Roomless
不设房
Hong Kong, 2011, colour, 2.35:1, 92 mins.
Director: Cai Jingwen 蔡敬文 [Kingman Choi].
Rating: 6/10.
Scabrously black comedy centred on a slacker and a hooker has a genuine indie spirit.
STORY
Hong Kong, the present day. After returning from film school in the UK and getting occasional work as a scriptwriter, the whole life of a young man (Xin Bi) changed on 1 Apr 2003 when he lost a big writing job, his girlfriend (Wang Luyao) dumped him and his mother died. Now, eight years later, he’s living on the dole in a tiny flat on Rongguang [Wing Kwong] Street, Hongkan [Hung Hom], Kowloon. Chapter 1. His landlady bawls him out for not paying his rent and he’s driven to eating leftover food in restaurants. Chapter 2. After getting his monthly dole, he decides to visit a hooker, Xiaomei (Pan Wanwei), but makes a mess of her room. Chapter 3. Xiaomei comes back to his flat and ends up staying, temporarily. Chapter 4. Xiaomei has come to like him a little, though he steals money from her bag to pay to have sex with her. She nags him to get a job. When he suggests she uses his flat as a workplace, offering discounts to students, she agrees. But an encounter with her one and only client (He Junyi) does not go well. Chapter 5. With her savings almost spent, he tries to get rid of Xiaomei and she threatens suicide. After an embarrassing episode between him and the returning client, Xiaomei consoles him and they patch things up. He floats the idea of the two of them moving to her family’s native province of Hunan, China, and starting a business. Instead, he decides to make some big money by doing a drugs run for his cousin (Li Zhuoxin) in Shenzhen. Chapter 6. He and Xiaomei separately cross the border into Shenzhen by train and meet in a hotel room. Chapter 7. Nothing turns out as expected.
REVIEW
Reportedly made, like his first film Children at War 世界很好/我们很糟 (2009), for just HK$20,000, this second feature by Hong Kong film-maker Cai Jingwen 蔡敬文 [Kingman Choi] has a genuine indie spirit that owes nothing to its tiny budget but everything to its attitude. A sex- and four-letter-filled rant against the inequities of Hong Kong society – but comically from the point-of-view of a slobby slacker whose only goal in life is to become a vengeful “social parasite” – Roomless 不设房 sports a no-budget look but is actually quite cleverly made beneath its seemingly random surface. Looking like it was mostly shot on spare ends and out-of-date film stock, the widescreen film suddenly throws in a multi-screen sequence halfway as if to point up the whole joke. And in between all the scatter-gun, cuss-heavy dialogue and the main characters’ sex-fuelled relationship, there’s no real nudity and even moments of poetic tenderness when needed.
At an hour-and-a-half it’s certainly too long by about 15-20 minutes, but not because of arty longueurs aimed at getting the film noticed at festivals. The biggest fault in Roomless – whose title seems like a pun on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless A bout de souffle (1960), with which the film shares the same kind of bandit spirit – is repetition: the almost continuous dialogue and voiceover tend to go round in circles rather than progressing the action or characters’ feelings, and it’s a relief when the movie eventually leaves the microscopic flat and moves across the border into Shenzhen for the finale.
The quirky chemistry between leads Xin Bi 辛比 [Tiny Gary] and Pan Wanwei 潘宛薇, as the chubby, film-obsessed slacker and the bottom-line, drifting hooker, is what makes Roomless so watchable: Pan, especially, plays into the film’s straightfaced humour particularly well. In the only other sizeable parts, He Junyi 何骏怡 and Li Zhuoxin 李焯新 also catch the tone as a sex-client and a drug-running cousin. The fretted music by Kevin MacLeod is a big help in keeping the movie light and approachable.
Despite its main character’s view of Hong Kong as a played-out territory with no future and no heart, Roomless is Hong Kong to its fingertips in its practical humour and moments of child-like cuteness. In that respect, it’s not so very far from the mainstream it affects to be at odds with. Cai is very much a film-maker to watch.
CREDITS
Presented by Whatever! Films (HK). Produced by Kingman Media (HK).
Script: Cai Jingwen [Kingman Choi], Xin Bi [Tiny Gary]. Photography: Cai Jingwen [Kingman Choi]. Editing: Cai Jingwen [Kingman Choi]. Music: Kevin MacLeod. Songs: My Little Airport.
Cast: Xin Bi [Tiny Gary] (young man), Pan Wanwei (Xiaomei, prostitute), He Junyi (Xiaomei’s client), Wang Luyao (young man’s girlfriend), Li Zhuoxin (young man’s cousin), Du Shaozhen, Yu Qunhua.
Release: Hong Kong, 7 Oct 2011.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 28 Dec 2012.)