The mainland China film market continued to expand in 2012, and the nation’s cinema business has become a headline grabber in recent months. Yet for Hong Kong’s filmmakers, despite being a key part of that scene on both sides of the cameras, the picture has been more one of mixed fortunes and cautious optimism. Ticket sales in the mainland continued their skyward rush last year, and spurred on the city’s makers of big-budget entertainment, while a more locally focused film scene made a stir with a pleasing variety of pictures. But the raw figures for the year’s Hong Kong box office weren’t so hot. The total takings for all films, local and foreign, rose 12 per cent yearon- year, but disappointingly only one Hong Kong movie – the police thriller Cold War – made it into the top 10. The number of local films released during the year was once again stuck in the fifties .
The allure of the mainland market for Hong Kong filmmakers remains undeniable, with box office successes there wowing on a regular basis. In July 2012, mainland director Wuershan’s fantasy piece Painted Skin: The Resurrection scored China’s largestever opening for a home-grown film, then went on to become the nation’s top-grossing domestic picture .
That record-setting run was dwarfed a few months later by the release of countryman Xu Zheng’s road comedy Lost in Thailand, which took the crown as the mainland’s all-time best domestic picture in January this year. The honour for top opening has since gone to the fantasy spectacular Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, directed by Hongkongers Stephen Chow and Derek Kwok, which scored big in February just ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays .
With Hong Kong filmmakers ensured quota-free access to the mainland market through co-productions with partners there, thanks to a 2003 trade pact, the backbone of the Hong Kong film industry continues to be pricy and star-studded movies made with success across the border in mind. Given the large sums involved, the past 12 months have offered plenty of diversity and on-screen glamour in the top-tier pictures. Cold War sported Tony Leung Ka-fai and Aaron Kwok as fast-talking Hong Kong cops in suave suits, plus megastar Andy Lau in a cameo, and had them all swept up in a whirlwind of conspiracy and corruption .
Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons saw codirector Chow return to the classic literary source of his mid-1990s Chinese Odyssey duology, for a parade of extravagant battles, spooky encounters and playful comedy .
Over in the action department, Dante Lam fired the year’s first shots with The Viral Factor, a global terror piece that aimed high in stunts and pyrotechnics .
Not to be outdone, Jackie Chan returned to screens later in the year as director and actor with the borderhopping spectacular CZ12. This was a fun treasurerescue tale built around some large set pieces, and it rekindled memories of Chan’s older action-comedy formula. Even Wong Kar-wai managed to deliver the action goods in The Grandmaster. Wong’s longawaited film revolved around the rivalries of martial artists, including the celebrated Ip Man. Boasting fine performances from Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Zhang Ziyi, plus fisticuffs courtesy of veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, the film was largely a treat – plot holes left admirers hoping to see a longer version one day .
Ambitious thrillers, too, have made for attractive viewing in the past 12 months. The Bullet Vanishes, from director Lo Chi-leung, was a particular pleasure, delivering a rare locally produced whodunit with two 1920s Chinese detectives (Lau Ching-wan and Nicholas Tse) teaming up to investigate murderous goings-on at a factory. Felix Chong and Alan Mak’s slow-boil spy story The Silent War, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, opted for a late-1940s mainland setting for a novel tale surrounding eavesdroppers seeking out Morse code transmissions. And more mid-century material turned up in Wong Jing’s The Last Tycoon .
Chow Yun-fat and younger mainland actor Huang Xiaoming shared the title role of a small-town lad who makes it big in Shanghai as a gangster, then becomes embroiled in wartime chaos. Back in modern-day thriller territory, Johnnie To directed his first fully mainland-backed film, Drug War, extending his acclaimed crime cinema to a wintry northern Chinese city. Premiered in Rome last year ahead of its Hong Kong premiere this March, the film was To’s second in a row to make use of mainland settings – Romancing in Thin Air paired a warm love story and daring narrative stunts with a spectacular high-altitude backdrop .
The trend for period spectaculars has fallen from the heights set by epics like John Woo’s Red Cliff in 2008, but Hong Kong filmmakers are still interested in the genre, and trying out offshoots. Actor-director Stephen Fung helmed the martial arts double of Taichi Zero and Taichi Hero, in which a gifted young fighter joins a village of kung fu aces to restore his health and ability. Fung threw in the requisite fisticuffs, from large battle scenes to an intimate kitchen fight, as well as new touches like steampunk imagery. The Four, from Gordon Chan and Janet Chun, meanwhile souped up a martial arts literature-sourced tale of law enforcers as a wuxia-superhero oddity, replete with modern gadgetry in a period setting .
