100 Hong Kong Films

And so our greatest Hong Kong film concludes with a quotation from writer Liu Yi-Chang’s stream-of-consciousness novella, Intersection, which loosely inspired Wong Kar-wai into capturing the tentative affair between two would-be lovers who cross paths briefly before parting forever.

The same destiny, ironically, could be said to apply to the diverging receptions of this rapturous film itself: just as it had stormed the global arthouse market and propelled its director into the league of the world’s greatest living auteurs, the multiple-award-winning drama looks set to be perpetually overshadowed by its canonised prequel, Days of Being Wild, in its home city – thanks partly to the 1990 film’s matchless feat in gathering six major stars for one elaborate narrative experiment. For any self-respecting Hong Kong critic who has witnessed the phenomenon first hand, it must feel a little sacrilegious not to love the Leslie Cheung-fronted heartbreaker.

Unlike Days of Being Wild – or in fact, 2046, which again charts the crisscrossing relationships among an ensemble cast and neatly rounded up Wong’s unofficial 1960s trilogy – In the Mood for Love is essentially a romantic two-hander which characteristically shuns the overt emotional wrestling of its two bookending films. The result is a film so simple in its premise – and so chaste and subtle in its expression – that the slightest turns of heads are bound to give an ecstatically poignant impression.

The year is 1962, and as next-door neighbours living in a crowded apartment complex, Mr Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung in a cheongsam showcase) gradually discover their spouses are having a clandestine affair. Alternately finding solace by spending time with each other, and masochistically toying with the other’s emotions by rehearsing imaginary breakups, the two soon consummate their mutual longing by role-playing as their cheating partners.

Drenched in sumptuous colours and a hypnotic soundtrack that swings from Nat King Cole to Latin melody, the film is ably fashioned by William Chang and unfailingly photographed by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, two of the very best cinematographers in world cinema. Beneath the entrancing visual palette is a repressed romance which finds its apt denouement among the Angkor Wat ruins – a sublime touch of storytelling that renders In the Mood for Love as close to perfection as a Hong Kong film has ever attempted to be.

Mr Chow and Mrs Chan are in the mood for love but little more than that. All they can share are furtive glances, weightless words and a concrete reassurance that history forgets.

Boat People is unquestionably one of the most important films in Hong Kong cinema, and yet it’s only with increasing distance that we begin to appreciate how infinitely evocative – as all great art is – this political thriller has managed to be. Centring around a Japanese photojournalist (Lam) who revisits the post-Liberation Vietnam in 1987 to document its rebirth, Hui’s film captivatingly reveals the horrors facing the people living in the port of Danang, who are sometimes sent to forced labour camps that are misguidedly labelled as ‘new economic zones’. Intriguingly, the film has for many years been seen as a foretelling of our own city’s destiny after 1997 – an interpretation not the least weakened by the Chinese authorities’ view of it as an ‘anti-communist’ work. The director herself has always denied, up to this day, the symbolic values of her work, and, watching it now in the cold light of day, it’s indeed not too farfetched for one to believe her film was simply a based-on-real-event drama intending to reveal the plight of the Vietnamese refugees, who were causing quite a stir in Hong Kong. Irrespective of the political readings it attracted, Boat People remains first and foremost a masterful drama about the survival of people, who may be possessing even less control on their lives than they thought. Its tragic sense of fatalism is haunting.

To understand how this particular John Woo-Chow Yun-fat collaboration – instead of their more stylistically accomplished The Killer or Hard Boiled – captured the imaginations of a generation is perhaps to chart the history of cinephilia in Hong Kong. With a Chinese title that translates as ‘the true nature of heroes’, Wu’s seminal heroic bloodshed movie has indeed combined the best of several (movie) worlds: as a relatively faithful remake of Patrick Lung Kong’s The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), it is further spiced up by the principle of brotherhood and the honourable code of yi stemming from martial arts epics of yesteryears – especially those by his mentor Chang Cheh, for whom Woo had previously served as assistant director. While deliciously pitting Ti Lung and Leslie Cheung’s brother characters against each other as mortal enemies on opposite sides of the law, the action classic is also exponentially enhanced by Chow’s charismatic portrayal of Mark, the trench-coated partner-in-crime who’s left a burnt mark on our public consciousness: who could forget the sight of him lighting a cigarette with a burning banknote? His cockiness is exceeded only by his loyalty and heroism; in our approving minds, Mark is us.

