A sweet little girl from the the city of Shenzhen in mainland China named Fan (Mak Wai-fan) recounts with innocent reflection her father’s early dawn ritual of dressing in complete darkness, preparing his meal, and rolling his portable cart to the train station, as he makes his exhausting daily commute to Hong Kong to buy […]
Little Cheung (Yiu Yuet-Ming) has learned that money and existence are inextricably connected to each other: “I’ve known from an early age, money is a dream. It’s a fantasy. It’s also a future.” His doting grandmother, a former Chinese opera actress, spends her afternoons gambling at a mah jong parlor. His grandmother’s affable and religious […]
A public broadcast on March 31, 1997 officially announces the disbanding of the Hong Kong Military Service Corps – the cadre of Chinese soldiers serving in the British garrison on the island – as images of regimental exercises leading to the final lowering of the sovereign flag cuts to a shot of a young boy […]
Autumn Moon (Sam Lee) describes with resigned disaffection his aimless life in the urban jungle of Hong Kong: playing street basketball with other underemployed, high school dropouts in the city park; collecting loansharking debts for a mob boss named Big Brother Wing (Chan Sang); coming to the rescue of a defenseless, mentally disabled friend named […]
In an early episode in 2046, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) – the international correspondent and aspiring wuxia novelist of Wong’s preceding film, In the Mood for Love (and now a struggling journalist and pulp writer of erotic serials) encounters a former acquaintance from Singapore named Lulu (Carina Lau) at a seedy nightclub on Christmas Eve, […]
There is a recurrent sound of a sensual waltz that accompanies each encounter between Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) as they invariably cross paths in a crowded residential complex: the first is a polite glance as Mo-Wan leaves the room of a friendly card game; and then during the subsequent encounters […]