For her latest film, CROSSING HENNESSY, director Ivy Ho invites us into the warm heart of Wan Chai, creating a wholly authentic and instantly recognisable portrait of what it's really like to live and love in Hong Kong. Not only are we shown the blinding neon and bustling streets of the island's traditional centre, but Ho guides us between the trams and the residential blocks, through the coffee shops and electrical stores, to meet a beautifully drawn collection of characters going about their normal lives.
Loy (Jacky Cheung) is one of life's underachievers. Now in his forties, he still lives with his widowed mother (Paw Hee Ching) and helps run the family's air-conditioner dealership. Desperate to get him married off, Loy's mother forces him into a date with Oi-Lin (Tang Wei), who sells toilets and bathroom appliances down the road. They are both reluctant to go and it soon transpires that Oi Lin already has a boyfriend, Xu (Andy On) who is soon to be released from prison. Loy is also still hung up over his ex-girlfriend (Maggie Cheung Ho Yee), who promptly reappears in his life.
Where CROSSING HENNESSY succeeds is in creating believable characters in an authentic setting. This is not a glamourous picture of Hong Kong, but a realistic one, where people drink cheap milky tea, sleep on foldout sofa beds and haggle over the price of second-hand cars. There are no uber-chic city girls here, high-flying bankers or blinged-up triads, just regular folk living regular lives and kudos must go to the tight-knit cast of seasoned veterans for creating such a likable bunch of characters. In particular, Paw Hee Ching's obsessive matriarch and a welcome return to the screen by Danny Lee as her seasoned would-be suitor.
Tang Wei is a pleasant surprise, not least because she speaks her own Cantonese dialogue, avoiding that omnipresent niggle in local productions of sloppy audio dubbing. She gives Oi-Lin an element of Jeon Ji-Hyun's MY SASSY GIRL attitude, while exposing her vulnerability through her love for Andy On's brutish Xu. Jacky Cheung also makes for an affable leading man, constantly chasing his dead father for advice now that it's too late, while obsessing over the mysterious Indian man who crops up wherever he goes.
The film's faults lie in its lack of invention. The setting couldn't be better realised - the film works best as a love letter to the beating heart of Hong Kong - and the characters are given far more depth and credibility than we have come to expect from locally produced comedies, but after throwing up a couple of interesting plot possibilities, the story goes nowhere. The intriguing relationships between both Oi-Lin and Loy and their respective exes prove more intriguing than anything blossoming between the two of them and it is a shame to see a film approach its subject matter from such a refreshing perspective, only for it to resolve matters so conventionally.
Cross published in bc Magazine (Hong Kong)