Written By

Wai Ka-fai is the writer and co-director of dozens of movies with Johnnie To and as Johnnie To says, “In our company, he is the creative driving force. Wherever he goes, we follow.” Wai is responsible for co-directing Lau Ching-wan in the brain-bending MAD DETECTIVE and for putting Andy Lau in a muscle suit as a monk-turned-male stripper who can see karma in RUNNING ON KARMA. He and Lau Ching-wan first worked together in TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1 (back in 1997) which was a meditation on fate, and now they’re back together in a movie best described as a Charlie Kaufman (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) version of a Hong Kong drama.

Lau Ching-wan plays a lawyer who dies in a car accident, leaving his daughter, Melody, blind and making his wife a widow. To cheer up her mom, Melody writes a book in which the family died but dad survived. And in her book, to cheer himself up, dad decides to write a book in which he died in the accident but his wife and daughter survived….and so it goes in an endlessly recursive loop as the dead are resurrected in fiction, which bleeds into reality, which turns into tragedy which sends the story spinning off into greater and grander realms of fantasy as mourning children and their parents attempt to have one more minute, just another thirty seconds, with their departed loved ones.

Using the form of the Hong Kong melodrama, the movie is shot like a yuppie fantasia full of improbably large apartments, photogenic cemeteries and antique street cars running through the city. But these glam trappings hide a troubled heart in which life is hard and only fiction can protect us from the sharp edges. With technical credits by the regular team of Milkyway collaborators this is a polished, gorgeous movie whose benign surface hides a stormy heart. Buddhism says that life is suffering, and Wai Ka-fai believes this with all his heart. The reason he keeps writing is to dull that pain, and while it’s a valiant effort that’s doomed to failure, the only other choice is to just give up. —New York Asian Film Festival, http://www.subwaycinema.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=119