Photo: sina.com
In the irresistible "Love in the Buff," which opens the Hong Kong Cinema festival Friday at New People Cinema, two Hong Kongers (Shawn Yue and Miriam Yeung) have an on-again, off-again love affair that starts in Hong Kong and moves to Beijing, where both have business opportunities.
In Peter Chan's "Comrades, Almost a Love Story" (1996), one of three retrospective films showing in the festival, two Chinese mainlanders (Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung) have an on-again, off-again affair in Hong Kong, where they've moved for business opportunities.
How things have changed in a decade and a half. Hong Kong is, if not dead, then certainly passe, and China is where it's at. And the Hong Kong film industry, which used to be unapologetically its own quirky self, is appealing to an emerging mainland ticket buyers' market that seems less playful and more conventional than Hong Kong moviegoers.
However, there are some highlights to the weekend series, starting with Pang Ho-Chueng's "Love in the Buff," the sequel to "Love in a Puff," in which our couple tried to kick the cigarette habit. This time, they stay true to themselves and each other, despite temptations from other jobs and other lovers - perhaps an apt metaphor for the Hong Kong film industry in general.
Seeing the three retrospective films from the late 1990s - Fruit Chan's landmark "Made in Hong Kong" and "Comrades" (both Saturday, the latter among my favorite films of the 1990s) and Patrick Yau's noir "The Longest Nite" (Sunday) - is to realize there was a time, before Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China, that anything went in Hong Kong cinema.