Ever modernising Hong Kong is a devil of a place for filmmakers to craft nostalgic pictures in, but helmer Alex Law rose to the task his Echoes Of The Rainbow, a semi-autobiographical look back at grass-roots life in 1969. Shot with a seamless blend of real locations, studio sets and unobtrusive effects, and rooted in one family’s hopes and struggles, the picture is an accomplishment in recapturing a past city lifestyle.
Viewers join the Law family, supported by a shoemaker dad (Simon Yam) and his busy wife (Sandra Ng), at their home in the working-class area of Shamshuipo. The household has two sons, the eldest a heartthrob hurdler at an élite school, the other more content to run about town stealing knickknacks and dreaming of becoming an astronaut. It’s a rough time in local history, however, as Hongkongers try to get by despite rampant corruption, water shortages and rotten weather, and the family must come to grips with personal problems of their own as well.
While writer-director Law inserts a superfluous romance side plot and skims too lightly across Hong Kong’s late-1960s social problems, the picture succeeds most in its focus on the family’s life. That’s delivered with community-based vignettes, and the youngest son’s growing understanding of the world around him becomes a central feature. Comparisons can be drawn to Japan’s high-budget Always film franchise, but in Echoes Of the Rainbow the filmmaking is a more down-to-earth affair. Actors Yam and Ng anchor the family convincingly, with Ng drawing on the same tough-minded style she put into her voice work for recent years’ popular Mcdull animations. The kids aren’t too bad either, the younger Buzz Chung cute and lively, and new singer Aarif Lee just as appealing. Familiar filmmakers can also be spotted in the sidelines, a bonus for movie hounds.
Yet for all its cinematic merits, Echoes Of The Rainbow’s biggest claim to fame in Hong Kong has come outside the theatres. Before the film’s March 2010 mainstream release, the lane filmed in front of the Law family’s shoe shop, Wing Lee Street, was slated for demolition and the subject of calls for conservation. When German school kids awarded it the Berlin Film Festival’s Crystal Bear in February, the street was pushed into front-page news at home. If young European moviegoers could find interest in Hong Kong heritage sites, commentators asked, why couldn’t bureaucrats see it too? A week into Echoes Of The Rainbow’s March release, officials announced plans to preserve the street and Law’s film was seen as the catalyst for the government cave-in.
Echoes Of The Rainbow is by no means the first 2000s picture to delight with screen trips down memory lane: for starters, Just One Look, Golden Chicken, My Life As Mcdull and others did it too in a 2001-02 group of pictures. But those movies came before the past few years’ explosion of local interest in Hong Kong identity and heritage. It’s a social movement that Law’s film has now become a major part of, and one in which it can be celebrated by even more Hongkongers than its predecessors were.
Tim Youngs