The Hong Kong black comedy returns to its vibrant, edgy self in Pang Ho-cheung's Trivial Matters, released after several years of local films being gradually watered down for the broader Chinese audience. Today one of the city's most exciting talents in darker comedies thanks to his debut You Shoot, I Shoot, as well as Men Suddenly in Black and AV, Pang joined forces with co-producer and actor Chapman To to invest in and deliver a clever crowd-pleaser of seven short stories taken from Pang's book of the same title. First released at Christmas 2007 as the plucky Cantonese alternative to Peter Chan's The Warlords, the megastar-led period blockbuster of the season, Trivial Matters goes beyond its unassuming title with a potpourri of charming and entertaining local skits and tales.
Kicking off the cinematic quickies is the opening short film Vis Major, in which a psychiatry professor winds up consulting a former student on his sex life. But little does he know that the younger shrink is gaining a remarkably vivid picture of the story from the professor's wife as well. Soon after, in the genre-bending It's A Festival Today, a frustrated young man hopes that having his chaste girlfriend move in with him will finally lead to sex. When that's clearly not the case, he must devise a novel plan to make the girl drop her defenses, if not her clothes.
In Tak Nga, even more scheming is on the cards when a classroom documentary from the year 4571 explains how a Hong Kong teen fraudster led to a planet being named. And Recharge sees a movie producer discover an unexpectedly low-key way to a prostitute's affection. By far the most touching of the bunch, however, is Ah Wai The Big Head, a short film set in the early 1990s alongside the hits of singer Danny Chan. When young Ah Wai is brushed off by her schoolmate and given cursory advice to make her go away, it turns out to be a life-changing experience and the two girls start to follow new paths.
After the vastly more formal approach Pang adopted for the man-killer drama Exodus, released several months earlier, Trivial Matters plays like a more energetic, experimental feature. For the adventurous viewer, the path through Pang's seemingly insignificant stories is fun and varied: one section appears to be shot on 8mm, another comes via video intercut with bedroom fantasy and one part's even played in English. The sleazier angles meanwhile stretch censorship limits for all-ages cinema and the comedy is among the most locally focused in quite some time, with young Hong Kong audiences readily picking up on references to teen magazines and pop culture, and enjoying touches of schooldays nostalgia. Shot quickly and on a tight budget, and wielding a superb cast of mid-tier names, up-and-comers and even a top director, Trivial Matters reminds viewers that even in difficult times for Hong Kong cinema the city's filmmakers can still slap together outstanding and daring big-screen frolics with apparent ease.
Tim Youngs