Hong Kong cinema is star-driven. Coinciding with the decline these past few years is a lack of new personalities who have captured the imagination of the movie-going public. Shu Qi, named "best newcomer" in 1996, is a rare exception, one of the few new personalities to qualify as a bona fide movie star. On the male side, teenage Nicholas Tse is the best bet to eventually inherit the title held by Chow Yun-fat before he left these shores for Hollywood. Tse is still young, and still an unproven commodity at the box office. But with such recent credits as A Man Called Hero and Gen-X Cops, he is maturing as an actor and a star. Metade Fumaca, starring Tse and "guest-starring" Shu Qi, is too experimental to generate huge ticket sales, but provides the actor with a credible stepping stone up the ladder to potential superstardom.
This is the second feature by director/writer Riley Ip Kam-hung, whose directorial debut, Love Is Not a Game, But a Joke, also featured Shu Qi. Metade Fumaca (Portuguese for "half-smoked"), is a more mature work, more ambitious in its story and structure. Eric Tsang is Panther, a middle-aged small-time hood who has spent the past three decades in Brazil, and returns to Hong Kong to find his only true love (Shu Qi). Fate brings him together with Smokey (Tse), equally small-time but with something to look forward to in life. It is a tale of relationships and emotions more complex than the usual Cantonese film. There is genuine chemistry between the roly-poly 46-year-old and the handsome 19-year-old, without which Metade Fumaca would be less than half-smoked.
Paul Fonoroff