chan, whose filmmaking career began in the commercial film industry: he was assistant director to a number of well-known figures including Kirk Wong, Alfred Cheung, Shu Kei, and Tony Au before he made his directorial debut, Finale in Blood/Da nao Guangchanglong (1993).10 As we shall see, in Dumplings the horrific is enriched by thematic leitmotifs characteristic of Fruit Chan’s social realist films, which can be seen as the result of the director’s hybrid cinematic heritage. Peter Chan’s casting of a director known for his independent arthouse films for the task gives credence to the project’s border-crossing mission in both geographical and generic terms. The other directors on the team are Thailand’s Nonzee Nimibitur (Nang Nak, Jan Dara, Three: The Wheel), Japan’s Takashi Miike (Audition, Visitor Q, Three . . . Extremes: Box), and Korea’s Kim Ji-woon (The Quiet Family, The Foul King, Three: Memories), and Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, My Lady Vengeance, Three . . . Extremes: Cut), all leading figures in Asia known for their artistically accomplished commercial films. Such an alignment of artistic talents suggests that the two projects, and indeed the new Asian horror film scene, are well-poised for competing with Hollywood’s ‘art-dread’ or ‘art horror’, which Cynthia Freeland uses to refer to ‘better films of dreadful horror’ in which ‘art-dread’ is provoked in the audiences ‘by making thoughts of vague yet evil threats take a form that seems plausible’. Instead of an over-reliance on gore and special effects, art-dread requires ‘a combination of effective narrative with other cinematic features’. In such films as The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, says Freeland, dread ‘involves an anticipated encounter with something “profound”— something particularly powerful, grave, and inexorable’.11 In both films, the encounter between Hong Kong and China is circumscribed within the uncanny and the dreadful, as the ‘profound’ and ‘inexorable’ disturb the normative boundaries of life/death, human/non-human, myth/science.

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Going Home I have argued that the China factor in Hong Kong’s cinematic imagination is anchored within the discourse of the Other (the prostitute and/as migrant) in post-1997 films such as Golden Chicken, Durian Durian and Hollywood, Hong Kong, in which colonial history and post-colonial reality are interlocked in the local imagination of China and Chineseness. Peter Chan’s Going Home provides yet another angle to look at the permutations of the China factor in Hong Kong cinema not so much as a failed romance but as an uncanny encounter. According to Chan, when he and co-writer Jojo Hui were rewriting the script based on another original story he came across in the United States, they changed the identity of the migrants from Taiwanese to Mainland-born Chinese and began to look for a suitable site for filming.12 This change reflects Chan’s conception of the nature of this encounter—between a Hong Kong cop and a Mainland suspect, between the human and the supernatural, between ‘myth’ and rationality—and its symbolic reworking of the familiar binaries of modernity and tradition, illusion and reality, scientific knowledge and superstition within the horror convention. The film incrementally escalates the tension between these binaries through an encounter between a Mainland-trained Chinese herbalist and a local police officer in a psychological tug-of-war that reveals the film’s skewed perspectives on China as a ghostly and uncanny presence. As the Hong Kong segment of a pan-Asian omnibus package, Going Home constructs its story using familiar elements of conventional horror: a haunted house, a ‘mad scientist’, new tenants caught up with supernatural phenomena, a child character as the medium to the supernatural, and finally the confrontation between two incompatible realms of knowledge and existence. Within these broad parameters, the film weaves in recognizably local elements—an evacuated police dormitory in an old neighbourhood, an old-style photography salon, a Mainland Chinese immigrant family, and traditional Chinese medicine—to contextualize the scene of the uncanny. In this respect, Going Home’s engagement with traditional Chinese medicine differs from the average Hong Kong horror film, which often uses local folk religions and shamanistic rituals to evoke and dispel good (or evil) spirits from the netherworld. In these films, the uncanny is largely an effect of the mystery and diabolic power associated with traditional rituals and shamanism, and the main action usually involves a lethal confrontation between two contending supernatural forces working through mortal human bodies. Going Home revisits this formula by replacing rituals and

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shamanism with Chinese medicine as both a symbolic and a material sign of the uncanny. Beginning with a father-and-son pair moving into an evacuated building in a run-down neighbourhood, the film soon turns our attention to the son’s encounter with a mysterious little girl who seems to live in the same compound. Using colour contrast (the girl’s bright-red jacket against an offcoloured matt green background tone) and point-of-view shots/reverse shots to reinforce the little girl’s hallucinatory presence, the film establishes at an early stage an eerie haunted house atmosphere. The narrative soon bifurcates into two parallel strands with the introduction of another central character, the Mainland-trained Chinese herbalist Yu (Leon Lai). Police officer Chan’s (Eric Tsang) point-of-view shot first reveals a dark figure slowly emerging from a shadowy doorway of the building before the camera closes in to show the face of Yu. Yu’s appearance is designed to arouse both fear and suspicion, but his mystique also carries a familiar trait. Dressed in a worn-out grey cotton suit, Yu slowly moves towards the camera (assuming the little boy’s point of view). As he moves closer, we see the details of his pale and expressionless face. His short, pushed back hair and black-rimmed glasses recall the stereotypical image of an educated man from Mainland China seen many times before in Hong Kong films and television programmes. His outsider status is reinforced by his reticence and aversion to social contact. As he walks past the new comers, the little girl re-appears, throws a glance at the little boy, and disappears with Yu into the far end of the corridor. This scene not only prefigures the bifurcation of the plot, but also the connection between the ghostly figure of the girl and the enigmatic Chinese herbalist Yu. Yu’s Mainland Chinese identity is spelled out more explicitly in the next scene, where he talks to his wife’s dead body in Mandarin while cutting her hair in a makeshift bathtub. The first half of the film alternates between scenes of the little boy’s encounters with the girl, and Yu’s daily ritual of making an elaborate Chinese herbal bath to clean his wife’s body. These intercutting scenes deepen the link between the little girl and Yu, suggesting that she might be his child, though the two never have verbal or eye contact. A turning point occurs when Cheung, the little boy, disappears one day, apparently having accepted the girl’s invitation to play with her. The search for his son brings Chan, the boy’s father, to a direct confrontation with Yu, who subsequently kidnaps Chan when his secret is discovered just three days prior to his wife’s anticipated revival. Here the psychological tug-of-war between the two men develops into a questioning of faith

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and fundamental values. Yu’s single-minded effort to resurrect his wife by means of traditional medicine is rooted in a fundamental belief in an alternative realm of knowledge outside of modern (Western) science. His convictions, however, are countered by the cynicism of Chan, who exploits Yu’s apparent insanity in order to free himself. The three-day countdown to the woman’s supposed revival thus turns into a battle of wills between the two characters. By pitting Yu’s psychotic Chinese herbalist against Chan’s small-time cop, the film steers away from the ghost story towards a psychological thriller where two incompatible belief systems and realms of experience collide head-on. While Chan’s detective logic seems to be gaining the upper hand most of the time in the debate, the film begins to soften its treatment of Yu at the same time. As he keeps talking and attending to his wife’s body the pulsating drumbeats at the background gives way to a stream of light piano music. Yu even uses acupuncture and traditional medicine to treat Chan’s asthma. The power dynamics between Yu and Chan are three-tiered: psychotic vs. victim; police officer vs. prime suspect; and doctor vs. patient. Here the antagonistic relations implied in this generic construction of the Self/Other work to destabilize perceived boundaries, as the two men begin to reveal their psychological wounds. While Chan uses his cynicism and worldly rhetoric to exploit Yu’s idealism and psychological vulnerability, Chan’s appearance and physical condition (an asthma patient being tied up and restrained to a small bathing basin) reverses the power position between the cop and the criminal to one of dependency. The inclusion of everyday routines such as cooking, eating, and casual chit-chat in this tension-driven drama raises the question, ‘who will win the argument?’ alongside ‘what will happen next?’ as we watch the drama unfold. It is also a question about what the film wants (us) to believe in. What, then, is the argument of the film? By first locating Chinese medicine within the uncanny through its connection with psychosis (i.e. Yu’s apparent necrophilic obsession with his wife’s corpse) and the supernatural, and then refocusing the narrative on a debate between illusion and reality, faith and disbelief, Chinese medicine and modern (Western) science, reason and superstition, the film admits doubt—not just in traditional medicine or the recuperative power of tradition but also in the transformative and redeeming power of faith in life.13 One is even prompted to ask, is the revival of the dead, whether as a person or buried memories, a form of necrophilia? Might the profusion of photographs of deceased persons further suggest that the nostalgic is susceptible to the perversity of necrophilia? By framing its own nostalgia

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within a ‘necrophilic’ text, the film distances itself from the nostalgic at the same time the dead (images) from the past is being invoked. Similarly, the encounter between Hong Kong and China symbolized by the cop and the herbalist in Going Home exhibits a dual tendency towards familiarity and estrangement, acceptance and resistance, identification and alienation. Towards the end, Yu and Chan’s growing sympathy for each other is short-circuited by the arrival of the police. On the day of his wife’s supposed revival, Yu is arrested by Chan’s colleagues, and is run over by a car when he tries to stop the police minivan from taking away his wife’s body. The film neither affirms nor disaffirms the miracle of resurrection by traditional medicine, but obliquely places it in Chan’s flashback and a videotape he retrieves from Yu’s apartment. The grainy video records episodes in which Hai’er (Yu’s wife) uses the same method to revive her husband six years ago. A brief scene in the mortuary shows Hai’er’s hand raise slightly, possibly implying that miracle might have happened. Since the rise of the corpse is contained by the pre-emptive framing of the videotape and the flashback, what actually happens to Hai’er in the end remains an open question. Chan’s flashback sequence and the brief shot of Hai’er’s hand raising situate the central myth of the film midway between belief and disbelief, an ambivalence well-suited to the uncanniness of the Hong Kong/China encounter this film tries to grapple with. As a horror film, the ending cannot completely disavow the uncanny or the possibility of the supernatural, which means scepticism and disbelief have to be channelled forth in a negotiated form through the framing and reframing of the uncanny within the subjective vision and memory of individual characters. This technique is used throughout the film, in the extensive use of mirror reflections, windows, doorframes, and point-of-view shots that mediate between illusion/hallucination and reality. This is consistent with the film’s beginning and ending shots, all set against the same photo salon that serves as the gateway to the spiritual world. Inside the salon a photographer takes photos of people in archaic fashion and hairstyles. The camera pans across similar portraits hung on the walls, and the same drenched green background is used to invoke an eerie feeling of déjà vu in the entire setting, whose artificiality communicates both nostalgia and a dream-like unreality. Following Cheung’s departure from the salon the camera cuts to a family photo of Yu, Hai’er, and the little girl. When Cheung looks back at the salon, his point-of-view shot reveals only the rusty gate of an abandoned premise. If the central myth of the film is caught between belief and disbelief, reality and illusion, through the photographer’s ‘supernatural’

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camera the ghost story is revived and given an ending of some sort. After all, the miracle of resurrection cannot be proved or disproved, but is preserved as an image in the photograph and the videotape through which Yu and Hai’er, the only two people who can testify to the miracle, confront us directly on-screen, albeit for the last time. Throughout the film, the camera repeatedly moves across windows, doors, corridor frames, mirrors, and old fading photos hung upon walls and interior surfaces. Despite the film’s scepticism towards tradition and the power of faith in changing reality, this repeated reference to photography, framing, and subjective vision and memory betrays a desire to document what has been lost in time and maintain a certain connection between past and present by invoking an image of the past. Peter Chan admits that his own nostalgic sentiment is behind the making of Going Home. The evacuated police dormitory and the old-fashioned photo salon, says Chan, were chosen as the primary setting for this reason. According to Chan, nostalgia runs through every film he has made, but in Going Home the nostalgic is closely associated with the sense of horror emitting from photographs of the deceased.14 The interplay between nostalgia and horror is evident in the frequent shots of old furniture pieces, stained mirrors, and black-and-white photographs in empty apartments. The absence of the contemporary urban landscape in the immediate surrounding multiplies the desolation and isolation of the characters.15 In Going Home, horror, inspired by and communicated through the nostalgic invocation of the ‘dead’ as an image, has to be understood at different levels. Apart from the interest in a ‘disappearing Hong Kong’ (c.f. Ann Hui and Fruit Chan), the film’s vision of the city-in-ruins is visualized by cinematographer Chris Doyle’s use of the non-bleaching effect,16 which works extremely well with the complex framing through mirror reflections to create a sense of flux, a quality that defines the experience of time and space in the film. A city in perpetual flux is perhaps the root of Peter Chan’s nostalgic horror in a double sense: the horror of disappearing into nothingness (death), and the horror of the dead coming back to life, either in the form of a ghost or the living dead. Yet, by shelving the possibility of the living dead inside layers of optical and cognitive frames, the film does not so much champion modern (western) science/rationality over superstition/traditional beliefs or vice versa as admit the difficulty of choosing between the two. These considerations lead to further questions about the relation between the city in flux and the desire to ‘go home’, which construes a nostalgic yearning for something better in the past, somewhere one has left behind in search of a better future that ironically

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beckons one to go home. This is a real journey as well as a hermeneutic one, similar to what we have seen in Durian Durian, and to some extent Hollywood, Hong Kong in Chapter 7. To Peter Chan, a returning émigré, ‘home’ has become a previous condition, part of one’s memory of belonging that one can no longer afford.17 This, too, is the nostalgic sentiment shared by the characters in Going Home, who are drifters in a city in drift. The cop and his son will have to move again in less than a month, and the Chinese doctor’s dream of ‘going home’ (China) comes true only as an ethereal image on an old photograph. In this light, the film ultimately subverts the binary relation between the migrant (believer) and the local (non-believer) by rendering them equally homeless. It further posits Yu, the migrant who wants to go home, as an active agent and a repertoire of memories, a far cry from Eric Tsang’s cop who cannot even speak about his past. As fellow drifters, Yu’s sense of homelessness is more grounded: he is a migrant in a hostile host city and an intellectual betrayed by his times, while the cop remains adrift in an existential homelessness from which he can never leave, hence, a nomad for whom permanence is only found in perpetual transit (c.f. Chapter 7). As a nonbeliever himself, Peter Chan has refrained from letting his characters go home in either sense, but insists on an indeterminacy that questions the very idea of home as either a previous state of being or simply a hand luggage one brings along in transit, an image that frames the father-andson duo at the beginning and end. Here the figures of the migrant and the nomad begin to overlap, for both the Chinese doctor and the cop do not and cannot leave their respective stasis of losing their homes. Thus, in Chan’s film, nostalgia for lost homes is circumscribed by the narrative and visual language, as if ‘home’ exists only in the perpetual flux of the present, just as the encounter with the past can only be grasped in the figure of the uncanny.

