Hong Kong Double Feature – The Twins Effect

What’s in a name? Knowing only the genre – Hong Kong action with fantasy elements – what would you expect from a series of two movies named The Twins Effect? Would you, as I did, expect a plot in which two siblings (probably estranged) must come together to discover a shared supernatural power which enables them to overcome some sort of great evil? Would you make the (quite reasonable I thought) assumption that the second movie builds on the world established in the first? And how surprised would you be to learn that they were in fact two entirely unrelated stories designed as star vehicles for a Cantopop girl group named Twins?

On the lookout for a local equivalent to J-pop duo KinKi Kids, Emperor Entertainment Group signed up part-time models Charlene Choi (already a budding actress) and Gillian Chung to form bubblegum pop band Twins in 2001. The following year saw the release of their first album and their appearance together in two lightweight comedies. The Twins Effect [Qiān jī biàn] (2003) is their third outing together, a martial arts vampire comedy which takes itself seriously for the first 10 minutes – a massive fight scene which sees two vampire hunters and a horde of the undead demolishing a train station (plus a train or two) – before tossing away all pretence and flooring the accelerator for silliness.

Although the opening sequence would have you believe that vampire hunter Reeve (Ekin Cheng) is the protagonist, he quickly takes a back seat to his female co-stars – his younger sister Helen (Charlene Choi) and his new apprentice Gypsy (Gillian Chung). Helen is a hot-tempered young woman with an impressive set of lungs whose ability to scream should be registered as a deadly weapon. Enthralled by her public confrontation with her cheating boyfriend (Chapman To), pretty boy goth Kazaf (Edison Chen) immediately falls for Helen and offers his shoulder to cry on. But Kazaf isn’t just any goth – he’s a vampire prince who refuses to suck blood, living instead off a supply of bottled blood sent by his father. Kazaf and his entourage, led by his loyal retainer Prada (Anthony Wong), have set up home in a large church in the middle of Hong Kong so that Kazaf can spread his wings away from the boredom of court politics – which is fortuitous since in his absence the evil Duke Dekotes (Mickey Hardt), last seen battling Reeve in the opening sequence, has been killing off the royal family to accumulate plot tokens which will allow him to achieve some vaguely defined ultimate power.

But don’t worry too much about the plot framework – it only really exists for two reasons: to provide an excuse for the action scenes; and as a backdrop against which Helen and Gypsy can pursue their romantic goals while becoming BFFs. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when Helen discovers that Gypsy has used some of her toothpaste, leading to a protracted fight sequence which escalates to ridiculous proportions, similar in tone to the comically endless battle between Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live (1988) over whether or not to wear sunglasses. Gypsy’s determination to impress Reeve almost gets him turned into a vampire, while Kazaf’s determination not to let Helen down forces him to wear dark clothes and masses of sunscreen on their midday wedding-crashing date. Of the two romantic pairings, the Helen/Kazaf relationship is far more engaging and occupies more screentime – a particular highlight sees Kazaf showing off his pimped-out coffin, complete with fur-lined upholstery, electric lighting and a kicking sound system.

The film is rife with cameo performances, most notably from Hong Kong action legend Jackie Chan. Making his first appearance as the groom at the wedding to which Helen invited herself, he turns up again at a crucial moment as an ambulance driver just as Helen and Kazaf are escaping from the bad vampires. This provides the perfect excuse for a Chan speciality, a Buster Keaton-inspired comedy fight sequence which allows a character with no fighting skills to pratfall his way to victory (or at least safety) against all odds. Chan’s high-kicking bride is played by Karen Mok (A Chinese Odyssey – reviewed here), a Cantopop legend with 17 albums and more than 40 film appearances to her name. All three members of short-lived girl group 3T can also be seen here in smaller roles: Mandy Chiang has the largest role as Momoko, the estate agent who brokers the deal with the vampires and catches the eye of Prada; Maggie Lau takes part in the ambulance chase as Nurse Maggie; and Yumiko Cheng appears as a wedding guest.

The Twins Effect II [Qiān jī biàn èr Huādū dàzhàn] (2004) jettisons the modern day for an indeterminate historical fantasy setting ruled by the evil Empress Ya Ge (Qu Ying), whose response to the perceived betrayal of her paramour High Priest Wei Liao (Daniel Wu) was to outlaw love and to turn all men into slaves – all except for the High Priest, who castrated himself. Spring (Charlene Choi) is a slave dealer with no ethical qualms about her livelihood, while Blue Bird (Gillian Chung) is one of the Empress’ elite agents. This time around the theoretical hero of the piece – improbably named Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in tribute to Ang Lee’s wildly successful film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Wò hǔ cáng lóng] (2000) – is played by Donnie Yen, the action director of the original The Twins Effect, who provides an appropriately brooding heroic presence. If this were a conventional wuxia adventure, Yen’s character would dominate proceedings as we follow his heroic journey to find the magic sword and overthrow the evil Empress. By now, of course, we know better than to expect any such thing – and he remains largely in the background, only coming to centre stage for an impressively staged battle with Jackie Chan (playing the reanimated terracotta warrior Lord of Armour Wei Cheng) which, while being a thing of beauty in itself, serves no other narrative function than to keep the “hero” busy while the real main characters get on with the story.

As with The Twins Effect, the focus is on the adventures of Choi and Chung’s characters as they pursue their respective beaus-to-be. Spring has been commissioned to find the missing amour of the corpulent Marshall Edo Bowman (Xie Jingjing), mistakenly interpreting her infuriatingly vague description as referring to escaped slave Blockhead (Wilson Chen). Blue Bird has been despatched on a mission to retrieve a map, stolen by master thief Peachy (Edison Chen), which has ended up in the hands of his two friends – Blockhead and Charcoal Head (Jaycee Chan). Whilst following the map to its destination, the two women fall in love with their respective lunkheads – one of whom, it turns out, is the rightful King who will claim the sword and lead his people to victory. Amongst the supporting cast, Fan Bing-bing – one of China’s most prominent actresses – stands out in an early career performance as Blue Bird’s rival Red Vulture, adding a nuance which hints at the stronger roles to come in films like I Am Not Madame Bovary [Wǒ Búshì Pān Jīnlián] (2016) (reviewed here). Providing the obligatory music-industry cameos this time around are Steven Cheung and Kenny Kwan of boy band Boy’z, who play two of the nameless slaves.

Similar in tone to its predecessor and featuring action sequences which are arguably superior to the original, The Twins Effect II is unfortunately weighed down by tired tropes of stereotyped male and female behaviour. The film’s matriarchal society is an ugly caricature and the prophecy of the Empress’ fall is framed in terms of restoring the balance by having a man take over. Although the filmmakers scramble frantically at the end to make it clear that the heroes will be establishing a society based on equality between the sexes rather than male dominance, it’s too little too late. There’s also a painfully unfunny character played by Tony Leung Ka-fai (an otherwise talented actor) whose attempts to masquerade as a woman are so wince-inducing that they verge on transphobia. Add that to the decision not to examine slavery as anything other than a comical trope and you have a film riddled with problematic elements which run the risk of outweighing its more enjoyable aspects.

Choi and Chung have good chemistry with each other, as you’d hope for a duo who collaborated to create 16 studio albums between 2002 and 2012. Of the two, Clarence Choi gets to have more fun, quivering with frustration in the first film and luxuriating in casual venality in the second. Gillian Chung is more contained in both, occupying more of a “straight man” role with touches of the conventional female romantic lead. They would appear together in 14 films (and one TV series) between 2002 and 2007, eventually living up to their band name by playing competing sets of good and evil twins in the far-more-accurately-titled The Twins Mission [Seung ji san tau] (2007). Both performers have continued to appear separately, with more than 50 other roles each on their respective CVs.

The Twins Effect was co-directed by Dante Lam & Donnie Yen – although to my mind Yen, who doubles as action director, makes a far more significant contribution to the film’s success than Lam. Donnie Yen is one of the action movie genre’s most prominent performers, and while his name may not be familiar as that of Jackie Chan or Jet Li, his face is likely to be just as familiar – indeed I recently saw somebody online confidently identifying a picture of Yen as Jet Li simply because they recognised his face and knew he wasn’t Jackie Chan. Yen won Best Action Choreography at both the Hong Kong Film Awards and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards for his work on The Twins Effect and I’ve talked about him at greater length in my review of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen [Jīng wǔ fēng yún – Chén Zhēn] (2010).

The Twins Effect II was co-directed by Corey Yuen & Patrick Leung – and once again it’s the action director, in this case Corey Yuen, whose contributions are most crucial. One of the Seven Little Fortunes (whose more famous members include Jackie Chan & Sammo Hung), he’s worked extensively in both Hong Kong and Hollywood action cinema. To select just a few highlights, he was martial arts director on the wild fantasy romp Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain [Xīn shǔ shān jiàn xiá] (1983); action director for John Woo’s Red Cliff [Chi Bi] (2008-2009); and solo director on the Jet Li-starring Fong Sai-yuk [Fāng Shì Yù] (1993) and its sequel.

If you’re looking for intricate plotting and nuanced characters, then boy have you been reading the wrong review! The Twins Effect movies are lightweight pieces of fluff hung on a loose plot framework which they will happily jettison if it gets in the way of the fun. Some viewers will find the movies funnier than I did, while others will find the humour to be gratingly annoying – but even then, fans of Jackie Chan should at least enjoy his appearances. I doubt that I’ll ever watch either of these films again, but I’m happy to have seen them.

As a special bonus for the curious, along with the usual trailers (which make the movies look more serious than they are), I’ve included a promotional clip for the theme song from the first movie, recorded by Twins with guest vocalist Jackie Chan.

Bad Monkey! The Forbidden Kingdom

Jackie Chan as a drunken immortal! Jet Li playing the Monkey King! Action choreography by Yuen Woo-ping! How could it possibly go wrong? As it turns out, quite easily – all you need to do is hand over the creative reins to a couple of white Americans who enjoy the surface gloss of Hong Kong action cinema but display very little evidence of understanding its soul. The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) compounds its sins by making the two stars take a back seat to the charmless white 20-year-old lead and sandwiching the more interesting material within a hopelessly hackneyed “real world” framing story.

The filmmakers attempt to establish their credibility right from the outset by putting a range of their influences prominently on display. Jason (Michael Angarano) wakes from a dream of the Monkey King (Jet Li) battling the heavenly hosts, at which point we see that the Shaw Brothers classic The Monkey Goes West [Xi you ji] (1966) is playing on his TV. As he gets up the camera moves in to provide a close-up of the all the martial arts movie posters adorning his walls. The opening credits then run over a montage of elements from those posters, showing off many of the cool movies the character/director has seen. Unfortunately these fine examples simply serve to highlight the vacuity at the heart of the ensuing story – and the staging of Jason’s widescreen Monkey King dream looks noticeably less interesting than the compressed image of the fight scene extract running across Jason’s TV screen. (Just how long has Jason been asleep anyway? The implication is that he fell asleep watching the film, but he can’t be more than an hour into the 112 minute running time and he’s clearly not getting up any earlier or later than normal. And exactly how does he watch movies on a TV positioned at the head of his bed when it’s clearly angled for optimum viewing by the camera operator at the foot of the bed?)

