Between Hell of Weapons by Tsui Hark and the Chungkin Express de Wong Kar-Wai, Made in Hong Kong by Fruit Chan is a little-known gem of the Hong Kong New Wave of the 80s and 90s.
The journey of the HK cinema fan is always the same. He discovered his unbridled energy, often through action thrillers. Infernal Affairs or to the Election. If it’s more romantic, maybe it’s the In The Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai who bewitches him in the first place.
Once you’ve tasted it, it’s hard to be satisfied. After John Woo and Ringo Lam, we tackle the works of Ann Hui, Patrick Tam and Stanley Kwan. And then, with a little luck, we then end up falling in front of the creations of Fruit Chanthe majority of whose films are unfortunately not accessible in France.
Made in Hong Kongwhich can be considered his true first feature film after an unenriching attempt at a studio film a few years earlier, is one of the few by the filmmaker to be visible here. Both extremely singular and at the same time consciously built on all the cinema that preceded it, the film is a fantastic synthesis. A crazy, violent and sexual catch-allwhich almost by accident found itself symbolizing a change of era: it was released in 1997, the year of the handover of Hong Kong to China.
A “no future” youth
Autumn Moon is a young boy out of school, with an absent father and at war with his mother and in conflict with his mother. He survives by doing odd jobs for thugs from the dirty neighborhoods. His best friend Sylvester is even more marginal: his mental handicap prevents him from having any normal relationships in an environment where nothing is done to help him. Ping is also a teenager, suffering from an incurable illness since she does not have the means to treat herself.
In other words, the heroes of Made in Hong Kong are declassified. People left behind filmed in their natural environment, stifling social housing where the sky struggles to show its colors between the immense overcrowded towers. Fruit Chan knows these places well, since he grew up there. Nothing destined him for the cinema, he who when he was still in high school had to work in an electronics factory every evening to get by financially. And yet, he fell in love with the seventh art when he arrived in Hong Kong as a teenager; Before that he had only seen communist propaganda films.
Made in Hong Kong is this because Fruit Chan wanted to talk about the microcosm he knows best; his entire universe. That of struggles and setbacks. Even in its production, the film is close to its subject: the 35mm film from the shoot was recovered from unused scraps at the studio where Fruit Chan cut his teeth as an assistant director. The cast is entirely made up of amateurs who have never experienced cameras before.
It is perhaps the combination of all this which gives the film its energy, its heightened vitality. Autumn, Sylvester and Ping have no room to live and yet they want nothing else. This desire is expressed in many ways, but it mainly does so hormonally. Sex is everywhere Made in Hong Kongomnipresent and yet never consumed: confined to the wet dreams of Autumn who imagines ejaculating on planes in the sky. As a metaphor for a desire for uninhibited freedom, it is difficult to make it more explicit.
Hell of tears
This carnal obsession, this desire for the other, is expressed visually in the first meeting between Autumn, Sylvester and Ping. It is upon seeing the latter that Sylvester begins to bleed from the nose; a ridiculous cliché that fans of Japanese manga know well, but which is here twisted to give it real meaning.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Sylvester does not react this way out of simple primary sexual excitement like the horny teenager he is, but because he is capable of feeling death in Ping. By her simple presence, she sheds blood because she is, like them, condemned.
This association of juvenile desire for the sexual act with death is not unique, Eros and Thanatos have been linked since the most ancient legends of the human species, but it serves a political purpose here: if death lurks the characters, it’s because Hong Kong is dying. Made in Hong Kongit’s twilight cinema.
At the time when Fruit Chan and his comrades were filming the feature film, the inhabitants of Hong Kong were living in worry and uncertainty. The former British colony became a unique and central place in Asia in the second half of the 20th century, often considered the meeting point between East and West. But this originality finds itself threatened, overtaken by the present.
In 1997, the British mandate ended following an agreement signed with the Chinese empire in 1898: it could only last 99 years. No one knew exactly what would change, or how. By accident, Fruit Chan found himself as a testament to the concerns of a youth – already lost – whose future resembles less a blank page than a an abysmal and terrifying voidt.
In 1980, Gun hell opened the period of the Hong Kong New Wave with horror and uproar. The climax of the film takes place in a now famous cemetery, which overlooks the city. Made in Hong Kong functions as a spiritual sequel to Tsui Hark’s film, particularly in its use of the cemetery: the vengeful rage has disappeared, all that remains is melancholy and obviousness. As if this cinema had always known that its meteoric existence could certainly not last too long.
The Hong Kong Feast
Even the title, Made in Hong Kongin addition to dialoguing in an amusing way with a Tsui Hark film shot the same year (Knock Offor “counterfeit” if translated literally), seems to be thought of as a twilight synthesis of this very particular cinema. This cinema in fact, only existed in Hong Kong, could only be manufactured in Hong Kong.
Formally, his language oscillates between two extremes. If the naturalism of the staging is often required, in the way the camera (very often carried) twirls wildly in real settings, independent Hong Kong cinema of the period also plays a lot with stylistic effects. to signify the subjectivity of its characters.
In Fruit Chan’s film the two approaches constantly meet and confront each other. The first lyrical flight appears after an almost documentary introduction, to set the stage for the triggering element of the story: Sylvester witnesses a suicide. A high school girl on a roof ends her life in a sequence bathed in ethereal blue light, which clashes radically with everything that has come before.
When the girl’s body meets the pavement, Fruit Chan uses a flash of light integrated into the montage as if to symbolize the impact on Sylvester’s vision. In the rest of the film, this aesthetic will return regularly in Autumn’s dreams, obsessed by this dead young girl and the letters she left in her will. The color blue also becomes a motif which accompanies the most fantastical passages of the story, always leading back to death.
This permanent tension between the fantasy and the concrete, the real and the dream, the naturalism and the aestheticized, is the very essence of Hong Kong New Wave cinema: a permanent in-between which perfectly represents the double identity of a torn territory.
Made in Hong Kong opens many doors for Fruit Chan, locally and internationally; it is thanks to him that his career as an author really launched. The film was restored in 2017 and then broadcast in numerous international festivals, which allows us to hope for similar treatment for his other feature films of the period, unfortunately currently invisible in France.
In particular, just after this film, he directed two other feature films which together form a trilogy dedicated to the theme of the return of Hong Kong, which will surely give us new ways of approaching the career of this still little-known filmmaker.
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