Dumplings More than coincidentally, the central myth of Fruit Chan’s contribution to Applause’s second omnibus project is, once again, a traditional medical treatment that promises eternal youth. This short film is also Fruit Chan’s second engagement with the issue of medicine as a life-giving practice. In an earlier film, Public Toilet/Renmin gongci (2001), Chan uses the intertwined stories of four pairs of characters from India, China, Hong Kong, and Korea to explore the meaning of healing, and the popular belief in alternative medicine rooted in Asian traditions. The story of these young globe-trotters on a mythical journey ends in a surrealistic

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scene that suggests both hope and the illusion of hope at the turn of the millennium. By comparison, Dumplings presents a much bleaker vision of the encounter with tradition: in a rundown public housing estate, a Mainland woman Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) operates a sinister business— serving fresh dumplings made of human foetuses, which she claims is a traditional recipe handed down from history. Her clients are well-to-do women who want to preserve or regain their youthful looks and sexual appeal. Her dumplings help save the marriage of Mrs Lee (played by teen idol Miriam Yeung), but when the Chinese ‘doctor’ goes into hiding after performing an illegal abortion causing death, Mrs Lee’s perverse desire for eternal youth turns her into a self-mutilating psychotic who attempts to abort her own child to obtain ‘raw material’ for the special dumplings.18 The film serves up a generous portion of repulsive images to magnify the horror of the characters’ perversity through close-up shot sequences in which Aunt Mei skilfully slice and dice her dubious ingredient—a pinkish, translucent meat mass—before turning them into ordinarylooking dumplings. A subplot involving the death of a teenage girl after an abortion at Aunt Mei’s magnifies the cruelty and inhumanity of the doctor’s practice. Unlike in Going Home, ‘traditional’ medical practice in Dumplings is endowed with diabolic qualities associated with Aunt Mei, an ex-surgeon from Mainland China. Always dressed in lowcut tops and skin-tight pants, Aunt Mei goes about her business in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact manner. Nonetheless, her interactions with female clients also reveal a deep-seated frustration and disillusionment with the sexist, chauvinistic social institution in which women are no more than men’s sexual spoils. As the film’s central diabolic force, Aunt Mei fits the bill of a femme fatale figure, a seductive, morally ambivalent and socially subversive Other. Her otherness is accentuated by a possibly deliberate disregard for social refinement and a facility for code-switching between Mandarin and Mandarin-inflected Cantonese. Throughout the film, the camera frequently refers the viewer to Aunt Mei’s photographs taken in China in the 1960s. Dressed in typical revolutionary costume, her youthful face in the photo looks similar to the supposedly much older woman in the present. These oblique references to socialist China and the Cultural Revolution encourage us to impute the allegorical meaning of ‘dumplings’, as a perpetuation of an inhuman and dehumanizing medical/political regime, and further locates the horror within the historical nightmare of China’s recent past. The femme fatale figure in this film as the locus of evil thus contrasts sharply with the more sympathetic and psychologically

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more complex portraits of the Mainland woman in Fruit Chan’s earlier films. Compared to the other two segments, Miike’s Box and Park’s Cut, which utilize more abstract settings and (especially for Park’s film) a self-reflective narrative to approximate a universal parable, Dumplings invests much more heavily in the local context by making direct associations between the horror text and the cultural and political alienation embedded in the Hong Kong/China encounter. Fruit Chan’s realist film style also accounts much for the characterization, choice of setting, and social criticism in the film, whose visual composition builds upon the sharp contrast between a lower class public housing neighbourhood (the site of Aunt Mei’s sinister operations) and luxurious upper class habitats. Similar to the disjunctive social space in Hollywood, Hong Kong, spatial configurations in Dumplings visualizes an exploitative capitalist economy that supports and perpetuates the cannibalistic trade in human flesh, its steady supply from China a vivid reminder of the equally horrific consequences of China’s one-child policy implemented since the 1980s. While this highly context-specific subtext of the film appeals mainly to the local viewer, the ‘local flavour’ thus evoked also helps to create a certain identity for Dumplings among the ‘three extremes’, an identity that resonates with the crisis consciousness underlying much of the Hong Kong (horror) cinema in the pre- and post-1997 years.19 As in Hollywood, Hong Kong and Durian Durian, the link between Hong Kong and China is precariously hung upon the traffic of illicit desire facilitated by cross-border traffic of cash and bodies. Like Zhou Xun’s character in the former film, Aunt Mei is yet another cross-border agent who successfully exploits the new socioeconomic realities. Her cannibalistic presence, which spreads like a contagious disease, eventually fractures the capitalistic order of class and gender and exposes the fissures within the ‘one country, two systems’ apparatus. Political meanings aside, the shamanistic female doctor also exhibits more general generic traits, reflecting Fruit Chan’s perception of his double mission to transpose his perennial ‘Hong Kong subject’ onto a pan-Asian horror text in which estrangement is obtained through playful engagement with conventional cinematic codes. In this connection, a quick reference to a similar tendency in contemporary Japanese horror films is useful. Jay McRoy’s study of Tanazaki Shimizu’s internationally successful horror films reveals the cultural hybridity at work in Shimizu’s films, which allows him to create a film text decodable at different levels of cultural awareness. McRoy’s reading of Shimizu’s films

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shows the entwinement of different stylistic, ideological, and cultural factors: the influence of Hollywood slasher films, an awareness of feminist sensitivities, and the incorporation of social and cultural themes more akin to the Japanese tradition.20 Indeed, McRoy’s observations are echoed in other critical studies of contemporary J-horror, in the sense that the exotic and heavily codified image of the Japanese supernatural, most often in the figure of the ‘avenging female spirit’, simultaneously articulates context-specific and universal fears in a post-industrial (if not ‘post-human’) world in which technology and science seem to have replaced the supernatural to become the new paradigm of horror.21 Another characteristic of this hybrid horror is the figuration of powerful females who invariably inflict vindictive violence on rather helpless male victims.22 In these films, very often the traditional system of values and the modern social order are seen to be disintegrating, and the vindictive female protagonists are destructive and self-liberating at the same time. In line with what Isabel Cristina Pinedo calls ‘postmodern horror’, postulated in these films is very often a radical indeterminacy of good and evil, while the conventional masculine heroism and middleclass professionalism are consistently undermined by the diabolic forces of a chaotic universe.23 At first glance, the female characters in Dumplings pale in comparison to their more blood-thirsty and destructive counterparts in J-horror, for both Aunt Mei and Mrs Lee seem to be subservient to the sexual power of Mr Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and the patriarchal order he represents. As the film progresses, however, the power dynamics between Mr Lee and the two women begin to change. After a sustained intake of Mei’s special dumplings, Mrs Lee is able to rekindle her husband’s sexual interest in her. When the couple finally makes love, Mr Lee works clumsily to undo the straps over his broken leg in cast in order to get on top of his wife, who looks calm, self-confident and playfully defiant throughout. The lovemaking scene tellingly suggests that Mrs Lee has transformed herself from a middle-aged housewife in despair into a seductress who takes control in the nuptial game. The nature of her transformation, though morally questionable, is visualized through a quick shot sequence in which she consumes the dumplings served by Aunt Mei. Edited in a continuous sequence, these temporally disjoined scenes, like fast-forwards, magnify Mrs Lee’s psychological degeneration into a cannibalistic monster in a highly condensed form. The camera uses close-ups at various angles and fade-ins to capture the subtle changes in her facial expression, from frantic repulsion to detached acceptance to vacant craving, all the while accompanied by a stream of

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light music and occasional diegetic sounds of chewing and bones cracking between her teeth. The consistently bright lighting and colourful background surrounding plays up the gap between form and content, that is, between the light-hearted casualness of serving dumplings and the cold-blooded cannibalism of the very act of their procurement and consumption. If these scenes vividly show a rapid process of dehumanization, the mise-en-scène and characterization suggest that this process has begun well before: the colourful and archaic setting of Aunt Mei’s apartment draws attention to the artificiality of Mrs Lee as a human being—constantly overdressed with heavy make-up, she looks reserved, lifeless, and rigid compared to Aunt Mei’s carefree casualness. Visually, her bright-coloured suits and brand-name handbags make her look like a doll among the numerous collectibles inside Aunt Mei’s crowded apartment. (This aspect of her character is underscored by Aunt Mei’s videotapes of old TV dramas, which show Mrs Lee in her heyday as a teenage idol.) Arguably, eating dumplings is a symbolic act through which Mrs Lee, a human doll, reawakens her darker self, demonic, bestial, yet complexly human at the same time. In a way, Mrs Lee is a victim of the male sexual regime, but her victimhood results in the radical intensification of her role as a doll, a pre-existing perversity that turns against itself and the hierarchy of sexual/social power that creates it in the first place. If Mrs Lee as a doll only succeeds in radicalizing the dehumanizing effect of patriarchy in the form of cannibalism, Aunt Mei embodies a more complex interplay of contradictory traits that amount to an unresolved puzzle. As a femme fatale figure, Aunt Mei is given the role of a ‘spokesperson’ for both traditional and modern values. Trained as a medical surgeon, Aunt Mei nonetheless is conversant with traditional healing recipes; she quotes from historical and literary texts to prove that cannibalism has been part of the Chinese cultural tradition since time immemorial. Throughout the film, Aunt Mei’s ‘voice’ has an overwhelming presence. Chanting and singing, her voice casts magical spells on her clients. On many occasions, Aunt Mei’s voice becomes a disembodied presence in scenes where she literally circles around her interlocutor as she speaks. Instead of using conventional shot/reverse shots to more solidly ground the characters in dialogue, the camera cuts between Aunt Mei’s dancing body and her interlocutor’s half-apprehensive, half-enchanted look, as if caught in the centre of a shamanistic ritual. Aunt Mei’s power, however, lies not only in the possession of traditional secrets to eternal youth, but also in certain ‘modern’ notions of individualism and sexual equality. Unbounded by conventional codes of morality (modern or traditional), Aunt Mei

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remains a professional woman who goes about her trade with full self-confidence. In Aunt Mei we see the combination of contrastive qualities—an unlicensed abortionist, a Western-trained surgeon, a practitioner of forbidden ancient crafts, and a cool-headed feminist preaching self-reliance and independence, and a sexually untamed femme fatale. Her trade perpetuates women’s submission to the male sexual regime but her life remains independent of men. In the film, Aunt Mei is the (only) one who lives both inside and outside the economy of desire in which all other characters are trapped. (Her brief affair with Mr Lee only testifies to the diminished male authority of the only male character in the film, as he, too, has degenerated into a sex object and prey to both his wife and Aunt Mei.) As a morally disturbing and socially ambivalent character, Aunt Mei embodies the subversive force that disrupts the social and natural order of life and death, mortality and immortality, a subversiveness very much in line with both Western and non-Western codes of cinematic horror.24 In the figure of Aunt Mei, Fruit Chan has created his own version of the hybrid Other, in the sense that context-specific elements of horror are articulated through a universally decodable language of ‘cinematic horror’, a practice that has gained increasing popularity in the making and marketing of ‘Asian horror’ as a new regional genre. Surprisingly, the film’s apparent affinity to Going Home in subject matter and narrative structure yields a very different vision of the Hong Kong/China encounter. In Going Home nostalgia, while negatively compared to necrophilia, points towards a shared predicament of loss and homelessness. In Dumplings, tradition (China), also negatively equated with cannibalism, is articulated through Aunt Mei’s disembodied incantations that ensnare her victims. Her frequent references to modern and classical texts strike a chord with a distant literary precedent, Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1917), in which the revered literary master lashes out at an equally corrupt and (in the Madman’s view) cannibalistic cultural tradition. In Lu Xun’s text, too, children are the most vulnerable victims to the ‘man-eating’ banquets of a world falling apart. As in postmodern Western horror, the film’s ending does not offer catharsis or resolution in the conventional sense. The shorter 30-minute version ends with Mrs Lee trying to abort her own baby in a bathtub using a cloth hanger, while the extended 90-minute version shows her eating the dumplings made of the aborted foetus of her husband’s mistress. It seems that Fruit Chan’s first horror project has packed in a century’s worth of cultural criticism that nonetheless finds expression in a cinematic language that yields double, if not hybrid, pleasures.

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Staging China beyond China: Perhaps Love and The Warlords Perhaps Love and The Warlords are two recent projects of Applause helmed by Peter Chan himself with a view to making a presence in the Western mainstream markets, where Chinese-language productions, especially wuxia and action, have received enthusiastic reception. This global ambition brought the production crews to Mainland China, which provided the location and manpower of production and the historical setting of the films. Packaged as big-budget high-concept productions, Perhaps Love is a star-studded musical, if not technically the ‘first Chinese musical’, while The Warlords toes the line of the Chinese historical war epic. My discussion below attempts to account for the relative success (and failure) of the films in delivering the desired results of Applause’s global ambitions and to evaluate the use of ‘China’ in the films alongside ‘foreign’ generic modes. Taken together, the horror films discussed above and the two films in question here represent two important facets of Applause Pictures as a Hong Kong-based pan-Asian production company with global ambitions. Seen from this perspective, we can glimpse at the increasingly complex territory of pan-Asian filmmaking, a field that possibly fits better with what Roland Robertson calls the ‘glocal’ in conceptualizing the mutual and simultaneous entwinement of the global and the local, hence the production and reproduction of locality through the processes of homogenization and heterogenization.25 Perhaps Love and The Warlords are the first major efforts of Applause to approximate the Hollywood ‘high concept’ film model. Forming a partnership with the Hollywood-based Ruddy Morgan has had an important impact on the form and content of the films. Modelling after the highconcept film, both Perhaps Love and The Warlords carry traits of the global blockbuster, which turned out to be the reason for the uneven reception among Asian and Western audiences. While Perhaps Love was generally well-received in Asia, bringing home both handsome revenue and numerous film awards in 2006,26 it was given a lukewarm greeting among Western critics and audiences. This could well have been a surprise to Chan, whose success with pan-Asian horror somehow did not translate well into making a Hollywood-style musical with pan-Asian elements. Contrarily, The Warlords (2007), an historical costume drama and war epic revisiting the classic themes of loyalty, fidelity, and brotherhood, was considered Chan’s ‘comeback’ film,27 and so far the film is making good rounds at international film festivals worldwide.28 Yet,

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viewers’ comments in Asia are not unequivocally enthusiastic. Some online reviews have shown dissatisfaction with the film’s recycling of clichés seen many times over, East and West.29 Nonetheless, with the backing of Hollywood production management, both films generally are credited for their technical accomplishments and production values, and slighted for the weak plot and character development. The uneven audience reception throws light on the dilemmas of panAsian filmmaking entering realm of the ‘glocal’—as a cultural product born out of the dialogue between Hollywood as a global entertainment giant and China as cultural capital in the production of the local in the context of the global. This differential reception across geographical and cultural zones can be understood in terms of the two films’ strategy of inter- and intra-cultural borrowing, that is, how visual acculturation, or culturally embedded viewing conventions and expectations, works in the encoding and decoding of the films. This process, in the case of pan-Asian films aimed for the mainstream global markets, is a variation of the mechanism that Wang and Yeh calls ‘deculturalization, aculturalization, and reculturalization’ in transnational filmmaking.30 When comparing the two different modes of transnational filmmaking exemplified by global blockbusters Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragons, Wang and Yeh argue that though the mechanism of deculturalization, aculturalization, and reculturalization is present in both films, due to the differences in the conceptualization, market positioning, and more importantly the presence/absence of a sense of cultural mission, the two films belong to two different modes of transnational filmmaking. In brief, the aforementioned mechanism describes the process through which an ‘ethnic’ source text is adapted into a global cultural product. In order to appeal to audiences in different cultural contexts, the source text has to be deculturalized (toning down or eliminating ‘difficult’ or ‘unpopular’ local elements), aculturalized (foregrounding ‘universal’ themes and images), and reculturalized (re-introducing culturally specific messages, either from the source culture or from the culture of the filmmaker, or both). At one level, this mechanism can be found in the two Applause films, in the sense that the source text, Western or Chinese, undergoes transformations similar to the transnational models. At a more subtle level, however, the differential reception across different cultural and linguistic zones throws light on the variety of spectatorial participation in the construction of meaning in media consumption. The rest of this chapter examines these two aspects of Perhaps Love and The Warlords: the extent to which these productions conform to the mechanism of transnational filmmaking, and the factors

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behind the differential reception of the two Applause films born of the same ‘parents’ and the same entrepreneurial vision/mission to tap into the international market with a pan-Asian label. A glance at online reviews and viewers’ comments shows that Perhaps Love was a big hit in Asia in 2005. Starring some of the best-loved idols from Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Korea (Jacky Cheung, Zhou Xun, Takashi Kaneshiro, and Ji Jun-hee) and filmed primarily in a studio replica of 1930s Shanghai with occasional flashbacks to 1980s Beijing, the film also boasts being the first Hollywood-style ‘Chinese’ musical.31 The high-concept packaging and star power guaranteed a mass following in Asia, and director Peter Chan’s adept hands in handling romance adds beauty to the glossy images and alluring melodies that account much for the film’s grip on audiences relatively less acculturated to the Western genre. This, however, does not mean Asian viewers know nothing about such classics as The West Side Story, Moulin Rouge and Chicago, only that they have different expectations of a Chinese musical. As a commercial film, Perhaps Love offers a sumptuous feast of romantic love, fantasy, beautiful faces, glittery costume, and extravagant set design, all packed within a self-referential film-within-the-film narrative to evoke the nostalgic ambience of ‘old Shanghai’ as an intersection between fantasy and reality, past and present, hope and disillusionment. All these technical details make up the nostalgic dreamland of the filmic universe, and make up for the rather lack luster characterization and plot development. The narrative is structured around a love triangle between Mainland actress Sun Na (Zhou Xun) and her two lovers, Mainland film director Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung) and Hong Kong pop star Lin Jiandong (Takashi Kaneshiro), which is re-enacted by the three in Nie’s film. The making of Nie’s film, thus, overlaps with the making of Chan’s film, and also the filmic narration of past and present. This self-referential dimension is reinforced by the character of the Muse played by Korean pop star Ji Jun-hee, who announces the beginning and the end of the characters’ journey through memory lane. As a musical, all the songs are rendered in Mandarin Chinese, which effectively puts a Western viewer at a disadvantage in comprehending the lyrics that make up a significant part of the script. But language alone is not the major hurdle to the film’s appreciation by non-Chinesespeaking audiences. The biggest drawback of the film, as some reviewers lament, is that it does not measure up to the established benchmark for Western musicals, not quite due to flaws in plot and characterization but the musical score, that is, the soul and substance of the musical.32 Adding to this complaint is the general perception that Perhaps Love

