It
turns out a web novelist by the name of Pizza has captured Hong Kong’s current
uneasy zeitgeist with a tale of the Armageddon. As adapted for the big screen,
it also involves the challenges of commuting and David Bowie. Hang on tight,
because Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After (trailer here) is one heck of a
wild ride that screens during the San Francisco Film Society’s annual Hong Kong Cinema series.
Most
of the twenty-two Hong Kongers aboard the fateful mini-bus were not planning to
be there. Suet, the driver, is covering for a colleague whose wife went into
labor. You Chi-chi was anticipating a date with his girlfriend, but she
canceled at the last minute. Junkie Blind Fai got on the wrong bus by mistake,
whereas the distraught Yuki left a work social outing early after her lecherous
boss summarily fired her. Hong Kong is bustling as ever leaving Kowloon, but
when they drive through Lion Rock Tunnel towards the New Territories, the
teeming masses and incessant traffic mysteriously vanish.
It
seems they are the last people left in Hong Kong and the four students who got
off at the first stop probably will not last long judging from their sudden
symptoms. Trading cell numbers, the core group agrees to reunite in the morning
to take stock of the rather dire situation. Soon they are simultaneously receiving
bizarre calls that turn out to be the lyrics of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in Morse
Code. Then things really start to get strange, as the apparent apocalypse takes
on both metaphysical and science fictional dimensions.
Frankly,
we never figure out what is going on with absolute certainty, but we get a
pretty good lesson in Hong Kong geography before the zombies show up. Reportedly,
the film is also loaded with vernacular puns and wordplay that would even be
lost on Mainland audiences, let alone Yankees, but it hardly matters. As it is,
Midnight is absolutely bursting with
madness.
It
is also fully stocked with big named stars, including Simon Yam, naturally
playing Wong Man-fat, a low level gangster who more or less assumes leadership
of the ragtag group, with characteristic flair. Johnnie To repertory player Lam
Suet is also perfectly cast as Suet the driver. Ironically, he probably gets
bloodier in Midnight than in his
recent To outings. Janice Man (or JM as she is also known, catchy that) is by
turns vulnerable and unnerving as the seemingly innocent Yuki. Kara Hui still
looks great and maintains plenty of edginess as Mak Sau-ying, a fortune
teller-slash-insurance agent determined to do some post-apocalyptic business
one way or the other.
Throughout
Midnight Chan creates an
uncomfortably realistic sense of what the end of the world might really feel
like, but unlike Abel Ferrara’s cratering 4:44 Last Day on Earth, he uses it as the foundation of a tense and compelling (though
admittedly logic challenged) narrative. Chan Fai-hung and Kong Ho-yan’s
adaption of Pizza’s descriptively titled Lost
on a Red Mini Van to Taipo nicely balances pitch black humor with moments
of deep-seated anxiety-ridden existential drama.
