Hong Kong, My Playground by Mabel Cheung – Liberation

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Publisher Spectrum Films always has good taste in highlighting neglected parts of Hong Kong cinema’s history: here it’s the turn of Mabel Cheung, who emerged in the ’80s with a penchant for Chinese immigrant stories as the countdown to Hong Kong’s handover continues China. The Soong sisters, Her most ambitious and comprehensive film was released in 1997, a fateful year, and allowed her to tell the story of modern China from a feminist perspective. The three sisters of the title, daughters of a pastor who had studied in the United States, returned to the country in the 1910s and each married a powerful man – proof that history produces the best melos. The gap between the youngest Ching-ling, wife of the first Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and future communist supporter, and the youngest Mei-ling, wife of the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, future president of Taiwan, will widen.

The filmmaker never gets lost in the crowd scenes and militant raids, always focusing on this unique sisterhood and their contribution to the political development of their halves. Soong Ching-ling, a co-production with China, stands out, helped of course by the outrageous cinematography of her interpreter, Maggie Cheung, as soon as she is dressed up and lit in a costume film. But the filmmaker also wavers under the eyes of the censors, spreading clusters of ambiguity at every line change (“Before we were slaves of ancient China, now we are slaves of the slaves of ancient China”) an intertitle that contradicts such a victory or a threatening scene (Maggie Cheung stands directly in front of a car that is about to crush her, like an echo of the student who stood in front of the tank at the Tiananmen demonstration in 1989).

Delicious bittersweet chronicle

more modest, Eight taels of gold (1989) uses the same sense of skillfully composed frame and counter-employment: the older sister Soong was played by Michelle Yeoh, star of the action film HK, and here it is her colleague Sammo Hung, who leaves the Tatanes alongside Jackie Chan in one of his rare dramatic roles . That of Slim, an old boy and taxi driver in New York, visiting his parents after a sixteen-year absence and laden with ingots, an outward sign of success (the gold taels of the title). He also finds his long-lost cousin and the possibility of great love.

The little funny note at the beginning (“Made in China, that means: Long live freedom,” (Ment Slim to a non-English speaking Chinese man) quickly gives way to a deliciously bittersweet chronicle, nuanced and not condescending, of culture shock and the immigrant experience: Are we really gone? Where are we returning to? “Wherever we go in the world, we will end up in a Chinatown” The cousin hardly jokes. This life review is also notable for its modesty: Mabel Cheung manages to drag out the emotional climax more than necessary, without ever breaking into tears, and to place her characters in a space that is always more meaningful than any grand explanation (a panoramic rotation). here a restaurant, there a river) testifies to a precious sensitivity.

Mabel Cheung box set: The Soong sisters (1997) et Eight taels of gold (1989) and Blu-ray, Spectrum Films, €30.