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looks too much like a poor cousin of its obvious inspiration, Moulin Rouge, which also blends in romance, comedy, and tragedy, and experiments with cultural code-mixing by incorporating Indian dance from its ‘Bollywood’ counterparts.33 Perhaps Love, to its merit, does utilize well the talent of reputed choreographer Farah Khan (Monsoon Wedding [2001], Main Hoon Na [2004]) to perfect its musical numbers, mixing hiphop, jazz, modern dance, and traditional Indian dance. However, in so doing the narrative falls victim to the spectacular choreography, whose visual charm outperforms the narrative and sometimes compromises the structural coherence and emotional tone of the main action. According to Chan, the idea of using Indian dance stems from an appreciation of the charm of Bollywood musicals and the genre’s aesthetics,34 but this also says much about the ‘foreigness’ of the genre to the local (Hong Kong Chinese) film tradition, the need to replicate pre-existing forms, and the resulting ‘look-alike-ness’ of the Hong Kong film and the Hollywood prototype. The issue raised here is not whether a Hong Kong film should (not) model after Hollywood productions, for which Hong Kong films are notoriously famous, but what factors may account for the film’s uneven reception among Asian and Western audiences. Curiously, plot and character weaknesses are also present in The Warlords, but the latter film is much better received in the West, while viewers nearer home tend to express a mild fatigue over the all-too-familiar war film aesthetic.35 My concern here is not whether a pan-Asian film such as Perhaps Love should be measured by the yardstick of Hollywood, but the specific manifestations of transnational filmmaking mechanism. I hope to account for the reasons why, unlike the more successful predecessors that seemed to have inspired Applause’s very first global endeavour, the film’s success remains largely within the pan-Asian audience zone. Here Wang and Yeh’s model of transnational filmmaking is also present, but with a difference. As an ‘Asian’ version of the Western musical, the film’s conception bespeaks a desire to ‘deculturalize’ not a specific source text (as in Mulan and Crouching Tiger), but a well-tested and well-developed generic mode from the West, and ‘reculturalize’ it through a ‘local’ love story spanning the years of China’s own romance with the market economy. The star power of the pan-Asian cast further provides the film with a generalized ‘ethnic identity’ in this process. Yet, the film’s choice of a generic borrowing, instead of a textual one, imposed technical limits on the extent to which the musical—a genre with clearly defined and culturally entrenched codes—can actually be deculturalized and aculturalized, and the film’s effort is not helped by changing the setting

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to a studio replica of 1930s Shanghai, where the film-within-the-film re-stages a real-life love story in the form of a circus performance to remind us of some firmly ‘culturalized’ backdrop of Western musicals mixing baroque, colonial, gipsy, and Oriental motifs. These technical constraints cannot be separated from the process of reception in film viewing, that is, the way in which certain texts and images are decoded according to culturally embedded norms as mentioned above. Even though the rather banal and over-sentimentalized love-triangle belongs to a commercial formula well-tested in mass cultural markets around the world, this formula adds little novelty, hence much less transformative power, to the musical as a meta-text. All this points to the central dilemma of the film: on the one hand, it attempts to expand and re-define its pan-Asian endeavours by adapting a ‘native’ Western genre for native or near-native Western audiences; on the other hand, its also strives to maintain its Asian identity—partly for the international niche market and partly for the Asian markets—in order to differentiate itself from a Hollywood production. As a result, what remains of the more ‘sophisticated’ cultural content is, it seems, the nostalgia for Shanghai as the embodiment of Chinese modernity since the early decades of the twentieth century. The stark contrast between ‘fiction’ (Shanghai, a film studio filled with glamorous nostalgic artefacts) and ‘reality’ (Beijing, a drab, frozen landscape of misery, betrayal, and unrequited love) alludes to this nostalgic sentiment, thanks to the cinematography of Peter Pao (Shanghai) and Chris Doyle (Beijing), who effectively capture the mood and atmosphere of the two cities in two different historical periods in visually expressive imagery. Memory, again, filters through video playbacks, and artifice and past experience overlap, as Beijing in the 1980s frequently pops up on-screen to disturb the equilibrium of the present. In the film, these temporal shifts are accompanied by a sound track of Mandarin pop songs lamenting separation and the passage of time from the period, notably the Taiwanese singer Qi Qin’s ‘Long Time Ago’. As such, the film’s reculturalization of a foreign genre speaks volumes about its nostalgic appeal to Chinese audiences, but to those outside this cultural sphere it is less relevant than the more conventional elements expected of a musical. Given the film’s conscious attempt to adopt certain transnational ‘formulas’, these formulas also produce an uneven reception due to differences in acculturated norms of cross-cultural decoding. Another dimension of visual acculturation is related to Iwabuchi’s notion of coevalness in the experience of modernity. Iwabuchi’s empirical study shows that the perception of coevalness differs between Taiwan

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and Japan in the two society’s consumption of each other’s cultural products. Taiwanese audiences tend to see themselves as ‘equals’ to the Japanese in the progress of modernity, while the Japanese tend to see themselves as more advanced.36 This applies, too, to Perhaps Love. On the one hand, Asian audiences receive the film as a contemporary piece of filmmaking and a symbol of modernity that Asia now champions on the international scene. On the other hand, to viewers in the West what is novel and modern about this film feels like passé and all-toofamiliar to what the West has already achieved, if not surpassed. This unevenness in the perception of modernity echoes Appadurai’s observation of the ‘nostalgia for the present’ in Filipino virtuosos of American pop music, that is, one’s past is the other’s present, and one’s present is the other’s future.37 This disjuncture is manifested in a slightly different form in The Warlords, to which I now turn. In addition to the action film, historical epic and martial arts film have long been the best-known Chinese-language film genres around the world, and The Warlords is just a relatively latecomer to a long lineup of exemplary predecessors. Yet, as a big-budget historical epic it is also the first film in this category directed by a Hong Kong director and produced by Chan’s newly formed joint-venture, Chan and Morgan. Set in nineteenth-century China, a war-torn country ruled by the corrupt bureaucracy of the Qing dynasty, the film utilizes the star power of Jet Li, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Andy Lau, all top-ranking stars in Asia. While Jet Li, a Mainland-born and -trained national martial arts champion, took off from Hong Kong kung fu films to become an international action star, Andy Lau, a former TV idol, has topped the charts of the most beloved actor/singer in the Greater China and Southeast Asia regions for over a decade, and Takeshi Kaneshiro, of Chinese and Japanese descent, is known for his roles in transnational Chineselanguage films by Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels) and Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers). While Lau and Kaneshiro underwrite much of the teenage and young adult market, Jet Li appeals to a more differentiated audience worldwide. But star power alone does not fully account for the different patterns of audience reception of Perhaps Love and The Warlords, since the praises and criticisms in review columns show a greater concern over the latter film’s ‘originality’ as Chinese-language war film, noting its obvious resemblances to Hollywood films in this category (300, Brave Heart). Apparently, The Warlords suffers a predicament similar to Perhaps Love; yet, this time the praises mainly come from the West, while Asian (mainly ethnic Chinese) audiences show a mixed response to the film’s treatment of theme, character,

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and visual representation. For example, while reviews in major cinema websites in the United States generally appreciate the complex drama of loyalty and betrayal and the refreshingly creative casting of Jet Li as a morally ambiguous military strategist and politician,38 online discussions among non-Western audiences see loyalty and brotherhood as clichés; one viewer jokingly re-titles the film as 800 for its overt borrowing from the recent Hollywood blockbuster, 300.39 Here I must confess to the same cultural ‘self-positioning’ as a Chinese movie-goer. While watching the film at a theatre in Hong Kong I could not help but marvel at how much the film resembles 300 in mise-en-scène, combat choreography (e.g. the close-distance shots of mutilation and mass killings), colour tone (sepia blue and sometimes drab), and the foregrounding of conventional themes such as the loss of innocence and the struggle of men against an inhuman political institution as they confront their own inner devils. The reduction of the role of Lian (Xu Jinglei), the only female character, to a sex object of two men, hence a threat to the male bonding to be eliminated, further aligns the film with the masculinist values of mainstream Hollywood war movies. A noteworthy anecdote on the film’s original title, ‘Blood Brothers’, may help situate the film’s masculinist lineage in a transnational context: Peter Chan reputedly changed the title to The Warlords to avoid a potential confusion with a 1973 film, Blood Brothers/Ci ma by veteran martial arts director, Zhang Che (Chang Che). This earlier film, based on an actual historical incident involving the assassination of a Qing official, features a similar plot line and character set. Remarking on a general under-valuation of Zhang’s legacy, David Desser (2005) notes that Zhang was instrumental in popularizing the ‘yanggang’ (masculinist) aesthetic in the martial arts genre, eventually replacing the more feminine-oriented films represented by King Hu, whose legacy, he argues, has been overstated.40 Zhang’s valourization of male action stars, Desser notes, ‘was in keeping with the triumphs of male stars in the increasingly dominant Hollywood cinema. This turn to male stars by Hong Kong cinema is one of the reasons it could, and did, make its presence felt on international screens.’41 The film also makes for an easy exercise in feminist and post-colonial critique, in a similar way that Zhang Yimou is criticized for projecting an image of a backward and corrupt China for the pleasure of the West’s Orientalizing gaze.42 Ironically, in this latter observation one finds clues to the greater success of The Warlords in Western markets. The film tells the story of three sworn brothers, General Pang Qingyun (Jet Li), Zhao Erhu (Andy Lau), and Jiang Wuyang (Takashi Kaneshiro) during the Taiping Rebellion

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in the eighteenth-century China. After a major military defeat in the hands of the rebel army, Pang temporarily takes refuge under the bandit leader Zhao Erhu and his protégé, Jiang Wuyang. Claiming a vision of restoring peace and order to the war-torn nation, Pang persuades Zhao to join the military. Political intrigues and back-door machinations by senior court officials soon turn the heroic drama into a bleak tale of moral conflicts and betrayals. Zhao is alienated from Pang when the latter breaks his promise not to exterminate the already disarmed Taiping soldiers, while Jiang is caught between respect and disappointment after discovering Pang’s affair with Zhao’s wife, Lian (Xu Jinglei). The moral/sexual/ideological conflicts among the brothers result in the death of all the four main characters—Jiang, the youngest of the three, kills Lian to clean up the house for the much-wronged Zhao, and sets out to kill Pang, who already has Zhao assassinated. An ironic twist occurs at the end. In deterring Jiang’s attacks Pang is shot by snappers at the back before being stabbed by Jiang. Agonized and probably seeking his own death, Jiang admits to killing Pang as he cries out loud to heaven. The film’s centre of gravity is Pang, whose real motive in sacrificing the lives of innocents remains unclear. This echoes the ambiguity in the portrayal of the tyrant King of Qin in Zhang Yimou’s Hero, whose moral claim of bringing peace to all under Heaven remains questionable. Visually, The Warlords eschews the spectacular swordplay of Zhang’s film, sustaining throughout a bleak and gritty imagery of desperate killings in the battlefield. Aided by a persistent sepia blue colour tone, the closedistance shots of mutilation and disfigurement magnify the shock and trauma of those who perform and witness the killing. The bleak imagery also underscores the ambivalence of Pang’s rhetoric of peace. The action choreography, cinematography, and colour of the film strongly recall the Hollywood epic 300, in which 300 courageous Spartans fight an allpowerful Persian army and perish eventually due to an insider’s betrayal. In 300, scenes of men in combat put great emphasis on the warrior spirit in face of mass annihilation. In The Warlords, the soldiers are portrayed as trained fighters, loyal followers of a charismatic leader, and finally desperate men clinging to the last chance of survival. The film’s nuanced borrowing from 300 and the Zhang Yimou-style war epic (which itself is a hybrid of both Chinese and Western visual codes) reveals the way in which the mechanism of transnational filmmaking operate. First of all, the ‘native’ text is being deculturalized as traditional values of brotherhood and loyalty are reframed by the Realpolitik of Pang; it is then aculturalized to obtain a kind of ‘universal’ relevance, in visual style and in the re-alignment of the traditional Chinese hero with the Western

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warrior. This is assisted by the foregrounding of Jet Li’s sexuality through his affair with Lian, a far cry from the kung fu superstar’s customary screen persona (usually a chaste, if not sexually inert, martial arts hero). The hero’s moral ambivalence, moreover, contravenes the conventional martial arts prototype that Jet Li has come to personify. Finally, the film is reculturalized as a ‘Chinese’ war epic, with a specific historical setting and the usual etiquettes of antiquated, evil-looking court elders, vistas of the Chinese ‘outback’, and the oath of ‘tou ming zhuang’ (the oath that bond the brothers by blood) vocalized at critical points of the drama. Both Perhaps Love and The Warlords signal a departure from Applause’s pan-Asian schema as these films are made and packaged as pan-Asian films catering to a growing international demand for Asian films. Using Wang and Yeh’s model of transnational filmmaking, we have glimpsed at the disjunctive patterns of inter-cultural code-mixing in the production of transnational films. Here acculturation in film decoding has played a role in the differential reception of the two films, and is further complicated by an ideology of what makes a film ‘Chinese’ in different contexts of viewing, and how ‘China’ is encoded and decoded as a cultural imaginary, being either Self or Other. Each film projects a certain image of China (1930s Shanghai or eighteenth-century China) through a carefully designed and hybridized visual medium to enhance its international appeal. Each represents a case in which a pan-Asian film uses China as a stage to enact an inter-cultural performance, hence as a ‘window’ to the world. While Peter Chan is not the first film director to have treaded this path, the irony inherent in Hong Kong’s China imaginary, and in China’s policy towards Hong Kong, cannot be missed. Historically, China has used Hong Kong as a window to the world ever since the imposition of an international trade embargo on the People’s Republic during the Cold War era. In terms of more recent politics, the continued prosperity and stability of the newly founded HKSAR is China’s biggest diplomatic show to the international community, especially to the United States and Taiwan. On the other hand, Hong Kong’s film culture, and by extension the popular imagination, has produced its own images of China that reflect the changing dynamics between the (post-)colonial city and the nation over time. While both inside and outside China, its exotic, antiquated image is utilized as cultural capital for transnational filmmaking, Peter Chan’s film encapsulates the promises and compromises of translating this Hong Kong–China imaginary into a global cinematic spectacle. Perhaps Love’s critical and popular success in Asia and its less fortunate fate among non-Asian audiences reveal the

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latent tension between the pan-Asian and the transnational modes of filmmaking, but in The Warlords one sees the inevitable repetition of the same mechanism that has helped Zhang and other Mainland directors to cut out a niche in the international arena.