Jason pops down to his favourite hangout, a pawn shop owned by the elderly Hop (Jackie Chan buried under old age makeup). The screenwriter appears to be a bit hazy on how a pawn shop operates, because this one regularly imports DVDs of subtitled Hong Kong action films. Jason is very excited that they have subtitles – which I thought was weird until I remembered how heavily the American experience of these films is filtered through bad dubbing. (I still find it difficult to understand the mindset of “fans” of these films who complain bitterly when their latest pristine Blu Ray upgrades with freshly translated subtitles don’t also include the incompetent hack job dubbing tracks which contributed to the wider public perception that these films are disposable trash. But I digress.) Jason wants to know whether Hop has any early Shaw Brothers films – which, when you consider that they made roughly 1000 films in a 30-year period and Jason seems to have one particular film in mind, is a meaninglessly vague question for the enthusiast he’s supposed to be. He’s excited when Hop tells him that he has a rare bootleg of an early Bruce Lee film. What is the identity of this obscure cinematic gem, you ask? Enter the Dragon (1973) – only the most successful martial arts movie ever made, and famously the *last* film to be completed by Bruce Lee before his untimely death! This is such a glaringly obvious mistake that I can’t believe the writer is responsible – it smacks of the ham-fisted intervention of Harvey Weinstein, the US distributor, somebody who’s never been afraid to underestimate the intelligence of the American people. (Jason’s other purchase is The Bride with White Hair [Bak fat moh lui zyun] (1993) – a choice for which I was inclined to give the filmmakers more credit until I realised the quality of their pending “homage”.)

Jason attempts to chat up a random woman whose importance to the story can be seen by her listing in the credits as Southie Girl (Juana Collignon in her only screen role). His attempt to impress her by pretending he knows kung fu goes down in flames when the local gang turns up to hassle him. Gang leader Lupo (Morgan Benoit) is a one-note racist rage machine, one of those delightful people who is happy to learn Asian martial arts for the purposes of terrorising others but sees no contradiction in spitting on the rest of their culture and treating them like lesser human beings. Having somehow got it into his head that Hop’s rundown pawn shop (which is completely lacking in security features beyond a single flimsy-looking chain lock) will have plenty of cash on the premises, Lupo and his gang bully Jason into helping them gain access to the store. Everything goes badly, Lupo shoots Hop, and Jason ends up falling off the roof clutching the Monkey King’s golden staff.

Rather than falling to his death, Jason wakes up in a vaguely defined “ancient China” which is either far in his own past or some sort of magical alternate dimension (or both). Unable to speak the language and attacked by soldiers who appear to be after his staff, he’s rescued by a drunk old man who just happens to be Lu Yan (Jackie Chan), one of the Eight Immortals of Taoist tradition. Lu Yan fills him in on the backstory, an insultingly sanitised rewrite of the Monkey King’s rebellion against the Jade Emperor. Gone is the the story of Monkey eating all the Peaches of Immortality and causing havoc in Heaven – here the Jade Emperor (Wang Deshun) views him instead as a cheeky monkey to indulge, instructing the Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) to grant him a meaningless title and send him on his way. Where the original story saw Monkey fighting an epic battle against the noble warlord Erlang Shen and his Heavenly Hosts, using his talent for trickery to aid him in battle before his ultimate defeat and imprisonment under a mountain, The Forbidden Kingdom paints a very different picture. This version of Erlang instead ignores the Jade Emperor’s instructions and challenges Monkey to a duel, gaining his victory by the simple trick of promising not to use his powers if Monkey drops his staff. Monkey agrees and the Jade Warlord immediately cheats, turning him into stone before directing his forces against the human world for some never-explained reason. Jason is apparently the Chosen One who must return Monkey’s staff to its owner (although how the staff, last seen embedded in the floor of Erlang’s palace, escaped his custody and ended up in the future/another world is also never explained).

Now seems like a good time to bring up Jason’s full name. Jason’s surname indicates that he’s of Greek descent – yes, a Greek hero named Jason, very original I’m sure. But just what is his not-at-all-made-up-honest surname? Tripitikas. Yes, they’ve decided to name him after Tripitaka, the Buddhist priest who travels to India accompanied by the Monkey King in the original story. While there is a fine tradition in Chinese film of depicting Tripitaka (aka Tang Sazang) as a comical figure, turning him into an idiot white boy whose response to being confronted with people he can’t understand is to repeat his words LOUD-LY AND SLOW-LY is just insulting. Although this does at least result in Lu Yan hitting the cosmic translator switch, Jason’s continued expectation that his companions will understand his film references is just stupid, as is his inexplicable belief that he can learn martial arts at the snap of a finger without any hard work. (Did he ever watch an entire martial arts film in his life? Some of them are 90% training sequence!) The filmmakers did at least choose to hedge their bets with the Tripitaka role, bringing back Jet Li as Silent Monk – meaning that, in a way, Monkey is joining the quest as a pseudo-Tripitaka to free himself. And wow am I grateful that they made this choice, because their interpretation of Monkey is TERRIBLE – he just bounces around randomly, makes stupid facial expressions, and wiggles his fingers to perform magic tricks. It’s a complete waste of a perfectly good Jet Li. Thankfully Monkey is barely in the movie and Li spends most of his time as Silent Monk (paradoxically a speaking role), putting on some flawless martial arts displays and playing very effectively against Chan. One of the most delightful scenes in the film has Li and Chan warring over which of them is going to train Jason, who ends up being treated like a rag doll they’re fighting over, being pulled every which way and pummeled mercilessly. (I choose to interpret this as an exercise in trolling, taking the opportunity to punish the idiot American for cultural insensitivity and stealing their limelight.)

Rounding out the cast we have two female characters – one good, one bad – both bearing little resemblance to their supposed inspirations. Joining Jason’s team is Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifei), a martial artist and pipa player who despatches her foes with jade darts and is on a revenge kick against the sleazy Jade Warlord for murdering her family. Although her insistence on referring to herself in the third person (she/her instead of I/my) could be viewed as a distancing technique to separate herself from her personal trauma, the script makes no attempt to sell that interpretation – it comes across instead more like a misguided attempt at exoticism. With depressing inevitability (and very little attempt at justification in the screenplay), she falls in love with Jason before succumbing to a perfunctory end in order to provide Jason with a “tragic hero” moment (appropriating her failed attempt at revenge for himself). Apparently intended as a tribute to Golden Swallow, as portrayed by Cheng Pei-pei in the lead role of the far better film Come Drink With Me [Da zui xia] (1966), the two characters share absolutely nothing in common beyond their gender and names. Seeking the golden staff on behalf of the main villain is Ni Chang (Li Bingbing), turning the misunderstood antihero played by Brigitte Lin in the aforementioned The Bride with White Hair into a caricature evil henchwoman after the elixir of immortality (something in which I have difficulty believing the original character would have had the slightest interest). Although both actresses play their roles with dignity, they’re poorly served by the script and deserve better.

Once the Monkey King has been restored (and issued some uncharacteristic words of wisdom), Jason returns to his own time, having miraculously survived a several story drop into a junkyard. There’s a token return to being beaten up by Lupo before he suddenly realises that he’s now a proficient martial artist and kicks his ass. The gang runs off; he discovers that Hop has survived being shot (because both Jackie Chan characters are, to nobody’s surprise, the same person and thus immortal); and a reincarnated Golden Sparrow tells him he’s cool (bleurgh).

Director Rob Minkoff is best known for The Lion King (1994) and Stuart Little (1999). A glance over the rest of his CV suggests that his talents lie primarily with making animated features, although in this instance I didn’t find his mixture of live action with CGI to be particularly thrilling. It’s often difficult to tell where to draw the line between the work of director and action director – it can veer wildly in both directions – but while Yuen Woo-ping’s action direction is largely of good quality, there are sequences which fall flat due to editing choices and I’m tempted to ascribe these failures of judgement to Minkoff. He certainly has some notable lapses in stitching together scenes with a consistent sense of place. A chase through an urban environment ends with the characters bursting through the wall of a building into… a forest? A fight scene taking place entirely inside a temple cuts away to a scene of two other characters watching the fight from an impossible external viewpoint. Jason falls from the top of a building into a yard which doesn’t match the view from above. After noisily fighting off the gang members in a dark and secluded location, he pops around to the other side of the building which is crowded with police, ambulance attendants and assorted bystanders (incidentally suggesting that this poverty-stricken neighbourhood has an astonishingly rapid response time from emergency services). The reincarnated Golden Sparrow, who has been hanging out in the crowd watching Hop being transferred into an ambulance, tells Jason: “I saw what you did. I live across the street.” No you bloody didn’t! If you did, the police would’ve seen it too. (Unless you mean you saw him approach the building with the gang members who followed him into the shop and shot the proprietor? Because if you thought that was cool you are seriously messed up.) Arrgh! Is it too much to ask for basic compentency in establishing a physical environment which makes sense? Disturbingly, Minkoff has been announced as the director of the upcoming Chinese Odyssey, another version of the Monkey story scripted by James V. Hart, the writer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) who grafted a ridiculous “lost love reincarnation” plot onto the original story. I would pay good money to ensure that this project never gets off the ground.

As for screenwriter John Fusco, his most significant screen credit was (and remains) Young Guns (1988) and its sequel Young Guns II (1990). Much of the rest of his writing career has been forgettable, although I note that he was also responsible for the disappointing Netflix Original sequel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny [Wo hu cang long 2: Qing ming bao jian] (2016). I was astonished to discover that he had also been a sparring partner of Jet Li, who was full of praise for Fusco’s work as a screenwriter, noting that he had succeeded in incorporating a rough version of Li’s personal understanding of martial arts and Buddhism into the film. With all due respect to Mr Li, while he’s technically correct that Fusco has done this, cramming this information into clumsy dialogue which doesn’t flow with the material around it is hardly an example of skillful screenwriting – and raising the idea that revenge rebounds upon the one seeking revenge is all very well, but choosing to illustrate this by literally having the character’s attack bounce back upon themselves is so leadenly heavy-handed that it’s a wonder the gravitational imbalance didn’t create a singularity causing the film to collapse in upon itself.

