words yvonne teh

Lawrence Lau turns the camera on a city
under siege.

“I think that, realistically, most producers don’t consider me to be a commercial director. So that’s why when they have a commercial project, I am not on the list of people that they would call immediately.” On the surface, that may seem a strange thing for Lawrence Lau (aka Lawrence Ah Mon) to say. After all, in the veteran helmer’s three decades in the movie business (he began his feature film career as assistant director to Tsui Hark on 1979’s The Butterfly Murders) he has directed box office hits like crime dramas Lee Rock I and II (1991) and acclaimed works like prostitute movie Queen of Temple Street (1988) and the 2006 paean to the local film industry, My Name is Fame.

Yet, as Lau himself notes, “My first film was about youth gangs and I’ve been sort of pigeon-holed as a director who is into youth-related subject matter. So when I approach any kind of production company, they always keep thinking of that as the sort of subject matter I can do best.” They can hardly be blamed – in the face of grittily realistic youth-focused works like his directorial debut-making Gangs (1986), the Milkyway Image duo of Spacked Out (2000) and Gimme Gimme (2001) and now Besieged City (2008), the South African-born Lau can safely be said to be the filmmaker associated with Hong Kong’s troubled youth.

“I think it started [with] all these docu-dramas for RTHK,” he says. “I was doing a lot of programmes on troubled youth and drug problems. But, of course, at the same time, I do have an interest in youth-related subject matter. I think that, basically, it’s a subject matter that never grows old. It’s a kind of eternal problem, it’s always there.”

However, as enduring as the youth problem may be, that doesn’t mean it is unchanging. Lau says that these days it has become more extreme with the prevalence of drugs. Even though Hong Kong hardly has the reputation for being the drug capital of the world, narcotics have become much more enticing because they are now so easily accessible and come in what he calls a “mind-boggling” variety.

Also, for all of the Triads continuing to be the favourite subject of some of his fellow local filmmakers, Lau believes that, for youth, the Triad problem is not such a big an issue any more. Instead, today’s troubled youngsters, like those who make up the bulk of the characters in Besieged City, are both more scattered and isolated. “Before, when we had the problems with the gangs, at least they had an agenda. They did things for the gang or for the Triad. So, at least, they had a purpose to what they were doing. Nowadays I think young people have no sense of morality. I think the sense of right or wrong has become less [clear]. Instead of following a Triad leader, they basically don’t have any kind of purpose in life and they just do whatever is, at the spur of the moment, more exciting, which is the most fun.”

As Lau shows in Besieged City, these young people are liable to cross any taboo, do anything illegal – be it shoplifting, drug-taking or physical and sexual assault – for kicks as well as to strike out against society at large. Lau says basically they are driven by peer group pressure. “Other people are doing it and are getting away with it. So they want to do the same thing or be one better and do something that’s more attention-grabbing, more defying,” is the way he puts it.

Seeing that Besieged City has had a Category III rating slapped on it (so ensuring that at least three members of the film’s young cast are not old enough to watch the nightmarish social drama in which they appear!), those behind the film have been accused of having plotted some attention-grabbing and defying of their own. Lau’s response to criticisms that his work is “over-sensationalistic” and “well-intentioned but slightly hysterical” is to suggest that “maybe it’s hysterical in terms of the way the film was done but in terms of what these people go through, it’s not that way out.” Also, while he is willing to grant that a lot of the movie is neither part of his nor any normal Hong Kong person’s reality, he nevertheless maintains that all the situations in the film could have or have happened.

The youth and world of Besieged City, Lau shares, are based on “what our researchers have come up with. Of course I can’t say that this is indicative of this whole new generation but certainly such elements exist – and even worse, from what I’ve been given to understand.” And not necessarily just in Tin Shui Wai, the HKSAR’s notorious ‘City of Sadness’ with its high rate of unemployment, suicides, spousal and child abuse either.

Even though Besieged City was shot in New Territories locale and the film’s four scriptwriters – Frankie Tam, Dennis Chan, Leung Tak Shun and Chucky Kou, all still in their 20s – were intent on setting the movie in it, Lau says “We’re not trying to do a portrayal of the community of Tin Shui Wai. That’s not our main purpose. If you’ve seen the film, you’ve seen that we don’t even identify the place in the film at all.”

Ironically, given its notorious reputation, much of the drama’s setting doesn’t appear as a low-income ghetto where terrible things regularly happen. As Lau says, “Actually, on the surface, it’s a very clean, very well kept up kind of new town. [But] I think because it’s so new, you don’t really get a sense of it being very lived in and a very well-knit community.” Consequently, the sense of alienation and isolation is very strong and not mitigated by Tin Shui Wai’s buildings being both so spaced out and distant from the territory’s central hub and other ‘happening’ places.

Yet, Lau maintains, that was only part of research which revealed so much that was dark and depressing, some young people face everyday lives that appear to them to be in a tunnel without an end. So then, what is his solution, if any? He points to a key point in Besieged City when its most ‘straight arrow’ character, a schoolboy trying to make good, trying to get out, urges another more troubled youth “Remember, don’t give up on yourself.”

“I think,” says the filmmaker, “that only through moral or actual physical support from some caring person can some of these problems be solved.”

Besieged City is now showing in local theatres.