Passion 1995
Director Clarence Ford (Fok) often treads a thin
line in his films between being stylish and being vacuous. With films like
Naked Killer, Dragon from Russia, Cheap Killers and Her Name is Cat, the
wonderful visual flair and constant movement that he brings to his films
can to a large degree hide the often confusing narrative within. There
are times though that no amount of style can disguise the absolute mess
that Ford has managed to create. This would be the case for On Fire, The
Black Panther and this film.
This is simply an incomprehensibly muddled,
dull and pointless film. None of the characters are more than chalk marks
and annoying quirks, the story goes nowhere and makes no sense and it has
an ending that belongs in a film like “Fame”. Even more amazing, Ford somehow
manages to make Simon Yam nearly colorless and Christy Chung nearly unattractive.
The film weaves or wobbles three interconnecting
stories together that on the surface may seem slightly arty in nature –
but none of the stories have anything to say. They go around in circles
with the characters acting like they have the brain matter of amoebae and
with ridiculous coincidences piling up like a rush hour freeway traffic
disaster. If Ford were trying for something profound about fate or human
nature, I would advise him to stick with red hotpants and cigar chewing
sex sirens.
One story line has Christy doing her best to be
a street punk with a hairstyle that looked to have been cut by a “topiarist”
and for which she should have sued someone for criminal neglect. She has
a boyfriend (Wong Hei) who swears he will love her forever – that is until
a drug dealer (Ben Ng) persuades him to use Christy as a drug mule and
then when the deal goes wrong to kill her. Ben has taken a sexual fancy
to the boyfriend and the boyfriend quickly decides which side of the bread
is buttered so to speak. Oddly, Ng and Wong Hei couple up again a few years
later in The Accident.
Simon comes to HK to look for his girlfriend but
finds her apartment occupied instead by Teresa Mak who tells him that she
moved away months ago. He moves in anyway and starts searching for her.
A cop (David Ng) has come across a personal advertisement that Mak (the
best thing in the film) placed in a paper and is trying to set up a meet
with her. Yuen King is Mak’s mother and walks through various scenes with
the subtlety of a bulldozer yelling and cursing every one in sight. All
the points Yuen has earned in various small roles get erased with this
travesty.
Christy comes into their lives like a stray dog
that won't go away and soon they are all trying to survive Ng and his homicidal
instincts – that is when the film doesn’t stop for a musical video number
on the streets of HK. Finally, at some point Christy lets her hair down
and Simon picks up a gun – but much to late to save this film from drowning
in a morass of ineptitude.
My rating for this film: 4.0
DVD Information:
Distributed by Ocean Shores
The transfer is decent - colors are fairly
vibrant.
Letterboxed
Subs are burnt in English and Chinese
No Menu = no nothing