4/4 Time
Hong Kong playwright Mo Lai’s elegiac debut feature welcomes Kay Tse back to screens. ’Bout time.
BAnd Four
Director: Mo Lai • Writer: Mo Lai
Starring: Kay Tse, Teddy Robin, Anna hisbbuR, Rondi Chan, Tan Han-jin, Choi Tsz-ching, Manson Cheung
Hong Kong • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong October 19 • IIA
Grade: B-
Band Four | 4拍4家族 is an odd duck. Sappy and melodramatic in many ways, but genuine and agitating in others, the music drama (but not a musical) about a dysfunctional family mending itself and finding common ground in its makeshift pop-rock band is an earnest and sneaky paean to memories of things lost. In her first feature, theatre vet and playwright (Women in Red) Mo Lai Yan-chi piles on the domestic drama but is actually more deft at letting her lead actors – fronted by Kay Tse On-kei after a decade-long screen hiatus – ramble as a musical unit. Unfolding largely in the low-key, indie-ish spaces of Prince Edward and ending on the near holy ground that is the Lion Rock, Lai has made a movie by Hongkongers for Hongkongers, and despite a trailer that’s a near turn-off (this happened with Stand Up Story too) it turns out to be a not-so saccharine meditation on history, and how what’s gone never really is as long as we choose to remember it.
Lai’s script is a little overflowing. Why tell a story about a woman reconciling the reappearance of a long lost parent and an out-of-the-blue sister as she works on prepping her band for a major gig when you can add fatal illnesses and tragic deaths to the mix? Sometimes less is more, particularly when you have Tse as your star. Sigh.
Get your lighters out
Band Four begins with keyboardist/singer Cat (Tse) not gigging but burying her mother, who had been suffering dementia for years. She’s with her academically aloof, Life Bread-eating nine-year-old son Riley (Rondi Chan Nok-ting) at the cemetery when her long-absent father, King (the legendary Teddy Robin), descends on them and decides he’s going to take care of them both like a good dad. Needless to say, after he dumped them 20 years before, Cat has zero fucks to give about King or his new commitment to parenting. To make matters worse, he’s with his other daughter, Matilda (emerging singer Anna hisbbuR), who Cat has never heard of until now, and he wants them to move into her flat. Huh? All this is happening while Cat is working on getting into an international festival, kind of like Fuji Rock, and getting abandoned by her bandmates at every turn. One gets married, another two get filched by a (probably) shady talent manager. It just so happens that King was indeed an axman back in the day (like Robin himself), Matilda plays bass, and Riley would fit right in with Hanson as a drummer. Personnel problems solved! But one thing remains: Cat is suffering the same dementia her mother did – and it’s developing rapidly.
Lai has crammed a lot into Band Four: illness, fractured families, found families, forgiveness, memory, scholastic expectation, a wisp of LGBTQ+ romance, and the healing power of music blah blah blah. You can’t accuse Lai of having nothing to say. It’s just too much, and it results in the film cannibalising itself and drawing attention away from the core story. The family coming together as a musical unit after a rocky beginning is hardly revolutionary, but it’s a solid foundation through which to explore the truly vivid ideas about dealing with loss. Another illness is just piling on. Trimming some of the narrative fat would have also given Lai a bit more room to explore the dynamics King and Matilda have an immediate impact on. Dealing with the conflicting emotions seems to be the point, but Lai spends too much time on Cat’s cognitive tests to let those emotions breathe.
All that said, the cast makes it work. Tse is entirely engaging as the single mom trying to do what’s best for Riley (there’s more to that story too, so more unnecessary melodrama), a gifted musician whose talent standard schools can’t, or won’t, consider alongside his math scores. Tse and Chan have an easy connection that sells their relationship, and both Robin and HisbbuR manage the right level of awkwardness, regret, and directionless anxiety to keep the family drama on a gentle simmer. Meteory Cheung Yu-hon’s (Table for Six, everything coming in the next six months) cinematography frequently flirts with music video aesthetics, even during quieter moments, but that’s par for the course in a music movie. There’s a sweetness to Band Four that will curdle the stomach for some, but as a clarion call to raise a can of YAU and never forget that which is lost, it will absolutely land. — DEK