Fine China

The MFA's Hong Kong Film Festival

by Chris Fujiwara

America leads the filmmaking world in money wasted and raked in, and India in the number of movies made, but in terms of how films look and sound, Hong Kong is the avant-garde among national film industries. The formalization of content and the hyperbolization of style in Hong Kong movies reach levels that recall the Italian commercial cinema of the '60s and '70s. Of the five recent HK films in the Museum of Fine Arts' current brief series (four of which I was able to preview), all are at least marginally offbeat, and one is excellent.

That one is Raymond Yip's Portland Street Blues (1998; screens August 27 at 8:15 p.m. and September 2 at 8:15 p.m.), a spinoff from the extremely popular Young and Dangerous series. It recounts how Teenie (Sandra Ng), the daughter of a low-level gang member, turned herself into Sister Thirteen, lesbian leader of the Hung Hing triad. Here Yip handles standard triad-movie situations with vigor and subtlety and isn't afraid to relax his pace to explore moods and relationships. Both from moment to moment and as a whole, the film moves in a way that feels organic and thought-out; even when it's predictable, it's satisfying. The acting is first-rate: Ng, on screen almost constantly as Sister Thirteen, carries the emotional burden of the film. In the context of a mainstream Hong Kong genre film, the portrayal of lesbianism is commendably straightforward, unsensational, and sympathetic, though some viewers may question the emphasis on Thirteen's relationship with a male boxer, Coke (Alex Fong).

Mabel Cheung's City of Glass (1998; August 28 at 4 p.m. and September 4 at 3:30 p.m.) is handsome fluff about two Hong Kong University students, Raphael (pop singer Leon Lai) and Vivian (Shu Kei), who fall in love during the political unrest of the '70s, separate, then meet again 20 years later, when each is married to another, and have an affair. Their story unfolds in flashback; as the film opens, they die in a car crash at midnight on January 1, 1997, whereupon their relationship is investigated by Raphael's son (Daniel Ng) and Vivian's daughter (Nicola Cheung), who meanwhile fall in love. Singlemindedly sentimental and including at least two too many renditions of "Try To Remember," City of Glass has a few things going for it: craft and, above all, an attractive cast. Shu Kei, who looks about 18 in the flashbacks, appears to reach about 22 in the "20 years later" scenes.

King of Comedy (1999; August 29 at 4:15 p.m. and September 3 at 8 p.m.), directed by Li Li Chi and Stephen Chiao, stars Chiao as a security guard and movie extra whose Method overzealousness gets him thrown out of film work. He takes a job teaching nightclub hostesses how to act like high-school girls and eventually puts his acting skills to work as an amateur undercover policeman. King of Comedy is a passable Hong Kong update of the Hollywood tradition of comedies about moviemaking (Jerry Lewis's The Errand Boy, for example). The high levels of violence, blood, lasciviousness, and tastelessness in what could easily have been an innocent romp will not surprise viewers familiar with recent Hong Kong cinema.

In one of King of Comedy's funnier scenes, the hero, who's functioning as stunt double for an action-movie star, has his arms slowly roasted while the director and the cameraman debate whether the presence of a pigeon in the foreground improves the shot. The kind of movie that this scene is making fun of is perfectly represented by Ballistic Kiss (1998; August 20 at 8 p.m. and September 1 at 6 p.m.), which is directed by and stars martial-arts star Donnie Yen. Yen plays ace hitman Cat, who's no slouch at massacring triadic goon squads single-handed but has a soft spot for his pretty neighbor (Annie Wu), who turns out to be a cop. The film catalogues the stylistic devices that have become de rigueur in even the most routinely ambitious HK films in the wake of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai: colored lighting, rhythmic superimpositions, slow and stop motion, jump dissolves, repeated shots.

Ballistic Kiss has a few good moments, including an eerie scene of the killer and the cop waiting for their enemies in a porno theater, but the pacing is clumsy and the alternation of frenzied slaughter and sentimentality quickly wears thin. With so many good films about contract killers -- from Sergio Sollima's Violent City to Darezhan Omirbaev's Killer -- gathering dust in vaults, why does the MFA give screen space to overheated crap like this?