I'm relatively new to Asian cinema. I suppose I've been watching the output obsessively for about a year now, and I sometimes think I'd be hard pressed to tell you which country I like the best, because there's aspects of all of them that I like.
When it comes to Mainland China, I love the fact that so many of them are about the lives of the proletariat, living under a communist regime. And the ways in which they're dealing with modernization is fascinating.
It was the films of Korea that started me watching Asian films in the first place. The Host, of all films. Far from one of the best, but I was seduced by the slick production values, combined with the old fashioned Korean family values that underpinned what was effectively a modern Godzilla-type monster flick.
Many of my favourites are Japanese. They older films have a subtlety and a sophistication that tends to be lacking in most of the other asian output -- though they can also match that with a banality and an impoverishment of imagination that beats out Hollywood as well.
But if I had to choose just one country's output, it would have to be that of Hong Kong. Not really a country at all, in fact, just a little region. Nevertheless, until quite recently, their films dominated the Asian market. Today, Hong Kong cinema is said to be dying, but the back catalogue contains some real treats.
Now, I'm not an art cinema guy, nor am I a world cinema type person. I've always preferred Hollywood studio stuff over small arthouse movies. And that may well be why I'm so fond of the Hong Kong film. It's almost all populist fare, aimed at entertaining a mass audience. And they like to get as many factors as possible into the mix, so a film will invariably cross multiple genres: comedy/romance/horror. Or Drama/sci-fi/historical. Sometimes, this results in the dumbest hodge podge of stories, but sometimes you get an absolutely sublime tale that really moves and engages you.
And if I had to pick a single favourite Hong Kong film, then I'd have to go with Peter Chen's film, Comrades: Almost A Love Story.
Comrades is the story of a country boy (Leon Lai) who arrives in Hong Kong and meets a highly driven, highly ambitious woman (Maggie Cheung), who migrated a little while earlier and is working multiple jobs in her desperate attempt to achieve economic stability. Initially, she's very dismissive of this bumpkin and tries to bilk him out of his dough to join an English class so that she can earn his commission. She learns English herself by washing the windows in the school and picking up what she can on the job -- in her off-hours from working at her main job at McDonalds.
Over time though, they become friends, and a friendship develops -- almost a love story, as the title suggests. But her desire for economic stability continues to get in the way of their potential romance.
The soundtrack of the film consists of the songs of the wonderful Teresa Teng -- an Asian icon who was enormous in Communist China during the first flowerings of that country being opened up during the early 80's post Tiennaman Square, etc. If you've ever seen Nick Broomfield's film, Ghosts, a dramatized account of a woman who comes to the UK to work and ends up getting caught in the Morecambe Bay cockle picking disaster, the songs that the mainlanders sing at their parties and when they're trying to relax tend to be the songs of Teresa Teng. You'll have heard them in a million cheap Chinese restaurants, and thought 'what's that terrible racket?', but after watching this film, I don't believe anyone could avoid getting her sentimental romantic ballads under their skin -- despite having no clue what it is that she's singing about.
The other interesting thing -- to me at least -- about Comrades, is that the director, Peter Chan, is married to my absolute favourite of all the Asian actresses, Sandra Ng. Sandra Ng is worth a whole blog post of her own, so I won't go dwell on her career here, but I will say that I'm very jealous of this director as he's married to one of the funniest, nicest, most talented actresses in the whole of Asia.
But if you're looking for an introduction to Hong Kong cinema, and you want something a little bit different from the traditional Chop-Sockey Kung Fu, the Johnnie To/Infernal Affairs style triad drama, or the Stephen Chow, Lunar New Year madcap comedy, then you can't go far wrong than seeking out Comrades, Almost A Love Story.
YouTube clip from Comrades
No comments:
Post a Comment