Conclusion The trajectory of Applause Pictures as a Hong Kong-based pan-Asian film production company sheds critical light on the permutations of the cinematic imagination of the local in the context of transnational filmmaking. In examining the two pan-Asian horror films and Peter Chan’s own recent explorations (back) into the ‘Mainland Proper’, I have tried to trace the ‘afterlife’ of the nostalgic in the pan-Asian film scene. I have noted two possible forms in which cinematic nostalgia and the imagination of the local may take in this particular context: first, the production of locality within globality (the creation of the local for global consumption), as in Perhaps Love and The Warlords; and second, a form of locality as ‘the result of the dynamics of the production and reproduction of difference’43 through which specific cultural and social conditions are articulated in a hybridized cinematic form, as in Going Home and Dumplings. In the case of Perhaps Love and The Warlords, big budgets and a Hollywood-style production rationale allow for a much more expensive cast, higher production values, and a much wider global exposure. However, conforming to the transnational mode also imposes constraints on the imagination of the local, which always tends to be filtered through established norms, or acculturated modes of decoding non-Western ‘ethnic’ texts, in order to access the Hollywood mainstream. The unsuccessful attempt of Perhaps Love to ‘go global’ does not disprove this theory; it only reveals that the mechanism of transnational filmmaking—deculturalization, aculturization, and reculturalization—works best unidirectionally. Insofar as the ‘local’ source text subject to cross-cultural transmogrification comes from a non-Western ethnic(-ized) Other culture, as in Mulan, Hero, and Crouching Tiger, but not the other way round, which is to say, you cannot yet beat ‘them’ at their own game. This explains why The Warlords has fared much better in the international arena, being a different type of universal hybrid dressed in an ethnic Chinese costume. Its conscious borrowing from both Western and Chinese sources in creating a cinematic spectacle of war, violence, sexual intrigues, and male bonding speaks well to audiences well-tuned to these universalized or ‘Hollywoodized’ codes. Unlike Perhaps Love, it does not seek to

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deculturalize or aculturalize a particular Hollywood ‘master text’, but merely reproduces its own differences in a non-challenging, hybridized cinematic vocabulary encoded in/as an ‘ethnic’ text. On the other end of the spectrum, the two horror films were made on much smaller budgets with a less ambitious agenda. Like other popular horror films from Asia, these films demonstrate an awareness of grounding local specificities within a cinematic language that can speak across cultural borders. This is not to say that the ‘local’ must be contained within the ‘universal’, or tamed by it, in order to legitimize itself in the international scene. The cross-fertilization of visual and cultural elements from various sources, as in the case of Takashi Shimizu and other Asian directors, reflects the realities of contemporary cultural life and therefore constitutes the very foundation for cross-cultural productions and interpretations. The horror films show precisely how local memories, nostalgia, and the geopolitics of Hong Kong’s post-colonial condition can find expression in a ‘universal’ cinematic medium, albeit a more modest one that does not escalate the local to epic (national) proportions. Peter Chan’s trajectory in Asia and ‘the world’ seems to have bifurcated with the production of the first two transnational spectacles. With Chan’s active involvement with Hollywood, Applause Pictures testifies to the historical role of Hong Kong as an in-between entity at the crossroads of China and the West. Even though the future for sustaining this intermediary position may no longer be the top-most priority of the company’s global agenda, its effort in the last decade or so has opened an avenue for rethinking the interconnections between the local, the global, and the national in Hong Kong’s cinematic discourse, not as opposing forces but interwined ‘imaginary geographies’ caught in a process of mutual displacement, translation, and transformation.

The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative

As Hong Kong has entered the second decade of Chinese rule, Hong Kong filmmakers are gearing up for a further opening up of the Mainland film industry to joint-ventured projects. The latest policy directives under CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Agreement) include further liberalization measures that exempt Hong Kong-made Chinese-language films from the import quota applied to foreign films. Under CEPA III, the Cantonese version of motion pictures co-produced by Hong Kong and Mainland companies can be screened in Guangdong after obtaining official approval, and the ratio of Hong Kong investment and personnel in Hong Kong–China co-productions has been reduced from 75 to 50% to enjoy quota-free distribution.1 Paralleling the pre-handover ‘brain drain’ of local talents to Hollywood, new political and economic realities have prompted more and more Hong Kong filmmakers to move their bases to Mainland China. The post-CEPA years have witnessed more and more Mainland-content films: Johnnie To, a director known for his commitment to making ‘Hong Kong films’ for the local audience, released his first Mandarin film, Linger/Hudie fei, in 2008 as a first step to tap into the Mainland market. Ann Hui’s The Postmodern Life of My Aunt/Yima de houxiandai shenghuo (2006), based on a same-titled novel by a Mainland writer and starring Mainland actress Siqin Gaowa and Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-fat, was a festival and arthouse favourite in the region. The critical success of this film is also a vindication of Hui’s previous Mainland-commissioned project, Jade Goddess of Mercy/Yu guanyin (2003). These films, among others, signal a deepening of the Hong Kong–China connection, previously dominated by popular genres and commercial films. A decade after the handover, it seems, a reverse migration has occurred, as more and more returnees from the West hop on the co-production bandwagon. Among these is John Woo, 211

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whose Red Cliff/Chi bi (2008) marked the Hong Kong action auteur’s return to Chinese-language filmmaking after a 15-year hiatus. At the time of writing, the second part this big-budget historical epic has been slated for release in 2009.2 The accelerated pace of economic integration in the Greater China region between Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan has brought a new species into being, the so-called pan-Chinese films, most of which are contemporary renditions of wuxia and historical epic. The success of Ang Li’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragons has prompted Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers and Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2006). Among Hong Kong’s contributions in this category are A Battle of Wits/Mo gong (Jacob Cheung Chi-leung, 2006), and Painted Face/Huapi (Gordon Chan Ka-seung, 2008). If the 1980s and 1990s were the decades of the global expansion of Chinese cinema, pan-Chinese films are well poised to be the ‘second wave’ of this phenomenon, complementing pan-Asian cinema of which Hong Kong is among the region’s key players. It is not an unwelcome phenomenon either, as the new alignments in production and marketing networks are breathing new life into the domestic industry in Taiwan.3 As far as the Hong Kong film industry is concerned, History repeats itself: the future, once again, is to be sought elsewhere. As ‘Chinese cinema’ gives way to ‘Chinese cinemas’, Hong Kong cinema aptly reflects this plurality, since it has always been at the intersection of contesting sociopolitical and economic forces. Likewise, the above digression into some of these forces is meant to situate the final pages of this manuscript in the midway of a still unfolding narrative. As mentioned in the ‘Introduction’, the subject of this study is the changing mode of Hong Kong’s cinematic imagination in the post-handover era, or what I have called the ‘post-nostalgic’ imagination. It has its roots in the recurrent themes of nostalgia, memory, and the search for local histories that characterize much of Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s. I have used the term ‘post-nostalgic’ as a corrective to the Neo-Marxist criticism of nostalgia in Western societies, which in Jameson’s view is a symptom of postmodernist culture or late capitalism. This view recently has been challenged by scholars writing on nostalgia films, or nostalgia in film. These later writings favour a critical re-appraisal of nostalgia by way of context-specific analyses. The argument I have pursued here has drawn upon this literature—Vera Dika’s re-appraisal of American nostalgia films, Ingeborg Hoesterey’s study on the relation between pastiche and historical knowledge, and closer to home critiques of cinematic nostalgia in Hong Kong cinema by Rey Chow, Linda Lai, and Natalia Chan, among others. Whether on Western or Hong Kong cinema, these critical

The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative

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studies have revealed that nostalgia is not just a symptom of opportunistic recycling of past codes and images in a consumerist society, but is potentially a medium for critical re-engagement with the past through the imagination. This line of thinking is also present in broader theoretical conceptualizations of globalization, as is exemplified in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), who argues that the imagination is a key to understand the disjunctive and overlapping spaces of global modernity (or postmodernity)—the financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, and technoscapes that constitute the ‘global now’.4 These reformulations of the relationship between cinematic nostalgia (as imagined, imaginary, and imaginative), historical knowledge, and the global present are of particular relevance to the Hong Kong situation, where cinema is always a terrain criss-crossed by overlapping, if not disjunctive, forces. If nostalgia was a reaction to an anxiety-stricken present and an uncertain future prior to the handover, the post-nostalgic as I have tried to capture and delineate here is not anti-nostalgic, but signals a different ‘relatedness’ to the past geared towards a meta-(con)textual self-critique. This term, I hope, has helped to communicate this understanding of the duality of cinematic nostalgia in the post-handover context. As has been pointed out in the ‘Introduction’, the end of British colonial rule did not impose any breaks or watershed in the cinematic imagination, but has accelerated and prompted into being certain tendencies already present prior to July 1997. In the foregoing chapters, I have tried to identify the defining features of the post-nostalgic by observing the way it operates in the film text. My analysis has covered films selected from a broad spectrum of style and genre, from arthouse films to action and martial arts films, comedies, and finally pan-Asian productions. My understanding of the post-nostalgic is shaped by two sets of questions, one formal and one thematic and contextual: (1) What is the nature of nostalgia in the film text? What are its constituent features? Does the deployment of nostalgia serve as a critique of the nostalgic, and hence obtain a new practice of the image? How? (2) What happens to the ‘local’ under the double hegemony of the national and the global? Is the local still relevant to (our understanding of) Hong Kong cinema in a state of flux? These questions are either implicitly or explicitly present in my discussion throughout this book, as shown in the summary below: (1) The overarching question about nostalgia, or cinematic nostalgia, is addressed in the first part, particularly in the chapter on

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Wong Kar-wai, and is further developed in the subsequent sections. Central to my argument about nostalgia and the post-nostalgic re-envisioning of the past is the notion of intertextuality, which, as the previous chapters have shown, is a key formal component of the post-nostalgic imagination in the film text. It exists in Wong’s hybrid references to past codes, texts, and material objects, in Ann Hui and Fruit Chan’s use of personal memories, social history, and popular cultural traditions, and in the configuration of the existential landscapes of Macau in Fu Bo and Isabella. Cinematic nostalgia becomes a source of formal and thematic experimentation in Johnnie To’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the action film aesthetic, in Stephen Chow’s kaleidoscopic code-mixing and updating of the martial arts ideal, in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s mediation between nostalgia and resistance to nostalgia, in Samson Chiu and Fruit Chan’s subversion of the official narrative of the ‘Hong Kong story’ and ‘one country, two systems’ through the figure of the prostitute, and in the dilemmas between the global and the local encountered in Peter Chan’s pan-Asian generic cross-breeding. Intertextuality, as it were, is both a means and a formal expression of the cinematic engagement with nostalgia. (2) The issue of the local as a source of identity has been a central preoccupation among critics and scholars concerned with Hong Kong culture. I have argued that the local can (and should) be liberated from a fixed identity or an end in itself through ongoing problematization. The local as a cultural imaginary exists in myriad forms in the films analysed in this study; this sheds light on the enduring instability of the local itself—an instability that offers a space of resistance at a time when compromises are a necessity for survival. Throughout this study, I have tried to locate this imaginary in the playful engagement with conventions in Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, which exemplify the dynamism and open-endedness of the Hong Kong cinematic ‘tradition’. A similar temperament is also discerned in Johnnie To’s reconfiguration of the cityspace and self-reflexive citations of convention in PTU, and in Fruit Chan’s updating of the street kid figure in Little Cheung. In this connection, the local as expressed in these films also sheds new light on the ‘China factor’ in Hong Kong cinema. As noted earlier, the materialized present of the post-handover period necessitates an adjustment of the ‘future anterior’ mode of representation, just as ‘disappearance’ has to be understood differently. This is most vividly played out in the film industry’s global trajectories, particularly in

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pan-Asian productions. At the same time, the global does not necessarily negates the national. Hong Kong filmmakers are actively seeking a ‘dual citizenship’ in the national and the global, churning out big-budget productions catering to home and overseas audiences while maintaining a regional presence through smaller budget films mainly for the Asia markets and a regional distribution network. We have noted some prominent examples in this category in Peter Chan, Johnnie To, and Stephen Chow. Whether pan-Asian or pan-Chinese, the lines between the two are less and less clear, and this may well be the local’s future ‘home’. Remarking on the mutual dependency of locals and cosmopolitans, Ulf Hannerz says, ‘there can be no cosmopolitans without locals’.5 I would like to supplement Hannerz’s positivistic formulation of ‘value in [cultural] diversity’ with Appadurai’s notion of the ‘neighbourhood’ as a site for the production of locality, that is, the local had better remain ‘a multiplex interpretive site’.6 The formal and contextual factors of post-handover Hong Kong cinema outlined above illuminate the aesthetics of the post-nostalgic and its broader social and historical resonances. My purpose has been to present a framework for rethinking some recurrent issues in the development of the local cinema in the last decade or so. This framework can accommodate a broad spectrum of arthouse and commercial films. In doing so, I have tried to qualify my discussion in each chapter in terms of the specific thematic, contextual, and formal elements of individual films/filmmakers. This being said, the versatility and mobility of Hong Kong cinema nowadays means much is bound to be left out in a single study, and more still awaits to be done. One question always asked but never quite answered (if answerable) is, ‘What is the future of Hong Kong cinema?’ When asked about the current state of the local film industry at a recent forum on Chineselanguage film,7 Permanent Honorary President of the Hong Kong Directors’ Guild and industry veteran Joe Cheung Tung-joe attributed the pathetic state of the local industry to a ‘cottage industry’ mode of operation and the limited space for truly creative works. One reason he gave was the necessity to cater to audience tastes and censorship laws in Mainland China. Another reason was that market specialization of Chinese-language films in the global market is narrowing down to two genres: the kung fu/martial arts film and historical epic. Cheung’s concerns are reflected in the differential reception of Peter Chan’s Perhaps Love and The Warlords discussed in Chapter 8, and the strong

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preference for a limited number of commercial genres in Hong Kong– China co-productions. On the other hand, the art film and festival circuits are showing signs of commercialization, as more and more international festivals have turned themselves into trade expos, where arthouse films are repackaged into a new ‘genre’ alongside mainstream showcases.8 There are, however, exceptions. Certain well-established directors can still make films that do not bring instant profits but will eventually break even in the DVD market and paid TV channel and overseas screenings. Johnnie To, for example, is able to produce this kind of films regularly, about once a year, based on precise calculation of cost against prospective returns from various sources. His latest offering in this category, Sparrow/Wenque (2008), is one such example of a film made ‘without burden’, says Joe Cheung. To of course is making inroads into alternative cinema in Europe and the United States with frequent showcases at international film festivals. To’s strength lies in his ability to balance commercial and artistic interests, and the more commercial Milkyway productions can generate adequate profits to sustain riskier adventures.9 One wonders how many of his peers, and followers, can cut out such a path. Another trend that is picking up momentum in the Greater China region is the involvement of Hong Kong filmmakers in Taiwan’s commercial cinema, which recently has shown signs of a long-awaited revival through a number of successful ‘commercial art films’. The latest addition to this category is Cape No. 7/Haijiao qihao by a young director Wei Te-sheng. A touching story about two lonely young hearts brought together by love letters written some sixty years ago, this film broke the domestic box-office records and reaped a good harvest at the 2008 Golden Horse Awards, rivaling the pre-eminence of Peter Chan’s superbudget blockbuster, The Warlords.10 This year’s event also gave credit to other emerging young local talents, who are tipped to be key players in the long-awaited revival of the Taiwan mainstream cinema. One local film critic sees this as yet another turning point in Hong Kong cinema, noting the eclipse of the local film industry’s leadership position in artistic creativity and acting talents. Now that the more established directors have virtually specialized in making big-budget co-productions in Mainland China, Hong Kong’s present and future stronghold lies entirely in technical know-how, production, and distribution.11 Whether this is an accurate prediction or not, only time can tell. But it is also true that Hong Kong filmmakers are actively behind Taiwan’s cinematic comeback. Eric Tsang, a famous Hong Kong actor/producer and TV variety show host, has a reputation for grooming young talents in the

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Greater China region. Together with Edko Films Ltd., Tsang funded the projects of two first-time directors, Winds of September/Jiu jiang feng by Lin Shu-yu, and Secret/Buneng shuo de mimi (2007) by teenage heartthrob Jay Chou. If this trend was to continue, Hong Kong would likely become more a centre of production rather than creativity in the region. The ‘big names’ would still be big, but they would be operating outside Hong Kong most of the time, making films for a much broader audience in the region and worldwide, Chinese or not. On the other hand, increased liberalization of the China market may mean greater control by Mainland authorities over content and subject matter, and a greater presence of ‘Mainland elements’ in Hong Kong productions.12 What can be said in this inconclusive conclusion is, perhaps, the ‘dual citizenship’ of Hong Kong cinema is still to be cherished as a new attribute of the local, whose global ambitions also necessitate a firmer grounding in the pan-Chinese/pan-Asian cohort, an intersection between home and world.

