Merry-Go-Round

东风破

Hong Kong, 2010, colour, 2.35:1, 125 mins.

Directors: Mai Wanxin 麦婉欣 [Mak Yan-yan], Zheng Sijie 郑思杰 [Clement Cheng].

Rating: 5/10.

Hong Kong family drama spanning half a century has plenty of dusty nostalgia but a poor script.

STORY

San Francisco, the present day. Drifter and drug abuser Guan Ya’nan (Guan Enna) ends up in hospital and learns she has advanced leukaemia. Separately, Yu Bingdi (Miao Kexiu), who runs the San Francisco branch of her family’s Fu Yuan herbal medicine business, decides to return to Hong Kong for the first time in over half a century – to prevent her great-nephew, real estate agent Yu Lin (Zhou Junwei), from selling the old family business in the Central district of Hong Kong Island. Having decided to revisit her roots before she dies, Guan Ya’nan gets a job in Hong Kong as an assistant to Lin Shan (Guan Weipeng), caretaker of the Donghua Coffin Home, where coffins await reburial in their ancestral homes on the Mainland. (Lin Shan still cannot forget a young nurse he loved in the late 1930s but who left Hong Kong prior to its fall to the Japanese.) Using a pseudonym, Guan Ya’nan also tries to befriend Yu Lin, with whom she once had a close e-mail friendship before he stopped corresponding when he discovered she was ill. Meanwhile, Yu Bingdi, whose grandfather’s coffin is among those at Tung Wah, has started to blow away the cobwebs at Fu Yuan and revive the business. Yu Lin tells his grand-aunt that he needs the money to give to a young widowed mother, Xin (He Yunshi), whom he cares for; reluctantly, she agrees to let him sell the shop, on condition he first works there for a month under her supervision. In the meantime, as she walks the streets of Central, memories flood back of her love affair with a young man (Lv Yulai) who gave her the English name Eva. They were in love back in 1938 but she was forced to leave him behind when he went to help run the family business in San Francisco.

REVIEW

In the mini wave of nostalgia movies (Echoes of the Rainbow 岁月神偷, 2010; Gallants 打擂台, 2010; Once a Gangster 飞砂风中转, 2010) as Hong Kong filmmakers look to excavate a local culture and self-identity, Merry-Go-Round 东风破 is the most ambitious but also the weakest and least affecting. With parallel time-lines – one in the late 1930s, the other in the present – the script by Mai Wanxin 麦婉欣 [Mak Yan-yan] (lesbian drama Butterfly 蝴蝶, 2004) and Zheng Sijie 郑思杰  [Clement Cheng] (Gallants) tries to build a cohesive drama out of too many elements that don’t sit naturally together: nostalgia for passing customs (the coffin home) and traditional practices (herbal treatments passed on by mouth), the internet age of “virtual” friendships, regret and guilt spanning a half-century, gaps between generations, and that old chestnut of returning to one’s roots. Add in dialogue that is often either too expository or, when trying to be philosophical or emotionally deep, is too often just simply arch, and the movie ends up a very hit-and-miss affair which constantly has problems establishing an overall tone.

The hits include handsome photography, especially in partly-lit interiors, by Guan Zhiyao 关智耀 [Jason Kwan] (Love in a Puff 志明与春娇, 2010) and a wonderfully gnarled performance as the coffin-home caretaker by veteran comic Guan Weipeng 关维鹏 [Teddy Robin], an early mentor in Zheng’s career and one of the leads in Gallants. The period production design – using oldstyle streets in Kaiping, Guangdong province – looks okay on a budget, and contributes to the film’s overall smell of dusty funeral parlours, musty herbal shops and strangely quiet backstreets. The casting of Chinese Tahitian singer-actress Guan Enna 官恩娜 in two unrelated roles, as an elegant young woman in the late 1930s and as the mixed-up Asian-American Nan, enriches the film with an extra layer of meaning, with Guan okay in both parts.

The misses include a stiff performance in the lead role by 1970s icon Miao Kexiu 苗可秀 [Nora Miao] – always more famous for her association with the films of Li Xiaolong 李小龙 [Bruce Lee] than as an actress in her own right – and retro western-hippie songs by Hong Kong band Ketchup that are completely unsuitable for a drama of this kind. But the biggest problem is the untidy script, which relies too much on coincidences and unlikely developments (especially in Nan’s borderline silly story which starts the movie) and never sets up any strong emotional arc for the viewer to engage in.

Merry-Go-Round tries for too much on limited resources and talent; with a bigger budget and cast, and a much better screenplay, it could have been genuinely effective rather than just occasionally interesting. The fact that even the film’s basic maths doesn’t add up – the character played by Miao should be about 90 but looks only about 60 – is symptomatic of the movie’s general laxness and lack of a strong independent producer.

For the record, several locations (including the coffin home) belong to the movie’s financier, Tung Wah Group of Hospitals 东华三院, Hong Kong’s oldest and biggest charity which is celebrating its 140th anniversary. [The film should not be confused with the 2001 contemporary ensemble comedy, Merry-Go-Round 初恋嗱喳面, directed by Zhou Huikun 周惠坤.]

CREDITS

Presented by Tung Wah Group of Hospitals (HK). Produced by Dragonfly J (HK).

Script: Mai Wanxin [Mak Yan-yan], Zheng Sijie [Clement Cheng]. Photography: Guan Zhiyao [Jason Kwan]. Editing: Mai Wanxin [Mak Yan-yan], Weng Hanming, Tan Guoming. Music: Ketchup. Songs: Ketchup. Art direction: Mai Wanxin [Mak Yan-yan]. Costume design: Wei Wanqi. Sound: Yu Jialu. Visual effects: Huang Zhiheng [Henri Wong].

Cast: Miao Kexiu [Nora Miao] (Yu Bingdi/Eva), Guan Weipeng [Teddy Robin] (Lin Shan/Hill), Guan Enna (Guan Ya’nan/Merry; young Yu Bingdi/Eva), Zhou Junwei (Yu Lin/Allen), Lv Yulai (young Lin Shan), He Yunshi (Xin/Yanny), Zhang Tongzu [Joe Cheung] (Niu Qi/Uncle Radix), Shao Yinyin [Susan Shaw] (Nancy), Liu Haolong (Leslie), Xie Xuexin (voice of radio host), Tang Junye (voice of young Lin Shan), Xu Guisan (Uncle Elephas), Lv Xiaokun (Uncle Polyporus), Jeff Lam (Toby), Cen Jiaqi (young Uncle Radix), Sam Ng (Stephen).

Premiere: Vancouver Film Festival (Dragons & Tigers), 6 Oct 2010.

Release: Hong Kong, 11 Nov 2010.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 1 Nov 2010.)