Merry-Go-Round 東風破

Story

San Francisco, the present day. Drifter and drug abuser Kwan Ah-nam (Ellen Koon) ends up in hospital and learns she has advanced leukaemia. Separately, Yu Beng-tai (Nora Miao), who runs the San Francisco branch of her family's Fook Yuen herbal medicine business, decides to return to Hong Kong for the first time in over half a century - to prevent her great-nephew, real estate agent Yu Leun (Lawrence Chou), from selling the old family business in the Central District of Hong Kong Island. Having decided to revisit her roots before she dies, Ah-nam gets a job in Hong Kong as an assistant to Lam San (Teddy Robin), caretaker of the Tung Wah Coffin Home, where coffins await reburial in their ancestral homes on the Mainland. (Lam San still cannot forget a young nurse he loved in the late 1930s but who left Hong Kong prior to its fall to the Japanese.) Using a pseudonym, Ah-nam also tries to befriend Yu Leun, with whom she once had a close e-mail friendship before he stopped corresponding when he discovered she was ill. Meanwhile, Yu Beng-tai, whose grandfather's coffin is among those at Tung Wah, has started to blow away the cobwebs at Fook Yuen and revive the business. Yu Leun tells his grand-aunt that he needs the money to give to a young widowed mother, Yan (Denise Ho), whom he cares for; reluctantly, she agrees to let him sell the shop, on condition he first works there for a month under her supervision. In the meantime, as she walks the streets of Central, memories flood back of her love affair with a young man (Lü Yulai) who gave her the English name Eva. They were in love back in 1938 but she was forced to leave him behind when she went to help run the family business in San Francisco.

Review

In the mini wave of nostalgia movies (Echoes of the Rainbow 歲月神偷, Gallants 打擂台, Once a Gangster 飛砂風中轉) as Hong Kong filmmakers look to excavate a local culture and self-identity, Merry-Go-Round (東風破) is the most ambitious but also the weakest and least affecting. With parallel time-lines — one in the late 1930s, the other in the present — the script by Mak Yan-yan (麥婉欣, Butterfly 蝴蝶) and Clement Cheng (鄭思傑, Gallants) tries to build a cohesive drama out of too many elements that don't sit naturally together: nostalgia for passing customs (the coffin home) and traditional practices (herbal treatments passed on by mouth), the internet age of "virtual" friendships, regret and guilt spanning a half-century, gaps between generations, and that old chestnut of returning to one's roots. Add in dialogue that is often either too expository or, when trying to be philosophical or emotionally deep, is too often just simply arch, and the movie ends up a very hit-and-miss affair which constantly has problems establishing an overall tone.

The hits include handsome photography, especially in partly-lit interiors, by Jason Kwan (關智耀, Love in a Puff 志明與春嬌) and a wonderfully gnarled performance as the coffin-home caretaker by veteran comic Teddy Robin (泰迪羅賓), an early mentor in Cheng's career and one of the leads in Gallants). The period production design — using oldstyle streets in Kaiping, Guangdong province — looks okay on a budget, and contributes to the film's overall smell of dusty funeral parlours, musty herbal shops and strangely quiet backstreets. The casting of Chinese Tahitian singer-actress Ella Koon (官恩娜) in two unrelated roles, as an elegant young woman in the late '30s and as the mixed-up Asian-American Ah-nam, enriches the film with an extra layer of meaning, with Koon okay in both parts.

The misses include a stiff performance in the lead role by '70s icon Nora Miao (苗可秀) - always more famous for her association with Bruce Lee's (李小龍) films than as an actress in her own right - and retro western-hippie songs by Hong Kong band Ketchup that are completely unsuitable for a drama of this kind. But the biggest problem is the untidy script, which relies too much on coincidences and unlikely developments (especially in Ah-nam's borderline silly story which starts the movie) and never sets up any strong emotional arc for the viewer to engage in.

Merry-Go-Round tries for too much on limited resources and talent; with a bigger budget and cast, and a much better screenplay, it could have been genuinely effective rather than just occasionally interesting. The fact that even the film's basic maths doesn't add up — the character played by Nora Miao should be about 90 but looks only about 60 — is symptomatic of the movie's general laxness and lack of a strong independent producer.

For the record, several locations (including the coffin home) belong to the movie's financier, Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, Hong Kong's oldest and biggest charity which is celebrating its 140th anniversary.