10. Hong Kong Double Feature
Reaching a landmark 10th country in this project, I chose Hong Kong because it is a place that has personal significance to me. Hong Kong is the path of my family from China to the United States. Indulge me before I get to the films.
My ancestors hail from southern China near Guangzhou. My father fled poverty and oppression under Mao in China by trekking through the jungle and swimming to Hong Kong. Growing up in a first-generation household in Boston, my father loved to recount tales of his “tau dou” (stealing a way) to Hong Kong. So much so that, as a bratty kid, I would tire easily of his sometimes exaggerated stories. Did he get foiled and sent to jail on his first attempt? Certainly. Did he save a friend from drowning? Was the swim across the bay so treacherous that he couldn’t see the other side when he first got in the water? I don’t know. As is the case with oral histories, fact and fiction are muddied. Thanks to Hong Kong’s generous migration policies (a byproduct of the Cold War), he resided there for 8 years before going back to marry my mother. Then, together they came to Boston in 1988, which was again thanks to then-generous U.S. laws for family unification (sometimes disparagingly called “chain migration”).
I’ve been back to China and Hong Kong several times in my life, most recently in 2014 and 2019. They were some of the best trips I’ve ever taken, but a lot has changed and will continue to change in Hong Kong.
For those who haven’t kept up with recent news from this area of the world, Hong Kong is, controversially, not a country, but a “special administrative region” of China. Slightly larger than a city-state, it was a leased British colony between the end of the First Opium War in 1842 to the handover back to China in 1997, during which China agreed to maintain a “one country, two systems” principle of governance for 50 years. Britain was a colonizer and did not grant Hong Kong full independence and freedoms. But it did give Hong Kong a unique heritage: a system of civil liberties and local democracy, an independent judiciary based on common law, free speech and press, and perhaps most significant, a blend of Eastern-Western sensibilities and culture creating something wholly unique.
History has shown that China has betrayed its promise, and Hong Kong will have fewer than 50 years to enjoy its separateness. In 2014, Hong Kong felt very much its own country, with a people, a history, and a culture unique to itself. My trip to Hong Kong in September 2019 coincided with mass protests and social unrest which defined that year. Hong Kong’s youth rose up, as they have done years before, joined by a clear majority of Hong Kong’s people, against increasing infringement and oppression by authoritarian China. What they protested then was an extradition law, which was shelved. But what followed from China’s crackdown was actually much worse.
Cinema in Hong Kong has a rich and storied history, with which I am actually quite familiar. Starting in the 1960s, Hong Kong studios pioneered the Wuxia and martial arts genres. Some of my favorite Wuxia films are Five Deadly Venoms (1978) and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978). The influence of those films has proliferated worldwide, inspiring disparate areas of the arts like the Wu-Tang Clan, one of my favorite musical groups. Hong Kong has produced international icons and superstars like Bruce Lee (Enter the Dragon), Jackie Chan (Police Story, Rush Hour), Jet Li (Hero), and Chow Yun-fat (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). Further, Hong Kong has produced adored arthouse classics, including the works of director Wong Kar Wai, who made two of my favorite films of all time, Chungking Express (1994) and In the Mood for Love (1999). For anyone who wants to learn more, I highly recommend this book by Jeff Yang.
I chose 2 films that are representative of Hong Kong. Hard Boiled, which I revisited after many years, represents its storied past. Ten Years, which I watched for the first time, reflects its anxious and uncertain future.
Ten Years
2015, anthology film
Ten Years is an anthology of 5 short films from various directors, imagining a dystopian vision of what Hong Kong might look like in 2025 (ten years after 2015). This small-budget, indie film was controversial. Some of the predictions are prescient and startling. And even before 2025, many of them have come true, which a hallmark of great science fiction.
The first short is about a public assassination plot, staged by shadowy mainland political figures and designed to turn public sentiment towards enactment of a harsh national security law in HK. In real life, such a national security law was recently enacted without any need for a fake terrorist attack. The second short is relentlessly pretentious and nearly unwatchable.