Notes Introduction 1. Many critics have used this term to describe the anxious anticipation of the future and the concomitant nostalgia for a reality soon to be lost in Hong Kong films in the 1980s and 1990s. See, for example, Ackbar Abbas (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance; Nick Browne (1994), ‘Introduction’, New Chinese Cinemas; Esther Yau (1994), ‘Border Crossing: Mainland China’s Presence in Hong Kong Cinema’, Nick Browne, ed., New Chinese Cinemas, pp. 180–201. 2. See Arjun Appadurai (1996), Modernity at Large; and Morley and Robins (1995), Spaces of Identity. 3. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006), ‘General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?’ Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, p. 4. 4. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 5. Andrew Higson (2000), ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation, pp. 63–74; see also Susan Hayward (2000) in the same volume, pp. 88–102. 6. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006), China on Screen, p. 14. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. See Linda Chiu-han Lai (2001), ‘Films and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering’, At Full speed; Rey Chow (2001), ‘A Souvenir of Love’, Esther Yau, ed., At Full speed, Chapters 9 and 10. 9. See Eric Kit-wai Ma (2001), ‘Re-Advertising Hong Kong: Nostalgia Industry and Popular History’, Positions 9:1, pp. 131–159. 10. Mike Featherstone (1991), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Chapter 1. 11. Fredric Jameson (1998), ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, The Cultural Turn, pp. 1–12. 12. Mike Featherstone, for example, notices a tendency towards ‘totalizing theory’ in the neo-Marxist works of Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. In film studies, some scholars have expressed the need for an adjustment to Jameson’s dismissive treatment of nostalgia. 13. Abbas (1997), pp. 21, 15. 14. Shelly Kraicer (2005), ‘Tracking the Elusive Wong Kar-wai’, Cineaste: Special Focus on Wong Kar-wai, Fall, pp. 14–15. 15. Stanely Kwan and Wong Kar-wai are often called the ‘second wave’; see Stephen Teo (1997), Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 184–203. 16. Vera Dika (2003), Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film, p. 18. 17. Natalia Siu Hung Chan (2000), ‘Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and Its Social Practice’, Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong, p. 269. 18. Ingeborg Hoesterey (2001), Pastiche p. x. 19. Ibid., p. 9. 20. Rey Chow (2004), p. 215. 218

Notes

219

21. 22. 23. 24.

Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 224. Linda Chiu-han Lai (2001), p. 232. In fact, ‘old Shanghai’ and ‘old Hong Kong’ can be regarded as two sides of the same coin, as Shanghai has been widely taken as a precedent for Hong Kong due to the two cities’ shared experience of colonialism. This nostalgic yearning for ‘lost history’ explains why a host of films and television programmes set in 1930s Shanghai sprang up during the late 1980s and 1990s. 25. Abbas (1997), pp. 14–15. 26. In the last few years a number of critical studies devoted to on Hong Kong’s commercial cinema have been published, for example David Bordwell (2000), Planet Hong Kong; Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Ching-kiu Chan, eds. (2005), Hong Kong Connections; Stephen Teo (2007), Director in Action; Leon Hunt (2003), Kung Fu Cult Masters. 27. Darrell William Davis and Yueh-yu Emilie Yeh (2008), East Asian Screen Industries, pp. 39–43.

1

Post-nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046

1. Tony Ryan (1995), ‘Poet of Time’, Sound and Vision (September), 5:9, pp. 12–16. 2. Among these are Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai (1997), Wong Kar-wai; Peter Brunette (2005), Wong Kar-wai; Stephen Teo (2005a), Wong Kar-wai; and Jeremy Tambling (2003), Wong Karwai’s Happy Together. The popular English film journal, Cineaste, published a special issue on Wong in Fall 2005. 3. Brunette (2005), p. xiii; Abbas (1997), pp. 48–62. 4. In his book, Teo puts forward an original thesis on the intimate connections between Wong’s film aesthetic, especially the themes of love and memory and narrative structure, and the works of his favourite authors such as Jin Yong, Liu Yichang, and Manuel Puig. See Teo (2005a). 5. Kraicer (2005), ‘Tracking the Elusive Wong Kar-wai’, Cineaste: A Special Focus on Wong Kar-wai, Fall, pp. 14–15. 6. Ibid. 7. Abbas (1997), p. 4. 8. Teo (2005a), pp. 134–135. 9. Wong’s distortion of the gangster film conventions in As Tears Go By is discussed in Abbas (1997), pp. 35–36. 10. See Michelle Tsung-yi Huang (2004), Walking Between Slums and Skyscrappers, pp. 49–56. 11. Long Tin (2004), ‘Hou bajiu yu Wong Kar-wai dianying’ (Post-89 and the film work of Wong Kar-wai) Poon Kwok-ling and Bono Lee, eds., Wong Kar-wai de yinghua shijie (The Film World of Wong Kar-wai), pp. 6–10. 12. For a critical survey of nostalgic film and culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s, see Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng (2000), ‘The Cultural Politics of Nostalgia in Contemporary Hong Kong Film and Memoir’, Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University. Critical studies on individual films can be found in Linda

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13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

Notes Chiu-han Lai (2001); Rey Chow (2001); and Natalia Siu Hung Chan (2000) and Luo Feng (1995). Urban comedies and youth films were the mainstay of Cantonese cinema in the mid- to late 1960s, and were the breeding ground for super-idols. For a historical review and critical analysis, see Kar Law, ed. (1996), The Restless Breed; Tin Long (2007a), 2006 Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective. For a detailed analysis of these nostalgic films and their predecessors, see Luo Feng (1995), ‘Historical Memory and Historical Amnesia: The Form and Content of Nostalgic Films’, pp. 60–75. The effect of the ‘China Factor’ on the Hong Kong New Wave is discussed in Li Cheuk-to (1994), ‘The Return of the Father: Hong Kong New Wave and Its Chinese Context in the 1980s’, Nick Browne, ed., New Chinese Cinemas, pp. 160–179. Brunette (2005), pp. 100–101. Teo (2005a), p. 119. Ibid., p. 118. Luo Feng (2004) ‘Ruhua meijuan—lun Huayang nianhua de niandai jiyi yu lianwu qingjie’ (Memory of Bygone Eras and Fetishism in In the Mood for Love), Pun and Lee, eds., The Film World of Wong Kar-wai, p. 132. See Matthew Turner (2003), ‘60s/90s: Dissolving the People’, Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man, eds., Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity; Gordon Matthews (2003), ‘Heunggongyahn: On the Past, Present, and Future of Hong Kong Identity (an extract)’, Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man, eds., Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity. In the same volume, Lui (2003) offers a more critical analysis of the so-called ‘Hong Kong Identity’, noting its feeble roots in economic and material comfort. See Lui’s article in Pun and Yee eds., pp. 206–218. Helen F. Siu (2003), ‘Hong Kong: Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape’, pp. 126–127. This ‘glorious modernity’ of the 1960s is best represented in the films of Kong Ngee Productions. For a discussion on the influence of the 1960s on later films, see Wong Ain-ling (2006), ‘Preface’, The Glorious Modernity of Kong Ngee, pp. 16–21. Teo (2005a), p. 117. Wong Kar-wai speaking at a press conference at Cannes, quoted in Brunette (2005), p. 103. This constitutes part of the so-called ‘China factor’ in Hong Kong films. Another dimension of this cultural nostalgia is seen in the reinvention of traditional China in wuxia (swordsplay) films by King Hu and Chang Cheh. Wong Kar-wai’s foreword to Duidao (photo collection), quoted in Feng/ Chan (2004), p. 132. Stephen Teo perceives a luring ‘potentiality’ for another love story in the last scene of Days of Being Wild; Another critic associates this inconclusiveness with the technique of ‘liubai’ (empty space) in traditional Chinese aesthetics. See Ching-siu Tong (2004), ‘Bashi niandai de liushi niandai wenhua xiangxiang—you huo shi A fei zhengzhuan de jiyi waiyan celue’ (The Sixties in the Cultural Imagination of the Eighties: Or the Strategy of Extended Memory in Days of Being Wild). In The Film World of Wong Kar-wai, Pun and Lee, eds., pp. 45–47.

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28. Rey Chow (2007), ‘The Everyday in The Road Home and In the Mood for Love: From the Legacy of Socialism to the Potency of Yuan’, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, p. 73. 29. Pam Cook (2005), ‘Rethinking Nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and Far from Heaven’, Screening the Past, pp. 1–22. 30. Feng (2004), p. 136. 31. Chow (2007), pp. 74–75. 32. Ibid., p. 80. 33. Brunette (2005), p. 89. 34. According to Abbas, ‘reverse hallucination’ is ‘not seeing what is there’, ‘an inability to read what is given to view’, as opposed to hallucination, ‘seeing what is not there’. Reverse hallucination is an effect of the déjà desparu that characterizes Hong Kong culture in the 1990s. See Abbas (1997), pp. 25–26. 35. Referring to the camera’s fondness of showing the characters midsection, Brunette (2005) observes that Wong’s camera plays with the viewer’s desire ‘always to see more’, p. 90. 36. Teo (2005a), p. 3; Abbas (1997), pp. 48–62. 37. Dika (2003), p. 18. 38. Those who attended the premiere at Cannes recall the haphazard editing and the out-of-proportion soundtrack. See Brunette (2005), pp. 101–107; and Amy Taubin (2005), ‘The Long Good-bye’, Film Comment (July–August), p. 28. 39. For more on this aspect of the film, see Stephen Teo (2005a), Wong Kar-wai, Chapter 9. 40. Teo (2005), p. 141. 41. Nathan Lee (2005), p. 32; Teo (2005a), pp. 135, 149. 42. Teo (2005a), p. 142. 43. Dika (2003), pp. 90–94. 44. Turner (2003), p. 39. 45. Dika (2003), pp. 13–14. 46. Taubin (2005), p. 29. 47. According to Teo (2005a), this is the theme and substance of Wong Kar-wai’s films, p. 145.

2 Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung 1. A glance at the publications of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in the last ten years will reveal the still gripping power of identity not only in cinematic representations, but also in critical discourse on Hong Kong films. In academic discourse, identity is tied up with the crisis of the local cinema itself and the film industry’s ‘post-colonial’ engagements with the nation (China), the West (Hollywood), and the forces of globalization. See, for example, Eric Kit-wai Ma (2001), Yingchi Chu (2003), Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 119–133; Gina Marchetti (2007), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs—the Trilogy, pp. 117–153; and Esther Cheung and Yiu-wai Chu (2004), Between Home and World, pp. xxx–xxxiv. A broader regional perspective is offered in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang (2004, 2008) on globalization and

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Notes cultural representation in East Asia’s global cities, Walking Between Slumps and Skyscrappers and Miandui qubian zhong de dongya jingguan: daduhui de ziwo shenfen shuxie (East Asia in Face of Great Changes: Identity Discourses in Metropolitan Cities). Huang (2008), pp. 50–51. See Judith Butler (1993), Body That Matter, pp. 2, 15. Ping-kwan Leung (2000), ‘Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong’, Poshek Fu and David Dresser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong p. 264. Appadurai (1996) in Modernity at Large gives a compelling account of how globalization has contributed to this ‘dispersal’ of the nation into diverse localities across national borders, and how acts of the imagination have become crucial in forging a sense of community and identity. ‘Narratively speaking, the temporal mode of Hong Kong cinema is not retrospective, but future interior—a syncretic culture caught in the complexity of an impending return that threatens to be a future undoing of its past achievement’ . Browne (1994), p. 7. For a comprehensive study on the Hong Kong New Wave cinema, see Pak Tong Cheuk (2008), The Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978–2000). See also Teo (1997), pp. 137–203. Jeremy E. Taylor (2004), ‘Nation, Topography, and Historiography: Writing Topographical Histories in Hong Kong’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 15:2, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 66. Abbas (1997), p. 85. Huang (2004). See, for example, Helen F. Siu (2003), ‘Hong Kong Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape’, Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man, eds., Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity, pp. 113–135. Ma (2001) offers an insightful case study of how this miracle tale is being mobilized in recent years in the mass media. Huang (2008), pp. 59–66. Huang points out the irony between the ordinary people’s alienation from the ‘monumental space’ of the global city, and the ineluctable equation between Hong Kong and its skyscrapers (architectural monuments). See Wendy Gan (2005), Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian, Chapter 1. See Fruit Chan’s interviews in various editions of the Hong Kong Panorama 1997–98; 1999–2000; and 2002–2003. Huang (2008), p. 55. Poshek Fu (2003), Between Shanghai and Hong Kong, p. 54. For a detailed analysis of this phase of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong, see Ibid., pp. 51–92. K. F. Yau (2001), ‘Cinema 3: Towards a Minor Hong Kong Cinemax’, Cultural Studies, 15:3–4, pp. 543–563. The symbolic meanings of this song are discussed in detail in Huang (2008), pp. 55–56. Fu (2003) observes that Hong Kong cinema from its early days has exhibited this ambiguity with regard to its identity, which was ‘not marked by a sense

Notes

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

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of double marginality in relation to the racial regime of British colonialism and the cultural hegemony of Chinese-centered nationalism’, p. 91. After the mass protest of July 1, 2003, the Chinese authorities have openly expressed concerns about the lack of a sense of identification with China among Hong Kong people, and the need for promoting ‘patriotic thinking’ in the territory, especially among the young people. The Chinese Communist Party’s military suppression of the student protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989 provoked a public outcry in Hong Kong; over 1 million people took part in demonstrations in protest against the Chinese government’s action. Democrats in Hong Kong are still calling for the vindication of those killed or incarcerated during the June 4th incident. Fu (2003), pp. 76–87. See William Tay (2000), ‘Colonialism, the Cold War, and Marginal Space: The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature’, Chi Pangyuan and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. The ‘Boat People’s Incident’ refers to a mass demonstration against the government’s public housing policy, which seemed to have ignored the pressing needs of the boat population. Scenes from a video recording of this street drama (The Story of Ng Chung-yin) are re-enacted in Ann Hui’s film. Elaine Chan (2001), ‘Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity: The Films of Ann Hui’, Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless Word, pp. 177–206. During the right of abode controversy in 2000–2001, Father Francesco Mello led a series of hunger strikes to protest the government’s refusal to grant residency to Mainland spouses and children of Hong Kong residents. The fear of an influx of Mainland immigrants provoked a heated public debate. The Chinese central government stepped in to ‘interpret’ the Basic Law’s provisions, and effectively ruled out right of abode for these people. The priest’s support for the Mainlanders was criticized by many people as endangering Hong Kong’s long-term social and economic well-being. ‘It’s kind of social duty for me . . . Films need to be shot for these people. I’m middle class, but I find that lifestyle very, very boring and self-centred. That’s why I started making documentaries. People didn’t used to talk about politics at all in Hong Kong. It’s about time we soberly accepted and examined our past.’ Ann Hui’s interview with Stuart Whitmore (1999), ‘First We Take Berlin: Hong Kong Director Ann Hui Hits the Festival Circuit with Her Ordinary Heroes’, Asiaweek, May 3, 1999. Gayattri Spivak (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, p. 310.

3 Allegory, Kinship, and Redemption: Fu Bo and Isabella 1. Macau is called ‘Ou Mun’ in Cantonese (or ‘Aomen’ in Mandarin). The English spelling is ‘Macao’. The more popular Portuguese spelling, ‘Macau’, is used throughout this book unless otherwise specified.

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2. The Portuguese first landed in Macau in 1553, but official settlement began in 1557. See Christina Miu Bing Cheng (1999), Macau, p. 7, n. 4. 3. Ibid. 4. Fu Bo was filmed in DV, and for this reason was off the list of the Hong Kong Critics Society Awards despite the generally positive critical reception. See Tin Long (2004). The film was listed under ‘Hong Kong Independent Films’ in the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003. 5. Jay Seavers (2007), eFilmCritic, http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie= 14594&reviewer=371, and Kozo (2008), http://www.lovehkfilm.com/ reviews_2/isabella.htm (Accessed December 9, 2008). 6. Cf. n. 4. 7. In 2008, direct gaming tax income for the first 11 months amounted to 36.82 billion patacas (4.7 billion dollars). This amounted to over 75% of the MSAR’s 47.73 billion patacas (6.04 billion US) total public revenues. People’s Daily Online, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90778/90857/90859/ 6556445.html (Accessed December 30, 2008). 8. This aspect of commercial horror is well-documented in critical studies of the genre. See, for example, Stephen Prince (2004), ‘Introduction: The Dark Genre and Its Paradoxes’, The Horror Film, pp. 1–11. 9. This parent–child trope is displaced in the shifu-tudi (teacher–student) in kung fu films, and godfather–underling in gangster films. For a discussion on the ‘father and son’ phenomenon in Hong Kong films, see Dang To/Deng Tu, ‘2006 Xianggang dianying de e fu yu nizi’ (Evil Fathers and Ungrateful Sons in 2006 Hong Kong Films), Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective 2006, pp. 74–78. 10. In a different context, Patrick Tam Ka-ming’s recent film, After This Our Exile (Fuzi, 2006), tells the tale of a little boy and his ‘fallen father’ whose redemption comes too late for the two to begin anew. Tam’s film won the Best Director and Best Film awards at the 2007 Hong Kong Film Awards. 11. Ching-siu Tong (2007a), ‘Hong Kong Films after CEPA’ (CEPA suo dailai de ‘xinbupian’ bianhua), 2003 Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective, pp. 52–54. 12. Pei Ah/Pi Ya (2004), ‘Impotent Males’ (Wuneng nan), 2003 Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective, pp. 55–57. 13. See Lai-kwan Pang (2005), ‘Post-1997 Hong Kong Masculinity’, Pang Laikwan and Day Wong, eds., Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 35–53. 14. Derek Elley (2006), ‘Isabella’, Variety, http://www.variety.com/index.asp? layout=features2006&content=jump&jump=review&head=berlin&nav= RBerlin&articleid=VE1117929655&cs=1&p=0 b 16 (Accessed December 12, 2008). 15. After Isabella, Pang made two other features, Exodus/Chu Aiji ji (2007), and Trival Matters/Po shi’er (2007), both are experimental works that were critically appraised but not commercially successful. Exodus is a weird twist of the Hong Kong policier marked by Pang’s characteristic black humour and understatement; Trivial Matters consists of seven shorts encompassing a wide spectrum of genres revisiting themes of love, death, and sex. 16. Long Tin/Lang Tian (2007a), ‘Jia luanlun youxi’ (A Fake Game of Incest), Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective 2006, pp. 130–133.

