Hong Kong’s long-running troubled-teens genre gets a punchy update in May We Chat, the second feature from critic turned filmmaker Philip Yung. Updating familiar screen stories of youth gone wild for a new generation glued to their phones, Yung’s film serves up a pop mix of sleaze, melodrama and current hot topics, and offers a showcase for emerging talent too.
Front and centre are three schoolgirls who come together through a phone chat app and follow a lifestyle marked by drug abuse, paid sex, skipping school and worse.
Deaf-mute Chiu Wai-ying (Rainky Wai) is living without parents and finds cash through compensated dating, rich girl Li Wing-yan (Kabby Hui) flirts with methamphetamine and suicide, and Wai-wai (Heidi Li) lives with a drug addict mother and gets mixed up with gangster kids. When the privileged Li disappears, loose connections give way to closer feelings as the other two girls become occupied with trying to track her down.
In a highly unusual step, Yung found an opportunity in May We Chat to update material from a 1982 troubled-teens film: David Lai’s Hong Kong New Wave work Lonely Fifteen. The appearances of two older figures, including the mother of Li (Irene Wan), come with grainy flashbacks of them as wilder kids in the earlier film. The move suggests a certain indulgence on the director’s part – after all, next to no one in May We Chat’s young target audience would have seen Lonely Fifteen, and knowledge of its plot isn’t needed – but it also adds an experimental touch in reflecting cross-generation trouble and change.
Yung’s previous film Glamorous Youth, which also focused on three young people and likewise held an adults-only rating, was a dark and elegant indie affair that unfolded slowly and carefully. May We Chat on the other hand is unquestionably more commercial in look and feel: Yung and his team pump up the production’s energy and colors, and weave snazzy speech bubbles of phone chatter into the narrative. At times Yung’s first-time efforts in directing for more mainstream appeal come across as awkward, like when questionable comic sound effects turn up, and his switches to extreme violence can be jarring. But overall Yung’s picture fits in neatly among the past few years’ plucky lower-budgeted productions, like Herman Yau’s prostitute dramas, that focus on small locally focused stories and flirt with bolder material.
May We Chat’s top attraction, however, may well be the three female leads, who make an especially strong impression. As in Lonely Fifteen before it, each of the top-billed newcomers was handed challenging material, and all lend considerable weight to their characters. As the trio come to outshine seasoned players around them, Yung’s forceful youth picture also finds success in supporting the entry of much-needed new stars to the local film industry.
Tim Youngs