The third short, Dialect, is my favorite. The title evokes the aphorism: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” It is about a Cantonese-speaking taxi driver who struggles to learn and speak Mandarin, as it begins to be imposed in HK by mainland China. Perhaps, I relate to the driver’s struggles too well; I’m a native Cantonese speaker who is currently struggling to learn Mandarin in an online adult-education class. Cantonese is the language of Guangdong (Canton) province which surrounds Hong Kong. During my 2019 trip, I experienced for the first time problems communicating in Cantonese in Guangzhou, especially with service workers who were often Mandarin-speaking migrants from other parts of China. Language matters so much because it is intrinsic to a people and a culture. This short also features some comedy and humor, which helps to deal with difficult topics.
The fourth short plays like a fake documentary about a self-immolator, like the Tibetan monks, who sacrifices him/herself for the sake of Hong Kong independence. The talking heads give an extensive history of HK, and it is the most overtly political of the anthology. I liked that one of the actors playing a student is South Asian, not Han Chinese, because it shows that HK is home for many people, not just Chinese. The fifth short is an allegory to the Cultural Revolution of 1960s/70s China, when little children “youth guards” went around terrorizing their neighborhoods, spying and picking on the bourgeois, non-conformists, and anyone weak they felt like, and violently attacking their elders in the streets. Quite a scary world. But the anthology ends on a unexpectedly hopeful note.
The trouble with anthology films from various directors is a lack of cohesion and a couple duds, or even one, can ruin the experiment. Even the best anthology films, such as Paris, je t’aime (2006), suffer from this affliction. I’m not sure how the filmmakers here decided on the order of the short films. I would certainly order them differently, probably in this way: 5, 1, 3, 4. Remove 2 altogether.
I saw Ten Years on Netflix.
Hard Boiled
1992, directed by John Woo
I think I saw this movie as a kid with my dad on a bootleg DVD from Chinatown, but my recollection is fuzzy. On revisit, Hard Boiled is a classic deserving on its reputation as one of the best action movies ever made. This ride is absolutely wild. John Woo, a treasure of Hong Kong, created a subgenre there known as “heroic bloodshed” or “gun fu.” Although I’m still more partial to his film The Killer, this film represents the pure essence of the subgenre and remains arguably its peak.
Unlike the relative unknowns in Ten Years, Hard Boiled stars a who’s who in this era of HK cinema. Chow Yun-fat stars as a renegade cop on the edge named Tequila. Like in The Killer, where he plays a hitman with a conscience, Chow always exerts an effortless cool, devil-may-care attitude, with a charismatic sense of comic mischief. Tequila is also a clarinetist in a jazz band for some inexplicable reason. The character is a walking trope, but Chow gives him life like only a true movie star can.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Chungking Express) plays his foil, a Triad assassin who lives a lonely existence and makes an origami for every person he has killed. He’s like if Alain Delon’s character in Le Samouraï watched Blade Runner too many times. Later, we learn he is actually an undercover cop who is so deep undercover that he’s losing his mind. (This is basically the same character he plays in Infernal Affairs.) He lives on a boat too because he dreams of one day sailing to Antarctica because he can finally be himself there. Okay, but can someone tell him he’s going to need a bigger boat to cross the Drake Passage.
The plot is basically an assemblage of cops and robbers tropes and is not too much different than Infernal Affairs/The Departed, which came after it. The plot facilitates the elaborate action/gunplay set pieces that make this movie special. The final half of the movie is one giant set piece in a hospital, which is absolutely bonkers. Tequila lullabies a baby while mowing down bad guys; the same baby later returns the favor by peeing on him to put out a fire. There’s a brilliantly choreographed single take gunfight, with a stage change in the middle while the heroes take an elevator ride. This was a real single take with practical effects, before the days when you do them willy-nilly with digital tricks. There’s an insane body count and flagrant use of slow-mo. And Chow and Leung never reload. Other impressive set pieces are the first sequence inside a traditional dim sum and tea hall (where there are a disturbing number of pet birds) and a hit inside a library. While the hospital finale is massive, I appreciate the real HK locations, many of which are gone (the tea hall was torn down immediately after the filming).
After Hard Boiled, John Woo migrated to Hollywood and directed some notable films like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II, but he was never able to reach the same heights outside of Hong Kong. Perhaps subconsciously portending Woo’s fate, in the tea hall Tequila and his partner casually discuss the possibility of emigrating and remark on the lacking quality of dim sum outside of Hong Kong. Tequila says there is dim sum in other countries; his partner says but it’s not as good.
I saw Hard Boiled on Blu-ray disc from Hong Kong Rescue.
This is #10 in my World Tour of Cinema project. Read my introductory post here.