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17. Cf. n. 15. 18. According to Butler, performativity involves the ‘resignification of norms [as] a function of their inefficacy’, p. 237. 19. The surge of Han nationalism among China’s younger generations during the pro-independence riots in Tibet and its xenophobic outlook reflects the pervasiveness of this racial logic in China today. The central government’s effort to promote patriotic pride is more than evident in the grandiose opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, whose glorification of the Chinese civilization sets the tone for the entire Games. 20. Cf. n. 13. 21. At the time of writing, the hitherto rhetoric of progress and prosperity of the Macau authorities is undercut by its over-reliance on China’s policy on Mainland tourist visas. From 2007 to 2008, China successively imposed stricter regulations on Mainland visitors to Macau, from one permission per individual every month to one in every three months. The revenue of Macau’s hotels and casinos allegedly dropped by over 40% soon after the new restrictions took effect.

4 Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie To’s Urban Legends 1. Tony Williams (1997), ‘Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo’, Cinema Journal 36:2, pp. 67–84. 2. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2005), China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, p. 158. 3. See Andrew Grossman (2001), ‘Johnnie To: A Belated Auteur’, Senses of Cinema (January). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/to.html; David Bordwell (2006), ‘Movies from the Milkyway’, Lawrence Pun, ed., Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination—Wai Ka-fai + Johnnie To + Creative Team (1996–2005), p. 16; and Teo (2007), Chapter 4. 4. Stephen Teo (1998), ‘Sinking into Creative Depths’, Hong Kong Panorama 97– 98, pp. 11–13. 5. The ‘triad kid fad’ triggered by the Young and Dangerous series ran its course in about eight months, despite the later release of the final instalment in 1998. Li Cheuk-to (1997), ‘Young and Dangerous and the 1997 Deadline’, Hong Kong Panorama 96–97, p. 10. 6. Beginning as a production assistant at the Hong Kong Television Broadcast Ltd. (TVB), To worked briefly under Chang Che, a famous martial arts film director, and began making his own films in the late 1970s. To founded Milkyway Image in 1996, and 100 Years of Cinema in 2000 with a group of Hong Kong filmmakers with a view to reviving the local industry. 7. Li Cheuk-to and Bono Lee (2000), ‘Beyond Running Out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To Ponders 100 Years of Film’ (interview with Johnnie To), Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000, p. 48. Also discussed in Teo (2007), Chapter 4. 8. Teo (2007), pp. 145–176. 9. Lai-kwan Pang (2005), ‘Post-1997 Hong Kong Masculinity’, pp. 48–49. 10. Ibid., pp. 49–53. 11. Teo (2007), pp. 117–126.

226 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

Notes Johnnie To’s interview in Exiled, DVD bonus track. See interviews with To and the actors in Exiled, DVD bonus tracks. Teo (2007), pp. 189–195. See Kam Louie (2002), Theorizing Chinese Masculinity, pp. 1–21, 140–159. The same pathos of brotherhood is expressed by the actors at an interview. In Exiled, DVD bonus track. Teo uses ‘unofficial trilogy’ to refer to the group movies, c.f. n. 14. To had in mind a third film after Mission and PTU with an all-female cast. Thomas Shin and Johnnie To (2003), ‘Johnnie To’s PTU: Blind Loyalty of a Night Voyager’, Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003, p. 83. In her analysis, ‘walkers’ are the flaneur-like characters in Wong’s film. See Huang (2004), pp. 31–48. Shin and Johnnie To (2003), p. 83. ‘. . . they are much more imposing than the real cops . . . and should look smart in uniform’. Shin and Johnnie To (2003), p. 82. Abbas (1997), pp. 25–26. See Williams (1997), pp. 77–78. Linda Chiu-han Lai (2001), ‘Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering’, p. 235. Rey Chow (2001), ‘A Souvenir of Love,’ p. 224. For example, the world of the jianghu (meaning rivers and lakes), an alternative social order in the martial arts tradition. Teo calls it an ‘inner world’ with its own codes of conduct. Teo (2007), Chapter 4. Ibid. Smith (2006), ‘Johnnie To and the Clockwork Metropolis’, Lawrence Pun, ed., Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination—Wai Ka-fai + Johnnie To + Creative Team (1996–2005), p. 236. Shin and Johnnie To (2003), p. 83. Two famous shen tan figures are found in Yuan Zhenhe and Wei Sili, both from Wei Kang’s serialized sci-fi detective novels. The popularity of these fictional texts has led to a number of film adaptations in the 1990s. On local television, various types of detective stories will foreground this character, be it in contemporary or historical settings. Teo (2007), pp. 102–103. This ‘cultural China’ runs through the Chinese martial arts film tradition. See, for example, Stephen Teo’s (1997) discussion on King Hu in Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 87–96; also, Kenneth Chan (2004), ‘The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword-fighting Movie): Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, Cinema Journal, 43:4, pp. 3–17. Two well-known examples are the one-armed hero Yang Guo in Jin Yong’s popular martial arts novel, The Legend of the Condor Lovers/Shendiao xianü and Ti Lung’s character in Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman/Du bei dao.

5 The Kung Fu Hero in the Digital Age: Stephen Chow’s ‘Glocal’ Strategies 1. Chow’s career marked another stage in Cantonese comedy beginning in the late 1980s, 1990s, and owed much to his predecessors, the Hui Brothers led by actor-director Michael Hui Koon-man, whose

Notes

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

227

first efforts virtually pioneered the new Hong Kong comedy in the 1970s. Davis and Yeh (2008), p. 43. Instead of the more standard Chinese word ‘wu shu’ (meaning martial arts), Bruce Lee characteristically used ‘gung fu’ (kung fu) to describe his style and philosophy of martial arts, as evident in his 1963 book, Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense published in the United States. See Hunt (2003), p. 1. According to Stephen Teo audiences associate wuxia with the northern style, which is more ancient and historical, while kung fu is regarded as a southern style and more recent. See Teo (1997), pp. 98–99. Hunt (2003), p. 7. For accounts of the transnational trajectory of the Hong Kong martial arts film, see Hunt (2003), pp. 1–20; and Teo (2005b). See, for example, Sheldon Xiaopeng Lu (1997), Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, pp. 1–32. Yomi Braester (2005), ‘Chinese Cinema in the Age of Advertisement: The Filmmaker as a Cultural Broker’, The China Quarterly 183, p. 550. Hunt (2003), p. 22. Tom Gunning (1994), p. 98 quoted in Angela Ndalianis (2000), ‘The Frenzy of the Possible: Spectacle and Motion in the Era of the Digital’, Senses of Cinema 3 (Accessed Feburary 19, 2006). Ibid., n.p. Teo (1997). Siu Leung Li (2001), ‘Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity’, Cultural Studies 15:3/4, p. 522. Ibid., p. 537. Abbas (1997), pp. 31–32; Hunt (2003), pp. 45–47. The virtual camera is a combination of computer programming and a much earlier technique, photogrammetry, developed for mapmaking. For a detailed description, see Silberman (2003). In Hong Kong’s local cinematic convention, wuxia represents the northern tradition of martial arts, while kung fu (a term coined by Bruce Lee himself, a Cantonese) associates with the southern tradition. Teo (1997), pp. 97–98. As Charles Leary puts it, The Matrix is ‘an image of “totality” ’, ‘a network , a total system . . . the imagination of the social totality’. See Leary (2004b), ‘What is the Matrix? Cinema, Totality, and Topophilia’, Senses of Cinema (May). Ibid. Hunt (2003), p. 184. Ndalianis (2000). Simon During, quoted in Meaghan Morris (2004), ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5:2, p. 184. Chan (2004). Christina Klein (2004), ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading’, Cinema Journal 43:4, pp. 18–42. See Kenneth Chan (2004) for an analysis Ang Lee’s dilemmas in telling ‘a story with a global sense’, p. 5.

228

Notes

26. Evans Chan (2004), ‘Zhang Yimou’s Hero: The Temptations of Fascism’, Film International 2 (Revised May 2005). 27. Richard Alleva (2004), ‘Mythmaking: Hero and Vanity Fair’, Commonweal. September, p. 22. 28. Pauline Chen (2004), ‘Review of Hero’, Cineaste (Winter): pp. 40–42. 29. Ho (2005), pp. 74–75. 30. A popular expression from the 1980s, mo lay tau is the hallmark of Chow’s verbal humour, distinguished by ‘an irreverence expressed in mischievous, nonsensical comic remarks, often adopted by the defeated as a face-saving stance to claim moral victory’ (Ho 2005: 74). Ever since Chow’s masterly use of mo lay tau in his films, the expression has become Chow’s exclusive label in the showbiz of Hong Kong. 31. ‘Kung Fu Hustle Shatters HK Box Office’, 2005-02-09, XinhuaEnglish. From: http://english.sina.com/life/1/2005/0209/20998.html; Xinhua online: http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-01/ 18/content_2475737.htm (Accessed January 22, 2006). 32. See Morris (2004), pp. 181–199. 33. According to Bolter and Brusin, remediation is ‘the process whereby a medium appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real’ (Bolter and Grusin, quoted in Hunt 2003: 86–87). 34. Srinivas, S. V. (2005), ‘Kung Fu Hustle: A Note on the Local’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6:2, p. 294. 35. The series has been running since its TV debut in Japan in 1983. It is a story about how young Japanese athletes struggle to become the world’s leading soccer players. 36. For a discussion on Jackie Chan’s effort to break into the US market, see Steve Fore (2001), ‘Life Imitates Entertainment: Home and Dislocation in the Films of Jackie Chan’, Esther Yau, ed., At Full speed, pp. 115–141. See also Leo Hunt’s essay on Jet Li (2003) in Kung Fu Cult Masters, pp. 140–156. 37. Davis and Yeh (2008), p. 136. 38. The original version was set in Shanghai in 1945. The first Cantonese adaptation was made in 1963, followed by the Shaw Brother’s remake in 1973 by director Chor Yuen. For more details, see Gina Marchetti (2005), ‘Going to the Source: Kung Fu Hustle and Its Cinematic Roots at the 29th HKIFF’, Hong Kong Cinemagic (Accessed April 20, 2008) and Gary Xu (2007), pp. 91–92. 39. For a critical review of Kung Fu Hustle’s multiple references to earlier Chinese films, see Marchetti (2005). 40. Gary Xu (2007), Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema, pp. 89–93. 41. Kung fu comics have been a popular pastime among young people in Hong Kong for decades. The reference to the comic book here also alludes to the familiar motif of the ‘scared scroll’, a mysterious training manual through which one will attain superhuman power.

6 Karmic Redemption: Memory and Schizophrenia in Hong Kong Action Films 1. As some critics have noted, loss of memory is a recurrent motif in post-1997 Hong Kong films. See, for example, Chu (2003), pp. 129–130.

Notes

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2. Hong Kong action film has caught the interest of recent critical scholarship. Despite market setbacks and complaints of its decline, the best works and their creators have received due recognition. See, for example, Morris, Li, and Chan (2005); Gina Marchetti (2007), The Infernal Affairs Trilogy; and Teo (2007), Action directors such as Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai, Alan, and Andrew Lau were given special highlights at the HKIFF in the last few years. 3. The sensationalism of Hong Kong’s popular cinema is not to be dismissed altogether, however, as this is what first distinguishes Hong Kong films as ‘purely cinematic’ in the eyes of some Western critics and film scholars. See Bordwell (2000), pp. 6–7. 4. Leary (2003, 2004a) has published two articles on the trilogy in the online film journal, Senses of Cinema. For an allegorical reading of the films in the context of Hong Kong’s post-colonial politics, see Law (2006). 5. See Marchetti (2007); and Law (2006). 6. Marchetti (2007), pp. 24–25. 7. Some critics observe that memory loss and its ‘degeneration’ into physical and mental illnesses has been used as a metaphor for the predicament of Hong Kong filmmakers and their perceived ‘identity crisis’ in the post-1997 era. See, for example, Long Tin (2007b), pp. 25–26. 8. For a discussion on the uses of nostalgia as resistance in American cinema, see Dika (2003). Chan (2000) has convincingly argued the case for the social function of nostalgia films in 1990s Hong Kong. 9. Marchetti (2007), pp. 177–178. 10. Ibid., p. 44. 11. A representative of the Mainland authorities, ‘Shadow’ obliquely comments on the eclipse of Hong Kong’s freedom and autonomy after 1997. See Law (2005) for a discussion on the film’s character symbolism. 12. Marchetti (2007), p. 82. 13. Critics elsewhere have noted the political irony and symbolic significance of the promotion interview, as Lau speaks, in fluent English, about his confidence in the law to ‘back him up’ before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997. See Marchetti (2007), p. 87; and Law (2005), pp. 397–398. 14. Gerard Genette, quoted in Turim (1989), Flashbacks in Film, p. 8. 15. The root of this apprehension can be traced back to the origins of triad societies in China as patriotic organizations and the long history of cooperation/co-option between powerful triads and government, which has been the substance of many Hong Kong gangster films in the 1990s. A more direct incident is a public comment made by the ex-Public Security Minister from Mainland China during a visit to Hong Kong in 1993: ‘Even triads can be patriotic’ (heishehui ye you ai guo de), which triggered widespread public discussion. 16. Turim (1989), p. 12. 17. Abbas (1997), p. 8. 18. Leung (2000), p. 264. 19. Marchetti (2007), p. 72. 20. The use of doubles is a common device in Hong Kong (and Hollywood) action films. Stephen Teo has an insightful analysis of the doppelgangers in his discussion on Johnnie To’s work. See Teo (2007), chapter 3.

230

Notes

21. Homoerotic overtones in Hei and Bong’s relationship are noted in Tong (2007a), pp. 18–19. 22. Teo (2007), p. 90. 23. See, for example, Abbas (1997), pp. 54–58. For a discussion on the representation of space in Chungking Express, see Huang (2004), pp. 31–56. 24. Abbas (1997), p. 54. 25. ‘Shallowness’ and ‘emptiness’ are common complaints in local reviews of the film. See various references to the film in Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective 2006.