More recently, Andrew Lau’s The Guillotines took an unusual approach to a story of Qing dynasty assassins, turning in a messianic figure as their target and then seeing the killers left on their own. The newest release among high-end period epics is Ronny Yu’s Saving General Yang, a testosterone-fuelled spin on a classic tale of duty and honour .
Even with so much on the go, the path forward for Hong Kong filmmakers in the mainland remains far from easy. The record-breaking success of Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons showed Hong Kong talent is still competitive in reaching huge audiences across the border. But Painted Skin: The Resurrection and Lost in Thailand had mainland production teams setting records too – and, in an interesting twist, both of those films were unofficial sequels to ones helmed by Hong Kong directors. What’s more, Wuershan’s Painted Skin boasted a Hong Kong cinema style, and mainland talent is also moving into genre territory, like cheap horror, in which Hongkongers have traditionally held the lead .
Meanwhile, Hong Kong filmmakers looking to the mainland must deal with sometimes hazy censorship requirements. Certain social and political topics are ruled out, and scenes of sleaze, the supernatural, violence, and more, can run into trouble. The censors’ requirements can result in sometimes awkward plot workarounds in the priciest of pictures, like ensuring a thriller doesn’t support the idea of law enforcers working in a grey area between good and bad. Adding to the difficulty is meeting the different tastes of viewers across Chinese regions. Early in 2012, Pang Ho-cheung’s Love in the Buff was a success on this front. Though set in Beijing, and playing well to mainland audiences with its well-written romance, Love in the Buff offered plenty for Pang’s hometown crowd to relate to in a plot centred on Hongkongers going north. On the other hand, there are films like The Lion Roars 2. Joe Ma’s period comedy about polar opposites made to live together was produced with a strong mainland cinema feel, and the comic style of star Xiao Shen Yang was ill-suited to Hong Kong tastes .
That problem wasn’t a regular issue for Hongkongers in 2012, however, as audiences could find a very local look and feel in a diverse array of features .
The filmmakers who busied themselves with these films didn’t just target teens – the regular demographic for locally targeted pictures in recent years – but also middle-aged audiences, less inclined to visit movie houses for local fare. The higher profile of decidedly local pictures in 2012 was a welcome development after past years’ worries over mainland-targeted co-productions diluting Hong Kong cinema’s identity .
And the moves were in step with many Hongkongers’ increasing drive to celebrate and protect local culture and heritage, something previously seen when Alex Law’s nostalgia flick Echoes of the Rainbow attracted crowds in 2010 .
Pang Ho-cheung’s Vulgaria was a key work among last year’s crop of very local films. After screening at festivals internationally (including Udine), the foul-mouthed feature about getting an adult movie into production made a splash in Hong Kong theatres. Clearly unable to pass mainland censorship and loaded with Cantonese slang and crude hometown gags, the film gunned for strong local support, which it duly received. The over-18s film came second among Hong Kong films in the city’s 2012 box office .
The Guillot In the months after Vulgaria came out, several filmmakers saw other clearly non-mainland-suitable works through to release, building up an intriguing trend. Daniel Chan’s two adults-only-rated films, Triad and Young and Dangerous: Reloaded, served up gangland shenanigans without censorship compromises, plus touches of nostalgia for 1990s Hong Kong cinema. Softcore porn got a run in Christopher Sun’s Due West: Our Sex Journey, a sleazy comedy about Hong Kong men’s red-light adventures in the mainland. Wilson Chin’s trashy Lan Kwai Fong 2, about pretty young things’ exploits with liquor and love, aimed to titillate both the nightclub set and a younger crowd by scraping into movie houses without an over-18s restriction .
