Country: Hong Kong
Movie Review: Much more assertive on drama than comedy, filmmaker Ho-Cheung Pang brings us a mature vision of modern Hong Kong through the analysis of the Cheng family members. Their joys, ambitions and concerns, are showed via personal relationships, professional lives, and interior battles. A fragile woman, Ching, whose husband is having an extramarital affair, is highly traumatized due to her unaffectionate mother, deceased 10 years ago. Highly concerned with his reputation, her brother Tao is a tutor whose wife, a model in the end of her career, tries to resist to some ‘temptations’ related to the profession. Both are concerned with the fact that their daughter, Chloe, isn’t so beautiful as they wanted, predicting she could face rejection. Ching and Tao’s father, Dong, is a fisherman-turned-priest totally dedicated to reincarnation rituals and to his much younger girlfriend who owns a nightclub. The family members try to adjust their own balance and make the right decisions to embrace happiness. “Aberdeen” (an area known as Little Hong Kong) was a good surprise, especially taking in consideration that I found Pang’s previous comedies, “Love in the Buff” and “Vulgaria”, an authentic waste of time. Using colorful scale models of the city to represent dreams, along with powerful camera shots that revealed a good eye for image composition, “Aberdeen” succeeds in depicting every character in order to compose the whole picture of a family whose individualities are caught in the middle of past and present.
