Love in a Puff

Love in a Puff
Hong Kong, 2010
Ho-Cheung Pang

One of the things that I love about Asian cinema is that everybody smokes. And when I say that they smoke, I mean that they've never got a cigarette out of their mouths. You'd have to go back to the 1940's or 50's to see smoking like you see in the Asian films.

Sadly, China is catching up with the West in a whole host of ways, and one of those ways is in its attitude to smoking.

Love in a Puff centres on the fact that people can no longer smoke in the workplace in Hong Kong, and so, just as they do here in the UK, people have to leave the bar, the restaurant or the office, and congregate on the street to satisfy their nicotine habit.

However, this tendency also has its upside. As one of the film's characters, Eunuch, says: "It does make it easier to meet girls. Before the smoking ban, you only met the women you worked with. Now, I know everybody from all the nearby offices."

And this story is about precisely that -- Jimmy Chung (Shawn Yeu) and Cherie (Miriam Yeung) meet in a smokers den between their two offices. He works in an advertising agency, she works in a cosmetics shop. His relationship has just ended, while hers appears to be struggling. The action all takes place over just a few days, during which they negotiate the future of their relationship.

Ho-Cheung Pang has turned out a number of very fine films in the past. It was one of his movies, Exodus, that got me hooked on H/K cinema in the first place, and others like Men, Suddenly in Black, and his collection of shorts, Trivial Matters are all well worth your time.

While Love in a Puff isn't quite up to those standards, it doesn't disappoint either. On the one hand, it's a rather slight romantic comedy. On the other, it's a rather fine character study with an acute sense of place -- Hong Kong, ten years after reunification.

Even without understanding the film's filthy Cantonese jokes, it's a pleasant way to spend an evening.