Our Time Will Come (2017)

Directed by Ann Hui
Country: Hong Kong / China

Ann Hui is one of the strongest cinematic voices from Hong Kong these days. Even if her last work, “The Golden Era”, wasn’t so striking as one would expect, illustrious dramas such as “Boat People”, “The Way We Are”, and “A Simple Life” still live in my mind.

Her new outing, “Our Time Will Come”, was written by Jiping He (“The Warlords”) according to real characters and events and depicts an important chapter of Hong Kong history, namely, the fight of the local people against the Japanese occupation in the early 40s.

Xun Zhou ("Flying Swords of Dragon Gate") is Lan Fang, a tenacious primary school teacher, who moved by a strong sense of justice and duty, decides to leave her aging mother (Deannie Yip) and the domestic comfort to join the Dongjiang Guerrilla, a special faction created to rescue important intellectuals - artists, writers, scholars, and filmmakers - whose voices were silenced and bodies put under lock and key. 
With the schools closed and her fiancé, Kam-wing (Wallace Huo), operating undercover on the enemy side, Lan is easily dragged to the Guerrilla’s missions, becoming a respected captain after receiving an invitation from Blackie (Eddie Peng), a feared leader who convinced her with words of praise and a couple of dumplings.

Everything gets complicated when Lan’s mother decides to actively help her daughter and the cause by passing critical information, ending up arrested and tortured by the Kenpeitai (the military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army disbanded in 1945).

Ms. Hui attempts to consolidate the realism when simulating a fictional interview with a former young messenger, Ben (Tony Leung), set in the present day and shot in black and white. In the film, this humble man had the privilege to meet the film’s heroine during those tumultuous times and still works as a cab driver.

Even low-key and a slightly stagy at times, the film manages to project this particular story in a way we can understand the wider historical context. Ann Hui fulfills this requirement through a sturdy directorial hand and clear storytelling, even considering her inability to transform “Our Time Will Come” into a thrilling film. In opposition to being a bit too relentless with sometimes wobbly spy moves and episodic brittle war scenes, the film boasts authenticity in its performances, using a legendary symbol of feminine independence and revolutionary resistance to remind us of the sacrifices and efforts put up by the oppressed minorities in response to a cruel occupancy.

The evocative cinematography by Nelson Lik-wai Yu, habitual first choice of Jia Zhangke, is one of the film’s highest pleasures.

Mad World (2016)

Directed by Wong Chun
Country: Hong Kong

Following the guidelines of a tight script written by Florence Chan, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Chun releases his debut film, “Mad World”, with promises of having much more to give in the future. The film, a compulsive drama, looks at mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, not only addressing the typical pain and distress that torments patients in this condition but also embracing understanding, expectation, and hope.

The film’s central character is Tung (Shawn Yue), a former successful stockbroker who decided to left his job and personal life to take care of his bipolar mother. Curiously, he struggles with the illness himself, extremely aggravated after his mother’s death, which happened in strange circumstances. So strange that he had to go to court to dissipate all possible doubts related to the incident.

The camera lens fixates on Tung after he has been discharged from the mental hospital and accompanies him in the difficult processes of re-adaptation to the real world and reconnection with his estranged, aging father (Eric Tsang). The latter, a good-natured truck driver, is happy to have him in his tiny space in a single-room-occupancy building. However, he is also concerned with his son, and in fact, he has reasons for that since he stopped taking his pills.

Through recurrent flashbacks, Chung thoroughly reconstructs some key moments in the life of Tung, focusing on his depressing experiences when in the company of his mother, who could cry like a baby in his arms and then suddenly curse him with a painful fury. Moments with his heartless girlfriend Jenny (Charmaine Fong), with whom he will meet up again in an attempt to resume the relationship, are also introduced, helping us to better understand his troubled past.

When everything seemed to be favorable, hope is turned into humiliation, and a fulminant relapse goes on his way without mercy or compassion. Pitch-dark are the clouds that hover above his head, making his poor father hopeless as he keeps observing his son lying on the bed all day, crying, without eating or having the strength to take a shower. These are the most powerful scenes in the film, and they cut like sharp razors.

To complicate, the neighbors don’t feel comfortable when Tung is around and demand his departure. Besides his father, there’s only one person in the building who cares about him, earning his friendship: a bright, sensitive kid who read him Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince at night through the wall. 

“Mad World” is an unadorned, modest tale with a topic many times explored before. Still, and even slightly flawed, it thrives with steeped emotional affluence and gripping performances. Besides sincerity and zeal in the filmmaking and production design, Wong Chun endeavored to extract some light from a life of shadows. Hence, the Best New Director Awards given to him by the Golden Horse Film Festival and the Hong Kong Film Awards are not so surprising.

Office (2015)

Directed by Johnnie To
Country: Hong Kong / China

The prolific Hong Kong film director, Johnnie To (“Election”, “Exiled”, “Drug War”), whose action and crime thrillers are regularly well regarded both by the public and the critics, steps into the musical comedy genre, bringing a few strong social messages that allow it to stand above the usual mediocrity presented in this type of farce. 

Silvia Chang wrote it and stars with distinction as Winnie Cheung, the CEO of the cosmetics company, Jones & Sunn, whose premises work as a hub for the majority of its occurrences. 
The loyal, proactive, and ambitious initiate, Lee Xiang (Wang Ziyi), who hates to wait in the line for the elevator, gets a job on the 71st floor, the executives' nest, and the one that gives him the possibility to dream of a brilliant future. On his first day, while constantly looking for the ideal postures and proper language to please his rapacious superior, David (Eason Chan), he gets the company of another beginner, Kat (Lang Yueting), a clever economist coming from Harvard, who happens to be the daughter of the chairman, Ho Chung-ping (the excellent, and yet modest this time, Chow Yun-fat). Her true identity is concealed and only Xiang was sufficiently perceptive to discover it, as he maintains a trustful, protective, and slightly flirting relationship with her. 
In the office, the daily gossips run like a river. Besides identifying the daily corporate slavery and speculative negotiations, we soon get into the various rumors about the affairs within the organization - David and the completely unreadable Winnie; also David and the fragile, affianced accountant, Sophie (Tang Wei); and finally Winnie and Ho, who gets his daughter’s blame for his wife’s comatose state.

Here, the rhythm is high and the romance feels busy, taken from a confidently built screenplay that only lacks that eminent emotional touch to become a little more than just an agreeable entertainment. The musical moments, not so special as I would like them to be, failed to alleviate and give a palpable boost to the compact narrative. 

Definitely, Johnnie To couldn’t make of “Office” the best vehicle to explore his strongest talents. Even unobjectionable in regard to its conception and execution, I keep craving his electrifying gang stories packed with warlords, cops, informers, and hoodlums.

Aberdeen (2014)

Directed by: Ho-Cheung Pang
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.