Trailer of The Midnight After: http://youtu.be/oRaASwkkevg
While the countdown has already begun, the 16th edition of the Far East Film Festival– held in Udine from 25th April to 3rd May– reveals one of its key features: the close artistic and cultural connection with Hong Kong, which is clear year after year at the Festival. However, for the upcoming edition, this connection will manifest itself with a slightly different nuance: sure enough, since the handover to China 16 years ago, the former British colony has never been so proudly hongkongese; and the same can be said of its cinema!
Hong Kong calling, you might say, and the great Udine festival is more than ready to take the call: Fruit Chan, who will present his latest work TheMidnight After, is among the guests of honour (an in-depth talk on this will also feature Marco Müller, an expert on Fruit Chan’s films). This eccentric and pleasantly absurd film, although hard to pin down, can be described as a surreal horror-comedy, a metaphor of Hong Kong’s obsession with its “expiry date” and its fear of disappearing.
16 years ago Hong Kong was fretfully waiting to rejoin China in the same way Los Angeles is presently dreading the arrival of The Big One. Back then, 1st July 1997 was HK’s sole expiry date. Today, the number of these “expiry dates” seems to have drastically increased: in both daily life and films, Cantonese appears to have been outmuscled by Mandarin, the official language of the People’s Republic; Hong Kong’s film industry is not the same as it used to be, due to the rules (more like obligations) set by the mainland, by which it has to abide; the city’s inhabitants, immune carriers of Hong Kong’s culture and traditions, are fleeing the bustling historical areas of the metropolis to find a safe haven in the outskirts or even abroad. Not surprising considering that the rents in Hong Kong are the highest in the world: in some cases, apartments are sold for the astonishing price of 100.000 Euro / m2 ! Are Cantonese language and culture about to expire? Are the houses about to expire? Is HK a city about to expire?
In The Midnight After (which will be screened in its final version after its stop over at Berlinale), HK is incredibly desolate. In the middle of the night, a mini-bus, with 16 typical Hongkongese aboard, drives out of the famous Lion Rock Tunnel and carries on north towards the New Territories.
The passengers are stunned looking at Tai Po, one of the world’s most densely populated districts, now an eerie ghost town. Vanished cars, closed shops, unlit signs and shut doors… no one in sight: it’s as if the once vibrant and fragrant harbour had been mysteriously robbed of its life and had faced the Apocalypse. The only thing the passengers can hear is a sound travelling through the ether, coming from the crazed mobile phones… could be a message from outer space…
Now, the 16 bewildered passengers, driven by a chubby driver (Lam Suet), livened up by a sleek gangster (Simon Yam), escorted by a clairvoyant and a long-haired geek, attempt to unravel this mystery and make sense of this unexpected situation through the customary optimism and known pragmatism of the Hong Kong people. The passengers call the control tower in vain, as Major Tom does in Space Oddity. They will also find themselves lost in the night, «sitting in a tin can far above the world and there's nothing they can do». David Bowie’s classic perfectly expresses the themes of exile and death, capturing the alienation of Hong Kong’s residents toward their own rapidly evolving homeland.
With Made in Hong Kong (1997) and Durian Durian (2000), Fruit Chan has presented us viewers with the city’s moral decay since its handover to China. The Midnight After isn’t merely the third, overwhelming chapter in this “saga”, but it also symbolises the rediscovered awareness of Hong Kong cinema. It also represents the proud and strong sense of identity of Hong Kong people, which goes hand in hand with their will to directly vote their mayor at the 2017 elections.