The Chinese folk legend of the Butterfly Lovers may have been adapted countless times but this sumptuous rendition – with its catchy tunes, poetic lyrics and eye-searing colour scheme – is hard to be surpassed either artistically or historically. Essentially doubling the fun of gender masquerade in the original story, The Love Eterne casts the Amoy opera actress Ling Po in the male shusheng role of Liang Shan-bo, a young scholar who chances upon Zhu Ying-tai (Loh), an aristocratic daughter who attends a male-only school disguised as a boy. The two immediately become ‘sworn brothers’ and subsequently spend three years together as classmates. However, after Zhu reveals her true identity, these BFFs’ decision to get married is tragically halted by her father’s plan to marry her off to a rich family, and the innocuous flirting gives way to a tear-jerking climax in the movie’s third act. A timeless work of art from a short-lived genre, this definitive huangmei diao film was a box office sensation and a cultural phenomenon across Southeast Asia (and especially in Taiwan), with Ling receiving a special award for outstanding performance at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards – because the judges couldn’t decide whether to name her best actor or actress!

The movie with which Wong Kar-wai became an auteur, Leslie Cheung became James Dean reincarnated and many of the unsuspecting mainstream audiences became bored out of their minds, Days of Being Wild is, above all, a hymn to rebellion: an intention noticeable from both Wong’s deliberate ditching of the conventional genre formula, as well as the fact that his film shares its Chinese title with Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – apparently with a cause. Set in a 1960s Hong Kong which had never quite looked this gorgeous before, Wong’s nostalgic reverie wrapped its unacknowledged – but totally unmistakable – political allegories in entrancing lights and shadows, presented for the first time here by the inimitable trio of Wong, production designer William Chang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle. For critics, playboy Yuddy’s determination to leave his foster mother to look for his unknown birth mother has been regularly compared to Hong Kong’s then-impending Handover, while the character’s comparison of himself to a fabled kind of ‘bird without legs’ – and thus could only land when it died – also mirrored the sense of rootlessness keenly felt by the population.

After spinning our heads for decades with its delirious showdowns and romantised notion of chivalry, the wuxia genre finally conquered the world with – of all stories – a poignant romance about two pairs of would-be lovers perpetually repressing their feelings. Looking to hang up his sword and settle down with his longtime muse (Michelle Yeoh), a mighty swordsman (Chow Yun-fat) is sucked into another one-last-job scenario as an aristocrat’s daughter (Zhang Ziyi) recklessly juggles the thrills of the martial arts world, her secret affection for a bandit (Chang Chen), and the wish of her family to set her up for an arranged marriage. Described pertinently by Ang Lee as ‘Sense and Sensibility with martial arts’, this visually stunning, gravity-defying masterpiece won four Oscars (including best foreign language film) and ushered in a new era of traditional Chinese movies made with a global audience in mind, most aptly exemplified by Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2003).

The legendary first feature by Cecile Tang – one of the extremely few woman filmmakers then working in Hong Kong – is a curious anomaly in many ways. One of the most significant arthouse classics in our film history despite its limited distribution, The Arch was photographed by the great Subrata Mitra (regular cinematographer for Satyajit Ray) in crisp black and white – amid a wave of lavishly coloured period dramas at the time – and edited by Les Blank and CC See with a Nouvelle Vague edge that intricately utilises freeze frames, quick zooms and fleeting flashbacks to visualise its protagonist’s fragmenting psyche. Lu plays Madam Tung, a dignified middle-aged widow soon to be honoured by the emperor for her chastity. She is, however, tormented by her suppressed desire for a cavalry captain (Chiao) temporarily billeted in her aristocratic residence; and when the captain turns his attention to her flirtatious young daughter (Chou), our heroine’s misery is completed. It is, in other words, as if Alain Resnais met Henrik Ibsen in 17th century China.