Not all were saying no to China, of course, and even among Hong Kong-mainland co-productions, a distinctly local flavour could be found in works of all sizes. Cold War was one of these locally oriented stories. Also at the forefront was Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, about the relationship between a Hong Kong movie producer and his long-serving family servant, which was released theatrically in March last year after starting its festival run in 2011. Offering more exciting cinema was Soi Cheang’s Motorway, a classy traffic cop saga, with a pared-down script and some supercharged automotive action on the city’s streets. And in the past month, Hongkongers took in Herman Yau’s Ip Man – The Final Fight, the latest in a string of pictures about noted martial arts teacher Ip Man. With Anthony Wong stepping into Ip’s shoes, Yau’s ambitious film told of the grandmaster’s life in post-war Hong Kong, but went beyond kung fu cinema to craft a nostalgic community portrait of Ip’s adopted city .
Noteworthy works outside genre-film territory included Yim Ho’s Floating City, Heiward Mak’s Diva, and Herman Yau’s Love Lifting. The low-key nostalgia-infused biopic Floating City focused on a local man from an underprivileged social group who rose to the senior levels of a major colonial trading company. The contemporaryset Diva hopped into the local pop biz to follow a burnedout singer, as well as a fresh-faced newcomer’s entry to the industry. Love Lifting saw a mainland weightlifter settling into family life in Hong Kong before returning to competition – a small, passionate picture of one of the city’s many new arrivals .
Viewers up for charming Cantonese entertainment could also look to comedies for choice picks. Brian Tse’s animated McDull – The Pork of Music was a major treat, weaving local pop culture and defiantly untranslatable Hong Kong references into an affecting storyline about a music-loving principal. Fans of romantic comedies were well served by James Yuen’s My Sassy Hubby. Made as a follow-up to Yuen’s 2002 charmer My Wife Is 18, the picture dished up an easygoing tale of a couple accepting one another despite their flaws, and threw in touches of social comment too. Other comedy highlights in the past 12 months were Wong Jing’s Mr and Mrs Gambler and, most recently, Vincent Kok’s Hotel Deluxe. Wong’s film (the title is self-explanatory) offered rough-and-tumble low-budget romantic comedy, while Hotel Deluxe, a Lunar New Year holidays release that few would call a quality film, compensated for a scattershot plot by piling up nonsensical gags in the local festive season tradition .
The realm of smaller works wasn’t all a picture of health, however, and several films may have had casual moviegoers questioning their ticket spending .
Cross, for example, was a troubled production about a religious mercy killer that took four directors and more than two years to complete, and it still looked muddled when it arrived in cinemas. Calvin Poon’s Shadows of Love, in which an everywoman florist steps into the shoes of a wealthy doppelganger, disappointed as it meandered through melodrama. Kam Kwok-leung’s Passion Island, a cinematic excursion into romantic healing, obsession, environmental messages, and art-film parody, may have been simply too bizarre for mainstream release .
When it comes to the big picture, seeing momentum in the low- to mid-budget arena is a welcome development. With established Hong Kong stars favoured for larger co-productions, the smaller films are keeping up opportunities for fresh and rising screen talent. Among the stars, old and new significantly building their base in 2012, were Chapman To, Ronald Cheng, Fiona Sit and Mag Lam, while those directing their first feature films included Brian Tse, Mark Wu, Fung Chih-chiang (crime story The Bounty) and Jacky Lee (indie-band film Lives in Flames). Further support for lower-budgeted films has been announced with the First Feature Film Initiative, announced by the government earlier this year, to spot new talent through screenplay and production proposal competitions .
The scheme would supplement the governmentbacked Film Development Fund, which since 2007 has offered partial financing for a number of small-to medium-size productions and assisted in promoting the film scene. Industry efforts like the Hong Kong- Asia Film Financing Forum can also play a part in supporting emerging filmmakers, and the Fresh Wave short film competition continues to help young hopefuls to get their work to the big screen .
The renewed enthusiasm for smaller and proudly local films is also encouraging since works like those can provide balance alongside the larger pictures aiming for greater China success, and can play up local strengths too. After all, it was a diverse and often unpredictable Hong Kong cinema sensibility – plus scenes of Hong Kong life itself – that drew so many around the world to the city’s cinema .
But winning and keeping local cinemagoers’ support is a big part of the picture, and that remains no easy task. Sustaining interest among today’s Hong Kong moviegoers for low- to mid-budget cinema has proved difficult over the past few years, and there continues to be a need to uphold quality. Should a surge of slapdash efforts make it to cinemas, or the industry continue to underrate the importance of quality screenwriting, for instance, Hong Kong’s filmmakers risk being overtaken by mainland talent and finding viewers turned off at home .
Tim Youngs