Since Jackie Chan and Jet Li need no introduction and I have nothing good to say about the white actors, I’ll skip straight on to the supporting cast. Liu Yifei aka Crystal Liu built her career in fantasy TV before transitioning into film and recording two albums, one single from which was chosen as the end credits theme for Powerpuff Girls Z [Demashita! Pawapafu Gāruzu Zetto] (2006-7). Making her English language debut in The Forbidden Kingdom, she has since become better known in the western world for playing the lead in Disney’s live action remake of Mulan (2020). Collin Chou has been making films since 1987, but western audiences will know him as Seraph from The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). Li Bingbing (my senior by two days) is more familiar to me from the excellent World War 2 spy thriller The Message [Fengsheng] (2009) and the Tang Dynasty action romp Detective Dee: The Mystery of the Phantom Flame [Di renjie: Tong tian di guo] (2010). She turned up more recently opposite Jason Statham in the prehistoric shark film The Meg (2018).

The Forbidden Kingdom is a deeply flawed film which could be significantly improved by a top-to-bottom rewrite eliminating the modern American framing sequence and the godawful character of Jason – although even then its sanitised take on the Monkey King would leave a bad taste in the mouth. That elements of the film still work at all is down to the professional approach of the non-white cast as a whole; the charms of Jackie Chan and Jet Li in particular; and the action choreography of Yuen Woo-ping.

MIFF69 – Centre Stage (1991) [and Painted Faces]

Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage [Ruan Lingyu] (1991) takes us back to the early days of Chinese cinema with a hybrid biopic/documentary depicting the rise to stardom and untimely death of silent movie star Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935), as exquisitely portrayed by Maggie Cheung. We’ll also be stepping outside of this year’s MIFF programming to explore a different aspect of the film industry with Painted Faces [Qi xiao fu] (1988), following the early years of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung as they trained in the Peking Opera tradition.

[A quick note on the anglicised spelling of Chinese names. I’ve chosen to reproduce the names of people and movies as presented in the subtitles of the restored print made available to the Melbourne International Film Festival. This often differs drastically from what you’ll find on Wikipedia or most other internet sources. Those sources are likely to be more accurate regarding modern anglicisation/translation conventions, but I thought it best to remain faithful to the film as I experienced it.]

Ruan Lingyu was China’s first great screen star, making her first film at the age of 16. Centre Stage joins her story in 1929 as the creative talent behind the newly forming Linhua Studio discuss their plans. Director Sun Yu (played here by his son Sun Dongguang) wants to showcase her potential to perform any role by casting her first as a prostitute in Reminiscences of Peking [Gu du chun meng] (1930) (aka Spring Dream of an Old Capital) before following up with a role as a chaste singer in Wayside Flowers [Ye cao xian hua] (1930) (aka Wild Flowers by the Road). We first meet Ruan herself in what appears to be a dramatic scene from her own life, until she breaks character with a smile to inform the director that her performance wasn’t good enough before repeating the scene. The line between her life and that of her characters continues to be blurred in the following scene – a conversation with the woman with whom she shared the previous scene seems at first to be part of the same narrative but turns out to be an intimate exchange between friends, as Ruan asks her what it feels like to give birth. In love with a man she knows will never fully commit to her, she adopted a daughter rather than rely on him but needs her friend to reassure her that you can still love a child fully without having been through the birthing experience. Although the distinction between Ruan’s life and her performances is clearer from this point, parallels between the two will remain an important aspect of the film.

Leaving aside the directors with whom she worked, the trajectory of Ruan’s life is depicted largely via her relationships with three men. First up is Chang Ta-min (Lawrence Ng), an inveterate gambler who hooked up with her when she was sixteen. Their relationship is very unbalanced – he’ll be absent for days before turning up again on her doorstep and constantly leeches off her career for extra cash and expensive gifts. He’s constantly and blatantly unfaithful, but she accepts this as just a given of being with him. The second man is Tang Chi-san (Chin Han), a wealthy married businessman first encountered alongside his mistress Chang Chih-yun, an actress who is ten years older than Ruan – and who is rumoured to be kept under his thumb by an addiction to opium. This unsubstantiated rumour is never given any credence by the film, but its introduction here foreshadows the important role that gossip will play later on. Tang takes a shine to Ruan and eventually wins her over after ending things with Chih-yun. He sets Ruan up in her own house with her mother (Hsiao Hsiang) and adopted daughter (Yumiko Cheng), taking care of the financial arrangements for the separation from her ex. Finally we have Tsai Chu-seng (Tony Leung), director of New Women [Xin nu xing] (1935) – her second-last, and most significant, film. Although it’s unclear whether or not they had a sexual relationship, they clearly have a significant emotional connection and their scenes together stand out as a highlight of the film.

New Women was based on the tragic life of Al Hsia (1912-1934), an actress and screenwriter who was hounded by the tabloids and took her own life. A little over a year after her death, Ruan Lingyu – who played her fictional counterpart Wei Ming – would leave her life in much the same way. The last half of Centre Stage is devoted to this final year of Ruan’s life. Despite being a highlight of her career, New Women was savaged by the press, who didn’t take kindly at being held to account for Al’s suicide and attempted to force cuts on the film (possibly, it’s suggested, at the instigation of the Kuomintang, who didn’t feel that Ruan was morally sound enough to represent the modern Chinese woman). Thanks to her hypocritical scum of an ex, always on the lookout for money and embittered by his bruised male ego, her relationship with Tang blows up into a tabloid scandal, beginning the spiral into depression – carefully hidden from everyone around her – which results in her suicide.

I mentioned up top that this is not a standard biopic. While much of the film’s 2½ hour running time is taken up with its dramatisation of Ruan’s life, the film opens with a discussion between director Stanley Kwan and star Maggie Cheung about their subject. Hearing a summary of how Ruan’s career developed, starting off in comedies and genre pictures before transitioning to serious dramatic roles, Maggie chuckles as she observes how much this resembles her own career, immediately establishing the theme of life imitating art. Kwan continues to intersperse his dramatic retelling with B&W interludes in which the actors discuss the real people they’re portraying and others provide additional historical context. It’s during these interludes that we learn that Chang Ta-min’s vile behaviour didn’t end with Ruan’s death – amongst the spate of dramatic works depicting the Chang-Ruan-Tang relationship triangle, Chang immediately tried to capitalise on her death by selling himself as the wronged man in a film project which was swiftly cancelled due to public backlash. Despite this he persisted, eventually playing himself in Who’s to Blame? [Shui zui guo] (1937) and a thinly veiled version of himself in Wife of a Friend [Peng you zhi qi] (1938). Neither film survives today, and Chang died in 1938.

Kwan was also fortunate enough to speak with people who knew Ruan Lingyu before her death. Included here is interview footage with director Sun Yu (filmed less than a month before his own death) and fellow actress Chan Yen-yen aka Lily Li (often characterised as Mae West to Ruan’s Marlene Dietrich) – she is played in the film by Carina Lau, who was the most significant female supporting role. Even more precious is Kwan’s use of vintage footage from Ruan’s body of work. Of the thirty films she made, most no longer exist – only seven survive in their entirety. Kwan and Chueng have done their best to fill in some of these gaps by recreating key scenes from Three Modern Women [San ge mo deng nu xing] (1932), Night in the City [Chengshi zhi ye] (1933) and The Sea of Fragrant Snow [Xiang xuehai] (1934). But while these glimpses of how it might have been are valuable, the sequences which really stand out are those in which they re-enact scenes from three films which still exist – Little Toys [Xiao wanyi] (1933), The Goddess [Shen nu] (1934) and New Women. In each instance Kwan begins by taking us behind the scenes, showing Ruan working out the details with her co-stars and listening to what her directors want her to convey. Next we see Maggie Cheung play the scenes in character, before finally juxtaposing her performance with the original scenes played by Ruan herself. It’s a masterpiece of reverse engineering how the original films were constructed while showcasing the talents of both actresses, foregrounding Maggie Cheung while granting space for Ruan Lingyu to have a voice in this depiction of her life.

Besides appearing in the documentary interludes, Kwan injects himself into the narrative by playing Fei Mu, who directed two of Ruan’s films. I’d like to quote a dialogue exchange taken from a party scene set on the last day of Ruan’s life, which she uses to say a fond farewell to her colleagues prior to her midnight suicide. Ruan is talking about the speech she’s due to give at a friend’s school in honour of Women’s Day.

Ruan: “What’s the idea of this festival? To celebrate us girls for rising up from a centuries-old men-dominated history.”

Tang (drunk): “You women are standing up and we men are falling down.”

Fei: “When women stand up it doesn’t necessarily mean men are falling down. We can stand up together in this large world.”

It’s an exchange which has little direct connection with the film surrounding it, feeling more like an authorial interjection aimed at the audience – but it’s a beautiful sentiment and, given that the film has already blurred the lines between fiction and documentary, it’s not out of place. Once we reach Ruan’s funeral in the final minutes of the film, Kwan throws out all pretense at maintaining a division between the two, cutting the emotional tension by showing his own crew filming the final scenes and the actors joking with each other. It’s a potentially risky move, but for me it worked.

I’m not very familiar with Stanley Kwan’s other work, but he received great acclaim for Rouge [Yim ji kau] (1987), a film with its roots in the same 1930s Shanghai setting. Here he’s opted for a more muted colour palette, with browns, oranges and yellows dominating – something I would have attributed to the age of the print, if not for the knowledge that this was a new 4K restoration made with the director’s supervision, making it clear that this was a deliberate choice. The movie benefits from being scripted by film critic Peggy Chiao, providing the crucial female perspective which, supported by her extensive knowledge of film history, forms the film’s spine. But for me, this is all about Maggie Cheung, who as one of the greatest actors of her generation is a perfect choice to portray China’s first female star of the silver screen. Her compelling performance demands attention whenever she’s on screen, no matter how much else is going on around her, earning her four awards as Best Actress – including the Berlin International Film Festival’s prestigious Silver Bear. Without meaning to imply anything negative about the rest of the cast, the only other performer working on the same level as her is Tony Leung. This isn’t the first time they’ve worked together, nor would it be the last. Sharing the small screen early in their careers on the TV series Police Cadet [San jaat si hing] (1984) and The Yangs’ Saga [Yang ka cheung] (1985), they went on to a string of four films with renowned director Wong Kar-wai – Days of Being Wild [Ah Fei jing juen] (1990), Ashes of Time [Dung che sai duk] (1994), In the Mood for Love [Fa yeung nin wah] (2000) and 2046 (2004). Rounding out their list of shared credits are The Banquet [Ho moon yeh yin] (1991), The Eagle Shooting Heroes [Se diu ying hung: Dung sing sai jau] (1993) – a parody made during the filming of Ashes of Time with the same cast – and Zhang Yimou’s Hero [Ying xiong] (2002).

