The 4th International Festival of Comedy Films opened yesterday in Vevey (Switzerland). The films in the competition comprised a curious mix of established truisms and new propositions. Alongside Ponzi’s The Pool Hustlers (Io, Chiara e lo Scuro aka Me, Chiara and the Dark); Crackers, the Louis Malle remake of Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti); wild Egyptian and Indian farces and bolder Scandinavian comedies, there is a jewel: Michael Hui’s new nihilistic masterpiece, Teppanyaki. Vevey also provides a succinct tribute to this director in its informative press.
Who is Michael Hui? He is Hong Kong’s Jerry Lewis. His work was introduced last year in Pesaro (CinemAsia 1) with the brilliant The Private Eyes and the enthralling Security Unlimited.
Going against the current misappropriation of Cantonese genre films by the non-PRC Mandarin language cinema (now Taiwan-centric and therefore even more disdainful of the Hong Kong public), Michael Hui is the only director who has managed to break the Cantonese bastion of television. He does this by reprising on screen in his directorial debut Games Gamblers Play (1974), gags and obsessive elements from two of Hong Kong’s most successful TV variety shows — which he both created and presented. The success of his first film and crossover from television to cinema helped launch the careers of dozens of young TV directors who between 1978 and 1981 flowed into Hong Kong’s ephemeral New Wave.
The importance of Michael Hui’s work is that it marks a real change in local commercial films. Hui develops such personal forms that the genre is reduced to a simple namesake. With precise additions of meaning he brings back to the physiological release of laughter some new (for the British colony) “poetic implications.” His films, albeit having an autochthonous base in comedy theatre, move towards a lively writing-style which references the Hollywood “classics.”
With a body of films that has few equals in Hong Kong, Hui has created a series of cruel machines that never misfire.
In each of his films, by way of meticulous work, dozens of ideas develop from one simple idea. Each gag has a crucial function in the action but also contributes to its continuity. His films which exude their structure, continuously bringing their internal coherence into discussion: right up to the last shot, to the last idea.
Along with his two brothers, Hui is a protagonist as well. He creates for himself a character who is a sower of disorder and who grimacingly targets a Hong Kong that is dying, but which continues to survive by way of tics and obsessions (it is the parochial universe of the Cantonese melodrama, but reversed).
Having suffered losses after the commercial flop of The Last Message (1975), his boldest and most personal film, he had to retool his films to prevent them from losing originality, but without alienating sectors of the public (which is not as provincial as one might think). Hui knows that creative freedom must be balanced with the product’s potential distribution.
One of the veterans of Cantonese films, Li Chenfeng (aka Lee Sun-fung), once declared: “In Hong Kong, making a film means making money. The ‘artistic’ part of a film is all in the finishing touches, the final touch conceded to the director once the deal, the negotiations, have been concluded.” Michael Hui is one of the few Hong Kong filmmakers who do not wait until the deal is concluded.
In order to (re)discover this avant-garde maker of Chinese films, the trip to Vevey was called for. In Charlie Chaplin’s adoptive nation we met Michael Hui and asked him some questions.
What is your creative method? What role does improvisation play? Is everything pre-staged, following a storyboard, or can the editing intervene and alter the shots?
All the gags are pre-staged in my mind, so the editor has almost no room for manoeuvre. Editing is mainly a timing problem, of the length of the gag. Two seconds too long can ruin it. I prepare a storyboard, but only for the comedy scenes — and in my recent films also for the action sequences. As I wanted to aim for an international market, I had to have more action sequences than usual.
Your films are among the few that really talk about modern- day Hong Kong. Don’t you think there is a contradiction with the deep originality of your films and the demands of this market?
Starting with, let’s say, The Private Eyes, I started to realize that our market was too restricted. Making a comedy in Cantonese is a real handicap for commercial success outside Hong Kong. Even though dialogue was never predominant in my first films, I tried to reduce it further starting with The Contract. This is the reason for the long (too long, I wonder) chase scene in The Contract. It’s difficult to bring a minimal element of originality to two hours of visual construction without using dialogue. This, after all, would remove the human side of the film. I envy Woody Allen for his freedom to express what he wants, without worrying about the commercial outcome. This is a possibility that we don’t have in Hong Kong because we have to think, first of all, about conquering the market. Everything that you do to guarantee the commercial value of a film will make it less human. Of course intellectuals will judge a film that contains a full 45-minute crazy chase sequence as being stupid and senseless. But what do you do when those 45 minutes are necessary to open a new market such as Taiwan? Or when audiences in the New Territories (Hong Kong’s “rural” area) need a long scene to get to know the character, before the character hits them with dialogue.
My first film, Games Gamblers Play, was hugely successful in Hong Kong. But the Taiwanese, when they saw it, complained that it was too “Hong Konghese,” and that they didn’t understand the meaning. This is just an example of how Hong Kong films that have been largely “Hong Kongized” are received by other markets in the Chinese world.
I’m glad to see that young film-makers such as Ann Hui and Tsui Hark are starting to make films that are not so “local,” and are more visual. Let’s hope that our film-making industry will be able to survive.
In contemporary Cantonese films, a type of comedy predominates that is based on special effects, and on the domino-style destruction (of cars, buildings and so on). Your films are “destructive” too, but they don’t seem to be connected to those types of films.
The difference is economic. My films are created as very low-budget films. Whereas films such as Aces Go Places (aka Mad Mission) want to imitate Hollywood. It’s become a very wide-spread phenomenon in Hong Kong — just think of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, the film by Tsui Hark that aims to compete with Lucas and Spielberg — and for which the budget is close to that of E.T.
But the main difference between my films and Hong Kong’s comedy films is that mine are more personal. They express the world of Michael Hui, Michael Hui’s perception. Whereas films such as Aces Go Places mainly conform to international clichés.
How much is autobiographical in your films?
I thought, while writing my screenplays, that I was being objective. I thought that Michael Hui was just a person like millions of others, a person who was content with having a touch more creativity. Over time, I realized that each one of my films was intimately linked to Michael Hui’s mental make-up at that given moment in his life. Even though I’ve never been a bodyguard or a private detective...
Can you explain your fascination with “cops and robbers- style” situations, where the ambiguity of the protagonist is in the forefront, as they sow disorder when instead they should be representatives of the forces of order (policemen, mental asylum guards)?
They were all pretexts that were necessary to express what I had in my mind. When I made The Private Eyes, I had just finished working like a dog, doing 20-hour days.
I was studying sociology at university, working as a TV presenter, and in an advertising agency. And the boss of the agency was British... I hate exploitation. That’s when I conceived of the type of psychological relationship between dominant and subordinate. I applied it to the world of private detectives but it could easily have been transferred to any other kind of job. When you see my films, you see the spectrum of my subsequent states of mind. Nothing in these is casual or has fallen from the sky. I don’t adapt pre-existing literary works. I write my own films. I place myself within them.
(Originally published in Il manifesto, Tuesday 21st August 1984).
Marco Mueller