Reviewed by Shelly Kraicer, November 2001 (revised 27 December 2001)

It is a pleasure to be able to welcome Vincent Chui's first feature, Leaving In Sorrow into the first rank of new Hong Kong independent films. It joins a relatively small number of such films, including Carol Lai's beautifully crafted drama Glass Tears (Boli shaonü, 2001) and Lawrence Wong's ingeniously off-beat Cross Harbour Tunnel (Guohai suidao, 1999). Chui and screenwriter Patrick Kong have created an intriguing and quite engaging experiment, whose strengths suggest that these young filmmakers' futures will be well worth following.

The film is an urban drama filmed in digital video (following Evans Chan's Map of Sex and Love (Qingse ditu, 2001), the first HK digital feature). Its style is explicitly modelled upon the Dogme 95 aesthetic, a manifesto of "authentic" lean cinema made famous by Danish director Lars von Trier. Leaving In Sorrow uses the Dogme "vow of chastity" as a stylistic underpinning -- no artificial lighting or sound effects, no extra-diegetic music, hand held cameras only, all shooting on location. But in essence, the film sits comfortably in the immediate pre- and post-1997 Hong Kong tradition of urban anxiety, floating cosmopolitanism, and chronological determinism (time, in the form of the Deadline, means everything) that characterized the HK film industry's more serious-minded productions in the era around the SAR's return to mainland sovereignty.

Leaving in Sorrow is a story about movement and about home: its themes are emigration, immigration, abandoning and recovering the places one calls home. It follows three lightly interlocked stories, set in Hong Kong, Beijing, and San Francisco. In the first, HK born, SF resident, Ray, a young vaguely info-tech style businessman and hyperactive "ladies' man" returns to HK to reunite with his semi-estranged father. The death of a cherished elder relative draws both back to their native mainland village, where Ray experiences a somewhat clichéd reawakening. The second story involves the upright but timorously passive Pastor Alex Lai and his money-minded real estate agent wife Ivy. They struggle as the strains in their marriage become exacerbated by overheated pre-1997 HK property market: Lai wrestles with selling his church to hustler/developers, as Ivy, planning to emigrate to NYC, schemes to sell their flat. The third story, the most carefully delineated of the set, follows HK gossip magazine writer Hong on his dogged (even stalker-like) pursuit of his editor Chris. His unrelenting efforts finally wear her down. Much later, she reveals to him her still traumatic memories of studying in Beijing in June 1989, and he takes her back to confront what she left behind.

Vincent Chui's handling of this material is a bit uneven, but that's an entirely forgivable flaw in a first feature with as many strengths as this one. The three stories, though they receive equal weight, are not equally well realised. Ray (Duncan Lai), the San Franciscan, is the least convincing character. His progress is a bit too schematic, and we're left with very little sense of any actual personality behind his suavely attractive womanizing façade.

Reverend Lai (Tony Ho) and his wife Ivy (Ivy Ho) are more interesting. We see his increasing discomfort as he tries to hold onto a relatively limited conception of a life lived according to moral principles, in a city that doesn't lend much support to his ideals. The portrayal of Ivy, aided by a subtle, finely modulated performance by first-time actress Ivy Ho, starts as a simple satire of a life devoted to commercialism. But it develops into a surprisingly sympathetic picture of self-awareness, as we witness her catch a glimpse of the shallowness, the emptiness of the life she's committed herself to.

Chris, the magazine editor, played superbly by Crystal Lui, is the film's most fully conceived character, and gets a performance to match. Her character offers a key to the film's deeper analysis of Hong Kong's dilemma. Starting from a job plugged into Hong Kong's culture of quick consumption (purveying celebrity gossip), she discovers that she has a buried history, one that she finally confronts with courage and great pain in a final scene whose power remains vivid long after the film's closing credits.

A project like this might have become an overly schematic, political mapping of the typical underpinnings of an upwardly mobile class of HKers' traumas and complexes. But Chui simultaneously complicates and lightens the film with a nervously fractured style. The skittering, quick-cutting, constantly reframing cameras (Chui used two during filming) can be a bit wearying, but it's not merely a stylistic affectation. Chui makes it integral to the film: a jumpy sense of space, an unstable set of points of view, scenes constructed out of brief takes shuffled together to leave tiny gaps, elisions, small jumps in space and time, a constant uneasy disequilibrium that can never quite settle down (with one notable exception). These techniques successfully evoke the fractured incoherencies inherent in the particular time and place – 1997 Hong Kong – that the film's characters float in.

The constant sound of radio and television news in the background is the film's best conceit. Excerpts of protest rallies, denunciations of government officials, democratic speeches: the film is filled with the mediatized record of HK's history of democratic resistance to 1997. This "background noise" is in fact the film's musical score. It places the characters' lives in a precise political context, pins their struggles to a particular chronology of HK history, and acts as a constant commentary underpinning their actions. It is very welcome, and rather uncommon, to find a recent Hong Kong feature film with such an explicitly political register. One thinks of Fruit Chan's handover trilogy (1997, 1998, 1999), Ann Hui's Ordinary Heroes (1999), Evans Chan's Map of Sex and Love (2001), and Herman Yau's From the Queen to the Chief Executive (2001) as signal exceptions to recent HK cinema's political amnesia. This separates Leaving in Sorrow from much recent HK independent cinema that I've seen, where characters seem to have walked straight out of a Tsai Ming-liang film, already primed with a generalized alienation and indeterminate ennui.

Chui's film neatly elides the precise moment of the handover, the anchor-point of Hong Kong Time: the action disconcertingly jumps from the last huge June 4 commemoration in Hong Kong a month before the handover to a year or more afterwards, when Hong Kongers are forced to deal with the effects of the post-1997 Asian economic slump. The film affords its characters no grounding, no stable fulcrum around which history pivoted (July 1), but takes them directly from pre- to post-return disequilibrium. But Leaving in Sorrow largely keeps its own balance, aligning style, structure, mood, and setting to fine expressive effect.