No. 7 Cherry Lane
Director:
Yonfan
Year: 2019
Rating: 7.5
In the end credits director Yonfan dedicates this
film to the city of Hong Kong. And it is a stunningly beautifully animated
heartfelt romantic paean to what his memories of Hong Kong were when he first
came to live in the city at 17 years old from Taiwan. Yonfan also acts as
narrator and begins with the sentence "Look how the golden years flowed away".
Because the Hong Kong depicted here is gone. It is 1967. The Pan Am airplane
coming in to land at Kai Tak nearly takes the laundry off the clothes lines
of the buildings it passes, students practicing kung-fu on roof tops, red
cotton trees, the men pulling rickshaws, the street cars, the small neighborhoods
filled with shops and signs, the food being cooked on the sidewalks, the women
in cheongsams, the British flag still flying, a city small in stature with
few ambitions. Remembrance of things past, a book alluded to a few times.
In a bus ride through the streets to North Point, Hong Kong jumps out at you
as the bus slowly makes its way with Rebecca Pan's happy version of the Ding
Dong song playing. It is pure nostalgia when the film pans the city. One
that is strangely affecting considering that for me it stems from the movies
of the period. It is a real valentine from Yonfan who came to Hong Kong and
made a success of himself.
Thus it felt like a slap in the face when a friend told me that he is pro-Beijing.
How could that be? How could you love Hong Kong as he seems to in this film
and possibly assent to what is going on? On top of that Yonfan is very openly
gay. The Mainland is not very friendly to gay people and censors gay scenes
from TV shows like Friends. It is like gays in America being Republican. I
don't get it. If there was anyone who I would have thought would stand up
for Hong Kong it would have been an independent filmmaker like Yonfan. Yonfan
has never been a favorite of mine - his films for my taste are overly wrought
melodramas of ill-fated relationships that drown in their self-imposed ennui.
But he made a few films that dealt with homosexuality - Bugis Street, Bishonen
- and non-traditional sexual relations and decadence- Colour Blossoms, Peony
Pavilion. His films are as overwrought stylistically with his sets awash
in color, fashions and décor. It is rapturous to the eye and he brings
this eye to No 7 Cherry Lane.
This film was in the making for five years as Yonfan worked with his animation
team out of Taiwan headed by Hsieh Men-wing. The animation will knock you
out - gorgeous, detailed, inventive, clever and amusing. In the film two characters
are discussing books - he says his favorite is the before mentioned Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past which he compares to Dream of the Red Chamber.
The other character asks do you like Dream of the Red Chamber, yes he answers
but not really for the main story but for the minor characters. In a way
that is how I felt about this film. I loved the animation, the music, the
mood - but the love triangle interested me less. Give me more Hong Kong and
less romantic complications. In interviews Yonfan says that Wong Kar-wai's
films had no influence on this. Perhaps not consciously but Wong's films
In the Mood for Love and Days of Being Wild were likely percolating in his
head somewhere. It is nearly impossible now for a filmmaker directing a film
from that period not to be influenced by those films. Rebecca Pan not only
sings that song but she makes a cameo as the lady leaving for Brazil, mole
and all, the plane flying directly above, the slow undulating mood of the
film is all WKW and at one point Perdida breaks outs. You can't escape Wong
Kar-wai.
Fan Ziming (voiced by Alex Lam) is hired by Mrs Yu (voiced by Sylvia Chang)
to tutor her 18-year old daughter (voiced by Vicky Zhao) in English. First
though he goes to the wrong apartment - that of Concubine Yu, an older and
long forgotten Opera Singer who left Shanghai after the Revolution. She is
voiced by Kelly Yao who was Sister Cindy in Naked Killer. Her apartment as
she puts it is a small district of Shanghai and the animated and detailed
décor is remarkable. Fan falls in love with both mother and daughter
and them with him - takes them to movies - for the mother three Simone Signoret
movies - Room at the Top, Casque de Or and Ship of Fools - all three
in which a young man falls in love with an older women and the daughter gets
Two for the Road, the only Audrey Hepburn film I dislike. The mother it turns
out had lived in Taiwan and gotten involved in the White Terror when after
the civil war the Kuomintang began a terror campaign of repressing those who
might have leftist sentiments. Yonfan's film before this Prince of Tears dealt
with the same subject.
Yonfan throws in some weird sexuality - the mother has some strange fantasies
of being raped and another when Fan comes into the room with another boy and
the boy unzips Fan's pants and cats lick his nipples. Earlier there had been
a very homoerotic scene when Fan and a friend took a shower together and
a boy peeped in on them. All these scenes felt very out of place - Yonfan
perhaps fantasizing. Around all of this - though always off to the side
- is student demonstrations waving Mao's Little Red Book and the police brutalizing
them. The Cultural Revolution had made its way to Hong Kong. One scene that
will take your breath away is when the daughter walks out of the movie theater
after seeing Fan kiss her mother into the bright sunlight (the animation does
some incredible things with light) and walks in a daze into a violent demonstration
and the entire style of the animation changes to black and white like newspaper
headlines.
You might think that this reflected the demonstrations in Hong Kong a few
years ago, Yonfan says no. At another time the daughter takes off her yellow
scarf and throws it into the wind where it flies gracefully until coming to
a stop and Fan goes and picks it up and returns it to her. Yellow. Yonfan
says a coincidence. Maybe. The film moves along very slowly, languidly - two
hours - and at times it felt quite sluggish but the animation takes it to
another level.
