Review: Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong on Metrograph Pictures Blu-ray

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 nave, 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.

Image/Sound

Kino Lorber’s transfer of a 4K restoration made from the original camera negative, which was supervised by Fruit Chan and cinematographer O Sing-Pui, looks fantastic. Given the budget limitations of the film, the image is surprisingly crisp, with the gritty textures of various overcrowded Hong Kong neighborhoods and the blood, sweat, and tears of the people who live there coming through in vivid detail. The color balancing is suitably naturalistic, outside of the handful of shots deliberately affected by color filters, and the grain is consistently tight and even, helping to retain the look of celluloid. While the uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mix suffers a bit from the imperfections of the original source, the audio is often pretty robust, especially in exterior sequences where the incessant buzz of Hong Kong’s hustle and bustle serves as a cacophonous symphony in the background without drowning out the characters’ dialogue.

Extras

Film critics Sean Gilman and Ryan Swen serve up an entertaining and diligently researched commentary track, going into great detail as they place Made in Hong Kong within the historical context of Hong Kong cinema. Their conversational tone keeps things moving along at a brisk pace, as they cover everything from the wave of suicides leading up to England’s handover of Hong Kong and the recurring theme of performative gangsterism.

The disc also comes with a trio of interviews, the most interesting of which is the one with Chan, who discusses the importance of the mentor-mentee relationship in Hong Kong cinema when he started his career and his attempts to break the mold and move into more personal forms of storytelling. The other two interviews, with producer Doris Yang and line producer Daniel Yu, are significantly briefer, though Yang’s story of how Chan roped her into producing several of his films while she kept her full-time gig at an accounting firm is worth seeking out.

Overall

Metrograph’s release of Fruit Chan’s breakthrough film boasts a suitably gritty transfer and an extremely informative audio commentary.