About a week prior to my encounter with Centre Stage, I was coming to the end of a month-long binge on Shaw Brothers films which were about to leave Netflix. Among these films – which varied wildly in quality – one of the standouts was Alex Law’s Painted Faces, which provides a valuable historical perspective on the connective tissue linking the Peking Opera tradition (which stretches back to 1790) to the rise of the Hong Kong martial arts movie which started to gather momentum in the 1960s. Serving as the intersection point between the two is Yu Jim-yuen’s China Drama Academy, birthplace of the Seven Little Fortunes troupe whose most famous graduates include Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Qiu, Yuen Wah and Corey Yuen.

We’re introduced to the Academy through the eyes of Cheng Lung (Siu Ming-fui), referred to here mostly by his nickname Big Nose but later to achieve fame as Jackie Chan. Poorly suited to regular schools and having recently made a nuisance of himself at the American embassy in Australia, where his father worked as the head chef, his mother (Mary Li) drops him off here as a last resort. Excited by the prospect of doing nothing but pretending to fight, he eagerly volunteers for the maximum enrolment term of ten years, but soon finds that he’s signed up for a much stricter form of physical discipline than he’d anticipated. The first half of the film follows the life of the various male students as they train under the guidance of their “big brother” Sammo Hung (Yeung Yam-yin) and Master Yu (portrayed with great sympathy by the real Sammo Hung). Key elements of this section of the film are their gruelling training regimen; the mockery they receive from students attending the more academically inclined local school; the budding friendship between Cheng, Sammo and Yuen Biao (Koo Fai); the role Sammo plays in looking out for the others and taking them on the occasional illicit expedition outside their school; and the stage performances of the star pupils which are the school’s sole source of income.

The second half skips forward in time to the younger characters’ teen years, which are enlivened by their introduction to the world of the all-girls equivalent run by Ching (Cheng Pei-pei). This also allows for a rather sweet strand of potential romance between Yu and Ching, who have clearly nursed a long-term mutual attraction which turns them both into tongue-tied nervous nellies – with all the heavy lifting of the nudging them both along being left to Ching and her oldest student (unfortunately the credits are too sparsely documented for me to tell you her name). This period also sees the Peking Opera tradition in decline, as the hardcore fans age out and the younger audience flocks to the cinema instead. Dwindling box office puts the school at threat, and the decision of the government to demolish the building housing the school finishes the Academy off entirely, with its students dispersing to find work in the film industry as stuntmen – which will eventually see many of the schools alumni make their way up to become action choreographers, film directors and – for the lucky few – movie stars in their own right. The movie ends with Master Yu heading off to America to establish a new school before his retirement, paying a final fond farewell to his star students from the Seven Little Fortunes – although sadly whoever wrote the subtitles undercuts the final scene, failing to understand that the Chinese characters on the fan Yu has been gifted are intended to refer to the troupe’s name (I forgot to note down the alternate translation provided but it was something like “Seven Destinies”).

Alex Law has peppered his cast with significant actors from the history of the genre. Sammo Hung, of course, was a member of Yu’s troupe and it must have been a strange experience for him to play his own teacher – particularly in the scene which has him beating his own younger self. Cheng Pei-pei is best known for her breakthrough performance as the lead of King Hu’s Come Drink With Me [Da zui xia] (1966) and her late career appearance as Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Wo hu cang long] (2000). Lam Ching-ying also has a major supporting role as Wah, Yu’s close friend who is approaching the end of his working life as a stunt performer. Sammo and Lam share one of the film’s best scenes, an extended sequence near the end in which Lam suffers a head injury during a stunt gone wrong and needs to be carefully talked down before he does himself further damage. Sadly, Lam himself was also nearing the end of his career at this point. After fifteen years as an actor he finally achieved fame as the Taoist priest in Mr. Vampire [Geung see sin sang] (1985), a role which was so popular that he became typecast and found it difficult to secure more varied roles. He died of cancer far too young in 1997, having lived for only 44 years. Also worthy of note is Wu Ma, an actor and director who had a small role in Mr. Vampire and cameos here as a film director, but is best known to me as the Taoist priest from A Chinese Ghost Story [Sien lui yau wan] (1987), one of my personal favourites.

Painted Faces is probably more accessible to a general audience than Centre Stage, for a few reasons. There’s the fact that more people have heard of Jackie Chan than Ruan Lingyu; there’s the wider range of potential audience identification points offered by spanning three generations; there’s the more conventional narrative structure of Painted Faces; and, of course, there’s the matter of length – Painted Faces is a lot shorter! Both, however, are well worth seeing – and for those who have the patience, Centre Stage offers a richer experience.

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen

Originally portrayed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury [Jing wu men] (1972), Chen Zhen is a fictionalised mashup of two disciples of Chinese martial artist Huo Yuanjia (1868-1910), the co-founder of Shanghai’s Chin Woo Athletic Association, who achieved folk hero status for his public bouts taking down foreign fighters. Screenwriter Ni Kuang saw the name Chen Zhen in Huo’s obituary and, liking the sound of it, pinched it for his story – creating a character with a number of parallels (possibly unintentional) to another of his followers, Liu Zhensheng. The character has undergone a number of revivals over the years, most recently being reinvented as a pulp action hero played by Donnie Yen in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen [Jing wu feng yun: Chen Zhen] (2010).

But before getting to that, it’s worth going on a quick trawl through the cinematic history of Chen Zhen. Having spent several years in Hollywood but never quite cutting through to the level of success he deserved, Bruce Lee came up with the concept of the martial arts/western TV series Kung Fu (1972-75) as a personal vehicle, only to see to the lead role handed to a Caucasian actor who had no martial arts training (David Carradine), with the studio refusing to credit Lee due to their claim that they had already come up with the same idea independently – a claim which doesn’t hold much water since they had apparently told Lee they wanted it to be set in the modern day rather than the Old West. Returning to Hong Kong, Lee was astonished to discover that he had become famous for his role as the Asian sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet (1966-67), a Batman (1966-68) spinoff generally referred to there as “The Kato Show”. His newfound local fame led to four films with Golden Harvest, the last of which was interrupted in order to make his international breakthrough film Enter the Dragon (1973) – although sadly he never had the opportunity to capitalise on his success, dying one month before its release.

Lo Wei’s Fist of Fury was the second of Lee’s films for Golden Harvest, set in 1930s Shanghai at a time when the Chinese people were being oppressed by the Japanese. Returning to Shanghai to marry his fiancée, Chen Zhen learns that his old master Huo Yuanjia has died and the remaining students are being harassed by the members of a rival Japanese dojo. After experiencing heapings of racist abuse in a variety of situations, Chen discovers that his master was actually poisoned and takes on the rival dojo single-handed, defeating all of the students and killing their master. Chen surrenders to a Chinese policeman only to be confronted by armed Japanese soldiers, with the film ending on a freeze-frame accompanied by gunshots as he launches himself at the soldiers.

Fist of Fury was a huge success, but the death of Bruce Lee (and the character of Chen Zhen) didn’t exactly leave much room for a sequel. During the mid-1970s race to find “the new Bruce Lee”, Lo Wei attempted to establish Jackie Chan as his successor in New Fist of Fury [Xin jing wu men] (1976), in which Chan played a street kid befriended by Chen Zhen’s fiancée. In the wake of this film’s relatively poor reception, Bruce Lee look-alike Bruce Li (real name Ho Chung-tao) starred as Chen Shan, Chen Zhen’s brother, in Fist of Fury II [Jing wu men xu ji] (1977) and Fist of Fury III [Jie quan ying zhua gong] (1979).

Chen Zhen himself finally returned to the big screen in the form of Jet Li in Gordon Chan’s Fist of Legend [Jing wu ying xiong] (1994), a remake of the original set once again in 1937 Shanghai. It’s a worthy successor to the original, taking some liberties with the story but overall faithful in spirit, if more nuanced in its consideration of race relations. The Japanese antagonist of the original has been reinvented as General Fujita, a violent madman who is detested by the pacifist Japanese ambassador. In this version of events Chen tries to avoid killing Fujita rather than deliberately setting out to murder him, and the Japanese ambassador colludes in faking Chen’s death to satisfy the Japanese authorities and prevent the outbreak of war. This changed ending presumably owes a debt to TV series The Fist [陳真] (1982), starring Bruce Leung, which saw the Mayor of Shanghai faking Chen’s death – although where the TV series had him temporarily retire to Beijing, Jet Li’s character heads to Manchuria to continue the fight against Japanese oppression.

Those paying attention to the dates mentioned earlier may have noticed one glaring error with the chronology of the films – Chen Zhen’s teacher Huo Yuanjia died not in the 1930s, but in 1910. This is not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, an error made by the various TV versions of his story. Although Fist of Legend was more successful internationally than it was in the domestic market, its revival of the character may have been a factor in the commissioning of TV series Fist of Fury [Jing wu men] (1995), which saw Donnie Yen play Chen Zhen for the first time. Given 30 episodes to work with, the show starts with Chen’s arrival in Shanghai prior to his first meeting with Huo Yanjia (here named Fok Yuen-gap in line with the earlier TV series The Legendary Fok [Daai hap Fok Jyun Gaap] (1981)) and ends the same way as Bruce Lee’s original.

Which finally brings us, fifteen years later, to Donnie Yen’s return to the role in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. Although initially conceived as a sequel to Fist of Legend, given that it opens in 1917 the absence of a time machine in either movie rather undermines this – it makes more sense to think of it as a sequel to Yen’s TV series minus the final scene. The film kicks off with an action sequence set in the trenches of World War I, where Chen has escaped his fate by joining the 140,000 Chinese labourers sent overseas to assist the British and French in lieu of troops. During the course of this set piece, which establishes Chen’s action hero credentials while maligning the Allied Forces as the sort of people who’d withdraw their troops without concern for the lives of their civilian support personnel, Chen’s best friend Qi Tianyuan is killed in action. Chen and his companions agree to take advantage of this sorry event to fake Chen’s death, with Qi’s sister back in Shanghai – Qi Zhishan (Zhou Yang) – a willing collaborator in the ruse.

Upon their return home, Chen becomes a pianist in a Shanghai nightclub (apocryphally named Casablanca in homage to the 1942 film) run by lovable patriotic gangster Liu Yutian (Anthony Wong), which provides cover for his activities with the underground anti-Japanese resistance movement due to its extensive clientele of foreign dignitaries. One night Chen follows the young General Zeng (Shawn Yue), son of a Chinese warlord, to secret peace-talks with his father’s rival General Zhuo (Ma Yue) only to realise that Japanese troops are lying in wait to sabotage the talks by killing Zeng and blaming his death on Zhuo. Concerned about breaking his cover, Chen makes the convenient discovery that he’s right outside a cinema showing a movie about a masked hero – and, even more conveniently, there’s a display window with a replica of the hero’s costume which just happens to be his size! Donning the outfit in record time – which, in a direct homage to Bruce Lee, looks exactly like the outfit he wore as Kato in The Green Hornet – he saves Zeng’s life and gives him a little speech about the need for China to come together against Japan before beginning a regular moonlighting gig as a pulp hero vigilante protecting the Chinese.