7 Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary 1. The history of this interaction is detailed in Fu (2003). 2. See Allen Chun (1996), ‘Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguity of Ethnicity as Culture and Identity’, Boundary 2 23:2, pp. 111–138. 3. Fu (2003). 4. A special study published by the Hong Kong International Festival contains a series of articles on the subject. See Cheng (1990); also discussed in Teo (1997). 5. See, for example, Esther Yau (1994); Teo (1997); Abbas (1997); Ma (2001); Marchetti (2007). 6. See Xiaoming Chen (1997), ‘The Mysterious Other: Postpolitics in Chinese Film’, Boundary 2 24:3, pp. 123–141. 7. Abbas (1997), pp. 23–24. 8. Ibid., p. 22. 9. Arguing that the imagination is a social practice, Appadurai (1996) identifies five interrelated dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. 10. Young (1995), Colonial Desire, p. 175. 11. Shih Shu-mei (2001), The Lure of the Modern, pp. 277–278; Yingjin Zhang (1999), The City in Chinese Literature and Film, pp. 137, 230. 12. Vivian Lee (2007), ‘In/Out of the Critical Divide: The Indeterminacy of Hero’. Scope 10 (4), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue= 9&id=955. 13. Chang (2003), ‘Golden Chicken: Samson Chiu Cooks up a Seasoned Chicken’, Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003, the 27th Hong Kong International Film Festival, p. 75. 14. Linda Lai (2001) uses ‘enigmatization’ to describe the peculiar use of language in many Hong Kong films that address primarily a ‘closed community of locals’. 15. The Mainland character in pre-handover in Hong Kong film and television is discussed in Cheng 1990 and Yau 1994. 16. ‘Anti-intellectualism’ has been used by many local critics to describe the excessive use of vulgarity and sensationalism in Hong Kong commercial films. 17. Athena Tsui (2003) ‘2002 Applause—Reinvestigating the Emigrant and Elitist Mentalitym’, In Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003, the 27th Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Notes

231

18. Abbas (1997), p. 10. 19. Deleuze and Guattari, quoted in Abbas (1997), p. 10. 20. Shin and Tsui (2003) ‘Three—Going Home: Peter Chan’s Journey of a Nonbeliever’, Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003, the 27th Hong Kong International Film Festival, p. 38. 21. Gan (2005), Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian, pp. 4–8. 22. Durian Durian continues the story of Fan, the teenage illegal immigrant in Little Cheung. According to Fruit Chan the original idea of making another film about the same working-class neighbourhood (Portland Street in Mongkok) came from the large amount of real-life stories collected by the crew during their research on Little Cheung. See Fruit Chan’s interview in Ye 2000. 23. Gan (2005), pp. 47–48. 24. Appadurai (1996), Modernity at Large. 25. Gan (2005), p. 52. 26. Ibid., p. 79. 27. Nienchen Ye (2003), ‘Can’t Pass up a Good story: From Little Cheung to Durian Durian’, Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000, the 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival, p. 23. 28. Wang Gungwu (2003), Anglo-Chinese Encounters Since 1800. 29. Chang (2002), ‘Hollywood Hong Kong: Fruit Chan’s Heaven and Hell’, In Hong Kong Panorama 2001–2002, p. 84. 30. Ibid., p. 87. 31. Gan interprets this ‘metonymic trick’ in both films as ‘a reminder of Hong Kong’s global connections’ and the necessity for ‘any negotiations of identity to be understood within a global context’. Gan (2005), p. 88. 32. Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999), Shanghai Modern, pp. 323–324. 33. Abbas (1997), p. 25.

8 Outside the Nation: The Pan-Asian Trajectory of Applause Pictures 1. Recent scholarship has shed light on how Asia as a popular cultural imaginary is implicated in the discourse of Asianism, hence the mass consumption of ‘Asian’ cultural products. For discussions on the historical development of Asianism, see Taizo Miyagi (2006), ‘Post-War Japan and Asianism’, AsiaPacific Review 13:2, pp. 1–16; Gi-Wook Shin (2005), ‘Asianism in Korea’s Politics of Identity’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6:4, pp. 617–630. For a critique of Asianness and its cultural manifestations in Japan and Asia, see Leo Ching (2000), ‘Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capitalism’, Public Culture 12:1, pp. 233– 257; Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), ‘Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of “Asia” in Japan’, Positions 10:3, pp. 547–574; and Chua Beng-huat (2004), ‘Conceptualising an East Asian Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5:2, pp. 200–221. 2. Applause Pictures ‘was created to forge new links between the film industries and film-makers of Asia Pacific’. http://www.applausepictures.com/profile/ index.html.

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3. See Stephen Teo’s report in ‘Hong Kong Journal Report’, Film Comment November/December 2000, pp. 11–13. 4. The CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Agreement) between Hong Kong and Mainland China came into being in 2003 in the wake of mounting public unrest over the ineffectual administration of former Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, as an attempt by the Chinese central government to reinvigorate the Hong Kong economy in the post-SARS period. Among the provisions are increased import quota and more relaxed regulations for the local film industry to operate in the Mainland. 5. Peter Chan was producer of The Eye (2008) for Lionsgate/Paramount Vantage, a remake of Applause’s 2002 production, Jian Gui (meaning ‘seeing ghost’). The original version of the film was a co-production with Singapore’s Raintree Productions. 6. Pieter Aquilia (2006), ‘Westernizing Southeast Asian Cinema: Coproductions for a Transnational Market’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20:4, pp. 434–435. 7. For a discussion on the ‘social content’ and style of Hong Kong horror, see Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover (2003), ‘Enfant Terrible: The Terrible, Wonderful World of Anthony Wong’, Steven Jay Schneider, ed., Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, pp. 45–59. 8. Peter Chan’s interview with Thomas Shin in Hong Kong Panorama 2002–2003, pp. 32–38. 9. Jay McRoy (2005a), ‘Case Study: Cinematic Hybridity in Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-on: The Grudge’, Jay McRoy, ed., Japanese Horror Cinema, pp. 175–184. 10. This film was a critical but not a commercial success. Fruit Chan spend the subsequent years to complete his next project, Made in Hong Kong (1997), which formally launched his arthouse career. See Gan (2005), pp. 4–5. 11. Cynthia Freeland (2004), ‘Horror and Art-Dread’, Stephen Prince, ed., The Horror Film, pp. 192, 195–196. 12. Shin and Tsui (2003), p. 36. 13. ‘. . . I didn’t believe [Yu’s wife] could come back to life. Hence I put the wife into Eric Tsang’s mind’. Shin and Tsui (2003), p. 35. 14. Ibid., p. 37. 15. The police dormitory and the photo salon are on Wyndham Street in the older part of the Central District on Hong Kong island, where headquarters of public and commercial institutions are located. 16. Shin and Tsui (2003), p. 35. 17. Ibid., p. 38. 18. In the full 90-minute version, the heroine consumes the five-month old foetus of her husband’s mistress. 19. Stokes and Hoover (2003), p. 47. 20. McRoy (2005), p. 181. 21. For an account of the figuration of technology in post-industrial horror, see Ian Conrich (2005), ‘Metal-Morphosis: Post-Industrial Crisis and the Tormented Body in the Tetsuo Films’, McRoy ed., Japanese Horror Cinema, pp. 95–106. 22. See Stephen Hantke (2005), ‘Japanese Horror Under Western Eyes: Social Class and Global Culture in Miike Takashi’s Audition’, Japanese Horror Cinema, Jay McRoy ed., pp. 54–65.

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23. Isabel Cristina Pinedo (2004), ‘Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film’, Stephen Prince ed., The Horror Film, pp. 106–107. 24. The breaking down of moral, social, and existential boundaries is widely noted as a central trope of horror. See Stephen Prince (2004), ‘Introduction: The Dark Genre and Its Paradoxes’, The Horror Film, pp. 1–14. 25. According to Robertson, ‘glocal’ emcompasses the multivalence of the terms ‘global’ and ‘local’, which he sees as complementary and simultaneous, rather than diametrically opposed. Robertson’s proposition allows for a dialogic negotiation among ‘many different modes of practical production of locality’ that both results from and constitutive of the ‘form’ of contemporary globalization. See Roland Robertson (1995), ‘Globalization—Localization: Homogenization—Heterogenization’, Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson eds., Global Modernities, pp. 25–44. 26. Among these awards are Best Director and Best Actress (Golden Horse Awards), and Best Actress and Best Cinematography (Hong Kong Film Awards). 27. Derek Elley, ‘The Warlords’, Variety, January 14, 2008. 28. The film won a number of major awards at the 2007 Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Cinematography. 29. Nelson H. Wu, ‘The Warlords’, The China Post (Internet Edition), December 28, 2007. 30. See Georgette Wang and Emilie Yeh (2007), ‘Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Production: A Tale of Two Films’, Chan Kwok-bun, Jan W. Walls, and David Hayward, eds., East West Identities, pp. 79–82. 31. Older musical films fall into two main categories: the huang mei diao, which are mainly sing-song costume dramas with conventional themes and playacting; and the so-called gewu pian, the song-and-dance film featuring young female singers. Popular in the 1960s, these films are usually considered a ‘local’ invention, mixing dialogue and drama with musical numbers (an affiliation to traditional opera), and hence not strictly speaking ‘musicals’ in the Western sense. 32. Sura Wood, ‘Perhaps Love’, The Hollywood Reporter, June 8, 2006. http:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film/reviews/article_display.jsp?&rid=405 (Accessed March 15, 2008). 33. Wang and Yeh (2007), p. 78. 34. Director’s interview included in the film’s DVD bonus track. 35. C.f. n. 35. An online film blog playfully titles the film ‘800’, for its obvious resemblance to the Hollywood blockbuster, 300 (2007). For instance, an online film blog playfully titles the film ‘800’, after the Hollywood blockbuster 300 (2007). 36. Koichi Iwabuchi (2001), ‘Becoming Culturally Proximate: The A/scent of Japanese Idol Dramas in Taiwan’, B. Moeran, ed., Asian Media Productions. See also Iwabuchi (2002), ‘Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of “Asia” in Japan’, Positions 10:3, pp. 562–563. 37. Appadurai’s logic boomerangs back to the ‘source’ of this nostalgia: ‘. . . you’re your own past can be made to appear as simply a normalized modality of your present’. Appadurai (1996), pp. 29–31. 38. Derek Elley (2008).

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39. Shao-hua Gua, Lords of War, http://storibord.blogspot.com/2007/12/lordsof-war.html (Accessed March 15, 2008). 40. David Desser (2005), ‘Making Movies Male: Zhang Che and the Shaw Brothers Martial Arts Movies, 1965–1975’, Pang and Wong, eds., Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, pp. 17–34. 41. Ibid., p. 23. 42. For a discussion on the ‘critical divide’ in the reception of Zhang Yimou’s film, see Vivian Lee, October 2007; see also Lu Tonglin (1999), ‘The Zhang Yimou Model’, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3:1, pp. 1–21. 43. Robertson (1995), p. 29.

The Hong Kong Multiplex: An Unfolding Narrative 1. Information based on ‘Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA): Third Phase of Trade Liberalization (CEPA III). Specific Commitments on ‘ “Cinema Theatre Services” and “Chinese Language Motion Pictures and Motion Pictures Jointly Produced” and Related Implementation Details’, Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority, Hong Kong Government, http:// www.fso-tela.gov.hk/doc/CEPAIIICommitments.pdf; http://www.fso-tela.gov.hk/accessibility/eng/whats_new. cfm; and http://info.hktdc.com/main/si/spfilm.htm; also discussion in Davis and Yeh (2008), pp. 102–105. 2. The 80-million-US-dollar historical drama opened in 48 Beijing cinema. The ‘most expensive’ Chinese-language film ever made, the film grossed over RMB25 million ($3.65 million) on its first day of release in China, HK2,000,830 ($257,500) in Hong Kong, and reported 139,000 admissions on opening day in Korea, breaking the records of Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers (58,000 and 60,000 admissions, respectively). Sources: Variety, http://www.varietyasiaonline.com/content/view/6450/1&nid=3597; and China View, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/10/content_ 8524002.htm (Accessed December 15, 2008). 3. Taiwan’s film industry has shown signs of a long-awaited recovery with the surprise success of Cape No. 7/Haijiao Qihao (2008), a small-budget production that has stirred up sensations rivaling the best of Japanese TV dramas in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was the highlight of the 2008 Golden Horse awards, and was hailed as signalling a turning point in Taiwan cinema. See discussion below. 4. Appadurai (1996), pp. 31–37. 5. Ulf Hannerz (1990), ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, p. 250. 6. Appadurai (1996), p. 184. 7. ‘Cross-cultural Perspectives on East Asian Cinemas: An International Symposium’, City University of Hong Kong, July 3–4, 2008. The forum was held on July 4. 8. International film festivals have played an important role in this new marketing positioning of arthouse films. See Davis and Yeh (2008), pp. 140–164. 9. See Lee Cheuk-to and Bono Lee’s interview with Johnnie To in Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000, pp. 46–50.

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10. Cape No. 7 won five awards in total, and Wei brought home the Outstanding Filmmaker Award. Warlords was awarded Best Film, and Peter Chan Best Director. 11. Tam Chi-wan/Tan Zhiyun (transcription) (2008), ‘Redefining Territorial Boundaries: The Impact of Cape No. 7’ [Haijiao qian lang, bantu chongzheng], Hong Kong Economic Journal (Xin bao), December 8, p. 45. 12. Tong Ching-siu, ‘CEPA Effects and New Types of HK Films Exploring Mainland Market’, http://www.filmcritics.org.hk/en/criticism.php (Accessed December 15, 2008); c.f. n. 1.

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary Names English

Chinese

Alan Mak Siu-fai Alfred Cheung Allan Fung Yi-ching Andrew Lau Wai-keung Andy Lau Andy On Ang Lee Anita Mui Ann Hui Anthony Wong Chau-sang Bai Ling Benny Chan Muk-shing Bruce Lee Carina Lau Carol ‘Do Do’ Cheng Chan Kwok-kwan Chapman To Man-chak Chen Daoming Chen Kaige Cheung Chi-leung Chow Yun-fat Chris Doyle Derek Yee Tung-sing Eddie Ko Edison Chen Edmond Pang Ho-cheung Eric Tsang Faye Wong/Wang Jingwen Fei Mu Francis Ng Fruit Chan Fung Xiaogang Gong Li 236

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary 237 Gordon Chan Ka-seung Hu Jun Isabella Leung Lok-sze Jackie Chan Jackie Cheung Jackie Lui Chung-yin Jay Chou Jeffrey Lau Chun-Wai Jet Li Ji Jun-hee Joe Cheung Tung-joe John Woo Johnnie To Jojo Hui Josephine Siu Fong-fong Josie Ho Kim Ji-woon Lai Man-wai Lam Ka-tung Lam Suet Lau Ching-wan Lee Chi Ngai Lee Kung-lok Leon Lai Leslie Cheung Leung Siu-lung Li Bihua Lin Shu-yu Liu Kai-chi Lo Hoi-pang Louis Koo Maggie Cheung Miriam Yeung Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai Pang Brothers Park Chan-wook Patrick Tse Yin Pauline Chan Po-chu Peter Chan Ho-sun Peter Pao Qin Hailu

238

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary

Ringo Lam Roy Cheung Sammo Hung Samson Chiu San Ma Sizang/Tang Wing-cheung Sandar Ng Kwan-yu Shaw Brothers Shawn Yue Shi Shuqing Simon Yam Sit Kar-yin Stanley Kwan Stephen Chow (Stephen Chiau) Takashi Kaneshiro Takashi Shimizu Takeshi Miike Teddy Chan Ti Lung Tony Leung Chiu-wai Tony Leung Kar-fai Tsui Hark Wai Ka-fai Wei Te-sheng Wong Ching-po Wong Kar-wai Wong Tin-lam Wong Yat-wah Xu Jiao Xu Jinglei Yau Tat-chi Yim Ho Yuen Qiu Yuen Wah Yuen Wo-ping Zhang Yimou Zhang Ziyi Zhao Wei Zheng Pei-pei Zhou Xuan Zhou Xun

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary 239

Film titles English 92 Legendary La Rose A Battle of Wits A Better Tomorrow / A Better Tomorrow II A Chinese Odyssey A Hero Never Dies A Wedding Banquet A.V. An All-Consuming Love As Tears Go By As Time Goes by Ashes of Time Breaking News Cape No. 7 Center Stage (a.k.a. The Actress) C’est la vie mon chéri Chicago Chungking Express CJ 7 Comrades, Almost a Love Story Confession of Pain Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Days of Being Wild Divergence Dumplings Durian Durian Election Election II Enter the Dragon Exiled Expect the Unexpected Face Off First Option Flirting Scholar Forbidden City Cop From Beijing With Love Fu Bo Going Home Golden Chicken / Golden Chicken 2

Chinese

240

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary

Happy Together He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father He’s a Woman, She’s a Man Her Fatal Ways Hero Hollywood, Hong Kong Homecoming House of 72 Tenants House of Flying Daggers In the Mood for Love Infernal Affairs / Infernal Affairs II/ Infernal Affairs III Isabella Jade Goddess King of Comedy Kung Fu Hustle Lawyer Lawyer Lifeline Linger Little Cheung Loving You Mad Detective Made in Hong Kong Men Suddenly in Black My Son A-Chang Once Upon a Time in China One Night in Mongkok Ordinary Heroes Out of the Dark Painted Face Perhaps Love Public Toilet Pushing Hands Red Cliff Road to Dream Rose, Rose, I Love You Rouge Royal Tramp Running Out of Time / Running out of Time II