As their popularity snowballed from the early days of television broadcast, the iconic Hui Brothers team left behind a trail of vernacular comedy movies that struck a resounding chord with working class audiences. Easily one of the best from writer-director Michael, The Private Eyes immediately impresses with its wordless opening credit sequence showing only the characters’ feet – in which a private detective tails his subject in a pair of miserably broken shoes, only to have one of his soles accidentally ripped off before stepping on a beggar’s bowl and a cigarette stub with his exposed foot. A cheeky, stingy boss who’s all too ready to exploit his employees, Michael’s small-time private eye is nonetheless faithfully aided by a honest, kung fu-fighting apprentice (Sam) and a stupid, stammering assistant (Ricky) who will literally test a bomb for him. Together with the funky soundtrack by Sam and his band, The Lotus, the movie also tapped into our collective consciousness with a range of riotous gags, from aerobics for chicken to a Sammo Hung-choreographed, Bruce Lee-inspired fight scene with flour and sausages.

Fans of Hong Kong gangster flicks breathed a collective sigh of relief when Johnnie To ended the genre’s post-Young and Dangerous impasse with his majestic two-part epic. Taking off from Election’s (2005) near-anthropological interest in the triad society’s origins, the veteran action auteur merges wit and gore in a disturbingly resonant political satire – very astutely disguised as a stylistically subdued dramatisation of the power struggles surrounding the biannual voting process at the top of ‘Hong Kong’s oldest triad’. A slow-burning crime caper spiced with occasional bursts of sadistic brutality (most memorably, a character is literally ground up and fed to the dogs), Election 2 is further enhanced by its political subtext: the candidates here, elegantly played by Koo and Yam, are not only trapped by their own lust of power or wealth, but also the mainland Chinese government’s omniscient influence on their handover of power. At its most ingeniously cynical, the film has made a mockery of our simplistic capitalist ideals and democratic aspirations in the very same stroke.

A marvellous pre-cursor to the explosive crime thrillers of John Woo and Ringo Lam, Johnny Mak’s directorial debut follows several Red Guards-turned-armed robbers through the sharp end of these Mainlanders’ dreams of making a fortune in the more ‘modernised’ Hong Kong. Led by a highly sought-after criminal intending to pull off a heist at a Tsim Sha Tsui jewellery store, the infamously violent Big Circle gang – while finding their loyalty increasingly split by the allures of the city – soon become the hottest target of the police force after being tricked by a small-time triad boss and sometime informant into murdering a corrupt cop. With memorable set-pieces ranging from a helicopter ambush – which may have inspired the mob boss sequence in Godfather III (1990) – to a gunpoint standoff that undeniably anticipated some of Woo’s most famous scenes, Long Arm of the Law tops it off with a climatic shootout inside the claustrophobic Kowloon Walled City that even today remains a milestone of our action cinema.

Wong Jing’s half-serious assertion that his father Wang Tianlin ‘has a bit of Wong Kar-wai in him’ does look to have some weight based on this Cathay noir musical, a localised but no less stylish adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen. Grace Chang shines in the leading role as a sassy nightclub singer who, after taking up a dare to seduce the engaged pianist (Chang Yang), soon falls for the train wreck of a man. As the two’s emotional tangle sends them into a downward spiral, their film is right up there among Hong Kong’s greatest musicals.

Destiny is calling Lai’s new immigrant from northern China, who forms a ‘friendship’ – with benefits – with Cheung’s Guangzhou comrade out of loneliness and a shared passion for the Mandarin pop legend Teresa Teng. The catch? He has a fiancée back home and she has her materialistic ambitions to fulfil. Definitely a love story and certainly one of our cinema’s very best, Chan’s nine-times Hong Kong Film Awards winner charts the decade-spanning near-romance with acute cultural awareness and a sublime touch of emotional delicacy.

After his master Huo Yuanjia is poisoned by the Japanese, gifted disciple Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee) becomes a murderous avenger who can’t stop terrorising the Hongkou Dojo and any racist banner in his sight, including the notorious ‘Sick Man of East Asia’ and ‘No dogs and Chinese allowed’. Eventually, Lee will leap into the air and kick towards the colonial oppressors while being fired at with pistols, turning himself into a nationalistic martyr with the most iconic of final freeze-frames.

If you really think about it, they should have put a spoiler warning on the promo posters of this exemplary undercover cop thriller: after all, what’s the point of a suspense noir when even your elderly neighbour – and her maid – knew that Tony Leung is going to put a gun to Andy Lau’s head at the movie’s climax? More ridiculous still: some guy called Marty did an obscure little remake and won a piece of bronze or two in Hollywood, where Hong Kong was spelled as ‘J-a-p-a-n’.

