Time Contributor | Little Gen
Look for more possibilities of life in the movie.
In the Hong Kong drama "Hong Kong Love Story", there is such a scene: a couple rushes to open a room to celebrate the seventh anniversary of love.
When I got to the front desk, I was told to wait in line and wait for three hours.
After buying it from the scalper for half an hour, the two hurriedly opened their bows, and the happy thing was over before it began.
This scene has an absurd sense of joy, filming the embarrassment and bitterness of Hong Kong people under the pressure of high housing prices.
Another Hong Kong drama, "Jinxiao Building", is even more to the point: "The Hong Kong property market is the most terrifying and psychic ghost story in the world." ”
exaggeration? Sensational?
Not at all.
Today, Time Jun takes you to see the Hong Kong movies of recent years, which have different themes and different genres, but they all focus on the housing market, and each one is more cruel than the other.
"The Ghost Lives with You": Fear in the House
The latest work of the famous Hong Kong director Chen Guo.
His masterpieces, such as "Made in Hong Kong", "Durian Fluttering", and "Last Year's Fireworks Were Particularly Numerous", all aim the camera at the marginalized people, with a very strong humanistic care and realistic texture.
Although "Ghosts Live with You" is a horror film, it continues this realistic brushstroke.
In the film, the three ghosts represent three classes, and their grievances are all related to the house.
Aunt Liang (Shao Yinyin) is a wealthy man who owns a villa.
She was severely ill and paralyzed, dying, and her four daughters and a son were always with her. But except for the fourth daughter, others do not do filial piety, but covet real estate.
Unexpectedly, My Aunt returned to the light and tried her last strength to slaughter the unfilial children one by one.
The whole scene is high-energy, full of surreal tragedy and absurdity.
The scene that is really close to reality is that the children who come to visit are thinking about buying and selling in the villa, and the aunt silently leaves a line of tears.
She has resentment, anger but it is difficult to release.
The Tall Guy Ghost (Paul Che) is a middle-class man.
Once, his wife forced him to divorce, sell the house, divide the assets, and he killed his wife in a rage to hide the body.
Even if they are long dead or occupy real estate, even ghosts need shelter.
Therefore, whenever someone looks at the house, or rests in the room, the tall ghost will come out and frighten people.
The third ghost is a child, Qiangzi.
He was poisoned at home when he was 4 years old, and the house became a murderous house. But in Hong Kong, such houses are still in short supply.
Unscrupulous landlord Ah Xiang (Tai Bao), he wants to convert this tenement building into 10 subdivided houses (house within a room, a type of rental house in Hong Kong) to earn rent.
In order to make a comfortable living environment, QiangZai constantly jumps out of it to obstruct it.
In Hong Kong, the tragedy of disintegration is staged in the mansions; the murder houses that are rumored to be hiding corpses are rushed to see the houses, and the subdivided houses living in a very poor living environment are also in short supply.
Through the three ghosts, Chen Guo looks into the housing dilemma faced by people of different classes in Hong Kong, and tells the absurd reality of "as long as there is a house to live in, what are the ghosts to fear".
How crazy can a person be for the sake of a house?
At the end of the film, the real estate agent Ah Yuan goes into hell to confront Yama King face to face, just to sign a contract for work.
Notice that in this scene, some areas of Hong Kong have become ruins.
In another movie, many people are forced by the pressure of reality, and the spiritual world is almost deserted.
Dance Faction 3: Dreams Fall
In 2013, the Hong Kong song and dance film "Crazy Dance Faction" was killed, like a dark horse.
The most exciting and moving thing about the film is that in the increasingly huddled environment of Hong Kong films, it dares to broaden the possibilities of genre; when the atmosphere of the times is becoming more and more decadent, it dares to celebrate the power of dreams.
In the climax of the film, Ah Hua (Yan Zhuoling), who has a foot injury, walks to the stage again with the help of her friends and contributes to the thrilling group dance together.
The light of dreams illuminates the wretchedness in their reality.
But in the sequel, DanceMania 3, all the dancers lose to reality.
Ah Hua gave up her love of dance, transformed into an actor, and mixed in various advertising shooting scenes.
The male protagonist, Ah Liang (played by Cai Hanyi), has become a short video blogger of YouTube.
He set up his own studio, desperately working to shoot works with traffic, and was tired of life and death.
Why fight so hard? Food (making money).