While Chen continues his exploits, he strikes up a relationship with Kiki (Shu Qi), who hits many of the classic femme fatale tropes – attractive nightclub singer fending off the attentions of her boss (good-natured) and patrons (less so), a damaged and conflicted individual with a drinking problem, and – most crucially – one of two spies within the nightclub secretly working for the Japanese. Although her interest in Chen is genuine, it’s not long before her superiors work out that he must be the masked vigilante, ordering her to report back on his movements and associates. Although he works out that she’s a spy, by that point the damage is already done – her superiors have enough information to make a brutal impact on his life. The final section of the film is basically a remake of the climactic confrontation in Fist of Fury set against the backdrop of the 1937 Japanese invasion as Colonel Chikaraishi (Kohata Ryu) – the leader of the forces Chen has been fighting and (by an astonishing coincidence) the son of the General he killed before heading off to the trenches – lures Chen to his father’s dojo, intending to re-stage the scene of his father’s death with a different outcome.

Donnie Yen, appearing here in the dual role of star and action director, is one of Hong Kong’s top action stars and notable for the lengths he takes to invest each of his characters with a fighting style suitable to their character. On record as stating that “Chen Zhen is Bruce Lee”, he avoids direct imitation of Lee for much of the film, choosing instead to honour the spirit of his approach by demonstrating a range of styles drawn from different traditions, much as Lee drew on a range of influences to create his own style of jeet kune do. It’s only in the final sequence that he allows Lee’s style to dominate – dressing in the same style of clothing, wielding nunchaku, emulating specific poses and movements, and making use of Lee’s characteristic vocal style. It’s a tour de force celebration of Lee’s oeuvre which makes no claims to originality but is nonetheless effective as a rousing conclusion.

Although I’ve noted that the setting of this film is more historically appropriate than the earlier versions, it’s got to be said that Legend of the Fist‘s version of Shanghai bears a greater resemblance to a historical theme-park than to any grounded reality. The Shanghai of the earlier parts of the film is all glitz and glamour, a hodgepodge of elements from the 1920s and 1930s thrown together in evocation of an era that never really existed as it’s been remembered through popular culture. As the Japanese gain power and the clock ticks down towards their invasion of China, the glitz and the colour palette begin to fade, colours becoming more and more washed out before finally transitioning to browns and greys. Gone, too, is much of the nuance added to Fist of Legend. The white Europeans are all either racist, incompetent, corrupt, or stupid – or some combination thereof – which, while blatantly stereotypical, does feel like a legitimate and justified perspective for Shanghai’s Chinese inhabitants. The Japanese characters are almost uniformly portrayed as evil, with Kiki being the sole exception – although even Kiki, while despising the results of her actions later in the film, is never really given the chance to redeem herself, continuing to carry out her orders regardless of her personal feelings and only achieving a vague sense of redemption through her pointless death. Apart from Kiki, only the Chinese characters are allowed any sort of complexity, and even then they are all – even the gangsters – unquestionably on the side of Chinese self-governance and unity, differing only on the means to achieve it. Having said that, there have been plenty of Hollywood films which are just as single-minded about American exceptionalism while reveling in much worse racial stereotyping – my feeling is that Legend of the Fist errs on the side of “simplistic” rather than “actively offensive”. (Japanese audiences may well feel differently, but the filmmakers have at least gone to the trouble of recruiting Japanese actors to fill out the cast.)

Director Andrew Lau has an eye for a skilfully composed image, having started in the film industry as a cinematographer and worked in this role with no less a luminary than the renowned Wong Kar-wai on As Tears Go By [Wong Gok ka moon] (1988) and Chungking Express [Chung Hing sam lam] (1994). Although my first encounter with his work as a director was the luscious wuxia epic The Storm Riders [Fung wan: Hung ba tin ha] (1998), he’s probably best known for the crime movie Infernal Affairs [Mou gaan dou] (2002) and its two sequels. Both Shu Qi and Anthony Wong, the most prominent supporting actors, have appeared in many of his films but have substantial careers of their own – Western audiences unfamiliar with their broader careers may recognise Shu Qi from the Jason Statham film The Transporter [Le Transporteur] (2002) and Anthony Wong as General Yang in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). Among the smaller roles, Zhou Yang stood out to me for her performance as Chen’s sister, although she has one of the those tiny CVs which looks completely different depending on whether you check IMDB or HKMDB – a more detailed cross-check reveals that IMDB have split her career into two separate entries, crediting her for stunt work in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) as Zhou Yang but attributing her other acting roles, including a more prominent billing in Love You You [Xia ri le you you] (2011), to a supposedly separate individual listed as Yang Zhou. (Love You You appears to be her last work in the industry.)

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is far from being a sophisticated film, but it looks gorgeous, has some great action sequences and is solidly entertaining – which is pretty much all I was looking for.

Parodying Monkey – A Chinese Odyssey Parts 1-2

Today marks a return to the world of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, as depicted by comic actor Stephen Chow in an extremely loose adaptation of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West [Xī Yóu Jì]. Despite being more of a parody than an adaptation, with only the most tenuous connection to the source material, the two-part film A Chinese Odyssey [Sai yau gei] (1995) been surprisingly influential on subsequent treatments of the story and remains popular in Hong Kong and China, being ranked 19^th on the Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures list during the 24^th Hong Kong Film Awards (2005), the same year Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle [Kung Fu] (2004) – reviewed here – won Best Film and three other awards.

The story breaks neatly into two parts, a practice which wasn’t unusual in Hong Kong cinema of the 1990s. A Chinese Odyssey Part 1: Pandora’s Box [Sai yau gei: Yut gwong bou haap] (1995) breaks viewer expectations straight away as Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, confronts Monkey (Stephen Chow) over his plans to eat Longevity Monk/Tripitaka (Law Kar-ying). Monkey has grown sick of Longevity Monk’s incessant yammering and just wants him to die so that he can enjoy some peace and quiet. Longevity Monk’s willingness to stick up for Monkey’s right to eat him doesn’t help matters either – Monkey loses his temper and attacks Guanyin only to be destroyed, causing Longevity Monk to kill himself in protest. The Buddhist scriptures never make their way from India to China, whose inhabitants remain unenlightened. The end.

OK, not really the end. Cut to 500 years later and a shoddy band of outlaws led by Joker (Stephen Chow again), who is barely able to see straight to walk properly, let alone hit the person he’s aiming at. He also turns out to be the reincarnation of the Monkey King. Monkey’s traditional travelling companions have been reincarnated as members of his gang – Pigsy/Zhu Bajie (Ng Man-tat) as his obnoxious second-in-command and Sandy/Sha Wu-jing (Johnnie Kong) as the pathetic Blindy – although that won’t become apparent until Part 2. The gang soon find themselves sharing the hideout against their will with two dangerous female spirits from the original stories: Spider Woman (Yammie Lam) – one of the seven Spider Demons of Silk Cave (named Spiderweb Cave here); and Bak Jing-jing (Karen Mok) – a shape-shifting skeleton also known as White Bone Spirit. Both women are looking for Monkey, having divined that he can be found at this location around this time, in the hopes that he will lead them to Longevity Monk – whom they will then eat. On top of that, Jing-jing hopes to avenge herself on Monkey for jilting her in his younger days.

After various comedy hijinks – including multiple sequences of Joker being kicked repeatedly in the groin, which does at least restore his eyesight – everybody is attacked by Bull King (Lu Shiming), another popular character from the original stories, leading Joker and Pigsy to escape to Spiderweb Cave with the two female demons. Along the way Joker has fallen in love with Jing-jing, who is willing to exploit his affection but is otherwise contemptuous – until Joker “admits” to being Monkey in order to preserve his life, unaware that he really is Monkey. Various fights and relationship mishaps ensue until Joker finds the Pandora’s Box of the title – which isn’t actually a box and has nothing to do with the Pandora of Greek legend. It’s actually a hinged piece of wood which reflects moonlight when opened and, at the correct phase of the moon, operates as a time machine. (Since the “Pandora’s Box” subtitle is burned into the film along with its original Cantonese title, clearly the decision to translate it this way was chosen by the filmmakers themselves, but it’s a very odd choice from a western perspective.) The final section of Part 1 consists of Joker going back in time over and over and over (and over) in order to save Jing-jing’s life, until one final attempt to rewrite the most recent iteration of events lands him 500 years in the past – shortly before the movie began.

A Chinese Odyssey Part 2: Cinderella [Sai yau gei: Sin leui kei yun] (1995) followed closely on the heels of Part 1, being released after a mere two-week gap – and once more adopting a westernised subtitle that has little direct relevance to the plot (I couldn’t even tell you for sure which of the two female leads is intended to be the Cinderella of the title). Waking up outside Waterfall Cave (soon to be renamed Spiderweb Cave), Joker encounters the delightfully sociopathic fairy Zixia (Athena Chu), who has recently absconded from her role as Buddha’s lamp-wick to explore the world. Declaring that she owns the mountain, as well as everybody and everything on it, she takes Pandora’s Box and puts her mark of ownership on Joker (prophesied in Part 1 as the first step to reclaiming his identity as Monkey). It’s not long before he accidentally unsheathes her sword, something which can be done by only one man – the man that Zixia will marry. As Jing-jing is also active at this time and Joker is still intent on reestablishing a relationship that hasn’t happened yet, this creates no end of further complications, with both Jing-jing and Zixia popping inside his body at separate points to have a direct conversation with his heart so they can tell what he really feels (a much more sensible prospect than attempting to get any sense out of him in person).

Although the Spider Woman of Part 1 is absent from Part 2, the Bull King takes a more prominent role this time around, being joined (much to his chagrin) by his wife Princess Iron Fan (Ada Choi). Another popular character from the original stories, Princess Iron Fan unfortunately gets short shrift here, only turning up roughly halfway through to play the shrewish jealous wife and confront the Bull King about his plan to marry Zixia behind her back. It’s an undignified role for such an important character, very much taking the back seat in comparison with the other female leads and disappearing from the film entirely after her husband steals her fan. Longevity Monk spends most of the film tied up waiting to be eaten, but there are some very entertaining scenes in which his guards kill themselves rather than continue listening to him talk. Pigsy and Sandy finally turn up in their original forms, this time with Sandy taking the more prominent role of the two – but they’re really only present as background characters, taking little part in resolving any of the important plot elements. It’s very much Joker’s show as he attempts to juggle his romantic conflicts while also reluctantly resuming his role as a reformed Monkey – a decision which will ultimately require him to reject emotional attachments, with tragic consequences (although a coda provides a bit of a cheat by taking Monkey 500 years into the future again to help that future’s versions of Joker and Jing-jing to reconcile).