The greatest of Qing dynasty court dramas also happens to be the most historically important Hong Kong film ever made. First released during the civil war, Shanghai filmmaker Zhu Shilin’s mega-budget epic – about the vicious political wrangling between Empress Dowager Cixi (Tang), Emperor Guangxu (Shu) and his wife Pearl concubine (Zhou), all mesmerisingly portrayed – was cited by Mao Zedong as ‘a film of national betrayal’ in 1954, before being labelled ‘a traitor’s film’ by the Gang of Four in 1967, thereby kicking off the devastating Cultural Revolution.

Taking respite from her chaotic life in Hong Kong, a businesswoman (Koo) returns to her ancestral home in southern China, where she’s been away for 20 years. There she reunites with her two childhood friends (Siqin and Xie), who are now leading a mundane married life in an agricultural community, and the three become consumed by complicated emotions arising from their widening moral and materialistic divide. Inspired by his father’s passing, Ho exquisitely turns his nostalgic longing for family roots into a lyrical meditation on the sentimental bonds which await across the border.

Made for chump change and shot on leftover film stock, Chan’s mischievously morbid effort tells the sad story of a triad member (Lee) who’s dropped out from school and abandoned by his family; even his friendship with a mentally disabled larkie (Li) and a terminally ill girl (Yim) seems to be cursed by the trio’s possession of a schoolgirl’s suicide notes. Every frame of this tale of wasted youth and irresponsible adults – possibly Hong Kong’s most acclaimed indie feature ever – screams of muffled anguish.

Ng and Pak had starred opposite each other a number of times but the 1950s screen couple – almost always typecast as vulnerable husband and independent yet devoted wife – were arguably at their heart-wrenching best in this excellent adaptation of a Ba Jin novel. Successively torn apart by his possessive live-in mother, her wish for a better future, the ongoing devastation of war and his steadily deteriorating physical condition, these star-crossed lovers are two for the ages.

From the genius casting of the irreverent Chow as the Monkey King to the masterstroke of letting Buddhist monk Tang Xuanzang (played by Law, no less) burst into The Platters’ Only You, Lau’s wildly imaginative Journey to the West adaptation is deservedly recognised for its sublime wackiness. Yet beneath all the time-travelling and supernatural slapstick of this postmodern two-parter is a traditional love story so cheesy it’s actually romantic. Also featuring the now-customary Wong Kar-wai spoofs.

At once an acting showcase for a present-day film star (Maggie Cheung) and a moving tribute to 1930s Shanghai screen legend Ruan Lingyu, Center Stage elegantly weaves together original footage of Ruan’s films, Cheung’s partly fictionalised re-enactment of her private life, as well as real-life interviews among cast and crew members. A meta-fictional exercise that sheds light on stardom from every angle possible, the film also helped Cheung to a Berlin Silver Bear award for best actress.

Everyone wants a piece of our rehabilitating hero (Tse in a leather jacket), an expert safecracker who’s persistently recruited by both sides of the law after more than a decade in prison – but will his unforgiving mother and upright brother understand? While this humane precursor of 1980s hero films may be eternally outshined by its much noisier remake (A Better Tomorrow), Lung’s early-career tale of an ex-con trying to go straight is an unsung masterpiece in its own right.

The favourite romance of many a Hongkonger, not least Mr Chow himself, this Alex Law-scripted drama is essentially a story of two lonely souls: a Hong Kong student (Chung) who moves to New York for her fickle boyfriend (Chan), and her older but no less puerile cousin (Chow), who settles her down before cheering her up with such sophisticated fares as, eh, going to Broadway musicals. Predictable it may be, but An Autumn’s Tale is as irresistibly heartfelt a film as it comes.

“Dawn, please don’t come…” As Sally Yeh pleads soulfully to James Wong’s iconic tune on the soundtrack, the forbidden love between Cheung’s scholarly tax collector and Wang’s glamorous ghost meets its heartbreaking demise. Based on a Pu Songling short story that has also been adapted into Li Han-hsiang’s The Enchanting Shadow (1960) and Wilson Yip’s eponymous 2011 film, this Tsui Hark-produced supernatural action fantasy spawned two hit sequels and remains a vital showcase of our cinema’s madcap inventiveness. It’s like a sensual Evil Dead romance!

