Made In Hong Kong (1997) and Three Husbands (2018): The Metaphors of Politics in Fruit Chan Gor’s Films
Fruit Chan, a Guangdong-born, Hong Kong-raised filmmaker, has always been an icon of the Independent Hong Kongese film industry and is famous for his critical reflection on Hong Kong politics and history. One of his earliest features, Made In Hong Kong, marked the beginning of his Handover Trilogy (Made in Hong Kong 1997, The Longest Summer 1998, Little Cheung 1999), addressing the sovereignty handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China after 152 years of colonization in 1997. Three Husbands is Chan’s most recent feature and the end of the Prostitute Trilogy (Durian Durian 2000, Hollywood Hong Kong 2001, Three Husbands 2018). Chan works as a reality checker to examine the present and past of Hong Kong and the city's development throughout the 21 years. Although there were similar settings and even repeated elements between these two features, the different approaches to political metaphors led to completely different cinematic experiences.
The Haunted Number: “Three” – Character building
Three protagonists, Moon (Sam Lee), Ping (Yim Hui-Chi), and Sylvester (Wenders Li) in Made In Hong Kong, share the initial motive of discovering the secret of Susan’s (Tam Ka-Chuen) suicide. All of them are alienated teenagers suffering from their own traumas. Moon is abandoned by his father, drops out of high school, and now looking for the meaning of nihilism while working for a triad. Ping has a fatal kidney disease but can’t afford the medical fee. Like Ah Mui in Three Husbands, Sylvester has an intellectual impairment and always accompanies Moon. The story ends as a tragedy, they all died as sacrifices for the hopeless society. Chan explains the inspiration of the characters, “In my research, I found that these young people had nothing in mind for their future, even with 1997 drawing to a close. They had no prospect in life.” (1) However, it’s still debatable whether “they have nothing in their mind for their future” or “there is no future for them to prospect;” do the individuals have the subjectivity? Through the three characters’ reactions to their distressing encounters, Chan shows the factual condition of Hong Kong when it entered a stage where it couldn’t take control of its destiny but waited for others to take charge of its sovereignty.
The indications of politics in Three Husbands are much more recognizable due to its straightforward simile instead of metaphors: humanizing the cities. The protagonist Ah Mui (Chloe Maayan), works as a prostitute in a boat, her superhuman libido and intellectual disability are taken advantage of by her three husbands. Each of the husbands represents different periods of Hong Kong under three sovereignties. The first “husband,” her father, trades her to another man for money, implying the Qing dynasty ceded Hong Kong to Britain. The second husband, Britain, continues taking advantage of Ah Mui by prostituting. The third husband, Four-Eyes (Charm Man Chan), symbolizes the handover to China as a legal marriage, but Mui’s identity as a prostitute remains the same. As another clear representation of the three sovereignties, the structure is further separated into three by three scenes of dictionary definitions of the three words (海: Sea, 陆:Land, 空:Nothingness), with Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations with English translations under each of the words. These settings are closely tied to the concept of the number three, but a movie that is entirely made up of representations can get tedious. Instead of a cinematic experience of sensing naturally arising emotions, it’s more like asking the audience to fill out a literary devices practice sheet.
Sex and Nudity
In those desperate times, the protagonists of Made in Hong Kong's sexual desire is the only vibrant and human-like feature. The sex dream Moon has about the dying Susan, the nose bleeding Sylvester has when he is attracted to Ping, and the moment in which Ping lifts her dress to Moon when they are in the cemetery are all guiding to a desire, a hope, or a utopia they have long harbored.
The sexual content of Three Husbands serves a very different purpose. The use of nudity amplified Chan’s political reflection more exposedly than any of his previous features. Ah Mui’s inability to express her thoughts clearly and her overactive libido seem to justify the body exploitation by the three husbands– “she couldn’t tell what she wanted straightly; therefore I would default it was her own willing to become a prostitute.” However, is sexualizing the sovereignties the only way to describe a partnership in which one party exercises authority over the other? Excessive nudity detracts from the film's ability to provoke thoughts and may alter viewers' motivations for watching it. The actress Chloe Maayan won the 38th Hong Kong Film Awards and the 25th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards for Best Actress for the role in Three Husbands. The accolades validated Maayan's career, but how much nudity meant to value an actress’s talent?
The Cross-era Conversation– the bonding and missing
The letter with dripping blood traces in Made in Hong Kong has three main characters’ intimate writing to each other. It’s initially Susan’s goodbye letter to her mother before she commits suicide. As the camera moves vertically, we can read the second and the last paragraphs from Ping and Moon. Ping and Moon leave their responses about death like they are having cross-era conversations. They write about death and then choose to commit suicide. It’s an ingenious choice to address the heaviest topic in such a gentle way by the voiceover of them reading the texts. Although they miss each other in their story, the film brings them together.
The aerial camera captured the bird's view of the cemetery in the mountain while a voiceover with the female anchor talking on the radio plays in the last scene of Made in Hong Kong. The anchor reads in Cantonese, “You’re listening to the People’s radio of Hong Kong, what we quoted was a speech given by Chairman Mao to the leaders of the young, let’s repeat and study the message in mandarin.” Before the Handover, the radio has already begun propagandizing Maoist ideology, as if it is a preview or caution of how Hong Kong would be changed in the future by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The three husbands and Ah Mui were on the drifting boat to the next destination that they were not clear about, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge is there, behind them. As the news report on the radio says, this bridge opened to the public in 2018 after 9 years of construction, when Three Husbands was released. The intention of building the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge is to tie closer the cultural distance between Hong Kong and Mainland through infrastructure, but Chan does not consider it to be a cause for celebration.
Chan’s cinematic language shifted from a metaphorical method in Handover Trilogy, his earlier series, to a much more radical disclosure of reality in Prostitute Trilogy, the most recent series after all the major socio-political changes, such as the 2014 Yellow Umbrella Movement and the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Protest. After connecting those incidents with Chan's production timeline, I tend to understand the shifted style shown in Three Husbands, the discomforts are actually reasonable. They may be more like instinctive reactions towards the moves of the break-promise, CCP, rather than a decline of literary device usage. His use of forms transformed as a result of the contents, which demonstrated how reality had progressed. It was less about a personal preference for cinematic vocabulary but a choice of the most relevant technique to depict the masses under the threat of losing civil liberties. Will the anxiety transfer to a complete inability to react to the ripped-off rights like Ah Mui? Chan’s answer that left in Three Husbands was pessimistic.