‘Lost’ and Found
First-time feature director Ka Sing-fung taps Cantopop star Sammi Cheng to step outside her sugary comfort zone.
LOst Love
Director: Ka Sing-fung • Writers: Ka Sing-fung, Lo Kim-fei
Starring: Sammi Cheng, Alan Luk, Hedwig Tam
Hong Kong • 1hr 32mins
Opens Hong Kong March 2 • IIA
Grade: B-
Lost Love | 流水落花 is a film about a family coming together, coming apart, and coming back together again. At least it is according to director Ka Sing-fung, making his FFFI-enabled feature debut. As Hong Kong filmmakers learn to manoeuvre under the watchful eyes of the censor board, the local scene is seeing a lot more of this kind of, for lack of a better word, nondescript drama. No cops. No robbers. No allegories. No metaphors. So is it odd that in Lost Love superstar Sammi Cheng Sau-man plays Chan Tin-mei, a woman grieving the death of her three-year-old son and looking to fill the gap with foster kids? Not really, because, as Ka noted, this is a film about a family and not a critique of the foster system.
And on that level Lost Love is hit and miss. As conventional as some of Ka and co-writer Lo Kim-fei’s narrative beats and plot turns are, there’s something low-key compelling in Tin-mei’s transformation from frustrated and ever so slightly resentful foster mother to genuine and capable parent over the span of 13 years. Any dissection of the foster system will have to come from audiences chatting over coffee after the film is over, as Ka’s sentimental camera (the warm Japanese family drama influenced photography of Yuen Long comes courtesy of Danny Szeto Yat-lui, who was similarly gauzy in Beyond the Dream) stays focused on the domestic drama the fostering unfolds against.
Questionable parenting
Tin-mei initially sells a foster career to her husband Ho Bun (Alan Luk Chun-kwong, S Storm, TV series The Gutter) with fairly mercenary tactics, summing it up as a paying gig where they can also return the goods if they’re unsatisfied. Though he’s perfectly comfortable with trying to have another child, Tin-mei is resistant and insists on going the foster route. After getting approval from social services case worker Miss Mok (always welcome Hedwig Tam Sin-yin, The First Girl I Kissed, Hong Kong Family) the couple cycles through a series of kids with wildly divergent needs, challenges and personalities. Six-year-old Fleur (Ng Tsz-kiu) has a cleft lip she was born with, so you can imagine how that works for her. Ching-ching (Leona Li Wan-wai), 4, is withdrawn following removal from her grandmother’s home, where she was living after her icy parents’ divorce. Ten-year-old Ah Ming (Matt Jiu Kai-nam) bounced around from home to home in the wake of his parents’ deaths, which has made him depressingly eager to please. Slightly rebellious siblings Ka-hei (Maya Tsang Yui-tung) and Ka-long (Tsui Ka-him),14 and 12, have their own secret world. Eight-year-old Sam (Sean Wong Tsz-lok) is a timid bedwetter who’s frequently bullied and 17-year-old Sino-African Hang (Gordon Lau Chiu-gin) tries to stay relatively optimistic and seems the happiest with Tin-mei.
There’s a lot of material to explore here, it’s a veritable issue buffet, particularly in the marginalised Hong Kong context. Kids that are picked on because they’re “disabled” or seem like easy targets have been mined for drama before, but Ka and Lo merely hint at other social structures that would most definitely have an impact on these kids. There are parents with drug habits who want their children back to contend with. Parents who’d rather pretend a child didn’t exist than upset the harmony with a new spouse. And any mixed-raced child that’s not white and Chinese remains a curiosity in Hong Kong. Each of these factors is probably a film in itself, but their circumstances are given short shrift – as are some authentic and engaging performances from the young cast, a combo of budding actors and non-pros, that never cross the line into unseemly cutesiness.
But Lost Love is, primarily, a story about a woman learning to heal and finding new purpose with help from the damaged children she takes under wing. It’s a domestic drama so naturally infidelity, the disintegration of a family, and raging insecurity loom. But credit where it’s due: Before she’s saddled with the beatific closing frames, Cheng is given room for Tin-mei to be a shitty, impatient mother who’s putting too much of the weight of her own loss on her fosters; unfairly treating them as a quick fix. That’s probably more common than we know among foster parents. Not everyone does it out of the kindness of their hearts (cheques help too). She did it in Heiward Mak’s Fagara and Stanley Kwan’s phantom First Night Nerves, and once again Cheng proves she’s got more in her acting arsenal than she’s been given a chance to show off. For his part, Ka is clearly killer with actors and his naturalistic aesthetic is a welcome rarity on the local cinema landscape. Here’s hoping he finds something to really sink his teeth into next time around. — DEK