I’ve wanted to see these films for a very long time, so it’s difficult to assess them objectively – lengthy periods of anticipation can easily result in unrealistic expectations. Even in the absence of such expectations, though, I expect I still would have felt a mild sense of disappointment at the end results. Most of my problems with the duology stem from Part 1. While Spider Woman and Jing-jing were never less than entertaining, I found it very difficult to care about Joker and his band of incompetent outlaws. It’s a big ask to expect an audience to sympathise with a group of criminals who are happy to attack women travelling unaccompanied, even if said criminals do get their arses thoroughly and deservingly kicked. It’s also a bold move to make a movie about Monkey in which he barely appears in any recognisable form – the vicious Monkey of the opening sequence is an amusing subversion, but while part of the point of turning him into Joker is that he’s almost unrecognisable as the same character, this is also a significant impediment to viewer interest. Once it becomes apparent that the point of Part 2 is to undo the events of Part 1 so that they never happened, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that much of Part 1 was a waste of time. Part 2 is much more satisfactory, but devotes far too much time to the Bull King for my liking – the character is a bombastic annoyance, the costume shoddy, and the actor’s performance unable to overcome my negative reaction to the previous two points.

Writer/director Jeffrey Lau is best known for his talent with mo lei tau comedies, which are distinguished by a combination of slapstick and nonsensical farce. Those talents are certainly on display here – and, although I take issue with some of his story choices, it has to be noted that his work here won him Best Screenplay at the 2^nd Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards. Some of the jokes failed to land, but I suspect this owes more to translation issues than to a lack of wit – Cantonese comedy typically involves a lot of untranslatable wordplay which goes right over the heads of those (like me) who don’t know the language. I do wish, however, that he’d refrained from casting himself as Grandpa Buddha, who appears a walking plot-dispenser in Part 1 and a disreputable bandit in Part 2 – not because he’s bad in the role, but because I feel both films would benefit from the character’s absence.

The most successful aspects can be attributed to martial arts director Ching Siu-tung, a successful director in his own right of excellent films such as A Chinese Ghost Story [Ch’ien-nü Yu-hun] (1987). His touch is evident not just on the combat scenes, but on the depiction of the supernatural elements, which could easily have been ripped directly out of one of his own films. His work on A Chinese Odyssey elevates the material around it – without his presence, I suspect I’d be a lot harsher on the end result.

I’ve talked about Stephen Chow previously (here, here and here), so in passing I’ll just note his extensive history of working with the male supporting cast and move onto the three female leads, who portray by far the most interesting characters. What I hadn’t realised until now was just how much the film’s romantic conflicts inadvertently reflect Chow’s own love life. Athena Chu, playing Monkey’s one true love Zixia, met Chow on the set of her first film Fight Back to School 2 [To hok wai lung 2] (1992). The two dated for three years, with their relationship ending around the time of A Chinese Odyssey. I’m not that familiar with most of her career, but she notably appeared opposite Michelle Yeoh in Supercop 2 [Chiu kup gai wak] (1993), a spinoff from Jackie Chan’s Police Story 3: Supercop [Ging chaat goo si III: Chiu kup ging chaat] (1992). Appearing in her first lead role as competing love interest Jing-jing is Cantopop singer Karen Mok, who began dating Chow after the conclusion of his previous relationship and appeared in many of his subsequent films, ending with Shaolin Soccer [Siu Lam juk kau] (2001). She’s probably best known to English-speaking audiences as General Kang from the American Jackie Chan vehicle Around the World in 80 Days (2004). Yammie Lam, playing the spider demon, had appeared in Ching Siu-tung’s Witch from Nepal [Qi yuan] (1986) and Ronnie Yu’s The Bride with White Hair [Bak fat moh lui zyun] (1993) – sadly, A Chinese Odyssey was pretty much the end of her career due to a series of personal tragedies which cast their shadow over the remainder of her life until her death in 2018, alone in her apartment, at the age of 55.

A Chinese Odyssey‘s popularity has allowed Jeffrey Lau to return to the well multiple times. First up was A Chinese Tall Story [Ching din dai sing] (2005), which appears to have had a more conventional plot – for a given value of “conventional” which includes Tripitaka being rescued by an alien princess. Athena Chu made a guest appearance in Just Another Pandora’s Box [Yuet gwong bo hup] (2010), a parody of A Chinese Odyssey and many other films, including Lau’s own The Eagle Shooting Heroes [Se diu ying hung: Dung sing sai jau] (1993), which is itself a parody of Louis Cha’s serialised novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes (1957-1959) (available in four volumes in a recent English translation – I’m currently halfway through). Lau finally took the plunge and made an official sequel with A Chinese Odyssey Part 3 [Da hua xi you 3] (2016), which saw Karen Mok return to the role she’d played 20 years previously. This sequel may owe its existence to the success of Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons [Xi you: Xiang mo pian] (2013), which saw Stephen Chow – now retired from acting to concentrate on writing and directing – create his own variant on Lau’s story which I feel surpasses the original. Chow’s reconceptualisation got its own sequel with Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back [Xi you: Fu yao pian] (2017) (previously reviewed here).

A Chinese Odyssey might not have lived up to my expectations, but I’d still cautiously recommend it to fans of Stephen Chow or aficionados of Hong Kong fantasy cinema. Ching Siu-tung’s guiding hand peppers the two-part film with an assortment of visual pleasures for those who enjoy his aesthetic, and the female leads are uniformly enjoyable in their roles.

Stephen Chow Double Feature – Magic Monkey & Adorable Alien

After my recent brushes with Sun Wukong the Monkey King, I felt like diving back into the work of Hong Kong actor/writer/director Stephen Chow, who has a bit of a history with the character. Back in 1995 he played Monkey in Jeffrey Lau’s duology A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora’s Box [Sai yau gei: Yut gwong bou haap] and A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella [Sai yau gei: Sin leui kei yun], a comedic riff on the original stories. Two decades later, Chow wrote and directed his own comic interpretation, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons [Xi you: Xiang mo pian] (2013), the first of his films in which he did not play one of the lead roles. After following this up with eco-comedy The Mermaid (2016), which I watched earlier this month, he returned to the world of Monkey – teaming up with Tsui Hark (who takes the director’s chair) and a completely new cast to make a sequel, Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back [Xi you: Fu yao pian] (2017).

Chow opened The Mermaid with a scene in which a sceptical crowd visits a dodgy museum of curiosities. It’s a fun way to kick-start the comedy, but the scene barely connected to the rest of the film. Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back opens similarly, but Chow has found a better way to expand the scene and incorporate it into the story. We meet Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang (ex-boy band member Kris Wu) and his animal spirit followers in the unexpected role of carnival hucksters. Penniless and desperate for food, Tang exhibits his followers as exotic creatures who fight demons, but they are completely uninterested in playing along until Tang’s provocation of Monkey/Sun Wukong (Lin Gengxin) sparks him into a violently overplayed demonstration of his abilities which destroys the rest of the carnival and leaves Tang awkwardly fending off offers of protection money. After leaving the carnival, we see that Wukong’s headband – more familiar in other versions of the story as the means of the monk’s ability to control him – is purely decorative. Instead, Tang whips him with one of the restraints used by Buddha to contain him within his mountain prison. Pigsy/Zhu Bajie (Yang Yiwei) is still a relentless womaniser and is mostly seen in one of two handsome forms, but finds spider demons and other female creatures a lot more attractive than humans. Sandy/Sha Wujing (basketball star Mengke Bateer) is a world-weary grump who spends most of the movie as a giant CGI catfish being hauled around on a wagon after a poisoning incident.

The central relationship in the film is the dynamic between Tang and Wukong. Tang spends much of his time beating or berating Wukong, while Wukong’s antagonistic behaviour spans the range from wilful misinterpretation to homicidal rage. Contrasting with this, we see Tang snuggling up to Wukong at night and whispering sweet nothings. Both extremes of behaviour ultimately stem back to a key event in Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, which is fortunately explained for those (like me) who haven’t seen it. In the earlier film, Tang fell in love with Duan (Shu Qi), who was later killed by Wukong before he could be tamed. Wukong now wears Duan’s headband, which serves as a constant reminder – both of Wukong’s role in her death, but also of Duan herself, leading Tang to occasionally hallucinate her presence (and making Wukong very confused).

These character dynamics play out against a seemingly unrelated set of encounters with demons which tie together at the end. We first see the team of pilgrims in action against a group of female spider demons, a version of the story of the Spider Demons of Silk Cave which was dramatised in The Cave of the Silken Web [Pan si dong] (1967), one of Ho Meng Hua’s four movies adapting tales from Journey of the West which also depicted the central monk as a fool who is out of his depth. Moving on to an immensely impressive city whose minister (Yao Chen) indulges in badly executed sleight of hand tricks which apparently fool the crowds, they come up against Red Boy, another popular villain from the novel who manifests here as a manic clockwork toy with springs for limbs. This leads to an encounter with White Bone Spirit (Lin Yun), a potential new romantic interest for Tang whose story had been reused in a different form for Monkey: Even Monsters Can Be People [Saiyûki: Goku Hanmon! San Yokai No Wana] (1978). Tang has the opportunity to prove that he’s not quite the fool he seems in his climactic encounter with the Immortal Golden Vulture, a rogue agent of Heaven who believes Tang isn’t worthy to seek the Buddhist scriptures (and who appears to be inspired by the novel’s Golden Winged Great Peng of Lion Camel Ridge). The four come together to defeat their foe, Tang and Wukong come to peace with each other, and the weird flirting continues as they walk off into the desert.

As one would expect of a Tsui Hark film, the entire production is lavish. Yoshihito Akatsuka’s sets are huge and filled with loving detail, providing appropriate arenas in which to host excitingly choreographed action scenes. The CGI is top notch, with imaginative designs rendered in a style which could easily stand up against a contemporary Hollywood production. The performers all acquit themselves well, selling the dominant comedic tone without undermining the dramatic elements. And, rather delightfully, both Stephen Chow and Tsui Hark turn up in cameo roles as cinema cleaners in an end-of-credits scene which is more of an anti-end-credits-scene scene. (See also the end of the second trailer below for a pseudo-behind-the-scenes look at Hark berating Chow.)

Stephen Chow used to take one of the lead role in all of his films. The last film in which he did so was CJ7 [Cheung gong chat hou] (2008), a tonally weird children’s science fiction film which is difficult to imagine as being at all marketable for a more conventional Hollywood audience. Chow plays Chow Ti, an impoverished construction worker who lives in a ramshackle hut on the site of a rubbish dump with his son Dicky (Xu Jiao). Chow has raised his son to value the importance of personal integrity and kindness over wealth and privilege. He works insane hours to fund Dicky’s education at an upmarket school in order to maximise Dicky’s chances of bettering his circumstances, but is consequently unable to afford to buy anything new, scavenging everything else – including school clothes and food – from other people’s garbage. Unfortunately Dicky’s inability to live up to the personal grooming standards expected by most of his fellow students and many of his teachers means that he is constantly being discriminated against and denied opportunities which are granted to the other students. The only teacher who takes the time who help and support him is Ms Yuen (Kitty Zhang Yuqi), who truly cares about her profession and keeps asking whether she can help him with his schoolwork at home.