A group of singers and dancers huddled in the Gongxia district, where gradually a community of artists was formed.
Industrial buildings, originally industrial buildings for commercial use, are located between high-rise buildings.
Its rise is closely related to hong Kong's expensive housing prices and rents.
In order to meet the housing needs of young people, the owners divided the house into narrow single rooms. The original security design was all broken, which was a clear violation of building regulations.
Therefore, sleeping in a workshop is illegal.
Even if they had to hide even to sleep, they had to live here because the rent was cheap.
Once a fiery young man, the flame in his heart was extinguished. They rarely dance, and even the rap lyrics have become commercial.
Between the words, it is all about rent.
In the film, these lost "artists" have another way out, to build a wild dancing street, promote Hiphop culture, in order to seek a sense of identity, to obtain a larger living space.
But sadly, the so-called Crazy Dance Street is only a whitewash tool for the real estate industry.
"DanceMania 3" portrays a group of young people who are crushed by reality, who lose the ferocious bloodiness of animals and the pride of chasing their dreams.
They are no longer angry and have long since departed from the core spirit of Hiphop culture: rebellion, catharsis.
And these young people who have broken the wings of their dreams are not the saddest group.
In another Hong Kong film, its characters suffer as much as the "caged people".
Drifting in Turbid Waters: A Land of NoBody
In 1992, Zhang Zhiliang made a realistic masterpiece "Caged People".
Hong Kong is short of land, and the poor people at the bottom live in beds in old buildings with extremely dense population density, and they are surrounded by barbed wire and separated, so they become "cage people".
"Turbid Water Rafting" echoes it, it depicts a picture of the lowest and most marginal beings, and the characters in the film are mostly released people, including Vietnamese refugees, drifters, sex workers...
There is an unwritten tradition among this group: when someone has just been released from prison, they will ask him to take his first drug in order to lure him into depravity.
By this sinful and pathetic means, they sustain the activity of the group against boundless loneliness.
However, the number of people should not be too large. Because only when people die can beds be vacated.
Where do they sleep? Where the poor live, in Sham Shui Po, on the streets.
Even so, because the reconstruction project is on the string, they will still be expelled.
The police cleaned up their belongings like garbage.
Therefore, they had to relocate again, using the iron windows and wooden planks they had picked up, and all kinds of stolen tools to build a new home next to the bridge hole.
The living space is constantly narrowing.
The public officials are rude and unreasonable, and these marginalized groups want to get justice: apologize. This is the central conflict of the film.
With the help of lawyer Ho, things made substantial progress, and the police agreed to pay each person 2,000 Hong Kong dollars, but refused to apologize.
Everyone cheered for this "victory", but Hui Ge (Wu Zhenyu) insisted on apologizing for not money.
The main line of the film is the process of Hui Ge being continuously banished by the city and the group.
His intransigence is also the biggest significance of the film, which is to say that even if human life is like grass, there is dignity and justice that cannot be trampled.
"Turbid Water Rafting" has a very different temperament from mainstream commercial blockbusters.
"Bomb Disposal Expert 2" and "Fury Case", the protagonists are all public officials, because of injustice, anger is fierce, and turn to the system to plunge a sharp blade.
But in "Turbid Drifting", Hui Ge is not angry, his ideas are extremely simple, no matter who it is, he must apologize for being wrong.
Director Li Junshuo obviously has a deep concern for the people at the bottom, otherwise he would not let Hui Ge follow Mu Zai to the crane, overlook the Hong Kong property market, and then sprinkle a bubble of urine to masturbate.
The director also wrote about the painful reality.
There is a scene in the film where Hui Ge looks at the sky and sees high-rise buildings lined up, and he bows his head, which is a life he can't afford.
In Hong Kong, he has always acted like an ant, living like dust, and he has no right to participate in the past and present here.
Through different types of stories, the three Hong Kong films present the anxiety, powerlessness and resistance of different classes of Hong Kong residents under the pressure of the property market, and then reveal the increasingly declining urban picture of Hong Kong.
Together with them, more and more Hong Kong films are beginning to feature the same or similar imagery.
"Hell" in "Wisdom Teeth", "Ghosts Live with You", "Wild Dance Party 3" ruins, "Muddy Water Drifting", "Hand Cigarette" in the fish tank...
If you understand them, you will understand hong Kong now.
Hong Kong has changed, Hong Kong movies have changed, and people are more and more afraid to watch it carefully.
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