Berlin Film Festival 1998

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Competition

Hold You Tight (Yue Kuaile, Yue Duoluo)

Intricately plotted, sexy and emotive, Stanley Kwan's new film has a spontaneity and spark rare in Chinese cinema these days. Maybe because it's his first feature since he 'came out' in his documentaries Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema and Still Love You After All, this is a film completely at ease with itself. It gets into the flaws in its characters' emotions with real warmth.
Five lives intersect over several months in Hong Kong and Taipei. Computer nerd Wai (Sunny Chan) takes his wife Ah Moon (Chingmy Yau) for granted until he loses her in an air crash; then he befriends a gay man (Eric Tsang) who becomes his first real confidant, but fails to notice that a teenage kid from Taiwan is so obsessed with him that he follows him everywhere. Jie (Ko Yue-Lin), the boy with the fixation on Wai, returns to Taiwan and runs into Rosa Gao (Chingmy Yau again), who's slightly older and more worldly than the late Ah Moon. She helps him to see that he'll never get anywhere until he deals with his confused feelings for Wai…
The action specifically takes place in 1997, the year of Hong Kong's return to China's sovereignty, and it in some ways reflects doubts and uncertainties about the future for Hong Kong and its people. But these characters could equally well be Berliners or Londoners. Their struggles to understand their own feelings and sexualities are absolutely universal. Kwan has drawn two excellent performances from cult-exploitation star Chingmy Yau, and he gets equally strong work from the men in the cast. (Eric Tsang's gay sauna scene is the kind of thing which can turn a whole career around.) The only real weakness is the rather dubious 'guest appearance' by an English film critic… Tony Rayns

Synopsis

Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan's seventh feature is a complex relationship drama that focuses on the emotional bruisings and confusion of a group of sexually disorientated characters. It's Kwan's first film since 1995's luscious Red Rose White Rose; in the meantime, he has directed two personal documentaries, A Personal Memoir of Hong Kong and Yin and Yan; Sex and Gender in Chinese Cinema.
Kwan says that these two documentaries had a strong influence on Hold You Tight: "Both of them evolved from my thoughts on family background and upbringing, my career as a filmmaker, my sexual orientation, and my identity as a Chinese man living in a British colony," he says.
Hold You Tight sees starlet Chingmy Yau, for whom the film was written, playing two roles, a young executive and a worldly boutique owner. When one of the women dies in a plane crash, the two men in her life become intimately connected. The film uses this relationship, and brings in the older woman, to explore the sexual identity of its characters.
"The film shows three ways to approach relationships, and all of them are drawn from past experience," says Kwan.
However, Kwan feels that although the film deals with personal issues, he has infused it with a high degree of objectivity. "A distant perspective requires closeness, a close perspective requires distance," he says, quoting Taiwanese master director Hou Hsiao-hsien. "I think it has helped me go beyond what I did in earlier films."
The decision to cast Hong Kong starlet Chingmy Yau in a dual role as the two women may raise some eyebrows. Yau has up to now played mainly in B-graders, notably the cult killer-lesbian-babe flick Naked Killer. "She's a more than competent actress, and proved more than equal to the challenges of the two roles," says Kwan.

(Dir): Stanley Kwan (Scr): Jimmy Ngai nach einer Geschichte von Elmond Yueng (Cast):Chingmy Yau, Sunny Chan, Eric Tsang (Running time): 95 Minutes

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