Looking for a toy for his son one night, Chow fails to notice a flying saucer rising from the garbage pile behind him. When he turns around, he discovers a squishy green ball left in its wake. Dicky isn’t impressed at first, but after another day of bullying and being beaten up at school, it turns into a cuddly little puppy-like alien with a big fluffy head on top of its squidgy body which he names CJ7. Dreaming of a fantastic day at school in which the alien helps him to get good marks and excel at sport, Dicky is unreasonably disappointed at CJ7’s failure to live up to his dreams the following day, and beating the poor little creature before throwing it in the bin. Coming to the realisation that his expectations were completely unfair, he is too late to rescue CJ7 from the garbage collection truck, but is delighted when it turns up again in his dad’s arms. Then, just as Dicky’s school life and grades begin to improve, tragedy strikes – and CJ7 tries to find a way to make everything better.

The level of humour in the film is remarkably subdued when compared to Chow’s body of work – even more so when you consider that this is ultimately supposed to be a feel-good children’s film about a young boy’s life improving. Dicky spends a large chunk of the film having an almost unrelentingly terrible time at his school, extending to his home life when his over-extended father begins venting his frustrations on his son – frustrations which Dicky inflicts in turn on CJ7. While it’s an effective representation of the way in which poverty, overwork and malnourishment can have a detrimental effect on people’s ability to continue to be their best selves, it’s very bleak for a kid’s film, even given that both characters are able to recognise their faults and work to redress their behaviour. Although Chow does manage to wrap everything up into a happy conclusion, while resisting the temptation to definitively resolve any of the character interrelationships, it’s only in the last seconds of the film that the viewer will discover whether the conclusion is tragedy-free.

Although Chow has restricted his acting roles to cameos since this film, prominent among the actors he’s worked with again are Zhang Yuqi (who went from sympathetic teacher in this film to the villain in The Mermaid) and Lee Sheung-ching (from obnoxious teacher here to deadpan cop in The Mermaid). Both of his co-writers had worked with Chow before – Vincent Kok contributed to Forbidden City Cop (1996), while Tsang Kan-cheung has a more extensive collaborative history which takes in The God of Cookery (1996), King of Comedy (1999), Shaolin Soccer (2001), Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and The Mermaid.

Although not well received critically, CJ7 was popular enough to spawn both and an animated remake – CJ7: The Cartoon [Cheung Gong 7 hou: Oi dei kau] (2010) – and a CGI sequel – CJ7: Super Q Team [Chang Jiang 7 Hao: Chao Meng Te Gong Dui] (2015).

Stephen Chow’s Mermaid – EnviroRomCom

Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle) has made a career out of entertainingly lightweight romantic comedies with vividly imagined action choreography centred around hapless losers made good. While all of these elements are present in The Mermaid [Mei ren yu] (2016), loosely inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, Chow has laced this film with streaks of darkness in support of its strong ecological stance.

Chow puts his cards on the table from the very beginning, opening with a montage of scenes depicting the pollution of the seas and the brutal slaughter of protected marine life (each of which is carefully documented in the closing credits). Having set the scene for his theme, he swiftly changes tone to give the audience what they came for, switching to a comedic vignette in which a dodgy sideshow operator (Yeung Lun) half-heartedly displays his blatantly fake collection of exotic creatures, including a skeleton of Batman (with two chicken wings for ears) and a fake mermaid constructed from a plastic toy and a salted fish. The sideshow promptly vanishes from the rest of the film, apart from a 10 second cameo as the film nears its climax.

The actual plot kicks in with the auctioning of the Green Gulf coastal wildlife reserve, which turns into a bidding war of oneupmanship between unscrupulous corporate billionaires Liu Xuan (Deng Chao) – an egotistical dirtbag womaniser with a lower class background who keeps his own musical ensemble on hand to play his personal theme song about being invincible – and Ruo-lan (Zhang Yuqi) – an unscrupulous high class mankiller who comes from wealth. Ruo-lan’s plans to increase the real estate value of her adjacent properties are foiled when she loses the bid to Liu Xuan, whose company has been using sonar emitter technology to drive away the dolphins so that he can turn the bay into a land reclamation project. After a mutual gloating session with Uncle Rich (a classy cameo performance from legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark) and the eccentric Cheng (Zheng Jifeng) – who arrives by jetpack wearing a skintight leopard-print jumpsuit – Ruo-lan entices Liu Xuan into a mutually beneficial partnership with the promise of a closer relationship.

Unbeknownst to all, Green Gulf is also the haven for a colony of merfolk, who inhabit the wreck of an ocean liner which ran aground long ago. They have been driven into this refuge due to the extreme power of the sonar emitters deployed in the area, which are responsible for causing massive tissue disruption to the local sealife, including some of the merfolk. Led by the dreadlocked Octopus (Show Lo) – who, in contrast to the other merfolk, has a tentacled lower half – they plan to avenge themselves by killing the man responsible. Selecting Shan (Lin Yun) as the prettiest, they split her fins to allow her to walk around and send her off to seduce and assassinate Liu Xuan. Inevitably, after a series of comedic mishaps, they end up falling in love, leading to Liu Xuan’s belated environmental awakening but also invoking Muo-lan’s wrath.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with the merfolk’s base of operations. Shan initially gets around everywhere on a skateboard, allowing her to move more quickly than the shuffling of her flippers stuffed into sneakers would permit. Part of the ship’s hull has been reconstructed into a skating ramp, allowing her to make rapid descents into their base of operations while doubling as a play area for the other merfolk. A tentacle-propelled catapult launches her upwards out of the ship, bouncing safely off a life preserver at the top. Sea urchins are thrown like shuriken and the merfolks’ knives derive from dead swordfish.

Although the romantic aspect of the plot requires a huge suspension of disbelief in order to see Liu Xuan as at all redeemable, Chow manages this aspect fairly well, orchestrating an evening at a fun park which allows both characters to revel in cheap food, bad jokes and worse singing, effectively putting them both off their guard. Liu Xuan’s transformation is too dramatic and sudden to be acceptable in a conventional drama, but it’s tonally in line with the other silliness on display – this is not a film where you should expect intense character arcs of personal development.

The hypocrisy of the corporate elite is effectively mocked via a strategy meeting early on, beginning with a public relations campaign emphasising the business’ commitment to environmental causes before the next item on the agenda, a demonstration of how their new sonic emitters can make goldfish explode. Although Ruo-lan can’t bear to watch this herself, she asks her assistant to take promotional pictures for her personal collection, complete with smiling attendants striking cheesy poses next to the crimson-drenched tank.

The comedy takes a darker tinge when Octopus, masquerading as a chef in an attempt to kill Liu Xuan, pretends that his prematurely revealed tentacles were fresh ingredients. Backed into a corner by his own story, he allows his own tentacles to be cooked, sliced, tenderised and ground while making various grotesquely hilarious faces until he can stand it no more, spewing forth an ink cloud and propelling himself backwards through the window. It’s both wincingly funny and deeply disturbing. This scene acts as the forerunner to a much darker scene later in the film. When Ruo-lan, in full villain mode, mobilises a mercenary strike team to attack the merfolk in their own home, they butcher their victims in a frenzy of violence deliberately evocative of the documentary footage seen earlier, leading finally to Ruo-lan shooting Liu Xuan with three different types of speargun. It’s a shocking shift in tone which adds a level of reality to the violence which I’ve never encountered in Chow’s other work, but it’s an appropriate extrapolation from the film’s subject matter and effectively underlines his pro-environment message. That said, Chow doesn’t abandon the romantic comedy elements entirely, tying off his story with a coda which shows his protagonists to be happy and offers a message of hope for the future.

To conclude on a lighter note, I’d like to give a shout out Zhang Wen and Li Shangzheng for their single scene as police constables trying to maintain a straight face while Liu Xuan reports his abduction by mermaids. Their steadfastly deadpan facade as they troll him with a series of wilfully misinterpreted identi-sketches is delightful, and their steadfast maintenance of a professional mien while stifling giggles is a comic tour-de-force.

Spooky Shaw Brothers HK Double Feature – The Enchanting Ghost/The Bride from Hell

Shaw Brothers might be the the most internationally recognised name in Hong Kong film production. Operating from 1958 until 1986 (when they abandoned film to concentrate on television), after driving Cathay Organisation out of the film industry in 1970 they dominated the marketplace, with no significant competition until Golden Harvest made an international splash with Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973). During this peak period, they released two stories in the classic Chinese ghost story mould directed by Chou Hsu-Chiang, The Enchanting Ghost [Gui wu li ren] (1970) and The Bride from Hell [Gui xin niang] (1972).

The Enchanting Ghost is loosely based on “The Bookworm [Shūchī]” by Pu Songling from his hugely influential Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio [Liaozhai zhiyi] (1740). While the original source introduces the supernatural right from the beginning, the movie chooses to tease the viewer for most of the movie with “supernatural” events which are shown to have a rational explanation, before letting loose in the final sequence.

Following the death of his father, the scholar Lang Lu-Zhu (Yang Li-Hua) is evicted from his house by magistrate Master Shi (Lui Ming), who has colluded with Lang’s uncle Long Zhong-Yuan (Lin Bing) to fake a record of unpaid debts which will allow the uncle (after a suitable passage of time) to seize the house for himself. Penniless and left with no other options, Lang packs his meagre belongings and moves into the local haunted house. That night, hearing what he thinks is a ghost, a candlelit exploration of the top floor reveals Yan Ru-Yu (Chang Mei-Yao) and her dying mother (Sha Lee-Man), who have sought refuge from an attack of some sort. After her mother’s death, Yan decides to remain with Lang as his wife and uses an abandoned loom to weave clothing which Lang sells to support them. After a number of misunderstandings with the friendly townsfolk and a narrowly averted assassination attempt on Lang by his uncle (fearful that his treachery will be discovered), they all become convinced that Lang is married to a ghost. Master Shi is dubious and returns to the house with the uncle, catching them unawares. Because he’s a dirty old man, he arranges to kidnap Yan, ultimately conspiring with his wife (Li Hong) and her maid (Lee Chi-Lun) to arrange her death so that she can never reveal the cause of her dishonour. Yan then returns as a ghost to take her revenge.

