Fong leaves her aging mother to join the underground fight

21 Jul Fong leaves her aging mother to join the underground fight

Every day while CFI’s Hollywood readers take in the business of the Chinese film industry, the actual movies can sometimes seem exotic or remote. But in major US cities, mainstream Chinese films are increasingly available: thanks to Wanda’s purchase of AMC and distributors like China Lion, they get American theatrical releases practically simultaneous to their premieres at home. Though they receive virtually no publicity outside the non-Chinese community, these films are more than worth seeking out by anyone serious about engaging the Chinese industry, understanding the Chinese sensibility and familiarizing themselves with China’s talent pool. Periodically, CFI will review and point readers in the direction of noteworthy US releases of contemporary commercial and independent Chinese titles.

Director Ann Hui’s World War II Hong Kong resistance drama Our Time Will Come, now playing in select theaters in North America, works from an enviably clean script by Ho Kei Ping to tell the complex story of the fight against the invading Japanese from 1941-45.

The spirit of young people from all walks of Hong Kong life willing to pull together to help Chinese intellectuals and artists flee the draconian Japanese military police to unoccupied territory on the mainland, is well-captured in the real life character of Fang Lan (Hung Sau-Fong in Cantonese), beautifully played by mainland actress Zhou Xun.

“Miss Fong,” as the schoolteacher-turned-resistance fighter is known, is in her mid-twenties and living with her mother, who rents rooms in their modest home to make ends meet at a time of food rationing and rampant abuse of the locals by the soldiers of the Imperial Army.

It is, of course, always safe in a Chinese movie to demonize the Japanese oppressors, and Hui does a good job of painting the fraught relationship between Fong’s sometime boyfriend airg Li Jinrong (Lee Gam-wing in Cantonese) and a Japanese colonel in charge of intelligence gathering

k.a. ‘Blackie’ Lau), a fearless and handsome rural peasant rebel played with great spirit and charm by Eddie Peng (Duckweed). From different worlds, their self-sacrifice against a common Japanese enemy is the bond that surely appealed to the censors in Beijing, who would have had to approve the film for release in China.

”What difference can you make?” asks her mother, played gutsily by Nina Paw Hee-ching, to which Fong replies: “Ma, if everyone thought this way, there’d be no victory.”

When the poet Mao Dun and his wife must be smuggled out of Hong Kong on a riverboat, Fong is swept up by history, and, over the course of the beautifully shot film, swept away by her admiration for Liu Heizai (a

Symbolically, at least for Hong Kong audiences who’ve just lived through the Umbrella movement in support of democracy in the face of encroaching Communist rule, her mother sends her off to the fight with an umbrella and a gold ring.

Our Time Will Come briefly gained notoriety on the mainland in June when it was bumped from the opening night slot at the Shanghai International Film Festival without explanation. That the film’s story of common people standing up to authority comes amidst increasing tensions in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region cannot be lost on Chinese audiences anywhere.

The film’s release in China, on July 1, coincided with the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China after 151 years of British colonial domination. That Hong Kong people protested the arrival last week of China’s president Xi Jinping in their city just as the film was released, would also have been on the lips of moviegoers.

The sharp-dressed men of discipline exchange thoughts about Chinese poetry over barbecue, the oppressor showing respect for the culture of his captor-to a point.