words rachel mok

One of Hong Kong’s most dedicated film writer/ directors seeks a soul through romance and riches

‘I didn’t make a film because I wanted to film Wanchai!’ James Yuen Sai Sang is dismissive of those who urged him to write another Crazy ’n the City because it had a ‘strong Hong Kong feeling’. ‘What I want to talk about is the people – I film in Wanchai,’ he says, ‘because I am familiar with the area as I used to go to school and work there.’ And so Yuen’s latest movie is not another HK story in which a young, idealistic rookie revives the self-belief of a jaded 30-something-year-old policeman. Instead, in Short of Love, Wong Cho Lam (best known for comedy performances in TVB soap dramas and the hysterical “safe sex” scene with Stephy Tang in La Lingerie) is Kit, an investment genius whose biggest headache after work is how to spend his somewhat inexhaustible fortune. When the financial crisis hits, his girlfriend Lily, thinking he is now a bankrupt, breaks up with him with a nice selection of descriptive, if nasty, words. A shocked Kit decides to take time out to chase romance as an “everyday guy”. But as we all know, the path to love isn’t smooth and the girls he encounters all have problems even his money cannot solve.

It’s a romantic comedy, of course – or is it? Yuen likes to think it is way more than that and has tagged the film with ‘A selfish man finds his soul’. ‘I want to use the financial tsunami as a hook to discuss the meaning of meaning – if you have lost all your fortune, does it mean you have nothing left in life? Hong Kong people get lost easily. The stock market goes down, the price of one’s property goes down… we all get upset by these numbers in a minute. It is in our blood – it is a cliché but it’s true. The media and everything are talking about making money, but no one talks about creating a dream and sticking to it.’ And so each girl Kit meets has a history she can’t escape – one has a mental illness, another unfinished business with an old flame in Yuen’s parody of the young rebel Wah Dee in the film that launched his career, the 1990’s A Moment of Romance, which was also pivotal in Andy Lau’s rise to super stardom.

After writing that film, Yuen has become a stalwart of the industry writing in total some 40 others including He’s a Man, She’s a Woman; Lost in Time and In the Heat of Summer and directing 12, Crazy ’n the City being one. Now he can say in all sincerity, “Making one more or less film really doesn’t matter. If Johnnie To quits today, no one will doubt that he can make a good film any more. If I don’t make films from now on, no one will doubt I can write – I really don’t have to prove [it]: I wrote A Moment of Romance and Curry and Pepper at 26.’ Nor is that mere boasting – Yuen has been nominated eight times for the Best Screenplay award at the HK Film Awards, the first time for both Tom, Dick and Hairy and Always on My Mind in 1994. The latest, and quite possibly not the last, he shared with the seven other writers of The Warlords. But, unlike so many in the film industry, he is not in the business for awards and plaudits: ‘I make film because I love it, and because I have something to say,’ he insists. ‘People change – maybe not a lot but little by little. That is my motivation in making film, to make the world a bit more positive.’

And he doesn’t see that happening, in his world anyway, by pandering to the Mainland market –although he recognizes that leaning on the Mainland is a current trend in Hong Kong filmmaking. He might have been one of the eight writers of Peter Chan’s recent costumed blockbuster The Warlords, but he rebels against making Hong Kong films that ‘mention nothing about Hong Kong. The biggest problem for me is that I am not living in the Mainland – I don’t know about their culture or society. We just pretend we know.’ And so he keeps his work fresh by casting around the SAR for new ideas and new faces – which is why he chose Wong Cho Lam as the leading man for Short of Love. Yuen says he is happy with the actor’s performance even if Cho Lam was not an obvious choice. ‘He is not Stephen Chow – people laugh when Chow sneezes but no one will laugh if Cho Lam sneezes. But this film is just a beginning for him – he will improve in future.’ Well, if that is anything to go by, we had better see the film – James Yuen Sai Sang may just have given Wong Cho Lam his Moment of Romance.

Short of Love opens on June 25.