A number of thoughtful and thought-provoking Hong Kong-made dramas have landed on the big screen this year. Hong Kong’s stalwart action genre is actively reinventing itself (Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Albert and Herbert Leung’s Stuntman) and Montages of a Modern Motherhood — Oliver Chan’s much-anticipated follow-up to her debut, 2018’s Still Human — is a raw and painfully honest depiction of new maternity. It’s got plenty of soul.
The same is true of both first-time filmmaker Riley Yip’s Blossoms under Somewhere and Philip Yung’s Papa — as distinct from each other as the filmmakers themselves. Blossoms is a delicately feminist coming-of-age story pivoting on two high-school girlfriends, Ching (reality television show King Maker contestant and singer Marf Yau) and Rachel (Sheena Chan), as they navigate boys, school and a small-business ownership. Papa is a drama about cha chaan teng (tea restaurant) owner Nin (Lau Ching-wan) trying to piece his life back together after his teenaged son, Ming (newcomer Dylan So), murders Nin’s daughter and wife — Ming’s sister and mother.
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Blossoms, quite deliberately, isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Ching and Rachel are best friends attending the same elite girls’ school, and both are earning extra cash by running their own online used-underwear business, catering to Hong Kong’s fetishists. The most significant differences between them are that Rachel is effortlessly attractive to boys and comfortable around them, whereas Ching has a stutter that holds her back from casual socializing. Ching is confident, more like Rachel, from behind a phone screen but struggles when forced to interact in real life. Cleaving closely to coming-of-age convention, a boy comes between them, and there’s misunderstanding and heartbreak before the young women finally reconnect.
Barring a disapproving principal, there are no adult characters in Blossoms. The focus is purely on Ching and Rachel, allowing them a near-total judgment-free space in which to forge their identities on their own terms. Few Hong Kong films about young women have given them the kind of agency Yip and co-writer Sze Ling-ling do. And Yip doesn’t get fancy with her storytelling either — a bit of fantastical animation in the closing moments is as far as she goes out on a stylistic limb. She needn’t have: Yau and especially Chan bring a natural charm to their roles in a way that makes it hard not to root for these girls as they stumble toward adulthood. Blossoms is a surprisingly assured and astute debut that bodes well for Yip’s sophomore effort.
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Conversely, Yung is on his fifth film, his last being the sprawling crime epic Where the Wind Blows. With Papa he returns to the more intimate, gritty material that he launched his career with in the police procedural Port of Call and also tapped into in his coming-of-age drama, Glamorous Youth. Based on a 2010 incident in Tsuen Wan, Papa is almost an experimental meditation on grief and forgiveness — one that asks the question as to whether anyone who has experienced violence can truly ever be free of its scars.
Papa jumps back and forth in time. The film’s tightly cropped Academy-ratio framing makes it difficult to gauge where in time one finds the story, or its protagonist, at any given moment. The audience is made to piece together Nin’s fractured life in much the same way as the character is shown recalling it in the film. Cinematographer Chin Ting-chang (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) changes up the grain, color and depth of field to indicate Nin’s private turmoil, while never letting the visuals distract from his emotional journey. Can Nin forgive Ming? Can they find a way forward? Like Yip, Yung doesn’t judge his characters and the filmmaking is better for it. Dare we call it, more soulful?