Lang, Yan and Shi are all taken from the original story, but Shi’s villainy takes a different form and there’s no ghostly revenge finale. Yan was originally a paper cut-out figure from one of Lang’s books who was able to manifest as a human – the only remnant of that here is a snippet from one of Lang’s scholarly texts (a poem by Emperor Zhenzong) stating that he will find jade-like beauty through his studies, connecting to Yan Ru-Yu whose name translates as “face like jade”. Interestingly, the scholar Yang is portrayed by a woman playing a man, a common casting convention in Huangmei opera and other traditions but a potentially baffling choice to those coming from a western perspective. Yang Li-Hua is convincing in the role, but the standout performance comes from Chang Mei-Yao, who is placed into the widest variety of settings and thus given a better opportunity to display her range.

I’m unaware of a literary source for The Bride from Hell (or more accurately The Ghost Bride), which was written by Hsu Tien-Yung following his Taiwanese film The Fairy’s Bride [仙妻] (1971) (about which I could find very little – it doesn’t even have an IMDB entry). In contrast to The Enchanting Ghost, The Bride from Hell opens with the ghost, who is met by Nie Yun Peng (Yang Fang) and his servant Da Huo Zi (Ko Hsiao-Pao) at the side of a lake with her face turned away, before they unknowingly encounter her again in the house where they take shelter. Anu (Hsing Hui) manufactures a situation which requires Nie to propose marriage, and the same happens with Anu’s servant Wei Yin Erh (Ching Hsia) and Da. Returning to Nie’s hometown, several of his older relatives identify his wife as a ghost and depart in haste. Nie later learns from a Taoist priest Master Tai Yi (Chang Feng) that three respected members of the town made their fortune 20 years ago by highway robbery. Among their victims was Feng Ai Jiao, a woman with a remarkable resemblance to Anu. As the film plays out, various town members try to deal with the ghost while being egged on by the secret villains, while Anu/Feng seeks her revenge. There is also a feeble comic relief subplot in which Nie’s servant Da becomes convinced that his own (mortal) wife must also be a ghost, which might be more amusing if it didn’t take up so much time.

The director really lets loose on the atmospherically filmed ghost effects, including some wire work to show her flying through the air. Wang Chi-Ren’s musical compositions boost the effectiveness of these scenes considerably, calling on a wide range of percussion and string instruments employed in a variety of ways to assault the ears. As with The Enchanting Ghost, the actress playing the ghost is the focal point of the film and does a fine job, although Yang Fang doesn’t quite hit the same heights here as Chang Mei-Yao did in the previous film.

Both of these films are engaging examples of their genre and time, although neither of stand out as classics for the ages. If you were to pick just one to watch, The Enchanting Ghost offers more nuance, a clearer narrative and more emotional kick, but The Bride from Hell wins if you’re simply after some ghostly action.

We Are One Retrospective – Offerings from Sundance

At last I’ve made it through my backlog of mini-reviews from the We Are One Global Film Festival. To finish up, here are my brief impressions of three films from the Sundance Indigenous Shorts Program, followed by a round-up of everything else I watched but haven’t previously mentioned.

Nutag-Homeland (2016, Canada, 6 min)

An impressionistic depiction of the USSR’s deportation of the Kalmyk people. The animation feels like it’s constructed from blobs of paint (or sometimes oil pastels), creating a very textured experience as shapes shift and transition between scenes and people, creating a sense of impermanence and dispersion.

Fainting Spells (2018, USA, 11 min)

Multiple layers of colour tinted negative exposures create a hallucinatory feel as an imagined myth of the Ho-Chunk Pipe Plant streams across the screen. The imagery scales further and further back towards representational reality, before a final section where it looks as if the spiritual essence of the land and the people on it separates and streams up into the sky. Hypnotic.

Throat Singing in Kangirsuk [Katatjatuuk Kangitsumi] (2019, Canada, 3 min)

Two Inuit throat singers practice their craft, accompanied by drone footage of the surrounding arctic landscape and their home village, creating an impression of astral bodies traversing the land.

Watched But Not Reviewed

Jaws – Assembling a Top-Tier Team (2020, USA, 12 min)

Sébastien Tellier on Paris’ rooftop | A Take Away Show (2020, France, 9 min)

The Stories That Prepared Us (aka How Movies Prepared Us for Coronavirus) (2020, USA, 9 min)

Blood Rider (2020, Nigeria, 17 min) plus Q+A

Cinema Cafe with Jackie Chan (2019, USA, 48 min)

On Film Festivals (2020)

• Mary Harron (1 min) – watch
• Julian Schnabel (1 min) – watch
• Darren Aronofsky (1 min) – watch
• JR (1 min) – watch
• David O. Russell (1 min) – watch
• Ang Lee (1 min) – watch

HK double bill – Kung Fu Hustle (2004) / The Adventurers (2017)

These two very different Hong Kong action films are both afflicted by script problems. In one case, the sheer imagination of the film overcomes these flaws; in the other, the film is fatally undermined.

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) is a live action martial arts cartoon in both good and bad ways – it’s bursting with visual energy and zany imagery, but it’s lacking when it comes to a strong narrative.

After a scene-setting prologue establishing that we’re in gangster-run 1940s Shanghai, the action immediately shifts away from recognisable genre pastiche to the mundane suburban squalor of Pigsty Alley, a slum owned by characters identified only as Landlord (Yuen Wah) and Landlady (Yuen Qiu). The inhabitants of Pigsty Alley are introduced quickly and economically as Landlord makes his rounds of the tenants and shop-owners, accepting free goods and behaving like a complete sleazeball to any woman he comes across, finally returning home to Landlady and receiving a thorough beating from her for his actions (which seems to be a daily – or perhaps hourly – occurrence). The inhabitants are all broadly sketched caricatures, but this is all that’s required for the story, and has the advantage of cementing their characteristics in the viewer’s mind immediately.

After attracting the unwanted attention of the Axe Gang, top of the heap in Shanghai, it becomes apparent that some of the ageing lowlife inhabitants are secretly martial arts masters. Coolie (Xing Yu) has powerful legs, Tailor (Chiu Chi-ling) uses the curtain rings from his changing room as forearm armour, and effeminate gay stereotype Donut (Dong Zhihua) is a master of the staff and spear. After fighting off the gang, they are in turn defeated by the weaponised musical notes of assassin duo The Harpists, before Landlord and Landlady escalate the absurdity and take out the assassins through a combination of sleepwalking and shouting… and the exponential increase in scale continues.

Writer/director/producer Stephen Chow plays Sing, a lowlife hustler who’s not particularly good at anything. He continually picks fights with those who look weaker than him and is thoroughly trounced every time. When he attempts to use throwing knives to kill somebody, they ricochet back and lodge in his arms. He’s determined to be a terrible person, but is only successful at victimising a mute woman operating an ice cream cart who lets him steal from her because (he later discovers) he defended her from a bully when he was a child (his last altruistic act). Sing is peripheral to the action for the first hour of the movie, acting as a catalyst to set off the initial conflict but otherwise barely relevant to the plot and impossible to empathise with. This is the core reason for the unsatisfying narrative structure of the film, because in the final act a change of heart will lead him to become the ultimate champion of martial arts and defeat the Beast (Bruce Leung Siu-lung). While his physical and moral transformation does have an emotional resonance, as his transmutation of the Beast’s weapon into a lotus flower spiritually purifies the city and himself, allowing him to reconnect with the girl from his childhood, it’s at least partially undermined by this narrative dislocation.

There’s no faulting the film on the level of physical comedy or martial arts choreography. Sammo Hung’s comic instincts come through in the basic concepts behind the choreography, although he was ultimately replaced by the great Yuen Woo-ping, who has a much higher profile in Hollywood due to his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and The Matrix (1999). Yuen incorporates older martial arts styles into the existing pattern, providing a traditional underpinning which anchors the rampant absurdity of the exaggerated fighting.

Despite my complaints about the narrative, this is still a thoroughly enjoyable action comedy which is perhaps Stephen Chow’s biggest international success. I wouldn’t rank it as highly as Forbidden City Cop (1996) or Shaolin Soccer (2001), but it’s still a huge amount of fun.

The Adventurers (2017) is a superficially slick master thief adventure film which lacks convincing characterisation or any real substance.

The plot revolves around dissecting the aftermath of a heist that went wrong five years prior to the main action. Andy Lau plays a master thief who was betrayed in the middle of a job and sent to prison. After being released from a surprisingly short prison term, he sets out to finish the job and determine who betrayed him. He’s pursued by Jean Reno, playing a French detective who has been his long-term nemesis. Also on Lau’s team are cookie-cutter characters played by Tony Yang (hacker who doesn’t understand women) and Shu Qi (sexy firecracker thief with poorly defined skills allowing her to do whatever is convenient for the plot). Tagging along with Reno is Zhang Jingchu, playing Lau’s ex-fiancee who left him when she realised he was a thief.

Unfortunately, while the underlying plot backbone holds together, it’s completely lacking in any surprise and the plot twists are telegraphed a mile off. The McGuffin consists of three interlocking necklaces with portentous titles which combine to form GAIA (written in capitals for no apparent reason). The names suggest that the necklaces might have special powers, or some other cultural significance, but apparently that’s only true in some alternative reality where this was a more interesting movie. They exist in this form purely to provide the suggestion of an exciting backstory which is nowhere to be seen.

Lau’s character lacks the dynamism demanded of an international jetsetter master thief. Lau tries to inject some charisma into the role, but is given very little to work with. His detective nemesis is an inconsistently characterised mess. Reno’s first appearance in the film, an exchange of banter with Lau at the prison gates, suggests the long term connection of two foes who respect each other but refuse to admit to themselves that they enjoy the chase. Later, he is portrayed as a tormented Javert-type who is driven to catch Lau because Lau saved his life by pulling him from a burning vehicle, a decision which led to Lau’s initial capture. This is accompanied with some poorly conceived argument that this makes him even more dangerous than a criminal without ethics, a bizarre justification which is accepted on its own terms as if it makes sense. Once the detective finally catches Lau, he greets Lau’s suggestion that he should be set free in order to retrieve the jewels by… immediately (and cheerfully) setting him free without a qualm. Reno struggles vainly to find a character in this mess and frequently looks as if the script has made him lose the will to live.

Among the supporting players, Yang is adequate in a thankless comic role. Zhang is given nothing to do other than look earnest until she finally hooks up with Lau and is given the opportunity to display a personality. Qi is the only person in the entire film who looks like she’s having any fun – she elevates her role by amping up the attitude and throwing herself into the material with glee. And there is at least some pretty scenery on view, with beautiful aerial vistas of Cannes and the Czech Republic featuring prominently.

I know that writer/director Stephen Fung is capable of much better than this, because I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier film Tai Chi Zero (2012). While the plot of that film was a nonsensical mashup of steampunk tropes and traditional martial arts parody, the story actually had something to say about the conflict of industrialisation with rural living and the broadly brushed characters, while melodramatic, felt more real than the poorly thought through cardboard cutouts on display here. What should have been an exciting action heist romp fell flat on its face.