Film byJonathan Romney
I've never seen a trailer as misleading as the one for Made in Hong Kong: don't go to the film expecting to see a computer-generated humanoid pelting through a 3D psychedelic abyss. Give or take the odd cut-price visual effect - old-fashioned tricks with filters or camera speeds - Made in Hong Kong is harsh urban realism of a familiar kind. But one thing the trailer does convey, along with all the hip neo-gangster flash, is the urgency: the feel of desperate, dandyish characters trying to stay alive as time ticks on.
The situation is Hong Kong just before the handover to China, a subject that has long been gnawing away as a subtext to Hong Kong cinema. The director, Fruit Chan, made the film for around $80,000, using spare ends of film stock and with patronage from the action star Andy Lau. The film manages the fragile balance of looking low-budget but not bargain-basement, the mix of stocks contributing a vital roughness and fragmentation. Made in Hong Kong is a cousin to the Hong Kong action movies and to the work of Wong Kar-Wai, who draws on the action genre for his hugely artificed art films, such as Chungking Express. But the stylishness of Made in Hong Kong is different - it evokes not jaded adult melancholia but hormonally charged teenage angst and, even though Chan was 38 when he made it two years ago, the film strikes a convincing melodramatic chord.
Set largely around a housing project that has the feel of an American jail block - echoing galleries, sliding steel doors - it's the story of Moon (Sam Lee), a gangling punk who lives by collecting debts for a Triad patron. Moon hangs out with and protects the shambling Sylvester (Wenbers Li), in a relationship straight from Of Mice and Men. Moon's girlfriend is Ping (Neiky Yim), a tough flirt he meets when visiting her mother for payment. Ping offers him sex in lieu, but their affair starts off on a curiously coy note, with a bit of sly flirtation about the colour of her knickers.
The three kids are haunted by a sudden death - a girl throws herself from a rooftop and lies dead on the ground, her love letters soaking up her blood. Moon becomes haunted by the girl in a series of wet dreams, as the artfully arranged streaks of blood turn to milk or semen. This is a film in which abstract movie images are powerfully played off against physical realities.There's a very palpable sense of space: we get the feel of sweaty sleepless nights in cramped apartments. The violence is vividly harsh: a high-school boy in pristine white chops off a man's hand while an astounded Moon can only conclude, "Everyone has their own story to tell." And, like a doomed fin de siecle heroine, Ping has a life-threatening illness: unlike la Dame aux Camelias, however, she proudly shows off her drip-bag. The pay-off of this morbid thread is a wonderfully brisk scene in which it turns out that Ping's mother tolerates Moon's presence only because she's after his kidneys.
Such grim physical realities undercut the veneer of tough glamour. With his big-collared shirts and spaceman goggles, Sam Lee's cartoonishly angular Moon is a Chinese club-culture version of Jimmy Cliff's rude boy in The Harder They Come. Moon gets recruited as a killer, and as soon as he starts posing with his gun, Chan cranks up his style into pop-video mode, dropping in touches of the staggered slow motion patented by Wong Kar-Wai. But we shouldn't be fooled by the gloss: Moon performs his first killing with smooth sang-froid, before we realise we're seeing the film playing in his head. Then he tries the job for real, and of course it's a botch-up, edited together as a blur of hesitant miscalculations.
In style and subject, Made in Hong Kong is absolutely of the moment, yet it also feels oddly retrospective: it could be Los Olvidados with funky shades. Above all, the moody Moon is James Dean in a 1950s rebel picture. There are plenty of traditional images of teenage pleasure and pain: Moon and friends wander through a graveyard to blissful folk guitar. The film is haunted from the start by premature death: the narrative plays some cavalier tricks with who dies and when, but the trio know they're doomed all along, adopting the dead girl's letters as death-cult fetish objects. The film's subject isn't teenage angst in the abstract but, Fruit Chan has stressed, an evocation of Hong Kong's mood in 1997, a sense of helplessness in the face of deadline. Made in Hong Kong conveys a tangible sense of walls closing in and the fear that fast times - even if lived in horribly straitened circumstances - are ending. The closing sequence, after the kids have met their flamboyantly romantic fates, makes everything clear with a chilly jolt. A disembodied schoolmistress voice comes on the radio, reading a Mao speech about the future belonging to youth. Cruelly ironic in terms of what's gone before, it has all the chilling effect of those brisk "Back to School" signs that start appearing in shop windows in late July.
"Made in Hong Kong" (15) plays at the ICA Cinema, The Mall, London SW1 until 15 July
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