Hidden Track
Director: Aubrey Lam
Year: 2003
Rating: 6.5
In the year 2000
Aubrey Lam made her directing film debut with “Twelve Nights” which coldly
dissected a relationship from beginning to end. I found this to be a painfully
sterile film that felt to be influenced by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman,
but only superficially. Now three years later Lam returns with her second
film that in a narrative sense takes up where “Twelve Nights” left off as
the film begins at the end of a relationship and then depicts the female
character attempting to deal with this emotional void. This film though is
an entire mood change – this is bright, colorful, fanciful, amusing and as
light as a floating feather even if it is rather self-indulgent. It may also
be guilty of trying too hard at times to create an "Amelie" type of enigmatic
“magic” but slips instead into cutesiness – but the lead actress Po Po is
such a charmer and the cinematography just looks so good that one is more
than willing to forgive this film its occasional Hello Kitty foibles.
Po Po is devastated after her boyfriend gives her the heave-ho and so she
packs up and flies to Hong Kong where her pregnant sister lives with her
husband. Her quirky character is quickly established as she asks the air
hostess if she can have a round slice of cheesecake as a triangular one feels
somehow incomplete and then she confesses to the passport control officer
that she has “she just broken up with her boyfriend and needs some fresh
air” when asked why she has come to Hong Kong. Once settled down she begins
to look for a song from the Taiwanese artist Jay Chou that was being played
when she first made love with her ex-boyfriend. She feels that having this
song will allow her to hold on to his memory a little longer. The Mandarin
title of the film is actually "Looking for Jay Chou", but in fact this singer
only appears at the every end in a peculiar unreal coda.
It turns out to be a much more difficult task than one would suppose though
as this particular song was on a rare and limited edition CD and actually
is a hidden track that plays long after the rest of the album is done. So
she embarks on a mildly meandering Alice in Wonderland odyssey through Hong
Kong in search of this song – which in itself is really a MacGuffin – it
is not the song so much as the musings that matter as she is led from one
person to another to another and along the way picks up perhaps a small smattering
of wisdom.
In her search she comes into contact with a few odd and romantically challenged
individuals. Her first encounter is with the nerdy slacker owner of a used
CD store – Shawn Yu who is abjectly mourning the death of his dog and promises
to never bring anything into his home that has a shorter life span than he
does. Others are the Casanova like David Wu who uses a different name for
every girl he knows, Denise Ho a tough talking tender hearted cab driver,
Daniel Wu who is a masculine cop who listens to Teresa Tang and takes his
mom on dates with him, Eason Chan a New Age stone therapist and Chan Hing
Cheung who feels that he and Po Po have so much in common because they are
both looking for a special man to love. None of these are really connected
up, but simply little episodes in her life that have a fairy dust quality
to them. There is in fact no particular attempt to link them up or create
a meaningful narrative – this is really a dreamy mood piece that goes almost
nowhere and that is a great deal of its charm.
One senses that for this film, director Lam was influenced by Wong Kar-wai’s
Chungking Express (the second part specifically) – certainly preferable to
Scenes from a Marriage for me – as Po Po (both the name of the actress and
character) seems clearly modeled on Faye Wong’s character with her elfin
looks, short hair style, wide-eyed looks and dreamy expressions and there
are a few shots of her that seem to be nearly right out of Chungking Express.
The Shawn Yu character has moments that recall Tony Leung as well with Shawn
attempting to get over the loss of his dog by talking to animals instead
of bars of soap. Throw on top of that the fish tanks, the cleaning and Po
Po’s propensity to daydream and it seems likely that Wong’s film was filtering
through the director’s mind. Not that I want to put this into the class of
Chungking Express - this is more Chungking light that primarily shines
due to the lovable performance of Po Po (in her debut) and some lovely imagery.