Under the long, long shadow cast by Hu’s other seminal classics sits this oft-neglected masterpiece, shot back-to-back with Legend of the Mountain on location in South Korea. Deliberately paced and meticulously edited (by the director himself, who also wrote the screenplay and supplied the art direction), Raining is a simple story masterfully told, concurrently observing the choosing of a new abbot and the attempted theft of a priceless scripture in a Ming dynasty Buddhist monastery.

Who could forget Faye Wong’s frisky fast-food joint waitress or Brigitte Lin’s Cassavetes-inspired smuggler in a blond wig? Jubilantly realised and populated by acutely lovelorn, if slightly unhinged, characters, the two loosely connected stories in this ad hoc project – shot quickly and cheaply amid the post-production limbo of Ashes of Time – delightfully tackles loneliness and chance encounters. Frenzied, quirky and irresistibly romantic, this hip little film channels the impish spirit of early Godard in Hong Kong’s urban setting.

Before making his gloriously divisive tribute to Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman with last year’s Wu Xia, Chan had already unleashed a superior remake of another Chang classic, The Blood Brothers (1973). In place of David Chiang, Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-tai are here Li, Lau and Kaneshiro, all magnetically watchable actors. As soldiers and bandits unite in the name of loyalty against a war-ravaged China in the mid-19th century, Chan’s epic captivates with its heroic taste for blood… and tears.

With its unflinching view of the Cultural Revolution and its equally bleak portrait of life in our materialistic city, Tang’s 1966-set drama about five Guangzhou residents attempting to flee to Hong Kong was banned by censors from release until 1987. One of the earliest films to deal with the clash of communist and capitalist ideals that would inevitably manifest itself with the 1997 handover, the moral degradation and spiritual disenchantment of its characters reveal the dehumanising effects felt by both sides of the border.

The most recent film on our list is a slice-of-life master-class – and a lock for best picture at next month’s Hong Kong Film Awards** – that speaks to all generations. Described in our recent five-star review as being ‘gently humorous, intensely moving but never outwardly sentimental’, this graceful based-on-true-events drama observes the dignity of the final years in the life of Sister Tao (Ip, named best actress at Venice), now in the care of the middle-aged son (Lau) of a family for which she has been a housemaid most of her life.

A laid-off teacher (Cheung) buries his sympathy and takes on the thankless job as a rent collector in one of the storylines of this community drama: a panorama of tough luck, unemployment and raw humanity. Charting the misfortunes of nearly a dozen residents of a ramshackle partitioned tenement, this kitchen sink drama classic famously provides the motto (“All for one and one for all”) for its production company, Union Film. Bruce Lee appears briefly as the kid of an impoverished couple.

Zhu’s clinical adaptation of Puxian opera classic After the Reunion is a love story so fatalistically tragic it could make Shakespeare envious. It begins with three celebratory occasions – a 20-year-old scholar’s (Fu) triumphant return from the imperial exams, his impending wedding to the beautiful daughter (Hsia) of an aristocrat, and his mother’s (Kung) newly-given honour as a chaste widow by the emperor – and ends with four suicides – brought about by a maze of feudalistic taboos and unfortunate decisions. An unforgettable 90-minute waltz into hopelessness.

An essential and one-of-a-kind homage to the decades of social movement in Hong Kong, Hui’s sprawling political drama depicts the lives of various characters, including Tse’s social activist and Wong’s Maoist Catholic priest, all tied together by Loletta Lee’s evocatively designed role: a young woman who’s lost her memory following an ‘accident’. Highlights include a street play about the late political pioneer Ng Chung-yin, charismatically given by real-life ‘artivist’ Augustine Mok Chiu-yu.

While To and Wai’s long-time collaboration had produced its fair shares of major hits (Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma), few could have anticipated the meticulous plotting of this psychodrama packaged as a crime thriller. Centring around a loony ex-inspector (Lau) who can see the ‘inner demons’ of others, this weirdly fascinating detective mystery merges Wai’s supernatural drift and fatalistic worldview with To’s film noir sensibilities and clinical shifts to ultra-violence. The Wellesian climax, mirroring The Lady from Shanghai, reveals the characters’ fractured personas to near perfection.