Passion 1995
Director: Clarence Fok
Year: 1995
Rating: 4.0
Director Clarence Ford (Fok) often treads a thin line in his films between being stylish and being vacuous. With films like Naked Killer, Dragon from Russia, Cheap Killers and Her Name is Cat, the wonderful visual flair and constant movement that he brings to his films can to a large degree hide the often confusing narrative within. There are times though that no amount of style can disguise the absolute mess that Fok has managed to create. This would be the case for On Fire, The Black Panther and this film.

This is simply an incomprehensibly muddled, dull and pointless film. None of the characters are more than chalk marks and annoying quirks, the story goes nowhere and makes no sense and it has an ending that belongs in a film like “Fame”. Even more amazing, Fok somehow manages to make Simon Yam nearly colorless and Christy Chung nearly unattractive.


The film weaves or wobbles three interconnecting stories together that on the surface may seem slightly arty in nature – but none of the stories have anything to say. They go around in circles with the characters acting like they have the brain matter of an amoebae and with ridiculous coincidences piling up like a rush hour freeway traffic disaster. If Fok were trying for something profound about fate or human nature, I would advise him to stick with red hotpants and cigar chewing sex sirens.

One story line has Christy doing her best to be a street punk with a hairstyle that looked to have been cut by a “topiarist” and for which she should have sued someone for criminal neglect. She has a boyfriend (Wong Hei) who swears he will love her forever – that is until a drug dealer (Ben Ng) persuades him to use Christy as a drug mule and then when the deal goes wrong to kill her. Ben has taken a sexual fancy to the boyfriend and the boyfriend quickly decides which side of the bread is buttered so to speak. Oddly, Ng and Wong Hei couple up again a few years later in The Accident.
 

Simon comes to HK to look for his girlfriend but finds her apartment occupied instead by Teresa Mak who tells him that she moved away months ago. He moves in anyway and starts searching for her. A cop (David Ng) has come across a personal advertisement that Mak (the best thing in the film) placed in a paper and is trying to set up a meet with her. Yuen King is Mak’s mother and walks through various scenes with the subtlety of a bulldozer yelling and cursing every one in sight. All the points Yuen has earned in various small roles get erased with this travesty.
 

Christy comes into their lives like a stray dog that won't go away and soon they are all trying to survive Ng and his homicidal instincts – that is when the film doesn’t stop for a musical video number on the streets of HK. Finally, at some point Christy lets her hair down and Simon picks up a gun – but much to late to save this film from drowning in a morass of ineptitude.