Patrick Lung Kong’s cinema ran into immense controversy with Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, conceived as an epic work loosely based around Albert Camus’ novel The Plague. Heavily censored before release for politically sensitive content, the film shows the horror of a mystery virus hitting a city. From a slum’s rat infestation comes a fast-spreading disease and, when the government is slow to react, panic sets in. An epidemic is eventually declared - factories close, the airport is sealed, stricken patients and their families are packed off to camps - and soon the race is on for a vaccine.
Though the casting is superb, from Cantonese star Nancy Sit to Mandarin cinema’s Chang Yang, the fierce sensationalism and narrative thrust stand out the most. The apocalyptic scenario highlighted the dangers of a tightly packed environment, urging overhauls of public health, sanitation and urban planning. The local pro-China leftist camp, however, long suspicious of the director’s work and motives, was vocal in demands for the movie’s banning. The chaos-causing disease, for instance, was seen by some as reflecting the mainland’s Cultural Revolution. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow was ultimately chopped down drastically from its original two-hour running time (without the director’s input) before it could reach cinemas, and thousands of feet worth of removed footage went missing. Today’s remaining copy is in a compromised state, spanning the final 72-minute length and suffering from degraded sound and image quality too. Fortunately, the Hong Kong Film Archive is preserving a copy of the original script as a reference.
Even in sliced-up short form, Lung Kong’s picture retains the makings of strong cinema. The movie opens with a warning suggesting that even though the story is fictional, Hongkongers risk dire consequences unless the government effects major social changes. As in Story Of A Discharged Prisoner, the filmmakers expose the less glitzy side of the rapidly modernising city and the cynical behavior within it. And behind all is a conviction that the people of Hong Kong deserve better.
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow was a commercial failure when it eventually got released, but these days the film has taken on a whole new dimension. Since the SARS outbreak of 2003, in which events paralleled many of those in Lung Kong’s movie (a mystery illness, victims quarantined, dead health workers hailed as heroes, calls for better public health), Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow more than ever looks like the work of a visionary.