Review: Made in Hong Kong Is a Gritty, If Derivative, Genre Tribute

The title of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong cheekily references a phrase you might have seen printed on the packaging for an action figure way back in 1997, the year of the film’s original release. But it also refers to the young, wannabe triad member with the unlikely name of Autumn Moon (Sam Lee), as well as to the production circumstances of the film itself. Its declarative label is somewhat excessive, though, as there’s no mistaking where and when Moon’s misadventures take place: Chan’s quirky, gangster-adjacent flick, so infused with washed-out and blue-filtered imagery, presents a portrait of Hong Kong that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle’s early collaborations.

From its handheld shots racing through open-air markets, to its use of expressionistic step-printed slow motion, to the way its perspectives on the city take inspiration from the cramped geometry of tiny Hong Kong flats, Made in Hong Kong owes a lot to Wong’s breakout work. The content and structure of the story, too, is reminiscent of As Tears Go By and Chungking Express. Moon, a youthful and essentially innocent small-time loan shark, narrates his chance encounters and near-misses in the city in a naïve, contemplative voiceover. Although there’s no lack of plot, the film is as much about milieu as it is about events; its rather loose cause-and-effect sequence allows it to soak in the atmosphere of Moon’s subjective world.

The threads of the story weave in and out of each other in an almost desultory manner. Moon and his buddy Sylvester (Wenders Li, performing a broad, offensive caricature of an intellectually disabled gangster) discover the bloodied suicide letters of a teen girl named Susan (Amy Tam Ka-Chuen) and must deliver them to their intended recipients. The pair encounter Ping (Neiky Hui-Chi Yim), the daughter of one of the debtors they’re meant to shake down, and Moon promptly falls in lust, creating a conflict of interest with his mob boss, Brother Wing (Sang Chan). After discovering his father has absconded with a mistress, Moon periodically arms himself with a meat cleaver, vowing to avenge this betrayal of his mother (Doris Yan-Wah Chow), even if she doesn’t seem to care very much. She dissuades him at first, and after he resumes the quest later, he’s given pause when, en route to take out his dad, he witnesses another son dismembering a father in a restroom stall.

Throughout Chan’s film, comic irreverence intermingles with cosmic coincidences—shades again of the Hong Kong we know from Chungking Express. If Made in Hong Kong faces reasonable charges of derivativeness, it doesn’t help that the beautiful Ping—who turns out to be dying of renal failure and in desperate need of both cash and a set of kidneys—sports Faye Wong’s iconic pixie cut from the former film. (Ping, never much of a character in her own right, might be described as a depressive pixie-cut dream girl.)

Still, it’s difficult not to get caught up in the film’s frantic tour through Hong Kong—and through Moon’s juvenile head space. An inveterate wet-dreamer whose daily morning routine involves rinsing out his underpants, Moon tells us about his distinctly un-erotic, cum-centric fantasies, to which we’re also given visual access: shooting ejaculate at the low-flying airplanes that perpetually pass over Hong Kong’s urban mass, or, in another recurring dream, imagining the blood running from under Susan’s mangled corpse transforming into milk-white liquid. All of Hong Kong seems little more than some version of Moon’s dreamworld, but reality is encroaching, in the form of death. As Moon says the last time he dreams of Susan, “There were tears on my face instead of cum—were they Susan’s?”

This line’s mixture of crassness and melodrama lands, but overall, Made in Hong Kong doesn’t successfully execute its pivot from the irreverent to the sincere, once things get serious for Moon. With its quick cuts and frenetic camerawork, it succeeds in capturing the pounding exuberance of being young in an urban environment—as in Band of Outsiders and Godard’s Jules and Jim, surely other reference points for Chan, some of the film’s best shots are just its misfit characters running in spaces they should know better than to run in—but it doesn’t manage to fuse this rebellious energy with the Wong-ian wistfulness it evidently aims for.