Name: Ho Yin Ting Yoyo
Student ID: 1042 5076
The local comedy film La Comédie Humaine was released on 2010, directed and written by Chan Hing-Ka and Chun Siu-Chun. In fact, La Comédie Humaine originally is the title of a multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories written by Honoré de Balzac, presenting a fluctuating panorama of French society after the fall of Napoleon. Adopting the similar title, this film also marks a fluctuating position of contemporary Hong Kong film industry. The change of the name of an agent (Benz Hui) – from Rising Sun, Midday Sun to finally Setting Sun – typically implies the transition in the development of local film industry since 1950s. Interestingly and ironically, its poster emphasizes this is the only one Hong Kong comedy film in the summer. Hence, sunset as a good metaphor of the declining local film industry seems to be comprehensible.
In the recent decade, the focus of market-oriented Hong Kong films has shifted to Mainland China. Not only the joint financial investment, but the joint involvement of both Mainland and Hong Kong characters is also welcomed in local film productions nowadays. On one hand, these commercial strategies of shifting target audience and co-financing bring huge potential economic benefits to the industry; on the other hand, the uniqueness of the dynamic Hong Kong popular culture is intentionally blurred and even become ‘odourless’ in order to cater for the mainland consumers. Therefore, it is controversial whether a joint ‘made-in-Hong-Kong’ movie with ‘cultural odourlessness’ is still considered as a domestic cultural text.
Consisting of various localized settings, the‘re-odour’ La Comédie Humaine unsurprisingly looks attractive towards those ‘isolated’ Hong Kong consumers, and is thereby evaluated as a ‘real’ Hong Kong film. Funded by the Film Development Fund (FDF), its production team and artists are all Hongkongers. Its overall setting on the story and characters certainly matches with the social phenomena and cultural practices in the Hong Kong society. For example, the plot in a scene modeling on The Assembly that a solider (Chapman To) had angrily ended an advertising call when he was ready for the battle – especially the nuisance of telephone advertisement has been a big social issue and even a part of everyday life in Hong Kong.
Moreover, the particular use of language in La Comédie Humaine contributes to identify the unique elements involved in Hong Kong comedy films. Although Spring (Chapman To) is a Mainland killer, he just speaks in Canton-Mandarin instead of standard Mandarin. Importantly, the jokes with Cantonese assonance are the common tactic in local comedy films to evoke strong audience identification that only the community sharing specific discourses could understand the film content. For instance, Spring uses the Chinese title of The Last Samurai (Jui-Hau-Mo-SI) to represent he was saved; however, it will become incomprehensible if it speaks in Mandarin ‘Zui-Hou-Wu-Shi’ with totally different symbolic meaning.
The aim of the La Comédie Humaine is to explore the interaction among the movie and the reality. The prologic and epilogic monolog by Spring that ‘whether movies influence we killers behave, or the other way round, maybe it is mutual’ is very inspiring. The stereotypical gendered representations of Soya (Wong Cho-lam) and Tin-Oi (Fiona Sit) are also the case in point. It is questionable that the construction of shared social experience in a society either comes from our similar patterns of direct experience or through those mediated experience. Nevertheless, taking Spring as a role model of a ‘real’ man, the La Comédie Humaine finally express a traditional social value and expectation on masculinity in the Hong Kong society – Soya as a ‘soshoku-danshi’ someday should and will become a ‘real’ man with strong sense of commitment and responsibility in different aspects.
A nicely written review with plenty of valid examples and a brief examination on the relevant theoretical concepts (e.g., process of identification, mediated experience). It’s good that you can express some inner reflections on the one hand, and situate the film in the larger social context at the same time. In particular, the observations on the development of local film industry are sharp and significant.
ReplyDeleteOne little suggestion is to investigate those parody scenes that pay homage to popular films (such as “Ip Man,” “The Killer’), and to reveal the functions of these nostalgic in-jokes for general audiences.