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: Glossary 241 Secret Shaolin Soccer Song of a Songstress Song of the Exile Sparrow Spring in a Small City Summer Snow The Eye / The Eye 2 The Longest Nite The Longest Summer The Mission The Postmodern Life of My Aunt The Promise The Warlords Three Three . . . Extremes Three: Memory Three: The Wheel Three . . . Extremes: Box Three . . . Extremes: Cut Throwdown Tom, Dick, and Harry Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 Visible Secret Winds of September You Shoot, I Shoot Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain

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Index action film, 15–16, 76, 79, 82, 87–9, 93, 101–5, 110, 116–17, 120–1, 123, 138, 143, 159, 169, 205, 214, 228–9, 248 An All-Consuming Love, 27, 239 anime, 123, 130 art film, the, 6, 21, 187–8, 216 Ashes of Time, 22, 37, 239 auteur, 14, 16, 21, 24, 26, 66, 87, 91, 94, 212, 225, 244 A.V., 78, 239 Bai, Ling, 38, 195, 236 A Battle of Wits, 212, 239 From Beijing With Love, 118, 239 A Better Tomorrow/A Better Tomorrow II, 89, 102, 105, 113, 145, 239 blockbuster(s), 16, 18, 121, 125, 185, 200–1, 206, 216, 233 Breaking News, 90, 93, 100, 104, 239 Cantonese cinema, 14, 24, 52, 54, 64, 79, 126, 220, 222 Cape No. 7, 216, 234–5, 239, 248 Center Stage (a.k.a. The Actress), 5, 239 C’est la vie mon chéri, 44, 239 CGI (computer-generated imagery), 16, 118, 121–2, 126, 128, 135 Chan, Fruit, 13–14, 17–18, 43, 45, 48–52, 63–5, 68, 88, 132, 137, 165, 169, 171–3, 175–6, 178, 180, 182, 186, 188, 193–4, 196, 199, 214, 222, 231–2, 236, 243–4 Chan, Ho-sun Peter, 17, 24, 171, 184, 237 Chan, Jackie, 109, 119, 132, 228, 237, 244 Chan, Ka-seung Gordon, 212, 237 Chan, Kwok-kwan, 131, 236 Chan, Muk-shing Benny, 138, 236 Chan, Po-chu Pauline, 25, 237 Chan, Teddy, 184, 238

Chen, Daoming, 145, 236 Chen, Edison, 141, 146, 236 Cheng, Carol ‘Do Do’, 168, 236 Chen, Kaige, 212, 236 Cheung, Alfred, 167, 188, 236 Cheung, Chi-leung, 212, 236 Cheung, Jacky, 167, 202, 237 Cheung, Ka-fai Nicholas, 95, 237 Cheung, Leslie, 28, 145, 237 Cheung, Maggie, 30, 39, 123, 237 Cheung, Roy, 96, 238 Cheung, Tung-joe Joe, 215, 237 Chicago, 202, 239 Chineseness, 1, 13, 17, 46, 49, 120, 132, 189, 230, 243 A Chinese Odyssey, 118, 239 Chiu, Samson, 17, 165–6, 173, 187, 214, 230, 238, 243 Chou, Jay, 217, 237 Chow, Stephen (Stephen Chiau), 4, 10, 15–16, 109, 117, 123–7, 130–1, 136, 170, 184, 214–15, 226, 238 Chow, Yun-fat, 105, 109, 113, 123, 211, 236 Chungking Express, 22, 24, 40, 101, 156–7, 180, 205, 230, 239 CJ 7, 137, 239 colonial history, 3, 22, 38, 55, 67, 69, 89, 148, 165, 189 colonialism, 3, 59, 164–5, 219, 223, 248 comedy, 5–6, 15, 17, 22, 25, 45, 76, 82, 117–18, 126–7, 169–72, 185, 203, 226–7, 240 Comrades, Almost a Love Story, 185, 239 Confession of Pain, 16–17, 110, 138–9, 141, 150, 152, 154–9, 239 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 121–2, 124, 135, 201, 203, 209, 212, 226–7, 239, 243, 245, 248 Cyber fu, 122 250

Index Days of Being Wild, 5, 8, 22, 24, 28, 37, 39, 220, 239, 248 digital technology/technologies, 16, 118, 121, 128–30, 136 Divergence, 110, 138, 239 Doyle, Chris, 193, 204, 236 Dumplings, 18, 186–8, 194–9, 209, 239 Durian Durian, 17, 165, 171–3, 175–7, 179–83, 189, 194, 196, 222, 231, 239, 244, 249 Election, 90, 239 Election II, 90, 239 Enter the Dragon, 119, 239 Exiled, 66, 88–9, 91–5, 97–8, 100, 110–11, 114, 116, 226, 239 Expect the Unexpected, 90, 239 Eye, The/Eye 2, The, 186, 232, 241 Face Off, 142, 239 Faye, Wong/Wang, Jingwen, 37–8, 40, 236 Fei, Mu, 27, 236 First Option, 90, 239 Flirting Scholar, 118, 239 Forbidden City Cop, 118, 239 Fu Bo, 14–15, 66–70, 75–8, 80–4, 95, 214, 223–4, 239 Fung, Xiaogang, 131, 236 Fung, Yi-ching Allan, 184–5, 236 gangster film, 66, 80–2, 87, 90, 102, 132, 142, 145–8, 219, 224, 229 gender, 4, 17, 34, 43, 76–7, 83, 93–4, 113–14, 124, 152, 165, 170–1, 182, 196, 227, 246, 249 globalization, 3–4, 43–4, 47, 73, 120–1, 164, 184, 213, 221–2, 233–4, 242, 244, 247, 249 global visual culture, 15, 119, 122–3, 131 Going Home, 18, 186–7, 189, 192–5, 199, 209, 231, 239, 247 Golden Chicken/Golden Chicken II, 2, 17–18, 165–71, 182–3, 189, 230, 239, 243 Gong, Li, 38, 236

251

Happy Together, 31, 219, 240, 248 He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father, 24–5, 240 Her Fatal Ways, 167, 240 hero film(s), 5, 8, 87, 89–90, 104, 107, 110, 157 heroism, 88–90, 95, 98, 100, 104–5, 107, 109, 111–12, 115–16, 138–9, 143, 197 Hero, 125, 207, 209, 212, 228, 240, 243 A Hero Never Dies, 105, 109, 239 He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, 185, 240 Ho, Josie, 95, 237 Hollywood Hong Kong, 17, 165, 171–3, 177–83, 189, 194, 196, 231, 240, 243 Homecoming, 5, 8, 24, 240 homelessness, 176–7, 183, 194, 199 (Hong Kong) New Wave, the, 1, 7–8, 14, 22, 24, 45, 50, 77, 220, 222, 243 horror, 5, 18, 70, 74, 109, 186–9, 192–3, 195–7, 199–200, 209–10, 224, 232–3, 243–4, 246–8 House of 72 Tenants, 132, 240 House of Flying Daggers, 205, 212, 234, 240 Hui, Ann, 5, 8, 13–14, 24, 27, 44–5, 56–7, 59–61, 63–6, 68, 88, 132, 169, 193, 211, 214, 223, 236, 243, 249 Hui, Jojo, 187, 189, 237 Hu, Jun, 168–9, 237 Hung, Sammo, 109, 238 identity Hong Kong identity, 43–4, 166, 220, 246 local identity, 7, 43 national identity, 54, 59, 140 Infernal Affairs/Infernal Affairs II/ Infernal Affairs III, 16, 102, 110, 138–44, 146–52, 154–8, 169, 221, 227, 229, 240, 245–6 intertextuality, 2, 5, 11, 14, 23, 29–31, 42, 104, 108, 118, 126, 214 Isabella, 14–15, 66–7, 69, 75, 77–84, 95, 214, 223–4, 240, 244, 247

252

Index

Jade Goddess, 211, 240 Ji, Jun-hee, 202, 237 Kaneshiro, Takashi, 150, 156, 202, 205–6, 238 Kim, Ji-woon, 188, 237 King of Comedy, 15, 117, 127, 240 Ko, Eddie, 91, 236 Koo, Louis, 110, 237 kung fu film(s), 16, 117, 119–21, 123, 126, 205, 224 hero(es), 117, 226 Kung Fu Hustle, 16, 117–18, 121–2, 124–6, 128, 131–3, 135–6, 214, 228, 240, 242, 244, 246, 248 Kwan, Stanley, 5, 8, 10, 24, 46, 238 Lai, Leon, 105, 143, 190, 237 Lai, Man-wai, 52, 237 Lam, Ka-tung, 113, 237 Lam, Ringo, 109, 238 Lam, Suet, 96, 237 Lau, Andy, 110, 141, 205–6, 236 Lau, Carina, 38, 148, 236 Lau, Ching-wan, 108, 237 Lau, Chun-Wai Jeffrey, 24, 237 Lau, Wai-keung Andrew, 16, 236 Lawyer Lawyer, 118, 240 Lee, Ang, 75, 124, 226–7, 236, 243 Lee, Bruce, 16, 52, 87, 119–21, 124, 128–9, 131, 134, 136–7, 227, 236, 245 Lee, Chi Ngai, 24, 237 Lee, Kung-lok, 14, 67, 237 92 Legendary La Rose, 8, 24–5, 239 Leung, Chiu-wai Tony, 30–1, 37, 123, 141, 150, 154, 156, 238 Leung, Kar-fai Tony, 197, 238 Leung, Lok-sze Isabella, 77, 82, 237 Leung, Siu-lung, 134, 237 Li, Bihua, 10, 237 Lifeline, 90, 240 Li, Jet, 8, 109, 121, 132, 205–6, 208, 228, 237 Linger, 211, 240 Lin, Shu-yu, 217, 237

Little Cheung, 14, 43, 45–54, 56, 63–5, 137, 169, 172–3, 178, 214, 221, 231, 240, 249 Liu, Kai-chi, 68, 237 Lo, Hoi-pang, 102, 237 Longest Nite, The, 66, 95, 109, 241 Longest Summer, The, 48, 169, 178, 241 Loving You, 109, 240 Lui, Chung-yin Jackie, 91, 223, 237 Mad Detective, 89, 108–12, 114–16, 138, 240 Made in Hong Kong, 14, 48, 172, 176, 178, 232, 240 Mainlander, 17, 167–8, 172, 223 Mainland Other, 167, 169, 180–2 Mak, Siu-fai Alan, 15–16, 102, 110, 138, 140, 144, 214, 221, 236, 246 martial arts film(s), 1, 15–16, 96, 118–26, 128, 131, 133–6, 163, 205, 213, 215, 225–7 hero(es), 122, 136, 208 melodrama, 1, 6, 16, 22–3, 25, 27–9, 132, 137 Men Suddenly in Black, 78, 240 Miike, Takeshi, 187–8, 196, 232, 238, 244 Mission, The, 88–91, 225, 241, 246 In the Mood for Love, 14, 21, 23, 30, 37, 219–21, 240, 246 Mui, Anita, 76, 80, 236 My Son A-Chang, 52, 137, 240 national cinema, 4, 218, 244 Ng, Francis, 92, 146, 236 Ng, Kwan-yu Sandar, 166, 238 nostalgia film, 7, 9, 11, 14, 23–5, 32, 36, 39, 41, 212, 229 post-nostalgic (imagination), the, 23, 29, 41, 45, 104, 108, 125, 130, 138, 140–1, 144, 165, 184, 212–215 On, Andy, 114, 236 Once Upon a Time in China, 8, 24, 121, 240 One Night in Mongkok, 125, 240

Index Ordinary Heroes, 14, 27, 43, 45–7, 56–65, 169, 221, 223, 240, 249 Otherness, 182, 195 Out of the Dark, 109, 240 Painted Face, 212, 240 pan-Asian cinema, 184, 212 pan-Asian filmmaking, 17, 185–6, 200–1 pan-Asian film(s), 201, 203, 208–9 Pang Brothers, 186, 237 Pang, Ho-cheung Edmond, 14, 67, 77, 236 Pao, Peter, 204, 237 Park, Chan-wook, 188, 237 parody, 5, 8, 11, 26, 36, 88, 104, 125–7, 133 pastiche, 9–11, 126–7, 131, 133, 212, 218, 244 Perhaps Love, 18, 186, 200–3, 205, 208–9, 215, 233, 240, 249 postcoloniality, 3 postmodernism, 6, 9, 218, 244 Postmodern Life of My Aunt, The, 211, 241 Promise, The, 208, 212, 241 Public Toilet, 194, 240 Pushing Hands, 75, 240 Qin, Hailu, 173, 237 Red Cliff, 212, 240, 242 Road to Dream, 130, 240 Rose, Rose, I Love You, 24, 240 Rouge, 5, 10, 24, 202–3, 240 Royal Tramp, 118, 240 Running Out of Time/Running out of Time II, 102, 104, 109–10, 225, 240, 246 San Ma Sizang/Tang, Wing-cheung, 50, 238 Secret, 217, 241 Shaolin Soccer, 16, 117–18, 121, 124–33, 136, 214, 241 Shaw Brothers, 119, 132, 234, 238, 244 Shimizu, Takashi, 188, 210, 232, 238, 246 Shi, Shuqing, 165, 238

253

Sit, Kar-yin, 25, 238 Siu, Fong-fong Josephine, 25, 237 social realism, 6, 14, 68, 132, 172 social realist cinema, 45, 64–5 Song of the Exile, 5, 8, 24, 62, 66, 169, 241 Song of a Songstress, 27, 241 Sparrow, 216, 241 special effects, 121, 123, 128–9, 131, 135–6, 188 Spring in a Small City, 27, 241 Summer Snow, 44, 241 As Tears Go By, 21, 37, 239 Three . . . Extremes: Box, 188, 196, 241 Three . . . Extremes: Cut, 188, 196, 241 Three, 18, 186, 187, 241 Three . . . Extremes, 18, 186, 188, 196, 241 Three: Memory, 188, 241 Three: The Wheel, 188, 241 Throwdown, 241 Ti, Lung, 145, 226, 238 As Time Goes by, 63, 239 To, Johnnie, 15, 66, 87, 90, 138, 143, 145, 147, 154, 211, 214–16, 225–6, 229, 234, 237, 242, 244, 246–8 To, Man-chak Chapman, 77, 169, 236 Tom, Dick, and Harry, 185, 241 Too Many Ways to Be No, 1, 90, 241 transnational cinema(s), 3, 218, 244 Tsang, Eric, 147, 169, 190, 194, 216, 232, 236 Tse, Yin Patrick, 127, 237 Tsui, Hark, 1, 8, 24, 53, 96, 106, 121, 134, 145, 176, 238 Visible Secret, 61–2, 241 Wai, Ka-fai, 89, 114, 225–6, 229, 238, 242, 247 Warlords, The, 18, 186, 200–1, 203, 205–9, 215–16, 233, 235, 241, 244, 249 A Wedding Banquet, 75, 239

254

Index

Wei, Te-sheng, 216, 238 Winds of September, 217, 241 Wong, Chau-sang Anthony, 92, 143, 236 Wong, Ching-po, 14, 66, 238 Wong, Kar-wai, 8, 12–14, 16, 21, 24, 29–30, 35, 41, 45–6, 80, 101, 125, 156, 180, 205, 214, 218–21, 238, 243, 245–8 Wong, Tin-lam, 91, 238 Wong, Yat-wah, 169, 238 Woo, John, 5, 8, 12, 16, 87, 89, 97, 102, 104, 107, 142, 169, 211, 225, 237, 249 Wuxia, 87, 110, 119, 121, 134, 200, 212, 220, 227, 248 Xu, Jiao, 137, 238 Xu, Jinglei, 150, 206–7, 238

Yam, Simon, 96, 238 Yau, Tat-chi, 66, 238 Yee, Tung-sing Derek, 44, 125, 236 Yeung, Miriam, 195, 237 Yim, Ho, 5, 8, 24, 238 You Shoot, I Shoot, 78, 241 Yuen, Qiu, 134–5, 238 Yuen, Wah, 134–5, 238 Yuen, Wo-ping, 122, 129, 238 Yue, Shawn, 141–2, 146, 238 Zhang, Yimou, 124, 132, 205–7, 212, 228, 234, 238, 243, 246 Zhang, Ziyi, 38, 123, 238 Zhao, Wei, 127, 238 Zheng, Pei-pei, 135, 238 Zhou, Xuan, 27, 31, 238 Zhou, Xun, 177, 196, 202, 238 Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, 121, 241