Losing the plot in Hong Kong

From 200 movies a year in the early 1990s, the Hong Kong film industry had shrunk to 100 by 1997 and a mere 50 in 1998. How far was this due to misgivings about post-1997 prospects under China? The authors take a mainly political slant on what is in fact a more complex issue.

Every film is interpreted in the light of the 1997 handover. Some lend themselves to the approach-such as a 1984 film, "Homecoming", about a young woman travelling to China in search of her ethnic roots. With others the authors are stretching the point. Wong Kar-Wai's "Happy Together" (1997) is a story of two homosexuals, not a coded essay on reunification. And it is surely obsessive to claim that the proliferation of comedies in the 1990s reflected a desire to blot out memories of the Tiananmen Square massacre. People like to laugh because they like to laugh.

Economic factors have shaped the film industry more, perhaps, than political ones. Hong Kong movies are in the doldrums less because hot talents such as John Woo, a director, and Chow Yun-fat, an actor, have decamped to Hollywood post-1997 than because of video piracy.

Pirate copies now command 40% of the video market. A new film may open in theatres at noon and be on sale as a pirate video five hours later for far less than a cinema seat. Unsurprisingly, there has been a steep decline in cinema admissions. Ineffectually policed, this black market is choking the film industry-compounded by economic recession throughout the region.

This book is best when tossing out nuggets of information that bring the scene to life. Dynamic titles, for example, have been a key element in the appeal of Hong Kong movies in the West: titles such as "Hard Boiled" and "Too Many Ways to Be No 1". But their Chinese equivalent ("Hot-Handed God of Cops" and "An Alphabet's Birth") somehow just do not have the same ring to them.

The authors are weakest when trying to evoke individual films. Extended plot synopses make the eyes glaze. This is an academic study that barely connects with how Hong Kongers have actually enjoyed movies. To local audiences, stars have always been more important than directors, but only the two martial-arts kings, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, get close attention-perhaps because only they are recognised in the West. An entirely different gloss on Hong Kong cinema could be written focusing on superstars such as Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau and Anita Mui. "City on Fire" is a western view of a very Asian phenomenon.

While we appreciate that the The Economist magazine deemed our book City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema worthy of its attention, we think that readers might be more than a little misled by the review that appeared in your 4 September 1999 issue.

We use anxiety about 1997 as a signpost by which to generalize about Hong Kong film output in the 1980s and 1990s, (a generalization borne out by comments from a number of people we interviewed in the industry), but we refer to various political, economic, social, and cultural issues in our consideration of the period. Moreover, we do not, as your review suggests, focus on Hong Kong talent crossing-over to Hollywood in our explanation of the industry's recent decline. We cite several factors, including the video piracy that your review singles out as the principal reason for the downturn. In fact, the statistic that you cite about the impact that pirated copies have had on Hong Konger movie-going and the anecdote that you tell about pirated videos appearing within hours of the release of a new film in theaters appear to be taken from our book.

As for Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan receiving close attention, the former appears briefly in an early chapter that summarizes Hong Kong's film industry prior to the mid-1980s and the latter, well, he is the biggest movie star in all of Asia. Your suggestion that we neglect such talent as Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, and Leslie Cheung misses the mark. Our chapter on director John Woo's films is as much about Chow as it is Woo while the latter two actors appear in various places in the text.

In any event, we wrote neither a book about the decline of Hong Kong's film industry *per se* nor a biography of Hong Kong film stars as your reviewer seems to have wished. Lastly, we find your remark about the literal translation of film titles from Chinese to English to lacking a certain 'ring' as you assert the 'western view' of our book to be a rather quaint contradiction.